The best part about this movie is the whole idea that sleep can kill you in a horrible and gory fashion. Once that is established, Craven does an excellent job of making normally comforting settings such as a soft bed or a warm bubble bath seem menacing. Never before has falling asleep seemed so scary, and it gets better and better as Nancy tries to come up with a solution before she goes crazy from lack of sleep, while surviving on coffee and caffeine pills. It has a very interesting suspense to it. There is also the nicely done part where they try to apply cold hard science to Nancy's problem ("Something's wrong, the numbers are never this high!"). Very cool.
Those are the good parts. The bad parts are the lame acting (excluding Johnny Depp) and the laziness of the script. It really, really hurts this movie that so little attention is paid to the parents. They are barely even IN the movie, even though the entire premise revolves around them! The backstory about these seemingly nice parents, in a quiet suburban town, viciously killing a man (child murderer or not), and keeping it a big town secret, is a neat idea that is just briefly mentioned like an afterthought ("Oh, by the way honey, all of us parents burned a man to death when you were a kid. Now go to bed, OK?"). The implication is that Freddie is getting revenge on the people who killed him by murdering their innocent children, but it's not explained or developed at all. Why is he coming back NOW, for instance? Why not earlier? And why in the world do Nancy's parents completely ignore her? If you murdered a guy years ago, and then your kid, who knows nothing about it, provides an exact description of him in her dreams, wouldn't you think there was something a bit odd going on? It would have been much cooler if they had realized Freddie was killing their kids, and there's nothing they could do about it.
I also hate the ending to this movie. Why do horror movies always have to have such bizarro endings? The climactic battle at the end is awesome, but then it takes such a weird turn--(and I'm not even including the nutty twist here, I'm talking about the father NOT CARING that his wife just got sucked into a bed by a demon!)--that it totally runs out of steam and turns into a horrible, nonsensical train wreck. Roll credits.
If the movie focused more on the parents, and had a decent ending, it would have been a true classic. Instead, it is a mediocre slasher flick with a few interesting elements, which is a real shame.
