New Line should never have bagged this Craven Concept

One cannot help to think, that if Wes Craven had some statutory control over his "terror in dreams" franchise we could have expected some very interesting and mind-challenging entries in this franchise. And what we got pertaining to the fabulous concept Wes gave us, is lackluster to say the least.

He brought lucid dreaming, meta-fiction, society and its questions to his movies, and the other entries at the best brought water-downed topics, with cheap-thrills.
I think we have to put the blame on New Line cinema. They have done a shocking job in bringing us quality and thought-provoking material to some of the sequels.

Even though it is apparently obvious there is a varying degree of quality within the spectrum of the Nightmare entries. Everyone except two of these entries has some worthy points of interest.
The dread-like trance of the original with Cravens intelligent ideas wrapped within the themes of Jung and the whole gambit of the vast majority of Craven’s work is displayed in a skilful conceit. The questions posed,“ What is reality?” “How can perception alter reality?”, “And what are the metaphors being used, and why?”
The themes underlined working concurrently with the very fearful moments at work here, insure that A Nightmare on Elm street (1984) is one of the most intelligent and serious genre movies of the 1980’s. At the time the first Nightmare came out, it was one of the first films within the Horror genre to successfully display surrealism at a visceral level. Cronenberg, and Carpenter also hit the mark with their respective Videodrome, and The Thing. And who can forget the stomach-churning and perverse Society, by Brian Yuzna- a wonderful execution into the paranoid and the sense of social exclution.
Innovative special effects, superior visual directing ( Ala Hopkins Dream Child) or taut fear with superior cutting edge story telling ( Wes Cravens New Nightmare. Good action sequences and set-pieces are illustrated in Renny Harlins fun Dream Master- and laced with poignant scenes, and fabulous character development- by the wonderful Lisa Wilcox as the Sissy Spacek/wall-flower psychic Alice- who learns to remove all her “garments” and become a powerful lucid dreamer. Dream Warriors has some chilling scenes, and a heavy dosage of Dream mythology plunged intravenously into the circulation of the corpus of the series. There is also a deeply ingrained sadness to Dream Warriors, with shell-shocked wearied teenagers living in hope, that one day they’ll reach adulthood, even though they are husks of their former self, and that Freddy has become an almost indestructible entity. Even though the second entry is a significant dip in quality, it does cover themes of underlined repressed sexual desires, and how evil can use this in committing horrifying acts and fed the guilt more. Interesting the makers stated they never knew of any of the gay issues in this movie-yeah right, this piece was shockingly homoerotic and decaying in S/M acts.
But in all the best Nightmare movie is none other than Wes Cravens new Nightmare, nothing comes even close. A fascinating metafilm concept which stretches the whole concept of a sequel to a level never before seen, and peppered with some important questions on society and entertainment. It would take a 5000 word dissertation to analyse this film- but I’ll leave it to more literal and psychological –read fellows to fill you in!

Now the much maligned remake. I’m really going to sidetrack this, as many of you have commented thoroughly, and with a attention to detail precision. All I’ll say, it bring very little new to the table, and the editor needs to go upstairs and meet his master. It does have moments of terror, and Harley does a terrific job of making Freddy a violent and threatening figure. I mean the scenes where he stares with those cold white eyes, unblinking, as if he is drilling right into your skull, is so chilling. And the paedophile element was quite nasty, and reinforced nastiness to the Nightmare series which had never been actualised before until now. Hopefully with the reboot sequel we can get a better structured screenplay, and introduce a very needed corpus of metaphysics and bring a new spin on the dream universe, which we have never seen before in the original entries. I’m an optimist so I live in hope- can’t these people relise that this entry is about the dream world- the material and possibilities are amazing!
Now the Nightmare series could have been a lot better and only a few of the entries above pass the test for greatness. The problems lie with New Line cinema who ironically in their financial quest, eschewed ideas (see Skipp and the Dream Child) which could have increased the series reputation; instead some of the entries almost destroyed the series, and brought lukewarm box office receipts. Thus no one wins! But there was still a quality, even in the very much critically –maligned remake, and people should realise that!

Now we come to the oil slip on the river of the series. These two entries represent an incredible drop of quality-actually I don’t think there’s is any scenes or themes within these films which fill the viewer with wonder, or shock to the core- whether by suspense-tension or a new revelation. Puerile direction, humour which is not contained or kept in context, bad casting, unimaginative writing, and dramatic gambles done with the Freddy character, with no sense of panache. I hated these entries with a passion, and no matter what your quirk is with the remake, it still has a professionalism which is leaps and bounds ahead of these turkeys.
They were an offense to Wes Craven, the fans, and movie-goers in genera