Nightmare , in my eyes, is another dud in the series. I can’t understand at all why a series that promised to be something so wonderful and truly genius – especially with such an original and interesting concept – has turned out to be such an uninspired mess of bad actors and silly plot-lines. You can most probably already tell that I didn’t think much of this movie, so I’ll get to the point why.
No one, that means no one, should replace their main female star. Kristen was played perfectly by Patricia Arquette in Nightmare , but now (most probably because Arquette recognised how rubbish the script was) she has been replaced by the awful doesn’t-even-midly-resemble-Arquette Tuesday Knight (boy, her parents must’ve had a real laugh naming her!) who was the epitome of tack, and didn’t hand in a single decent scene the entire movie through. I don’t know why New Line didn’t just leave this project to rot when Arquette refused to reprise her role – it would have been far bolder than to create this mess. The idea of Kristen pulling people into her dreams was played skillfully and poetically in Part , but here it feels extremely old and tired, which is a shame and marrs its originality.
Another thing that really annoyed me about this movie was the atrocious acting. When will producers of Horror movies realise that just because a teenage actor comes cheap it doesn’t mean they are good at what they do – it means they are bad at what they do. And another thing that annoys me about the producers; they always overlook reason and logic simply to make another sequel. Wasn’t Freddy ultimately destroyed in Part ? If so, how can he possibly be back for this, the fourth?
Despite all these negative things, Nightmare does have a few (and I use that word loosely) saving graces that don’t make the time spent watching it an utter waste. The final half an hour is actually well-filmed and makes an interesting watch. The effects in the final battle between Alice and Freddy are breath-taking as all of the souls that Freddy has tortured rip free from his body. There is also a stunning death scene in which a victim’s skin peels away, making her become a fly – the ultimate nightmare! I really wish that the whole movie could have kept the kind of tone that the final half an hour had. It’s just a shame that it took an hour and ten minutes to get going properly.
OVERALL SUMMARY
It’s obvious that this movie came out when Horror was having its major down-ward-spiral-into-hell phase in the late ‘s, and although Nightmare does have some interesting scenes, they are all outweighed by the mind-numbingly bad ones. This is a movie that should never have been made. Ever.
