A Nightmare on Elm Street Reviews

There hasn't been a great deal of excitement around this update to the 1984 original, and by the looks of critic reviews, there's good reason. Some of them hurt worse than Freddy.


"This Nightmare offers dutifully grinding thrills of a routine sort."

— Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

"...he [director Samuel Bayer] settles for delivering the cheapest, lamest, and most unoriginal of thrills, and in so doing accomplishes something unlikely: making one hanker for the '80s and the beauty of analogue-age special effects."

— Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

"...director Samuel Bayer's feature debut does nothing glaringly wrong, but there's not much that's inventively right, either. The slickly assembled widescreen pic has no distinctive style and scant imagination, not even in the realm of those fantasy f/x that kept the original series colorfully diverting."

— Dennis Harvey, Variety

"I stared at A Nightmare on Elm Street with weary resignation. The movie consists of a series of teenagers who are introduced, haunted by nightmares and then slashed to death by Freddy. So what?"

— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"...(this) back-to-the-beginning approach unimaginatively goes through the motions, offering scant justification for its boring existence..."

— Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter
 
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