by jellydonut25 » Tue Oct 09, 2012 9:59 am
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - it's not as bad as a lot of people would want you to believe. At least the effects are still there and Freddy is still kinda menacing and not just a cartoon character, but this is the point at which you can see the series start to turn south...it marks the beginnings of Freddy's over-the-top kills instead of just using his glove or something, and the beginning of Freddy functioning as a vehicle for laughs and justice rather than going after just innocent kids.
Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - ugh, the series goes from merely okay, to absolutely horrible in just one film.
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare - There's more entertainment value here than there is in part 5...not a good movie, not even a good horror movie, but actually an OK parody of the NOES films, and as I once read somewhere: I don't want to see Freddy acting like a cartoon character, but if he's going to, at least here he acts like Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny, cartoon characters that I enjoy.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare - I really like this movie a lot and I feel confident saying that the Heather Langenkamp trilogy is an excellent trio of films that all surprisingly keep the same tone and all work really well. I know that Freddy vs. Jason was later, but I really look at that as a one-off type thing, so I appreciate that Robert Englund got to take Freddy out properly instead of via Freddy's Dead. This movie works on so many levels, it's a great addition to the series.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 - Wow...this movie gets so many things wrong that the four things it gets right (I counted them: #1 - Jackie Earl Haley as Freddy. #2 - the whole "the brain functions for 7 minutes after the heart stops" thing is a very cool/terrifying detail. #3 - the revealing of the back-story through dreams is a nice touch...in the original series, they were often helped by good ghosts, so why not have that power of good function through the dreams themselves? #4 - the idea that even if you manage to stay awake, your brain will start to shut down and you will dream while you are awake, meaning you are safe nowhere) can be counted as nothing but pure accident. One thing that absolutely AMAZES me how they managed to screw it up was the Freddy's knives scraping across metal thing...instead of that eerie screeching sound, we get sparks flying? wtf?
Freddy vs. Jason - a fun movie. pretty much the right way to do an "icon vs. icon" film. perfect? not by a long shot, but it's fun.
so, I'd put FvsJ above the F13remake film, making it my 4th fave F13 film.
as for the NOES series, I definitely prefer it to F13. The F13 series just never hits any of the right beats for me and I honestly find a lot of the films kinda boring.
My ranking:
NOES
Dream Warriors
New Nightmare
Freddy vs. Jason (and I kinda think it's more of a NOES film than F13)
Dream Master
Freddy's Dead
Freddy's Revenge
Dream Child
Remake
there's only two films that i basically hate (5 and the remake) and another one that i don't hate but find mostly boring (2). I wouldn't say i particularly LIKE parts 4 or 6, but I find them kinda entertaining in their own right, 4 moreso than 6.