Plot
When
a group of teenagers began having the same dreams about a disfigured maniac they start
to get killed one by one. It is up to one of the survivors to try and put an
end to him and figure out why he has chosen them for slaughter.
Review
The last of the icons of horror to be bastardized
with a pointless remake or re-imagining, Freddy Kruger's 21st century makeover
signals the death knell for any hope I ever had that the studios today would be
able to do justice to such classic legacies. Leatherface and Jason's reboots
were decent enough but hardly cutting edge horror like the originals were. The
least said about Rob Zombie's abortion, Halloween, the better. Here
Freddy drags his barely-beating corpse across the finishing line to star in
arguably the worst big budget horror film of 2010 - hell, I'll go further than
that. It's the worst big budget horror film for a many years I don't hate it
because it doesn't do the original justice, nor am I one of the "anti-remake"
brigade because some big budget remakes have been excellent (Dawn of the Dead
anyone?). I hate it because it blows big time.
A Nightmare on Elm Street's biggest problem comes from the fact that it
tries to be scary but fails miserably. Sudden blasts of sound are sent crashing
through the speakers when you're supposed to jump. It's not jumping out of
fear, it's jumping out of being surprised by a sudden blast and after the tenth time, it all gets
repetitive. There are attempts to include some traditional shocks but you know
as soon as the camera pans away and you're expecting Freddy to appear, rest
assured when the camera pans back again he's standing there for a "boo" moment. Yawn-inducing
terror at it's finest. Not only is it repetitive but it's extremely slow and
long winded. The dream sequences are also overused to the point
of being meaningless. You can easily gather what you're watching on the screen
is a dream or reality simply by how absurd some of the situations are.
The dreams are more elaborate and last longer but thanks to the constant
unnecessary overindulgence in flashy effects, these sequences are more about the
style and less about the substance. It's all well and good creating a fantasy
world but when you have a character walk around it for five minutes without so
much as a hint of any danger, you're asking for trouble. Gone is the original's
eeriness and unsettling nature and without it, even the most thrilling dream
sequence will leave you scratching your head just wondering what the point was.
A whole batch of sequences from the original are
rehashed with better effects but seem to have been included solely because
they're in the original and not for any particular relevance to the story. Remember the death of Tina in the original? Well it's played out again here with
another character but it's pathetically copied. There's even the appearance of
Freddy's bladed glove appearing between the legs of the heroine as she takes a
bath but, unlike the original, there's absolutely no reason to include it here.
He doesn't drag her underwater - it's there for the sake of referencing the
original and no doubt would look good in the trailers. A lot has been made about Jackie Earle Haley's
performance as Freddy Kruger but I saw nothing that I couldn't have seen in
countless other supernatural slashers. Haley talks in a deep, mumbling voice
most of the time (like Christian Bale's porn-style Batman voice) making it hard to hear certain lines and
he is hidden behind some
rather shoddy make-up. In fact Freddy's new face is arguably the worst he's looked.
There are odd moments where you think that the character is going to pick up
steam and burst out into being something other than a cookie cutter slasher - stringing a victim upside
down and telling him his brain will work for another seven minutes after his
heart stops, meaning Freddy has more "play time" with him before he
dies, is one such moment.
But the character then fires off some random one liners which seem to have been
lifted out of the previous sequels. This is hardly a re-imagining of the
character and more like leftovers.
Verdict
A Nightmare on Elm Street has been watered down into a
pathetically generic teen horror film for the brain dead generation. You can
tell that it has been directed by a former music video maestro with it's rapid
editing, it's style-over-substance approach and general lack of anything that
you'd call horror. When will studios stop putting amateurs in charge of horror
films and let some promising young directors take the reigns for a change? Where
is this generation's Carpenter, Craven or Romero? Everything that made the
original such a great horror film has been obliterated and mashed down into just
another typical contemporary teen horror slasher. And for a series with such
infamy, that just isn't good enough.
