After the embarrassing mess Nightmare On Elm Street 6 was, it took Wes Craven to bring back Freddy in a fresh new way. You can’t accuse this film of not being original. It’s shot documentary style almost the whole way and interprets reality…well…in a real way. We get to see the New Line offices, Robert Englund playing himself, Wes Craven at home (great pad man) and John Saxon being a nice guy. I bought it. The film starts fast putting its audience in a shaky environment from the get go: earthquakes, creepy phone call, TV’s that run themselves and spooky dream sequences. The film also has many nods to the original Elm Street. Anybody that remembers the first one will double his/her pleasure upon viewing this film. From the opening sequence to the girl on the ceiling bit, to the "screw your pass" line to the Freddy phone, this flick is a perfect companion piece to the first. We even get to see Rod (Nick Corri) at a funeral…fun stuff….

New Nightmare manages to do something that I thought was impossible: make Freddy scary again. You see Freddy is more than his character here, he represents all the evil in the world, trapped through storytelling. But now that the stories are over, the evil is loose and he’s everywhere. Freddy is bigger and badder, we even get a nod to "Nosferatu" upon his rebirth.

Craven does mess up with the finale that takes place in Freddy’s world. The flick is psychological, touching deep themes most of the way but Craven ends it all with a slam bang, stalk scene that feels a tad clumsy and that would be more appropriate for one of the campy "Nightmare" films. With bad morphing, matte paintings and an incompetent Freddy the finale tarnishes the film. Another negative thing is the acting from Craven and producers. Its weak but it’s quickly forgiven cause they’re not actors.

All of the earthquake sequences in the film were actually filmed one month prior to the Los Angeles quake of '94. The real quake struck only 2 weeks before the end of filming. Subsequently, a unit was sent out to film drive-by footage of actual quake damaged areas of the city before the end of filming. The cast and crew believed that the earthquake scenes that were filmed before the real quake struck were perhaps a bit overdone, but when viewed after the real quake hit, all were frightened by the realism of it.

The "bio-engineered" hand/glove that Freddy uses in this film (as opposed to the glove used in the prior films) is actually derived from the artwork of the theatrical poster and video box covers of A Nightmare On Elm Street.