 Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten. I-I can't even hear you in that stupid thing. You insisted on wearing it. Would you just take it off already? Hello, and welcome to Season 7 of Frightfully Forgotten horror movies. And we're gonna kick off Season 7 with a Part 7 horror movie, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Wow. Seven seasons already. We've had some growing pains. And some drinking pains. Show me that VHS. Show me those movies. I got a tube TV in the basement. I got a KGP. Our night is just about to begin. Wes Craven wrote and directed New Nightmare to kind of revive the whole series and to make it scary again, and to make Freddy scary again, because let's face it, he became a joke. I still want to hear that record. Yeah, there's a Freddy record and the Freddy rap. So we're gonna take a look at Wes Craven's New Nightmare and see why it failed to revive the franchise. There's none made after this. He basically killed his own series. All the mainstays are in this movie from the original. Heather Langenkamp, Robert England, John Saxon is in this, Miko Hughes that we have to mention. He was in Pet Cemetery, a kindergarten cop just to mention two movies. Wes Craven's New Nightmare starts off with this montage of Freddy and he's building this new animatronic claw or something. There's all these flames and he's in his lair and everything. And we find out this is actually part of a movie set. They're designing Freddy's new claw. And it's all just a movie. This claw starts to go haywire and start killing people on set. Heather Langenkamp wakes up earthquake and he finds out she's having this nightmare. She's been having these dreams about Freddy Krueger in real life. And she's getting these prank calls from this obsessed fan. She's on edge. She's trying to continue her acting career, move it forward while staying away from the whole Freddy thing. She's got a family. She's got little boy Dylan and her husband who is an effects artist. She gets a call from New Line Cinema to picture this new idea. So she goes down to New Line and guess what the idea is? A new nightmare in Elma Street movie. Wes Craven's been working hard on this script and he wants her to reprise her role as Nancy. She's not really sure if she wants to do this or not because she's been having these weird nightmares and she's kind of haunted by the whole experience. Her son Dylan also is having these weird things happen to him. He's having these seizures. He's foaming at the mouth. She keeps finding him like downstairs at night in the dark watching the original Nightmare in Elma Street movie. Heather's husband's off on the new Nightmare set working on that new claw that we saw in her dreams. So her dreams are kind of starting to come to real life. Because all this crazy stuff is happening with her son she calls him, come back home, you know. Kids fucked up. On his ride home in the dark on the highway the Freddy claw comes through him and he actually dies in his car crash because, well, Freddy is real. At the morgue, Heather sees that there's claw marks on his chest and so right away she thinks about Freddy. During the funeral, she gets a vision that her son gets nabbed in the grave by Freddy Krueger and pulled through the side of the coffin. Then she wakes up from a dream. She goes and has a meeting with Wes Craven. Wes Craven proceeds to tell her that Freddy actually is real. An ancient being kept locked away in these movies. Once they stop being made, he gets released. This is so ridiculous. That's why he's writing this new script? Yeah, exactly. To keep Freddy locked away. Heather's son, Dylan, actually gets taken by Freddy Krueger and Heather has to go sort of into his lair to go get him back. Big showdown, of course, at the end in Freddy's lair. Why did Wes Craven's new nightmare fail to revive the series? It's kind of interesting because Wes Craven started this big phenomenon. Nightmare on Elm Street, man, and he also killed it inadvertently at the same time. So we're going to take a deep dive into why this movie ultimately didn't work and why it killed the franchise. The least grossing of all the nightmare films, too. Which is strange because there's so much hype behind it. Wes Craven's coming back. It's new nightmare. Freddy's going to be scary again. Even we made fun of Freddy when we were kids making home movies. We had a sketch where he dressed her buddy up as Freddy. He goes to the barber shop and we just beat him up. How come it bombed? I know I was excited. Remember, we were kind of excited. It's like, oh, yeah. And Wes Craven's doing it now. It's like, oh, this is going to be awesome. Wes Craven's new nightmare. Miss me. And it was not awesome. It was a huge disappointment. And let's tell you why. The general atmosphere of the movie right from the get go pretty much is just flat. It just feels boring. It's not scary. There are very little points in the whole movie where there is suspense, where you're on the edge of your seat and you feel like you need to see more. Defeats the whole purpose of making Nightmare on Elm Street. Scary again. Exactly. If we're going to make it scary again, make it scary. Don't make it boring and bland and kind of just flat. It's also the longest running movie of the series as well. Yeah, an hour and 51 minutes. It's that long, eh? An hour and 52 minutes. And it feels it. It drags. Yeah. And the dream sequences don't really feel like dream sequences which I kind of get where Wes Craven's going for. It's kind of more like realistic, like are they dreaming, you know? They don't really clue you in that this is a dream. But that's kind of the charm of the first couple of movies. You know they're dreaming because it's so weird and fucked up. It's not only the new nightmare, it's the no nightmare. There's no nightmares really in this movie. It really hurts the movie. The fact that Wes Craven chose to make it a meta movie where it takes place in the real world where the movies are just movies. Yeah. That killed this movie because it makes it too convoluted. Yeah, and there's too many things that can go wrong with that plot. So how does Freddy really exist? How does a character that he just thought up on a script come to life and like become real? They don't explain that. It's all vague and like it just doesn't make any sense and because it doesn't make sense, it's not scary. Yeah, you can't relate to it whatsoever. You have to believe in something for it to be scary. Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund go to that TV show because all those kids in the Freddy outfit like, okay, yeah, Freddy, obviously he's not scary if kids are dressing like him and like idolizing him. Yeah, exactly. They did redesign Freddy to make him look a bit different but he still kind of looks the same. He still kind of looks the same and honestly, I think he looks worse. He does. Like even though some of those later Freddy designs and like Freddy's dad is horrible, fucking horrible, but this isn't much better because it's too rubbery. You can see that he's wearing a mask. He's just fucking, it's a mask and his hands are all rubbery. There's claws. You can tell they're all rubber. There's like, they're not real claws. You don't suspend your disbelief at all in this movie. He's kind of fucking lame. Yeah, and he still has those shitty one-liners. That's the nail in the coffin. So it really makes no sense that West Craven set out to make a movie that's so much different than the bad sequels and still gives Freddy shitty one-liners. He still fell into the trap. West Craven fell into his own fucking trap. They shouldn't have really even showed him. They should have kept him in the shadows. That's what made the first two movies the best, the scariest. West Craven is out to make Freddy scary again. Why not do what you did in the first movie and keep him in the shadows and keep him scary, you know? It's like he didn't know what he was doing. Exactly. Or he was castrated by the fucking studio, right? The studio was like, well, sure, he got this good idea, but we need you to do this, this and this. The acting does not help with this movie at all. Every performance in this movie, besides maybe Heather Langekamp, is fucking phoned in. West Craven is the worst in his own fucking movie. What makes that such a shame is that West Craven has probably the most pivotal point in this movie explaining why this is happening. And it should be probably one of the scariest scenes in the whole movie, and he blows it completely. It's like, oh my God, West, stick behind the fucking camera. You're not an actor. You fucking suck. You're doing a shitty job of explaining a shitty movie with a shitty premise that makes no fucking sense. And you can't even drive it home. It's like, oh man. And he's all like in that nice fucking penthouse. Yeah, he's all rich and everything. It's like, how are you supposed to care about him too? He's supposed to be going through all these problems with these dreams he's having. He used to write the script because these awful nightmares. Yeah, I'd have a lot of nightmares too in that fucking penthouse, buddy. He's keeping on all this money and everything. He should have had him all fucked up and like, shuffled and like, he can't sleep and maybe he's going on a bender or something. Yeah, well like, one of the ideas was that he was supposed to be cutting his eyelids so he could stay awake. He's like, why not have him all screwed up? That would have been so much better. Nico Hughes really doesn't do enough to carry this movie. He is one of the main characters in the movie and he fucking blows it. If not the main character. Yeah, the story centers around him and he fucking ruins it and kids are always a make or break thing with movies. You got a bad child actor. It destroys the movie. It doesn't matter how good everything else is. And he fucking wrecks it. And it's not that he's bad. He's just not good enough for this role. Foaming at the mouth. Not good. The music for this movie fucking sucks too. Just like the general look of the movie, it's boring. There's nothing special about it. I can see why you want to make it different but at the same time, don't make it different and boring. Exactly. Make it different and interesting. Yeah, and like, somebody like West Craven should know that music is probably half the movie. It creates the atmosphere of whatever scene you're watching. So I mean, if you don't make scary music, you don't make a scary movie. No. Basically. The kills for this movie, there aren't enough for one thing. There's like two. Yeah, there's only two kills that you see and two other kills that you hear about. The kills are boring and unimaginative. The CGI in this movie, there's some fucking awful just bad 90s CGI. Really puts a damper on the whole thing. Yeah. Just shits over all the other practical effects. West Craven being the man that he is at this time, he helped to pioneer some of the best practical effects. The ending of this movie is so anti-climactic. Like, so they're in a dream, I guess. You don't. And so they pushed Freddie into some fucking oven like he's the witch from Hansel and Gretel. Yeah. And that's it. That's how they kill. They don't like have to like do anything clever, like bring him into the real world like in the first movie. They just push him in some oven and he dies. Yeah. That's it. What the fuck? Or it could be also that West Craven finished the script, right, because he says as long as there's Freddie movies, Freddie's kept away. Yeah. So maybe they never beat Freddie, but West Craven beat Freddie by finishing the script. And if that's the case, that's the lamest fucking ending of all. Can you think of a more lame way to beat a bad guy in a movie by finishing a script? Yeah. Ooh, boy. You really got him. Why didn't West Craven just write a two-page script? Yeah. And just like write that everything's finished and fine. Like why does he have to write some fucking thousand-page movie? Like what the fuck? So it is really interesting how West Craven had this grand idea to reboot the series, to make it more scary, to make Freddie more serious, and failed completely at all those things. Yeah, on every level. How could you fail this miserably? I find it mind-boggling. Yeah. You know, he's not a poor director. He's made scary movies before, to legitimately scary movies, the first one. Serpent the Rainbow is pretty scary. How did you fuck this up so bad? I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt, and I'm gonna say that it's the studio that got involved without really knowing. I'm just gonna throw that out there, because it has to be, it has to be at least some of it. It's really hilarious that West Craven created this phenomenon, and then also completely destroyed it. Was it on purpose? Did he purposely sabotage his own movie just to kind of be like, I don't want nothing more to do with this. Yeah, and I'm gonna make it so bad that nobody else is gonna want to touch it. Maybe then fucking, if that's what it was, he's a genius. He's a pure fucking genius. But what do you guys think of New Nightmare? Yeah. You know, maybe some of you guys like it. If you do, let us know. Let us know why, because I'm curious as to why someone would like this movie. And maybe there's more behind scene stuff that we don't know about, right? That made West Craven go in a different direction than he wanted to. Let us know. And we think it fucking sucks. And until then, keep drinking.