Unreal Movie Review: Nightmare on Elm Street

It’s kind of sad to watch the last bastion of classic horror fall. First, Rob Zombie massacred Michael Myers with two awful Halloween remakes, then Jason butchered his most generic group of campers yet in a Friday the 13th reboot. But with a dark, nightmarish atmosphere, and an Oscar-nominee in the lead villainous role, it appeared that Nightmare on Elm Street might have been a contender.

Though a better tale than Myers’ and Jason’s new adventures, Freddy’s latest story still is by no means good, by no means scary and by no means a necessary remake, but I think we all knew that last one already. It has its moments, but overall is just a hive of horror clichés, with nearly nothing original to contribute to the genre.

A bunch of kids start having nightmares where they’re stalked by a burned man in a hat with a glove full of knives. The problem? Whatever he does to them in their dreams, will happen to them in real life, as proven when they are jolted awake by glove slash, and find their hand to be bleeding.

Actually, you’re lucky if it’s only your hand bleeding.

When one sleep-deprived teen (Kellan Lutz) finally ends up opening his own throat with a steak knife, the other kids really start to worry, and one by one their dreams become so intense that they’re consumed completely by Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley) and wind up with their chests opened by invisible knives.

The closest this film has to a pair of leads are Quentin (Kyle Gallner) and Nancy (Rooney Mara), who pop pills, shoot adrenaline and burn themselves with cigarette lighters in order to stay awake. Before they succumb to Freddy’s violent slumber, they must unravel the mystery of how all the kids are connected, and what happened to Freddy in order to make him seek revenge from beyond.

Well, unfortunately for the film, the central mystery is spoiled by the main theatrical trailer, which shows a group of extremely angry parents chasing Freddy down, locking him in a warehouse and burning it to the ground. In the movie, this is supposed to be some sort of revelatory moment, but are we really not supposed to know Freddy’s origin story at this point? I guess that’s the problem with remaking a movie everyone’s been watching for thirty years.

When your big reveal is in your promotional screenshots and trailer, it’s time to rethink your plot structure.

But the Freddy in this movie is quite different than his predecessor, namely the film tackles issues of pedophilia and molestation rather than straight up child murder, which somehow, actually seems worse. When you look at the facts, Freddy does seem to be perhaps one of the most twisted horror villains ever, and in an already dark movie, things take a turn toward absolute black near the end, when all the facts come to light.

Jackie Earle Haley is a talented actor (and one hopefully not typecast as a pedophile now between this movie and Little Children), but other than a few “classic” puns, he has very little to do as Freddy other than scratch his claws along the sides of metal walls. His new burn-victim make-up just is not scary, and he looks more like an extra terrestrial than a vengeful demon. In fact, he’s much MORE creepy as pre-death Fred Krueger in his flashbacks as an overly touchy preschool worker.

No offense Haley, but you look creepier in real life.

The idea of being murdered in your dreams and subsequently in real life has always been kind of lame to me, but it does open up the potential for some pretty cool scenes, unbound by reality with the option of complete insanity like something you might see in The Cell. But in Elm Street, all of the dream sequences are the same, the person nods off to find themselves the exact same place they were, but now the lights are flickering and no one else is around. They wander around cautiously for a few minutes, and then Freddy jumps out and swings at them and says something clever. Sometimes they die, sometimes they wake up with half a second to spare.

There are one or two cool moments, like when a girl’s classmates explode into ash, or the homage to the original film where blood pours down from a ceiling, but there was just so much more potential here than what was explored, and I HATE the cheap “scare” tricks employed by this movie to elicit jumps from the audience.

A rare, decent dream sequence.

I can run up behind someone and clash some cymbals together, startling them and making them jump out of their chair, but that does not make my actions effective horror. It is a physical need of the body to jump at least a little bit when a microsecond cut suddenly reveals a scary face accompanied by a deafening noise. This happens no less than a dozen times in the film, and though it’s jarring, is by no means legitimately scary.

I think Elm Street does a lot of things right in terms of atmosphere, and with a few tweaks, it could have been a pretty decent attempt at a completely unnecessary remake, but as it stands now, it’s just a bunch of cheap tricks strung together by a classic story told created by someone with way more talent than anyone involved in this film, Wes Craven.

I appreciate the effort, but Elm Street doesn’t go far enough with its concept, and it’s just another unwanted remake to heap onto the coals of Hollywood so the machine can burn for a few more days.

2 out of 5 stars