Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and her four friends have all been having the strangest nightmares lately. Each one of them is being haunted by a scarred man in an old hat and a dirty sweater with strange knife-like fingernails. Of course, they just think it is a nightmare until they start talking to each other about it and realize they are all dreaming about the same man. What's worse is when one of the girls, Tina (Amanda Wyss), ends up brutally slaughtered in her sleep, everyone in town thinks it is her boyfriend, Rod (Jsu Garcia). When this happens, Nancy's nightmares get worse as the burned Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) starts stalking her, Rod and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen (a 21 year-old Johnny Depp in his premier role).
Of course, their parent's don't believe the kids as they start talking about the man in their dreams killing them in their sleep, and no one can explain how things like the slashes and burns they experience while asleep carry over into the waking world. At one point, Nancy's parents, Lt. Thompson (John Saxon) and Marge (Ronee Blakley) send her to a sleep-study experiment where she wakes up from a nightmare with Freddy's hat in hand. What's worse is Nancy's parents' reaction when she describes the character from their dreams.
Both the sound and video of the film have been cleaned up superbly and it really creates a good movie-watching experience. Granted, a lot of the visual effects are dated and, quite frankly, look like rubber being slashed, but that is part of the allure of these now-classic horror movies. These were made in a time when there wasn't a budget or capability for massive CG sequences, and everything had to be done in the real-world.
The Blu-ray release of A Nightmare on Elm Street comes with about two hours of extras (not counting commentaries and pop-up videos, of course). The longest of these featurettes is "Never Sleep Again" and it is an extensive making-of documentary that goes from Wes Craven's path to making the film to the funding issues behind it and finally, the film and phenomenon that followed. What I really enjoyed about this particular featurette was that they went through many of the major visual effects from the film and talked about how they did them, including Tina's death scene where she is dragged up a wall and across the ceiling. This featurette also goes into the details of the Freddy make-up and Englund's task of becoming Freddy and getting into the character's mindset.
In the featurette "The House That Freddy Built," major players at New Line Cinema talk about the company and how the Freddy Krueger series allowed the studio to break out of small independent ventures and into more mainstream productions. Of course, its roots are in the horror genre, and pretty much all of their productions have at least one leg in that area. This featurette touches on each of the Freddy movies, as well as the purchase of the Friday the 13th franchise and the lengthy venture in making Freddy Vs. Jason. It also hints at a possibility of a Freddy vs. Jason vs. Leatherhead movie since they have acquired the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre license as well (though this comment could have been made more in jest than anything else). While not the longest of the special features, I found this one really interesting. The last featurette discusses dreams and nightmares in general and how they have affected our culture and what the power of dreams are.
A Nightmare on Elm Street also contains three alternate endings to the film that each have a slightly different feel, and all come down to editing. All four endings (the actual and the three alternates) have the same basic scenes, but ordering changes give them drastically different feelings.
A Nightmare on Elm Street on Blu-ray really is the ultimate version of this film, and with the upcoming release of the remake, there is no time like the present to get back into the Freddy mindset. Any fan of the series should be willing to pick up this release, and those fans won't be disappointed in the purchase whatsoever.
