Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Written and Directed by: Wes Craven
Starring: Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, Nick Corri, Amanda Wyss, Charles Fleischer, Ed Call, Sandy Lipton, Lin Shaye, Jack Shea, Mimi Meyer-Craven

It's true, I've never seen this movie before. And I'm sure there's sufficient literature on it out there already, but... well, you know. Bear with me.

A bunch of teens get killed in their dreams by the child murderer their parents burned alive many years before. (The ones who have sex die first, but that goes without saying.) So they try not to sleep. Good luck with that. Sleep is inevitable. Stupid sleep. I learned that from Body Snatchers, of course (yeah, because before that I thought that you didn't have to. My life is sad, no?).

Anyway, the plot is predictable enough, but I can hardly complain about that. I knew the plot was going to be predictable (thus is the nature of predictability). It's just really cool.

And about half of it is set in people's dreams, allowing for some pretty imaginative art direction and modes of death. Johnny Depp's death was pretty impressive, I must say. I don't think there's actually that much blood in one person, but okay.

I laughed at him all through the movie. He was so cute and young and full of juice. He was 21 (a little older than his character, I should think), but still. He had hair problems even back then. Stranger still, he was playing a normal person. Not a gay pirate. Not a pedophile with a chocolate factory. Not even a schizophrenic writer, or, you know, J.M. Barrie. It was freaky.

He was better than the other kids, too, I'm sorry. The acting wasn't particularly spectacular. The grups were better, but they weren't in it as much. Of course, it wasn't particularly well written either. Parts of it were quite amusing, but a lot was... well... not good. There were a few believability issues, too. I don't care about a ghost killing people in their dreams, I buy that, but, for example, if a guy killed 20 children I don't think he would have gotten out of prison on a technicality. They would have crucified him.

That didn't bug me very much though. Generally, I liked it. Freddy's pretty nifty. I kinda felt bad for him, too. I mean, the poor guy had a pretty bad time. He got hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. It's so sad.

END TRANSMISSION (yay! I can go home!)