A Nightmare on Elm Street 7-Film Collection, 2025.
Directed by Wes Craven, Jack Sholder, Chuck Russell, Renny Harlin, Stephen Hopkins, and Rachel Talalay.
Starring Robert Englund, John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Jsu Garcia, Amanda Wyss, Ronee Blakley, Linn Shaye, Mark Patton, Robert Rusler, Kim Myers, Clu Gulager, Marshall Bell, Hope Lange, Laurence Fishburne, Craig Wasson, Patricia Arquette, Ken Sagoes, Tuesday Knight, Rodney Eastman, Brooke Bundy, Toy Newkirk, Brooke Theiss, Lisa Wilcox, Danny Hassel, Kelly Jo Minter, Brekin Meyer, Yaphet Kotto, Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt, Roseanne Barr, Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper, David Newsom, Miko Hughes, Wes Craven, and Robert Shaye.
SYNOPSIS:
The long-awaited box set featuring all seven original Elm Street movies on 4K UHD.
To say this one has been a long time coming would be something of an understatement, but after the 40th anniversary release of Wes Craven’s 1984 original A Nightmare on Elm Street on 4K UHD last year Warner Bros. saw fit to release the first seven movies in the franchise in one glorious box set, which was nice of them. Alas, 2003s Freddy vs. Jason and 2010s Platinum Dunes remake did not make this set, so if you are a Freddy Krueger purist and insist that nothing short of a complete box set of all the dream demon’s adventures will do, then this ain’t for you, kiddo.
However, for those of us who know where the quality in the series lies, this seven-disc set is nothing short of a treasure chest, and regardless of the quality of some of the movies and the silly direction they took, looking at them now with fresh eyes on a new(ish) format and being so far removed from the era they originally came out in, there is something comforting about all of them, even when Freddy is goofing around with power gloves and flying broomsticks.
It is unlikely that a history lesson about how filmmaker Wes Craven came up with the concept of Freddy Krueger and how the movie got made is needed at this point, so jumping into the 1984 original we have Tina (Amanda Wyss) and her friends Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), Glen (Johnny Depp) and Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as Nick Corri) all having dreams about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a child murderer who killed local kids with his deadly finger-knives a decade before. Krueger was hunted down and killed by a vigilante mob led by Nancy’s parents Marge (Ronee Blakley) and Lt. Donald Thompson (John Saxon), but the demented killer is back in the dreams of Springwood’s teenagers as revenge against those who put an end to his murderous reign.
It is obvious straight away that there has been some tinkering with the image in this movie as there is very little grain, although this is not necessarily the disaster it could be with other movies. Opening with the iconic shots of Freddy Krueger making his finger-bladed glove, the blacks are very black, which makes the red stripes of his jumper pop all the more, and the overall look of Tina walking through the old boiler room in her dream is very atmospheric. When we do get our first proper look at Freddy in the alley behind Tina’s house during her next dream, the make-up still looks impressive and the detail is certainly a lot clearer than it has ever been on previous formats.
However, it isn’t consistent throughout and there are scenes where the colours and clarity do drop a little, such as when Nancy is being questioned by her father at the police station. It isn’t enough to distract you but the inconsistencies are there, much like with the Dolby Atmos audio that is impressive in the way it separates a lot of what is happening on the screen to give you an immersive experience, but there are times when the mix doesn’t quite do its job, such as when Rod tackles Glen in Tina’s back yard, the jump-scare sound getting lost in the mix and not creating the desired effect.
But technical glitches aside, this is A Nightmare on Elm Street and it is a classic. In all honesty, it was always a little clunky in its execution, and over the years various mistakes have been chopped and altered – for proof, go back to a VHS or early DVD edition and see the mattress Freddy lands on when he falls over the banisters in Nancy’s house, which is no longer there – but that hasn’t really hindered its effectiveness at being a bloody good time.
Of course, the concept is the key to it being this scary as we all have to sleep, so having the killer always waiting for you when you close your eyes is one of the most anxiety-inducing ideas put to film, but it wouldn’t be half as effective were it not for Robert Englund embodying the character of Freddy Krueger, one of cinema’s most terrifying villains. On paper, Krueger was a child killer (or molester, in Wes Craven’s original concept, but this was altered due to a real-life story that was in the news at the time) who has come back from the dead with skin like melted pizza and a sick sense of humour, but it was Englund who gave the character his nuances, such as the dropped shoulder to show the weight of the glove (which Englund apparently based on cowboy actor Gary Cooper), and the little flicks of his tongue to antagonise his victims.
