A Nightmare of Elm Street Totally Bit Ass

The original Nightmare on Elm Street was not a great film by any stretch, but it was unique, quirky, and at times legitimately scary in new and creative ways. There were some neat effects and some cheestastic dialogue, but everything came together to form the glorious horror classic we all still love today. The new Nightmare on Elm Street ignores all of those old devices that worked so well in 1984 and instead opts for following the current "make it dark and broody" trend in film making, clearly a better idea. While certain parts were visually well put together, the character development was non-existent and the cheap, predictable scares fail to induce even a shocked blink.

A Nightmare on Elm Street follows roughly the same story as the original; Kids are tormented in their dreams by a murderous man with knifed-out fingers, a striped sweater, and an Indiana Jones style fedora. The extra broody team of high schoolers dig into their pasts to uncover who is terrorizing them and why. As evidence gets randomly stubbled upon with the greatest of ease, the kids approach their parents about what happened to them when they were in preschool and in the grand tradition of parents being idiots they manage to avoid giving a straight answer for most of the movie. After finally learning the truth, the remaining two friends go after Freddy in his natural habitat and, like in the original, pull him out of a dream in order to kill him in real life.

Nightmare winds up being bookended by the most memorable scenes of the film; opening on a diner scene you should be pretty familiar with from the trailers, and closing on an updated take on the final shots from the Wes Craven classic. Everything in between was predictable, cheap, and wholly out of the spirit of the original Nightmare franchise. The Friday the 13th remake at least felt like a Friday the 13th movie, whereas this Nightmare remake feels like bland rip-off you'd buy off a one-legged street vendor named Quincy. It lacks all of the charm, all of the cheese, and all of the originality that made the 1984 version such a classic.

Probably the greatest fault of A Nightmare on Elm Street is the absolute waste of half an hour of development on a character who couldn't act her way out of a Colgate commercial. This wouldn't have been a problem if director Samuel Bayer hadn't just completely sidelined who the movie is actually about. The film's star is Nancy Holbrook (changed inexplicably from the original Nancy Thompson) played by Rooney Mara, but you'd never know it based on the amount of time we're forced to watch Katie Cassidy parade around the screen as Kris, crying at every possible moment and regurgitating her terrible lines for a half an hour before she's killed in one of several scenes stolen from the original. Sure, we probably should have known a bit about this girl since her death is the first of the core group, but not by sacrificing every second of screen time to her.

This movie did not look half as good as it should have, and even the scenes they ripped directly from the original didn't match the caliber of their predecessors. There are scenes that are iconic in the original that here are played way down and virtually deprived of the gore necessary to even be called a horror movie, and the effects are executed so poorly that they are overshadowed by a film that's 26-year-old. It's rated R but everything felt really tame, as if they edited it down to get a PG-13 and didn't quite make it.

This review is reaching epic lengths but I would be remiss if I didn't talk about Freddy himself. Played pretty well by Jackie Earle Haley, the character was devoid of everything that made Freddy entertaining. Sprinkled in are a few good one-liners ("How's this for a wet dream?"), but there's no soul to him. No life. Haley, at the behest of Bayer, was mostly menacing and not at all hilarious or cheesy (the true essence of Freddy) leaving Freddy as just a standard husk used for killing dumb teenagers that for the most part you want to see dead anyway. Old Freddy found time to screw with the heads of his victims, while new Freddy simply pops out of dark corners and punches through people.

There was a good movie in here, but Samuel Bayer didn't find it. While the story could have evolved into something watchable, the characters simply bounced from scene to scene like pawns in a really poorly thought out game of chess. The few decent effects aren't enough to distract from the pile of bad ones that don't even compare to what was done in the 80's. If any movie ever misses the mark more than this one, I'll be thoroughly surprised. Trash effects, empty and wasted characters, weak-ass reboot.

2 Stars

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Comments

[Kristin]

Its just terrible that they ruined that head stretching through the wall effect...it just looked stupid in CG...