Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE

WRITER: Wes Craven

DIRECTOR: Wes Craven

STARRING: Robert Englund as Himself/Freddy Krueger
Heather Langenkamp as Herself
Miko Hughes as Dylan
David Newsom as Chase Porter
Tracy Middendorf as Julie
Fran Bennett as Dr. Heffner
John Saxon as Himself

QUICK CUT: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and Wes Craven reunite to reminisce about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

THE MORGUE

Heather Langenkamp - An actress and mother trying to balance the two, and struggling to escape the fame of an old horror movie she just can’t seem to shake.

Dylan - Heather’s son, a sleepwalker, and prone to nightmares. I’m sure he’ll be fine.

Freddy Krueger - Our fave dream demon, who gets pulled back quite a bit from his humour of the last few films, and refocused. He is menacing, and closer to chilling than he has been in a long time.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! After that last movie, I seriously need a palette cleanser, and fortunately, my next in depth look is at the final proper Elm Street movie, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. After Freddy was definitively killed in the last installment, where does the franchise go from here? Let's find out...

The movie opens up with a variant take on the original forging of the iconic glove for a new era, more mechanical, more slashy, but still very familiar. I love opening the movie like this, with the clear homage, but still something new. It sets the tone for this entire movie, which they continue to do as the scene goes on.

We watch as a pair of hands put the glove together, and then pick up a meat cleaver, hacking off his hand and...it's all a movie set, with several familiar faces, including Wes Craven himself, hard at work on the new Nightmare movie. Oh yes, we are going meta with this one.

I learned this trick from some guy named Williams…

Nancy is here, except it's not Nancy, but rather Heather Langenkamp, as played by Heather Langenkamp, with her husband Chase, who designed the new glove. Her kid is also there watching the filming, and that's not gonna traumatise him at all.

As they all putter about, the glove starts twitching, seemingly on its own, and eventually slashes the two techs that work for Chase.

Which is when Heather wakes up during an earthquake, yes it WAS ALL A DREAM. Except a lot of the details remain true; the movie is about HEATHER, and she's married with a kid.

The movie putters along as the family goes through their morning routine; Chase gets ready to go to work on a movie, Heather has an interview celebrating the 10th anniversary of the original Elm Street, and dealing with harassing phone calls, and Dylan is playing with his food.

After an aftershock causes the wall to crack suspiciously like claw marks, Heather discovers Dylan watching one of the Elm Street movies, and when she shuts it off, he WAILS LIKE A BANSHEE. Fuck, I forgot how bothersome that was.

The phone also rings, and the harassing phone calls which she thought had finally stopped, are back. And they are a strange, Kruegerian voice reciting the iconic nursery rhyme.

Which is when Julie the babysitter shows up to keep an eye on the kid, and Nancy can head to that interview finally.

The interview starts off normally enough, until they decide to bring Robert Englund on, and he tears through the set, in full classic Freddy regalia, freaking out Heather. The line between film and dreams and reality continues to blur.

Heather gets a call from someone over at New Line Cinema, and they invite her over for a new proposal. So she heads right over, and meets with Bob Shaye.

I have no jokes, I just wanted to share some Robert out of makeup.

The two of them quickly catch up, and Bob pitches Heather a new Nightmare movie, they brought Wes back, and he's been working on a story where she personally would confront a new Freddy.

And you can tell something is up with Bob by the way he's acting, and twitching, and reacting to certain things. He is clearly going through a number of the same things as Heather has been.

Heather returns home hears Dylan howling again, and rushes to her son's aid. She finds him convulsing, and mutters "Never sleep again" as he wakes up from his episode.

She calls Chase to tell him their son is having issues, and he rushes home to be there for Dylan. Unfortunately, the glove he is working on has disappeared, but it's not far behind.

While Chase hurries home, Heather reads Dylan Hansel and Gretl, and then shows her that his stuffed dino Rex, is guarding the foot of his bed from the scary man who keeps trying to crawl up and get him.

Momma Langenkamp shows Dylan there's nothing down there, and the foot of his bed just exits to his room, but the kid knows better.

We cut to Chase on his way home, and we watch as the familiar new claws come after him, and it eventually ends in his death.