With exception of Englund, the legendary John Saxon and then-newcomer Johnny Depp, the rest of the performances aren’t particularly great. Heather Langenkamp made Nancy one of horror’s most notable final girls, but when she isn’t doing anything physical her line delivery is very flat and uninspiring, although she would be better in later movies. Academy Award winner Ronee Blakley is also very wooden, which is a shame as she has some of the best lines in the movie (although “He’s dead because Mommy killed him” isn’t one of them). Perhaps she was being method to prepare for her final shot – if you know, you know.
Despite showing its age a bit and its flaws not really improving or diminishing over time, A Nightmare on Elm Street still holds up as the quintessential 1980s slasher movie, moving on from the simple Friday the 13th formula by introducing the supernatural element of Freddy Krueger and by having him not be a silent killer. Granted, he says too much in later movies, but here he sticks to the shadows and only speaks when taunting his prey, making him a much more frightening and effective slasher. How Wes Craven thought this would be a one-and-done movie is baffling.
Producer Bob Shaye, however, did not think that and saw the potential in making a sequel, rushing A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge into production for release less than a year after the first one hit cinemas. Wes Craven, who had sold his share of the rights to New Line Cinema, was offered to direct the sequel but declined due to not liking the script, and so Alone in the Dark director Jack Sholder got the gig, along with David Chaskin writing said script.
In this movie, Nancy has moved out of the house on Elm Street and the Walsh family have moved in, but teenage son Jesse (Mark Patton) is having peculiar dreams involving a burnt man in a red and green sweater who wants Jesse to kill for him so he can return to the real world.
Focusing on possession and the house being a recurring theme, New Line really didn’t know what they had and initially cast a stuntman in the role of their main villain. One shot of him still exists in the movie – when Jesse’s gym teacher Coach Schneider (Marshall Bell) is tied up and Freddy appears in the steam of the showers, lumbering like Frankenstein’s Monster in a rubber mask – and you can clearly see why Robert Englund got an apologetic phone call asking him to return, and Englund is all over this movie, bringing Freddy out of the shadows (slightly) and making him the most evil version of the character in the whole series.
But regardless of that, this movie has a reputation and one that often places it near the bottom in fans ranking lists. Thanks to David Chaskin’s script, Freddy’s Revenge comes loaded with homosexual subtext (or, if you like, text, with it being so obvious) that leans into the original concept of Freddy being a child molester, making the dream demon a metaphor for Jesse’s latent homosexuality and his desire to bed his best friend Ron Grady (Robert Rusler). Chaskin initially denied this was the intent and put it down to the openly gay Mark Patton’s performance, but the writer has since admitted this was the case.
A bold attempt at a controversial subject for a 1980s slasher sequel, but Freddy’s Revenge also drew negative comments for moving away from Wes Craven’s original concept. The Walsh family were nothing to do with Freddy’s original demise so why was he targeting them when his plan was to kill the children of those who murdered him? Okay, fair point, but this was only the second movie and the rules for the franchise were still to be established, hence why the movie’s best scene – where Freddy goes berserk at a pool party in the real world and slaughters dozens of teenagers – also comes under fire not not making much sense within the franchise’s later rules.
But put all that to one side and look at Freddy’s Revenge from a horror movie perspective, where we have clearly defined ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, and the movie is slasher movie gold. As previously stated, Freddy Krueger is at his most evil and sadistic here, his nightly torturing of Jesse leading to one of the franchises greatest scenes – where Freddy bursts his way out of Jesse’s body – and the performances from Robert Englund and Robert Rusler combined with Christopher Young’s bombastic score provide a franchise highlight. It also helps that Freddy’s make-up is a little different here, with Kevin Yagher coming on board and redesigning it so Freddy resembled a witch, making him look as evil as his dirty deeds.
This darkness means that Freddy’s Revenge is not the most humerous of the series, but the supporting cast does feature the legendary Clu Gulager as Jesse’s overwrought father, who puts in a few amusing moments as he thinks Jesse’s erratic behaviour is down to drugs, and Marshall Bell appearing in anything automatically makes it better, even if he is a predatory gym teacher with an S&M fetish. And, of course, there is Robert Rusler as Grady, adding his usual 1980s cool that in any other franchise would have made him the lead, but that wouldn’t have worked here. Kim Myers as Jesse’s love interest Lisa also makes for one of the series’ most underrated female heroines.
