Archive
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER – Craig Safan
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth movie in the massively successful Nightmare on Elm Street horror franchise was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master; it’s a direct continuation of the story from 1987’s Nightmare on Elm Street 3, in which the survivors of that film have been released from the psychiatric hospital, but still find themselves being stalked by the horribly disfigured child killer Freddy Krueger, who has the ability to murder people in their dreams. The film stars Lisa Wilcox, Danny Hassel, Tuesday Knight, and Robert Englund in his iconic role as Krueger, and was directed by Renny Harlin, who was helming his first major studio feature film following the success of his 1987 English-language debut, the low-budget horror movie Prison. The film was actually one of the best reviewed films of the series, with special praise being given to the surprisingly insightful screenplay by Brian Helgeland, and especially the special effects and design; the critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time that the film was ‘by far the best of the series, a superior horror picture that balances wit and gore with imagination and intelligence’. Read more…
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS – Angelo Badalamenti
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As a way of continuing to capitalize on the unexpected success and popularity of the first two films in the series, the producers of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise continued the story of the maniacal mass murderer Freddy Krueger in 1987’s third film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Directed by Chuck Russell, the film stars Patricia Arquette as Kristen, a young woman who dreams of Freddy (Robert Englund), and who is subsequently sent to a psychiatric hospital when the wounds from her encounter with Freddy are mistaken for a suicide attempt. At the hospital Kristen meets her fellow patients, a doctor named Gordon (Craig Wasson), and a trainee therapist, who turns out to be Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), from the original Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Gradually the patients begin to realize that they are the surviving children of the parents who killed Freddy in real life, and that he is now trying to finish off the job. Read more…
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE – Christopher Young
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the wake of the massive, and unexpected, success of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, New Line Cinema realized they had a potential franchise on their hands. Audiences had responded very positively to Freddy Krueger, the wisecracking maniac with a striped sweater and a gloved hand full of knives who kills people in their dreams. Despite him having apparently been vanquished at the end of the first film, they found a way to bring him back for a sequel, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge got the green light for release on Halloween weekend, 1985, under the direction of veteran Jack Sholder. With the exception of Robert Englund as Freddy, the film featured an all-new cast, focusing on Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton), a teenage boy who moves into a new house with his family, without realizing that it is the same house where Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) fought Freddy years previously. Before long, Jesse is having nightmares about being stranded on a school bus with two girls and being stalked by a deformed killer; Jesse and his friends soon uncover information regarding Freddy’s legacy, but things quickly turn violent, and it becomes apparent that, instead of Freddy murdering people in their dreams, he is actually possessing Jesse’s body so that he can carry out murders in the real world. Read more…
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET – Charles Bernstein
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The world was introduced to the iconic horror movie character Freddy Krueger in 1984 in the film A Nightmare on Elm Street, written and directed by Wes Craven. Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio, the plot revolves around several teenagers who are stalked and killed in their dreams (and thus killed in reality) by Krueger, who appears to them as a horribly burned man wearing a red-and-green hooped sweater, a battered hat, and a glove with knives attached to its fingers. The teenagers are unaware of the cause of this strange phenomenon, but their parents hold a dark secret from long ago. The film starred Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Robert Englund as Krueger, and Johnny Depp in his feature film debut, and was a massive critical success; along with John Carpenter’s Halloween, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street is considered one of the most influential and important horror movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The film spawned an astonishing eight sequels (including a crossover with Friday the 13th and a reboot in 2010), but none of them truly captured the raw, visceral terror of the original, which tapped into deep-seated fears about the nature of dreams versus reality. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 