I watched Wes Craven’s “New Nightmare” last night and enjoyed it for the most part. I was interested in seeing it since it’s not a “sequel” to the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and has gotten more good praise than bad. The movie is set in the “real world” and follows actress Heather Langenkamp (Nancy from the original “Nightmare”) ten years after the making of the first film. She’s married, has a child and seems to be being stalked by a rabid “A Nightmare of Elm Street” fan. Of course, she starts see Freddy Kruger everywhere she goes and becomes convinced that he’s trying to kill her family so he can come out of the “movie” and into “real world.” It’s an interesting premise to turn the reality of Freddy Kruger in on itself and the movie does have some really good scenes and scares. I particularly like the sub-plot of Los Angeles having one earthquake after another for no real reason. It mirrors Heather’s unsettled mind. Yeah, it sounds silly, but it works. And it’s fun to see Robert Englund, Wes Craven and assorted other “Nightmare” alumni play themselves. What didn’t really work for me was the climax of the film. It’s ok and certainly doesn’t ruin the movie. I think that rooting the movie’s premise abd conclusion totally in Heather’s psychology would have made for a far more interesting conclusion.

Bottom Line:
Worth seeing for it’s clever reinvention of the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” story line.
(Hell, you might even like the ending more than I did.)

Let me say this right off the bat … Eli Roth is not the salvation of the modern horror film. It’s that simple. My only guess as to his “success” is that he is someone’s nephew or he’s sucking the right person’s cock. His first film, “Cabin Fever,” was awful all the way around from the script to the directing of the film. “Hostel,” Roth’s second film, is better in terms of a consistant style, tone and better directing but it still suffers from a lot of plot elements that just don’t gel and ultimately undo the film.

The Story:
“Hostel” is about two American friends who go on a backpacking trip to Europe, and they’re looking for excitement, girls and drugs. Someone tells them that if they want to meet girls, they got to go to Slovakia; he tells them about this hostel where there are tons of beautiful girls who’ll have sex with anyone who’s a foreigner. So these two guys and their Icelandic friend go to this place, and it turns out to be true; but then the next day [they find themselves] in a whole lot of trouble and we realize there’s something really horrible, awful and sick going on there.

Eli Roth seems to be under the impression that lots (and I mean LOTS … I haven’t seen so many breasts in a film since “Showgirls”) of tits, ass, sex and some gratuitous violence will make a horror film good. Um, no. It doesn’t quite work that way. There have to be some scares in there or what’s the point. I thought that “Haute Tension” did an excellent job of ratcheting up the the scare with the violence. In “Hostel” it’s all just window dressing for ole Eli to play with boobies and blood for an hour and a half. Sure, I squirmed a little at certain points, but the violence is nowhere near as graphic as you al led to believe from all the internet hype. There are a few choice shots of gore with the rest being suggested by quick editing. Overall the acting in the movie is good, so I have no complaints there.

The set up is totally sketchy. That the three backpackers would take the advice of a total stranger and run off to Slovakia for an easy lay seems a wee bit of stretch. When all the badness starts happening, two of our three leads are dead and gone by the halfway point. All that is left is for our hero to walk into the nightmare only to stumble through a series of events that allows him to escape and get revenge on all the folks that put him in the situation in first place. He even manages rescue a Japanese girl who we don’t really care about anyway as she’s on screen for two minutes before reappearing later in the torture chamber. As with “Cabin Fever,” everyone (and I mean the whole town!) is in on the secret so our plucky hero has to make it out all by himself.

Yeah. It was all pretty pointless. I could have gotten into the movie a lot more if at least one of the backpackers besides our hero had been allowed to live thus giving our him a goal to work towards besides just escaping the horror of the torture chamber. The inclusion and rescue of the Japenese girl is meant to give us this but is handled so badly in set up and execution that it’s totally laughable. Laughable too is the series of events that lets our hero get revenge on all the main baddies at the end of the film. Roth just rolls them out one after another (with no real reason) so they can be offed and we can feel “justice” has been served. Let’s just forget that the torture warehouse is still in full swing with even more folks being kidnapped and killed as our hero rides the Eurail to safety.

The concept of toursists being capture and sold for torture and murder is a pretty interesting idea and could have made a nice horror film. It’s just a shame that it wasn’t treated in a more “mature” manner with less breasts and more scares.