Feel free to visit my list on Ranker and vote on how I rate these movies.
With that let us take a look at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and rank those movies from worst to best...
9. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge- This movie is god awful...not because of a flawed premise, and not just because it was so poorly executed. The real problem with this film is Freddy in the real world, at a pool party, surrounded by buff jock guys. Freddy is a coward...a weakling...and in the real world any one of the kids at that party could have and should have whooped that ass! I like the idea of Freddy having a real life avatar...in fact it was such a good idea that it is the basic premise of Freddy versus Jason...but of all the kids to pick he picked Jesse, sure maybe cause his family moved into the house at 1487 Elm Street, but this movie failed on so many levels...Even though it has one of the better heroines of the entire series who defeat Freddy with her love something we do not see happen in the rest of the series.
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8. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)- I am not a big fan of reboots...and this one wasn't awful save for the simple fact that Robert England is Freddy and Jackie Earle Haley wasn't able to overcome that performance ala Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson both playing very different Jokers. It seems to me a successful reboot changes one key fact to turn the series on its side. Since the original film was so dark, and we all grew tired of the comic book version of Freddy we saw in the the way too many sequels. I wonder if a twist would have made this film better...the writer in me thinks maybe making Freddy innocent of his original sin would make for a compelling tale. Or at least a version of the story worthy of some exploration.
7. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child- Nightmare 5 and 6 are equally bad, but we list five first because it was so bad they had to kill Freddy off in the next movie as the only way to get people to come back. This movie is just bad, and after a few movies one starts to run out of ideas. With that being said I would have preferred a imposter Freddy ala Friday the 13th part 5 over Freddy and Alice having babies. Granted I was not the age of the target market when this movie was released but I am willing to bet the target market was not too concerned with babies, or the underlying themes of child care and abortion.
6. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare- the joke of the 1980's that anything with the word final in it is hardly that. I saw Ozzy on the No More Tours tour, and again and again and again...Since the Final Nightmare was the sixth of nine movies thus far at least it is consistent. And no the 80's is not a time period but a lifestyle...Beyond that this movie is just a hot mess. Convoluted from the very beginning and such a unworthy send off that Bob Shaye had to let Wes Craven make one final Freddy movie more worthy of his superstar status.
5. Freddy versus Jason- Hooray we have made it out of the far too many sequels that were poorly thought out and poorly executed. We get back to a Hollywood staple the monster movie and the monster v monster fight movie. I think this movie served both mythologies very well and we could debate forever who actually won, and that is yet another critical point to any successful monster v monster battle. Since I am more of a Freddy fan that lil wink at the end tells me that he won...
4. Wes Craven's New Nightmare- I heard Wes Craven say that this movie was made for the people who made the movie...and that Scream was made for the audience of movies like this. It seems very interesting to me that he made this and then started making Scream like this idea was the thing that led him to that one. The first time I saw this movie I didn't like it very much, but each year as I go back to these movies I grew up on this one stands out a little more with each successive viewing. It is a very imaginative and I especially enjoy the darker version of Freddy that we started with...even though I love the wise cracking side of him we saw in the sequels that really didn't measure up as well.
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master- I love Alice. I love the transformation she goes through in this film, and this was the first Freddy movie I saw in the theaters so it always holds a special place in my heart. This movies has several of my favorite death scenes for the whole series and again Alice is freaking awesome. The only thing that could have made this movie better was the return of Patricia Arquette as Kristen. Not that Tuesday Knight did a bad job...Just that Patricia was great and it would have been great for all of us fans to see her reprise her role.
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors- There are those who will argue it is the best movie of the bunch...I cannot say they are wrong. However, this is the movie that led us to the more cartoon, wise cracking Freddy. Once he uttered that one line each movie that came after had to write a moment like that in...and some of them worked a lot better than others. I will say this it is by far the best sequel...and it is a lesson that other franchises should have learned from...it was a very inventive way to expand the universe of Freddy and tell a scary story in a fresh way.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street- What is better than the original? If the first wasn't any good there would not have been the 8 other installments right? I, like Rob Zombie, like to point out how dark Freddy was in this movie...we end to forget that with the smart-alecky, wise cracking, almost anti hero he would become. In the original he is just a child murderer set out to do evil. Nancy is a great heroine and is very much the earliest version of Sidney from the Scream franchise. This movie has a very indie feel for it and even now 30 years later it still holds up, in fact it even stands out. It maybe the best 1980's slasher movie...but we can debate that another day.
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