As the with first movie, Freddy’s Revenge has had a digital noise clean-up but this one is a bit more consistent and doesn’t detract from the overall image. Again, this is a dark movie and those blacks are impressively pitch without any obvious crushing, but the daylight scenes are bursting with colour, especially when there is a swimming pool in the shot. With this new-found clarity you also get to appreciate Kevin Yagher’s make-up and special effects all the more – such as the aforementioned pool party scene, where Freddy is hissing and snarling against a flame-lit background – and you can now clearly see who is driving the school bus during the opening dream sequence (which is also one of the best in the series). The Dolby Atmos audio is also more consistent, with all the bangs and clatters in the right place with no drop-out, so all in all, this 4K version of Freddy’s Revenge is a definite upgrade to the previous Blu-ray, and if you were one of the doubters on how good this movie is then now is the chance revisit and appreciate it in all its UHD glory. It may be a standalone in terms of connecting it to the other movies in the series, but it does deliver on everything the franchise promises, all in one movie.
The movie was a financial success and so another sequel was forthcoming, and 1987s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was the point where the series became what most people now think of when they hear the name Freddy Krueger. Despite its financial success, Freddy’s Revenge was not received well by fans or critics and so a reset was required, with New Line bringing Wes Craven back into the fold as a writer, along with Bruce Wagner. Alongside them were director Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont to help adapt their story, as well as returning cast members Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon from the original, and an accompanying Dokken music video, meaning we were off, screaming into late 1980s pop culture.
Ignoring the events of the previous movie, Dream Warriors kicks off with Elm Street teenager Kristen (Patricia Arquette) dreaming about being chased through Nancy’s old house by Freddy; quite how Kristen grew up on Elm Street but doesn’t know whose house that was is a mystery that is never solved, but that’s what four writers gets you. Anyway, Kristen is put into a children’s psychiatric ward at nearby Westin Hills Hospital, where she becomes part of a group of teenagers – all Elm Street kids of the same age apparently, yet none of them know each other – who have all attempted suicide because of bad dreams, and as well as their doctor Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson), they also come under the wing of Nancy Thompson (Langenkamp), who now works in the field of dreams, as it were.
After a group hypnosis session, it turns out the kids are all ‘Dream Warriors’, meaning they have special powers in their dreams, and when ol’ Pizza Face Freddy thinks he finally has the remaining children of his killers in one place, the stage is set for a battle to put him in his grave once and for all.
Often cited as the fan favourite, it is easy to see why Dream Warriors is many people’s go-to Elm Street movie as it is very watchable. For a start the tone – in terms of both the writing and the visuals – is a lot lighter, especially with Freddy himself, who is now cracking one-liners and is omnipresent throughout, and the group of teenagers rebelling against adult authority – a Wes Craven trademark – gives the movie an edge that appealed to younger teenage audiences more than its predecessors, despite their younger cast members.
Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy and gives a much more mature performance, and despite her limited acting abilities her onscreen chemistry with both Robert Englund and John Saxon is undeniable. Saxon himself is a welcome presence, as always, and despite not going up against Robert Englund directly, he does get to fight Kruger’s stop-motion skeleton in a junk yard, which was worth the price of admission in 1987 and is still a highlight to this day.
The whole ‘Dream Warriors’ angle is a little undercooked and would be exploited more in the following movie, but it is relatable as we’ve all dreamt we can fly or have some sort of power in our dreams, although the budget meant only a scaled down version of that would appear. It is telling that Craven’s original script was a lot darker and more brutal than the finished movie, and you can see the potential of his original vision in the movie’s poster, which sees teenagers armed with various weapons to take Krueger down.
If you were a teenager in 1987 then Dream Warriors was the horror movie to see (apologies to The Lost Boys) and looking at it now its themes of teenage suicide are still relevant and effective. However, despite its youthful energy and a peak performance from Robert Englund, the movie does suffer from a few flaws (apart from none of the kids knowing each other), the major one being the weak ending (another Craven trademark) that sees religion coming into the story and Freddy being disposed of in an entirely convenient and ‘think-of-something-quick’ ending that the studio probably loved. Its other big drawback is the acting from most of the supporting cast, most of whom were/are now familiar faces (back when Laurence Fishburne was still credited as ‘Larry’), but Patricia Arquette’s forced whines and Craig Wasson having the charisma of a 1970s science teacher (tweed jacket an’ all) are more grating now than they were then.
