Freddy Krueger isn’t dead, he simply gone post-modernist. That’s the bizarre twist that cult director Wes Craven has given to his cash-cow horror creation in this painfully intellectualized epilogue to the Nightmare on Elm Street series. In a way, you’ve got to give Craven high marks for sheer gall – not everyone would take a basic slasher-movie concept and turn it into a ponderous thesis on contemporary film theory. But when it comes to revitalizing a moribund genre, Craven earns only an E for effort.
In this film-within-a-film-within-a-film-with-a-film puzzle box, Craven has gone crawling back to the original Nightmare in an attempt to grapple with the meaning of terror, but he succeeds only in totally confusing his audience. Original cast members Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund and John Saxon play both themselves and their characters from the first film in a storyline that threatens to give the term “self-referential” a bad name. Also along for the deconstructionist joy ride are filmmakers Craven and producers Robert Shaye and Marianne Maddalena. Depending upon your outlook, this piece of gamesmanship is either daringly audacious or artistically vapid. Unfortunately, it seems as though the latter may be more accurate – New Nightmare wears thin after 30 minutes as it turns into a post-graduate bore that fails to deliver the basic blood-curdling chills. By the time he finally appears on screen, even Freddy Krueger seems muzzled into lackluster silence by the movie’s self-induced sense of muddled posturing.
Of course, if you see this film in a packed theater, the audience can offer some real entertainment. For example, at the showing I attended there was an on-going debate about who was who (including, even, some random confusion about who played Freddy). It’s not often that you see this many people engaged in a loudly vocal discourse on post-modernist aesthetic theory. Besides, the “Freddy Bobbitt” joke that one guy yelled out was pretty funny.
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