A Nightmare on Elm Street

When Platinum Dunes redid The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and did it terribly, I didn't care all that much. I was never a huge fan of the original. Likewise, I didn't bother watching The Amityville Horror remake that they did. I was a little more disturbed by how poorly done the Friday the 13th remake was because I actually did enjoy those movies growing up, but they didn't exactly hold a special place in my memory. No, the movie that always scared the pants off of me growing up was A Nightmare on Elm Street. I cherished that movie, and the early entries in the series, because it presented a villain that was altogether terrifying. Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers were unstoppable killing machines, sure. But they were just relentless. They wanted to kill you and be done with it. Not Freddy Krueger. Freddy Krueger wanted to play with you first. He psychologically tortured teenagers before he dispatched of them. And while Jason and Michael were terrifying because you couldn't hurt them... Freddy wasn't even on our plane of reality. To fight him, you had to do it on his turf, where he could manipulate anything to his will. So when Platinum Dunes announced they were remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street, I instinctively cringed. You can mess with Jason all you want. Leave Freddy out of it.


Sadly, the production company founded by Michael Bay and others didn't listen to me. They set about the task of modernizing Freddy Krueger and in doing so, they wasted a major opportunity. They recast Krueger with Jackie Earle Haley and essentially rehashed the plot of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. In this one, Freddy is killed by a town mob and becomes the evil dream-master who begins terrorizing teens in their sleep, eventually killing them in their dreams which kills them for real. Why is he targeting a specific segment of teenager? He's taking vengeance on the kids of the parents who burned him alive. Whether or not the mob was justified is something revealed late in the movie, so I won't spoil it. You can probably make an educated guess, though. The main difference between the original and the remake is that Freddy was a child-killer in the original, while he's a suspected pedophile in the new version. Other than that bit of plot? Not much to speak of. Freddy starts picking off teens. Our main character, Nancy, (Rooney Mara) and another kid (Quentin, played by Kyle Gallner) start noticing this and attempt to put the pieces together before they fall asleep. Of course, the longer they stay awake, the more they put themselves in danger of napping when they don't realize it or falling into a coma from sleep deprivation.

That's essentially the plot of the original, barring a few tweaks and all, but let's be honest here. What separated the Nightmare on Elm Street series from other slasher flicks was the inventive kill sequences. Since Freddy had control over their dreams, the writers could kill off teenagers using whatever crazy methods happened to pop into their heads at the time. Some of them from the original and its sequels were, considering the budget, particularly well done. Johnny Depp, in his first role, being pulled into his bed and spit back out in a fountain of blood and gore was a prime example of this. As the series dragged on and Freddy got more and more of a wise-cracking evil mass murder, the quality of the kill sequences started to fall off as well. Ideally, the remake would have, at a minimum, offered some unique and memorable kills. It did not. Not in the least. In fact, two of the kills completely rehashed elements from the original. This wouldn't be an issue if they were done in a new and interesting way, but they weren't. Kris (Katie Cassidy) dies the same way that Tina (Amanda Wyss) does in the original, except it's done in a more brutal and "realistic" way in this version. In the original, much of the dream sequences take place in a boiler room. That's where the teens wind up once they realize they're dreaming usually, and it's significant because that's where Freddy was burned alive. That was a plot device driven by budget, though. There was no reason for the remake to revisit countless boiler room scenes, but alas, we were taken back to the boiler room in the very first scene of the movie. This wasn't done for budgetary reasons this time around. The remake had a $35 million budget, compared to $1.8 million for the original. It wasn't done for plot reasons, either. This was done out of laziness. Or worse, it was done out of a fear to break any new ground, either visually or in the plotting of the series.

Since it failed so spectacularly at that, did the remake have anything at all to offer? Slightly. Jackie Earle Haley was a much different Freddy Krueger, and I liked his better. Nothing against Robert Englund or anything, but even at his creepiest, he was no match for the level of creepy that Haley pulls off. He tends to be an unsettling screen presence to begin with, but he transcends that. He's a Freddy that actually made me feel uneasy and disgusted. That's what I should feel about Freddy all the time. The writers wisely kept the one-liners to an absolute minimum and focused on a very dark, disturbed, twisted Kreuger for this one. They pulled it off in his character. If only it would've carried over into the dream sequences. Outside of Haley though, keep looking if you're hoping for anything resembling an engaging character or actor. You won't find one here. It's all done sloppily. The parents that are hiding things from the kids aren't nearly as foreboding and devious as they were in the original. The actors aren't as talented. The characters aren't as interesting. In the original, I actually end up pulling for and sympathizing with Heather Langenkamp's Nancy. In the remake, the teens are treated like Freddy fodder. I don't care about them. I had to look up their names.

Unless you're a big fan of jump scares (which A Nightmare on Elm Street uses to a nauseating level), there's not much to see here. While the premise of Nightmare has always been the most interesting horror/slasher movie premises to me, I will still sit here waiting for someone to adapt it and improve on it. I'll wait for a talented director to, if nothing else, provide something visually interesting. In the meantime, I'll go back and watch the original A Nightmare on Elm Street and enjoy an effective, competently made horror movie. I'm pretty sure it's streaming right now on Netflix anyway.