I really wanted to say something about finally being at the last one, but that’s not even fucking true. I guess depending on how you categorize the movies, technically Freddy’s Dead could be the last one, since it features the fictional world of Springwood, whereas New Nightmare gets a little weird. The main character is Heather Langenkamp, the star of the original, playing herself. Robert Englund is of course in this one as well, playing not only Freddy Krueger, but also playing Robert Englund. Not to mention a guest appearance by Wes Craven….playing Wes Craven. Confused yet? Good.

Talk about a remake! His hat is green and his face is shittier! HOLLYWOOD!

Heather is on the set of the newest Freddy Krueger movie where her husband is working as a special effects artist. The Freddy glove comes to life and starts killing people on set, and Heather wakes up to realize it’s a dream. Obviously her role as Nancy in two of the films is causing some bad dreams. She starts doing press for the 10 year anniversary of the original film, and reconnects with Robert Englund and Wes Craven. Craven says he has been having nightmares about some evil entity or something, and that his dreams say the only way the evil entity can be defeated is by trapping it in a work of art? But not like Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters 2. Or at least, I don’t think quite in that way. The rest of the movie acts as a pretty standard Freddy film, and Heather eventually defeats him. Sorry, but once you reference Vigo the Carpathian you throw out all hope for accurately summarizing the plot of any film…other than Ghostbusters 2.

“You’re saying that after this, I have to direct a movie about a vampire…in Brooklyn…starring Eddie Murphy? Well, punishment fits the crime!”

Guess what? This is the first film in the series to even come close to being as entertaining as the original. Sure, it got a little confusing and self-reflexive, but they managed to pull it off. The changing of the mythology, whatever the fuck it was that Wes Craven was talking about, is the reason why I felt this film worked. It wasn’t quite a “remake”, but told the same story using similar characters in a similar way, yet it was different enough that you didn’t seem to mind the introductory period where you get acquainted with these concepts. The other films in the franchise don’t need time to explain the fact that Freddy will kill the shit out of you, but they do anyways, and it’s boring as shit. In this film, by making Heather Langenkamp the main character, the rules were changed slightly, so you had to connect to the characters and rules of this world. When people died, you were actually curious as to how that could happen. All it took was five shitty sequels before making another film in the franchise that didn’t suck huge dong. But still, I don’t even like the first film that much anyway.

Wolfman Moon Scale