As Dream Warriors incorporates a lot of special effects – both practical and optical – the 4K upgrade is definitely more noticeable. There is a lot less digital noise reduction here, making the grain level more consistent and obvious, although the contrast is a little dark in places. Flesh tones are natural and details are sharp, the opening scenes of Kristen being chased by Freddy through a blue-lit boiler room looking particularly clean and sparkly, and that heavy metal soundtrack pumping out in Dolby Atmos is another plus.
Most importantly, though, Dream Warriors was a huge success and set the template for the series going forward, but whereas Dream Warriors straddled the fine line between being attractively camp or being downright silly – despite Englund’s broader delivery of the one-liners, the movie still had the scary edge that the first two movies had – 1988s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master would take that template and run with it, turning Freddy Krueger into an MTV-era icon, complete with his own rap song with The Fat Boys and a TV series in the shape of the underappreciated Freddy’s Nightmares.
The first evidence that things were a little different were Robert Englund getting star billing in the credits, placing Freddy front and centre for the follow-up to the mega-successful Dream Warriors, but where would Freddy go now that he had whittled the Elm Street children down to a trio? Of course, the writers found a way for him to get access to a new bunch of kids and things kicked off again after Dream Warriors survivor Kincaid’s dog urinates fire on Freddy’s final resting place – no, really – and with up-and-coming director Renny Harlin at the helm things took a much more colourful and kinetic turn thanks to a lot of quick edits and neon colour filters.
In truth, a lot of this fast-paced action was trying to mask the fact that there wasn’t much of a story and Freddy had somehow stopped being scary and started being a lot more fun. The bright visuals helped showcase Kevin Yagher’s excellent make-up effects, and given how many special effects teams worked on this movie you would expect the filmmakers would want to show their work off, but something was missing and the dark, sadistic Freddy of old had now fully transformed into the evil prankster that became what many people recognise him to be.
Character-wise, The Dream Master doesn’t fare too badly, with the dull Kristen now portrayed by Tuesday Knight instead of Patricia Arquette, but Kristen’s friend Alice (Lisa Wilcox) becomes the series’ final girl for a couple of movies and she is probably the best of the bunch, her mousy persona gradually disappearing as her friends get picked off and she takes on their strengths, making her a formidable opponent for Freddy. Her friends Sheila (Toy Newkirk) and Debbie (Brooke Theiss) provide decent support and both have memorable interactions with Freddy that show off some brilliant creature effects, and there are some interesting ideas peppered here and there, like the time loop Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel) find themselves in.
The Dream Master is the one in the set that benefits the most from the 4K UHD upgrade, the bitrate sitting high in the 80s on the Mbps scale for a lot of the running time. The grain level is slightly less than with Dream Warriors, but given that this is a more colourful and vibrant movie it doesn’t detract from it at all, Audio is also fantastic, giving a very clean and unfussy Dolby Atmos mix that perfectly complements the visuals. The Dream Master may not be the best movie in this set, but it is an enjoyable and very accessible Elm Street experience, and hands down is the best-looking movie here.
Which is unusual because in every other Elm Street collection 1989s A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is the best-looking one, thanks to director Stephen Hopkins wanting to add some gothic flair to proceedings and so some gorgeous matte-painted backgrounds were incorporated into the movie. However, what this sense of the uncanny also brought was the realisation that we were now a long way off from Nancy and her friends being stalked by a mystery killer, and Freddy was now lounging somewhere in a cartoon-ish dream realm.
The Dream Child sees the return of Alice and Dan, now a couple and graduating high school with a new bunch of friends. However, Freddy isn’t done with them and begins to break through into Alice’s dreams again, but when she discovers she is pregnant the scheming ghoul finds a way to break through to the real world again by using the dreams of Alice’s unborn baby.
Which sounds like an intriguing idea on paper, and one that could – and should – have seen Freddy return to his darker, edgier roots, but The Dream Master had been the most successful entry in the series so far and Freddy’s Nightmares had proved popular, bringing the wisecracking dream demon into people’s front rooms without the need to rent a VHS tape, plus kids knew who Freddy was as they likely had a lunchbox or a pair of pyjamas with his gruesome image emblazoned on them, and so sending him back to the shadows with his razor glove for company at that point would have been commercial suicide in the eyes of producer Bob Shaye.
