5. Nightmare On Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street, one of Wes Craven's many unfortunate horror franchises, stars Freddy Krueger, a former child murderer who seeks revenge from beyond the grave. Freddy, equipped with finger-shears and a striped sweater, haunts the dreams of teens, killing them in their REM-sleep state where they're helpless to fight back. As far as slasher flicks go, Freddy Krueger fails to ever be very frightening aside from the occasional tongue sticking out of a telephone. But what's most shameful about the 1984 horror flick is the ending. I can look past our heroine Nancy jumping out of the window and very clearly landing on a safety mat sitting on her front lawn. I can even try to ignore the fact that literally minutes later, Freddy is thrown over a staircase and you can see that he falls on a mattress. That's just lazy editing and I don't give Wes Craven credit for going beyond the minimum needed to complete a film. But unlike the Dude, what I cannot abide is that the movie breaks its own rules in the final scene. In the penultimate scene, Nancy proclaims to Freddy that she's no longer afraid of him, causing him to lose his powers and apparently reverse time and bring Johnny Depp back into the movie. Of course, seven seconds later, Freddy is back and starts killing people again. If he was able to kill her when she's no longer afraid, why is time reversing itself like Superman pushing the world clockwise? And how is he able to kill a group of people who aren't even asleep? I think the worst part about all this is that Nightmare on Elm Street still manages to be Wes Craven's best movie.