You can't deny that Wes Craven's original "Nightmare on Elm Street" was horror of great significance and, although dreadfully overrated, it was a pretty clever and spooky film that introduced the legendary icon of Freddy Krueger. It was obvious right from the start that none of the several sequels would ever live up to the original and this first attempt immediately confirms so. Despite a dazzling intro, showing a school bus racing through a nightmarish wasteland with Freddy at the wheel, this is a very tame and soft teenage-horror flick, completely lacking coherence and logic. The story supposedly takes place 5 years after the initial Elm Street events and the house where Nancy lived has been sold to the Walsh family. The adolescent son Jesse begins to suffer from nightmares in which Freddy Krueger orders him to kill in his shape. The screenplay is a series of stupidities and continuity errors but the whole things basically is an excuse to show fairly impressive visual effects, so who cares about the story anyways? Jesse's transformations into Freddy Krueger are well staged and the murders he commits are decently gore. Several sequences and scenery don't make the slightest bit of sense (exploding parakeets, guard dogs with children's faces
) and the suspense-elements of the original have vanished entirely. The acting is considerably good, even though the hero screams like a little girl and the heroine looks like Meryl Streep's younger sister. At least in this first sequel, Robert Englund doesn't constantly fire off unfunny and embarrassing one-liners.