He may have been right, but what we ended up with was a movie that even the director couldn’t make sense of, as most of his ideas were either cut out or not used in the first place. The Dream Child has become famous over the years for being sliced to ribbons by the MPAA, but the reality is that it was only two scenes that were trimmed, and although their reinstatement here is most welcome it doesn’t really help lift the movie any higher.
Robert Englund is still clearly having fun, but his makeup took on a different design that tried to make Freddy look like an old man but came off looking too rubbery and false. Lisa Wilcox and Danny Hassel do well as the main protagonists, and Alice’s new friends are all fairly likeable, although the death count is a lot lower in this one. Oh, and we have to mention Super Freddy, who appears in the dream of one of Alice’s comic book artist friends, because that’s where we are in the franchise by this point – maybe Wes Craven was right.
As with the previous movie, The Dream Child does look fantastic in 4K UHD, but it always did. The overall colour pallet is a lot darker, with a lot of blues, pinks and purples mixing in with the deep blacks, and the special effects still hold up – even the rubber Freddy baby – making this another excellent upgrade of a movie that does have some ideas going on but tries too hard to to appeal to a mainstream audience, upping the goofy humour and not using the razor glove to kill, making fans of the earlier movies feel like they’d lost their franchise.
As it was, horror movies – and especially slasher movies – weren’t performing too well at the box office in 1989, with Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers both underperforming as well, so when The Dream Child didn’t hit the expected target then questions had to be asked. To be fair, the movie did still make a profit but it wasn’t The Dream Master amounts of money, and if New Line wanted to continue then a new approach was needed.
And for ‘new approach’, read ‘gimmick’. Instead of rushing a new movie into production, New Line left it another year so they could put together a Nightmare movie that would appeal to fans of all tastes, and so in 1991 it was announced that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare would be Freddy Krueger’s swansong, in this iteration at least. Trends and fashions had changed, and by 1991 Hannibal Lector had become the new horror icon, with audiences seemingly preferring a more ‘realistic’ type of killer in their movies, and so it was that franchise stalwart Rachel Talalay – who had been involved in every Elm Street movie so far, albeit in different roles – would be handling directorial duties for this final escapade.
Set 10 years in the future and not connected to any of the previous movies, Springwood no longer has a child population thanks to Freddy wiping them all out, but there is one unnamed teenager who survives and is dreaming of the razor-gloved maniac. This John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) believes he has a connection to Freddy but Freddy is using him to get to someone else, and when John Doe leads him to the inhabitants of a foster care facility outside of Springwood, Freddy’s plan becomes clear.
Promising to go out with a bang, Bob Shaye and Rachel Talalay decided to throw everything into the mix with this one and, inevitably, not all of it stuck. The movie did gives us some of Freddy’s backstory (the bits that weren’t in the first episode of Freddy’s Nightmares) and it was fun to see Robert Englund playing Freddy without the make-up on (as well as seeing shock rocker Alice Cooper as Freddy’s adopted father), but the goofiness was still there; in fact, there was more of it, as Freddy literally became the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz before going all Wile E. Coyote and pushing out beds of nails for falling victims to land on, and this is before he offs a poor unfortunate by playing a video game with a Power Glove. That said, the death of one character is framed by some fantastic and very funny slapstick courtesy of Robert Englund, and despite it being a million miles from Wes Craven’s original vision, it still brings a chuckle and is the best kill we’ve seen for a couple of movies.
Also featuring cameos from Roseanne Barr, Tom Arnold, Johnny Depp (not as Glen) and a welcome appearance by Alien star Yaphet Kotto, Freddy’s Dead is not the dark and dangerous finale that was promised, but by this point that was never going to happen. The movie is a lot easier to watch than The Dream Child and, despite its forehead-slapping moments, is reasonably entertaining, as long as you go into it knowing what to expect.
The disc comes with 3D glasses for you to enjoy Freddy’s final moments, should you wish, but again, don’t go expecting miracles as this is a low budget horror movie from 1991 so Avatar it is not. As with many movies from the early 1990s, colour and dynamics were not at the forefront of cinematographer’s minds, so the movie isn’t all that visually appealing; it is a lot tidier and sharper, but compared to the previous two movies it is a little bland, albeit with stable and consistent grain. The Dolby Atmos track is quite punchy but, like with the first movie, it does seem to squash some of the audio cues so the original stereo track might prove to be more beneficial, depending on your setup.