Fortunately, Heather wakes up from a nightmare to find Dylan awake, saying Rex woke him up fighting. There is a ring at the doorbell, and it's the police there to confirm her nightmare was now a reality.

Heather heads to the morgue to see Chase’s body, and catches a glimpse of some scratches on Chase's chest. Brushed off as just damage from the twisted metal wreck, but Heather sees claw marks.

So it's time for the funeral, another callback to the original movie, and hey! Hello John Saxon, welcome to the show!

An earthquake hits, and Dylan disappears. Heather sees Freddy reaching out of the fallen coffin and grabbing Dylan. She dives after the villain, taking her son down a long satiny tunnel to his doom.

That night, Heather finds Dylan sleepwalking, and before he can fall into the Mindscape, she wakes him up while watching the original Elm Street again.

He doesn't want to go back to bed, and starts repeating that nursery rhyme once again. He explains he heard it from children singing at the foot of his bed. Look, if it was the little meowing kid from the Grudge movies, tell him to shove off.

Later, they're at the park, and Heather is talking through the problem with John Saxon. Meanwhile, Dylan is playing, climbs all the way up to the top of a rocket ship jungle gym type thing, and falls off. Fortunately, mommy catches him before he bounces.

Heather gives Robert a call so she can pick his brain next, and he's acting squirrely too, expressed through Freddy appearing in his art. As well as just being generally distracted.

Robert also mentions that Dylan is being written into the script, mentions what just happened at the park, which he didn't know about, and things continue to get stranger. Also, sadly, this is where Robert as Robert exits the movie.

Once again, Dylan is caught sleepwalking, and when he comes to, he tries to attack his mom with a bunch of knives he taped to his fingers.

She wakes up after another aftershock, with Dylan chanting never sleep again once more, she gets another stalker call, and Dylan has a seizure. So, all in all, she's having a wonderful morning.

Which means it is off to the doctor, who tries to blame Heather and the movies she makes for traumatising not just Dylan, but children everywhere. I sense Wes has some unresolved issues with censors and critics.

The doctors hold him overnight for observation, and give him some pills to help him sleep. While he does that, Heather heads off to have a little chat with Wes.

Wes tells her he doesn't know where the story is going. He dreams it up, literally, and writes it down in the morning.

He elaborates and recalibrates what we think of as "Freddy". He is a dream entity, haunting nightmares, seeking purchase in our reality, and is as old as stories, trying to become real through fear.

It remained trapped in the movies though, captured because of their popularity, but it has been finding a way out as popularity waned. And that's why Wes is writing the new movie.

And of course, the only one who can stand between this entity is Heather, his first opponent. Gotta love the poetry.

Let me tell you...this stuff hit me at JUST the right time. I saw it when it hit VHS, having become a fan of the franchise. I think this was my first truly meta movie, and the notion of stories, the power of them, how they can affect our reality, and us affect them, are all ideas that have stuck with me, and in my own writings, to this very day.

Heather does more research into childhood schizophrenia and sleep disorders, another earthquake hits, and Freddy pays her a visit.

Freddy is finally wising up and taking out the sources of caffeine first.

They scuffle a bit, but Heather has never had much trouble taking on Fred. But still, another earthquake hits, waking her up, but not before Freddy can slash her arm.

She hurries to the hospital to check on Dylan, and finds Julie there for some reason, doing the same thing.

The doc sees the gouges, and when Heather blames them on something she hit during the earthquake that just happened, well, she is surprised to learn there WAS no earthquake.

All of this starts to add up to the doctors becoming very suspicious of momma Langenkamp, thinking she might be the source of everything wrong with Dylan.

Heather falls asleep, having another threatening nightmare, and wakes up to find her child gone. The doctors reassure her that Dylan is down the hall. She hurries to find him, and does just that, as Julie watches over him.

Heather rushes off before security can grab her, urging Julie to make sure she keeps the kid awake. A goal which is instantly challenge by a nurse arriving with a shot to knock him out.

Julie chases the doc away, and that's when Freddy shows up, invisible to everyone but Dylan. He grabs the babysitter, drags her up around the room, another echo of the original, and slays her as well. And before you can sing Dancin' on the Ceiling, she's gone.

