The evolving errs of Wes Craven

Note: I was going to title this "The Decline Of Western Craven"...that doesn't quite fit tho...

Anyway:
Sux.  A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is not perfect.  You know how I know this?  Because I saw FREDDY'S DEAD first, then I saw NEW NIGHTMARE and I really was far more impressed with NNM than w/ FD.  At some point later on I saw A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.  Was VERY disappointed, not being well versed on the history and evolution of SFX (I was just a kid!).
  SCREAM (1996) was a good movie.  HALLOWEEN H20 was a good movie.  I liked H20 much better than pretty much all of the other HALLOWEEN entries.  The only one aside from H20 that I ever liked was HALLOWEEN II (1981), but I guess my opinion on that is kinda void since HALLOWEEN (1978) is considered such a well made film, but, IMO, it's just amateurish to the Nth degree.  Someone once said on an Amazon forum (not sure if they were talking to me as they didn't address who they were talking to), to paraphrase, that in order to like horror movies you have to find that little kid part of you that was once scared of what was underneath the bed.  Yeah.  I grew up.  Sorry.  Anyway; I liked HALLOWEEN II, and I can still watch it from time to time, but refuse to buy it b/c at some point in the 1990s, Uni Corp or whoever owned Halloween II at the time changed the cover-art to look like CUJO and HALLOWEEN were the stupidist films ever made (CUJO may have semi-good, or better, but I saw it when I was a 13 or 14, and around that time I thought CANDYMAN was boring, so I don't know if my experience with CUJO is the same experience I would have if I watched it now...but the mid-90's cover-art for CUJO IS the best attempt I have seen to make a classic horror film look like elite trash [although those Direct2Video films like JACK FROST and UNCLE SAM etc. were hard to beat; if I were them I'd put a brown paper bag over the tapes instead of trying to advertise those atrocious films to anyone; "here's your trash, if you want it..."  Apparently some people will watch almost anything]).
  Oh, yeah...as I was saying.  SCREAM, although primarily a hip-teenage parodic sarcasm fest with some genuine horror intermingled, was a breath of fresh air to horror movies, b/c it said to the world: "We're not stupid - give us something we haven't seen a million and a half times already".  The fact that the killer actually ran to its victims was especially useful in making the film relatable.  And the fact that the women were not flimsy ditzs was refreshing.  And HALLOWEEN H20 apparently got wind of that.  Nobody elese did.  The entire rest of the decade was spent copying off of SCREAM.  URBAN LEGEND was almost a direct copy-cat, and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER was just stupid - another one of those films about how to be hip & demonstrating how teenagers know more about solving murder mysteries than the police do.  I did like the first sequel tho.  Ha!  I'm staring to see a trend here...honestly most of this post is spontaneouss, try not to read too much into it...
Anyway.  Here's where it all comes together.  2010.  A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.  Why does the world need a new NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET?  For one thing, it'll be in color (ha).  For another, it'll stave off whiny kids who think blu ray is a magic tool to make everything glow and sparkle.  The MAIN thing tho is that the special effects will be on par with NEW NIGHTMARE's, and not the pre-historic decay of the 1984 version.
What did the filmmakers give us?  They gave us a shiny film with a boatload of character development backed by a screenwriter who doesn't know how to write in character development.  They gave us a more realistic Freddy Krueger, who didn't kill people in their dreams in wild and imaginative ways, but instead assumed that people believe in ghosts and thus would suspect it was F.K. if someone starting levitating in a diner and thus decided it woud be safer to make it look like the diner kid took a knife and killed himself.  Yep.  Way to take all the fun out of it, ey?  BORING, BORING, BORING.  I didn't finish the movie because no ending could justify it.
  I would go back and just watch the original, but the whole franchise is so cheesy.  The SFX combined with the snarky jokes Freddy keeps spewing out, not to mention the early-80's MTV set designs, with all the fake smoke etc...just stupid.  I'll never have you Fred Krueger.  But at least I have the poster for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988), which isn't quite as cool as the slightly modified poster-art that was ued as the VHS cover-art shortly(ish) thereafter, but it's close enough...more or less...