One of the neater tricks in recent memory was Wes Craven's
reappearance in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, once again
holding Freddy Krueger's puppet strings. The directorial
possessive is deserved here, since the filmmaker has made a
movie about the making of one of his movies. I can't think of
another film that casts its own director and studio executives
-- let alone its own actors -- playing themselves in addition
to their characters. You follow? The concept is that once New Line stopped
releasing movies in the Nightmare series (remember, the
previous entry was titled Freddy's Dead), the very real
evil that was embodied in Freddy's character has been stripped
of its outlet in the movies. As a result, it's crossing over
from the world of fiction into the real world, apparently
giving creator Craven some very bad dreams. To stop it, he has
to make another movie in the series, with the original star --
a reluctant Heather Langenkamp. If the film's execution lacks
the stuff it struts in conception, it's still quite a concept,
and a unique, cerebral horror film.
On laserdisc, the concept goes one step further, with a movie-length
commentary from Craven himself on one of the supplementary
audio tracks. Quite a treat.
![[****]](../../flicker/4star.gif)