Heather hears the babysitter's screams and comes running, finding her son once again missing. Put a bell on that kid, for all this trouble.

She wonders where he could be, and the doctor's assure Heather he's heavily sedated. But she yells at them, reminding them that he sleepwalks, and she realises he must be trying to head home across the freeway.

There is an EPIC chase to try and grab the kid from the road, filled with lots of cars and stunts. It is HUGE. It's a bit dodgy in places where the effects get a bit too obvious for today's eye, but it's still pretty fun to watch.

But sadly, the movie isn't cut short by a splat kid, and he makes it home ahead of his mom. And when they arrive, Saxon is there waiting.

Heather tells John what happened, and something seems...off. He says a line, albeit a very common sentence, from his role in Nightmare the First, in that very specific way. He also begins to call Heather "Nancy".

Costumes begin to change as well, as the lines between fiction and reality and metafiction become ever fuzzier, the world of the movie overtaking Heather's reality. And along with that, Freddy escapes into their world.

Hancy returns to the house, now transformed externally to her home from the original movie. Dylan has gone missing AGAIN but she finds his sleep pills, laid out like a trail to follow. Gee, just like Hansel and Gretl.

This leads Neather down through Dylan's bed and beyond, where it no longer enters back into his room, but instead descends deeper into Krueger's hellworld.

She finds a copy of the script, and Dylan manages to find her first. But that's when Freddy shows up, and we get a pretty good fight. Heather takes zero shit, and holds her own against the ancient force.

And a little help from Dylan stabbing Freddy in the leg does not hurt, not in the slightest.

Freddy changes his focus from Nanther and goes after the little stabby child, chasing him around the lair for a bit. This movie only has room for one person making stabby!

The kid scrambles into a tiny spot Freddy can't quite reach into, and Heather soon comes running towards her kid's screams. When she gets close though, her foot sinks into a stair like it's quicksand, in yet another callback.

She perseveres though, and reaches the pair before Freddy can literally swallow her child whole, and gets stabbed some more instead.

Okay I think I found the problem, and it looks like that back wisdom tooth is gonna need a root canal…

We continue the Hansel and Gretl imagery, as they shove Freddy into the small space and lock the door behind him, and the flames leap higher and higher.

Freddy goes boom, the whole dreamworld explodes, and before the Sleepwalkers can arrive to investigate, the humans get spat back out into the real world.

And the movie fades to black, as Heather reads to her son from the finalised script of the movie, winding back to the start, in a neat little bookend.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: No surprise, this looks great.

Audio: SUCH good audio, with good surrounds and atmospheric stuff.

Body Count: A shockingly low number.

1 - Tech guy dies four minutes in
2 - Crazy Eddie gets it in the chest.
3 - Chase gets a truck ride handjob from Freddy and dies.
4 - Freddy drags Julie around the room
5 - Nancy burns Freddy good.

Best Corpse: Julie wins, for being the one we spend the most time with, and get smeared around

Blood Type - B-: Nothing really stand out, but a decent amount of blood, and the new Freddy look is spot on.

Sex Appeal: Nada.

Drink Up! Every time there is an earthquake.

Movie Review: As you can probably guess by my personal comments in the middle of the review…I loved this movie. I don’t need to get into the quality of the acting, or the story, or Craven’s skill. We all know its top notch. In the early mid 90s, this movie was so inventive, and I am hard pressed to think of anything like it at the time. It changed the way I thought of storytelling, and should have revitalised the Freddy franchise, in a whole new evolution. I was shocked by how little blood there was, and how few kills. But what the movie does, it does quite well. My biggest complaint is the screaming kid. And even then, when he’s ACTING, Miko is really good. If not for the cringey moments, this would be a near perfect movie for me. Four out of five bladed fingers

Entertainment Value: Seeing the blurring of lines of reality is so fascinating, and so well done. Especially for a creature like Freddy who could absolutely cross that line, and has ALWAYS been where his power lies. Jason is in the movies, Michael is in movies, but Freddy…he’s of the imagination. Also, I was shocked how good the non actors like Bob Shaye and Wes Craven were. Their performances were a treat, and felt very natural. Such an enjoyable movie. Four out of five bowls of oatmeal.