With Freddy dead and buried, slasher movies seemed to disappear into straight-to-video purgatory during the early 1990s, but after New Line put out Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (do you detect a theme?) in 1993, someone decided there was one more Nightmare to be had, and that person was Wes Craven.
New Nightmare was released in 1994, promising a fresh take on slasher movies and the character of Freddy Krueger, giving audiences a taste of what would become known as ‘meta’. In it, Heather Langenkamp returns but this time she is playing Heather Langenkamp – or rather, a version of herself – and is the mother of a young son called Dylan (Miko Hughes). Dylan has been behaving strangely, suggesting he has seen the man with the claw in his dreams, and after meeting with Bob Shaye (playing himself) she is offered the part of Nancy in a new movie being written by Wes Craven. However, Wes (also playing himself) is coming at it from another angle, as he is writing what he dreams about and he is dreaming about an ancient evil that once manifested itself as Freddy Krueger through his original movie, but now the series has finished the evil is restless and Wes needs to write a proper final chapter to keep the evil from ever reaching the real world.
Or something like that, as New Nightmare is a very messy and confused movie. There is a clever idea at the centre of it somewhere, but this is still a franchise movie and has to appeal to a wide audience, so while they change Freddy’s look to make him creepier – the long coat is cool, but the additional thumb blade on his hand is too clumsy to work and the make-up looks like a cheap latex mask – you still have moments of silliness and callbacks to previous movies that don’t really pay off in any way.
And neither do a lot of the plot threads, such as Robert Englund (as himself) acting a bit mysterious whilst on the phone to Heather and painting a huge picture of Freddy. It feels like it should pay off in some way but it doesn’t, and the only time you see Englund again in the movie is when he is playing Freddy as he just disappears, as if there was a story there but it got cut out. John Saxon also appears as himself (sort of) in a confusing role, and you can see what Craven was aiming for but it is done so conveniently to hurriedly get things moving to the final confrontation that it doesn’t feel properly thought through.
As for that final battle, Craven goes full-on Hansel & Gretel with the fight for Dylan fought in some sort of CGI hellhole that totally undoes the ‘real world’ setting the first two acts set up. Still, we do get some more slapstick with Freddy’s elongated rubber tongue, but it isn’t funny this time, coming a movie too late and clashing with the serious tone of the opening act, a tone that was meant to do away with all the goofiness the previous movies had built up. Didn’t Scream try to do away with what came before it a couple of years later? And who directed that? It’s almost like this was a test run for meta ideas. Ah well, at least Heather Langenkamp wasn’t as dreadful this time.
As with Freddy’s Dead, New Nightmare isn’t the most vibrant of movies but it looks a lot tidier than on previous releases, although the green screen work is a little rough in places. The shot when Freddy fully returns looks great thanks to the use of shadow, but the visuals never really gets past just being a cleaned-up version of the Blu-ray without showing off anything new, although it scores quite highly on the audio front as the 5.1 track is quite busy and pounding when it needs to be.
Each disc comes with the same set of extras from the previous Blu-ray collection, which is basically a couple of archive audio commentaries for the first movie and short cast and crew interviews for the rest, although New Nightmare does feature two new featurettes containing interviews with Robert Englund, Jack Sholder, Chuck Russell and New Nightmare cinematographer Mark Irwin. Both total about 15 minutes and there’s nothing that hasn’t really been said before, but it is nice to have a couple of updated perspectives. If you are lucky enough to get the limited edition Steelbook set, each movie comes housed in its own individual Steelbook featuring the original artwork and a cool red and green striped box to keep them all safe.
So is this collection worth picking up? Well, if you are a fan and don’t own the previous Blu-ray set then yes, you should, but even if you do own the previous set then the upgrade is definitely worth it. For a generation, Freddy Krueger was THE ultimate horror movie boogeyman and the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies weren’t just movies, they were a rite of passage, and despite the series going down the goofy route, looking back at them now they press all the right nostalgic buttons, even the slightly naff ones. Where the franchise goes now is anyone’s guess as Robert Englund is a tough act to follow, but for now this set presents those movies as they should be seen, preserving them in the best quality for future generations to enjoy. Welcome to prime time (bitch!).
- A Nightmare on Elm Street – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
- A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child – Film: ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★
- Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
- Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
