A Nightmare on Elm Street
A Nightmare on Elm Street
R | 09 November 1984 (USA)
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Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop's daughter, Nancy Thompson, traces the cause to child molester Fred Krueger, who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers' children, claiming their lives as his revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen, must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world...

Reviews
Phonearl

Good start, but then it gets ruined

SparkMore

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

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Keira Brennan

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

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Lucia Ayala

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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slightlymad22

Having completed my look at Eddie Murphy's filmography, I'm moving on to Johnny Depp. I'm not sure how popular this thread will be, as he is pretty unlikeable these days. But for a time he was one of my favourite actors.A Nightmare On Elm St (1984)"One, Two, Freddie's coming for you..."Plot In A Paragraph: A bunch of teenagers are stalked in their dreams by a man with a burnt face and razors for fingers. I watched this with my son, who questioned if it was a spoof!! He found the acting laughably bad. The sequels have tarnished the reputation of this classic a bit. But for me, this is the high point of 80's horror. Freddy Kruger is a step above Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees, as for one, he isn't hiding behind a mask and he has a personality and a dark sense of humour. How many of us have dressed up as Freddy for Halloween?? The character is an icon.Heather Langenkemp is great in a role she will forever be identified with, John Saxon is as solid and dependable as you would expect. As for Johnny Depp, he gets the movies best death, but based on this movie, is have never guessed he would become one of the worlds biggest stars.This movie was a bit if a blessing and a curse to Wes Craven, as he was pretty much typecasted as a horror director after the success of this.A Nightmare On Elm Street wasn't the smash I thought it was. It was the 40th highest grossing movie of 1984, with a $25 million dollar gross. it was a great success against its $1.8 million dollar budget.

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pkollmeier

Aside from its clunky ending, A Nightmare on Elm Street is my favorite horror movie of all-time. For starters, Freddy Krueger does not discriminate, and he will haunt your dreams no matter your age. Aside from Alien's "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream," "Don't Fall Asleep" is the second-best horror movie catchphrase of all- time.After Friday the 13th and the 80s slashers took the scene, Wes Craven came through with a whole different evil villain in Freddy Krueger, a former child murderer that kills kids in their dreams. I'm sorry, what?He got the idea from a string of stories ran in the LA Times about a young child that had survived the field killings in Cambodia. After a slew of nightmares, the young boy was found dead in his house after dying in his sleep. The police found a coffee pot in his closet with an extension cord running up under his bed and plugged into the wall. He obviously didn't want to fall asleep either. Craven ran with the story and created the most heinous, vile monster in horror movie history. With some Hitchcock elements spun throughout, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a fantastic ride from start to (almost) finish. The mood, music, atmosphere, shots, effects, blood, kills, and nightmares are all perfect. There are a few scenes that you watch and say "Wow, that's a classic cinema shot," or "Holy hell that's terrifying". Some scenes make you feel like Freddy Krueger is actually out there waiting for you to fall asleep tonight.Heather Langenkamp, aka Nancy Thompson in the film, works perfectly here. All of the characters do really. There are some missed opportunities, sure, but it all works out and there are times throughout the film where you feel trapped inside a boiler room, a terrible nightmare or a dangerous place and think, "Is this really happening to me?" The ending is a bit clunky and takes the fear away a bit, but I also think that is part of the point. As Nancy fights back and becomes the ultimate bad-a#$, Krueger becomes less and less of a threat. Facing your fears is difficult, but Nancy shows us the courage and tenacity it takes to destroy an evil entity like Freddy Krueger. Or, does she?

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a_chinn

Wes Craven's classic original film that spawned a highly influential franchised (and a terrible reboot) is still the best of them all. Craven cooks up an irresistible premise of child murderer Fred Kreuger killing the kids of Elm Street in their dreams as revenge for his mob justice murder by their parents may years before. What makes the set-up work so well is the blurring of the lines between dreams and reality when Kreuger stalks the kids in their dream. The characters fight sleep to avoid Kreuger, but are never quite sure when reality may have drifted into dreams after they may have dozed off in class, in a bathtub, or wherever they might be at any moment. Once reality moves into the dreamworld, Craven plays off of some of our most primal of fears; claws, drowning, burning, not knowing what's a dream and what's reality, and, of course, being killed in your dreams. In many ways, this film stands in stark contrast to the rest of the series. Most notably Freddy Krueger (in this film referred to as Fred Kreuger) has a total of 7-minutes screen time. This film is mainly about the Elm Street kids trying to figure out what's going on and how to stop Krueger. This film is also much stronger than the sequels because Freddy is not yet the wisecracking, one-liner delivering character he later became, which has the impact of making him a much more frightening of character. Since this is the first film in the franchise, it gets to tell the origin story of Freddy and Elm Street, which is more interesting than the sequels ("Dream Warriors" and "New Nightmare" being the exceptions) and who all basically recycled the same material but with bigger budgets and set pieces. Heather Langenkamp is quite good in the lead as Nancy and Amanda Wyss is good as well as her best friend. I did like how Craven (SPOILER ALERT!) pulled a bit of a Marion Crane by starting the film with Wyss, who gets killed off about 20-minutes into the picture and the film then shifts it's focus to Langenkamp. It's also pretty fun to see a teenage Johnny Depp in his film debut. And, of course, Robert Englund is very scary and effective as Fred Kreuger, even if he's not on screen all that much. Englund really made this character his own throughout this series and England's absence from the remake is a major reason why that film did not work. Also worth mentioning is the iconic music from Charles Bernstein, who for some reason never scored another film in the series, and also of note is the wonderfully surreal and dreamlike photography by Jacques Haitkin, who's now a second unit director of photography on major Hollywood films like Captain America films, the Fast & Furious films, and even the new King Kong film, "Kong: Skull Island." My main complaint about the film is the ending. The producers wanted a twist ending that left it open for a sequel and Craven wanted a happy ending. I'm not completely opposed to twist endings, though more often than not they don't work, or even unhappy endings, but I do think this film would have worked better if it had more definitive of resolution. And regarding the producers desire for potential sequels, Jason got killed at the end most every Friday the 13th film and managed to come back over and over again. Why wouldn't that work here too? Overall, this is Craven's best film and one that really got under my skin as a kid back in the day watching it over and over on VHS, but what's so great about the film is that it still holds up today, both in concept and in suspense and scares.

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lorcan-61881

So after Halloween and Friday The 13th,a new horror film was coming that was unexpectedly become a new horror film that would be going on for years to come,A Nightmare On Elm Street which focuses on the humorous killer Freddy Kruger who begins to haunt young Nancy's dreams unaware,she's get a police officer daddy and also,she's a pretty strong lady and won't take no sh*t from any one. When A Nightamre On Elm Street came out,it was booming,it was the new Halloween/Friday The 13th and as I said,it got another bunch of films and spin offs and a remake. The film is a brilliant classic,the acting was also brilliant especially from Heather Langenkamp who to this day,remains one of my favourite final girls along with Laurie from Halloween and Alice and Ginny from Friday The 13th:Part 1&2. Robert England was the only one in the three big horror franchises that actually appeared on screen and had actual lines,Michael and Jason just killed people and stared at people angrily. Johnny Depp also did a fantastic job in this doing an amazing performance as Nancys brother who was weird to see in this and even reappeared in the sixth Nightmare On Elm which was most likely the worst. A Nightmare On Elm Street is definitely a A+!!

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