A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Elm Street kids are having the same bad dream in which a malicious bogeyman in a stripey jumper with a hideously scarred face is terrorising them with knives attached to his fingers. The dream becomes reality when Tina (Wyss) is cut to ribbons in the locked bedroom she's sharing with boyfriend Rod (Corri). Nancy (Langenkamp) sets out to discover the truth by trying to draw the bogeyman out of the dream. Hard though it is to divorce the image of Fred Krueger (Englund) from the farrago of a franchise that we now know was to follow, there are some genuinely frightening dream sequences - and some throwaway black humour. 'It's dreadful up there. You need a mop,' advises a cop after the fountain-of-blood scene in Glen's (Depp's) bedroom. The subtext wanders around a bit - one minute Krueger is a Christlike figure, the next he's a boyfriend substitute - but it's all good scary fun.