Jackie Earle Haley plays the dark and mysterious Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Beautiful people and unrepentant carnage are essentially the only two constants audiences can expect in modern Hollywood filmmaking, disregarding for a moment the utter dominance of computer animation in live action films. There’s nothing wrong with all the bloodshed and bombshell women — that’s what most spectators crave. But a little originality here and there shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Originality is something one might think a big-time movie producer would have looked for before green-lighting yet another horror movie remake. Alas, New Line Cinema has recreated A Nightmare on Elm Street and proven once again horror movie remakes are often just as bad as repetitive horror movie sequels and far more useless.
For the uninformed, during the past few years, modern directors have been coming in droves to recreate classic horror films, including musician and director Rob Zombie (The Haunted World of El Superbeasto) taking a stab at the first two installments of the Halloween franchise and relatively unknown director Marcus Nispel’s fateful recreation of Friday the 13th.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is being advertised as a re-envisioning of the titular nightmare Freddy Krueger, who can only slaughter his targets by invading their dreams, except the consistently gory wounds afflict his victims in the real world as well. On top of this, before inexplicably transforming into this terrible phantasm, Freddy was a sadistic child molester.
The film revolves around his slow stalking and murdering of the teenagers who told on him as children, an act which led to his murder. The teenagers’ only defense is to stay awake at all times, which is an impossibility.
That’s the plot, and from the audience’s point of view, the film effectively transmits the message that no matter how badly he’s burned, Krueger the pedophile will always win. Of course, this probably wasn’t exactly what the creators had in mind, but then again, Wes Craven, who directed the original almost 26 years ago, probably wasn’t expecting his classic film to be butchered like a promiscuous teenager who can’t stay awake.
In the original, Freddy was a child killer and not a child molester, and the story had strong undertones decrying teenage sex — in a sense, it was partially a morality play. By removing these undertones and changing Freddy’s criminal nature, he becomes a hero for vicious rapists who has no purpose in the story other than providing an onslaught of claw-handed violence. One of the cornerstones of the horror movie genre is loving to hate the villains, but this movie forces its audience to simply dislike Freddy.
This new Freddy, played by Jackie Earle Haley (Shutter Island) doesn’t deliver the same semi-comedic soul that Robert Englund (Night of the Sinner) brought to the role. Sure, Freddy tells plenty of gruesome jokes in the film, but moviegoers will be laughing more at the terrible misplacement of the gags than anything else.
Conversely, awkward laughter may well be the only real emotion a viewer can pull from the movie. Screenwriters Wesley Strick (Love Is the Drug) and Eric Heisserer must love walking because every other scene in the film involves one of the one-dimensional teenage victims meandering down a lonely hallway in nearly absolute silence.
Then there’s an ear-piercingly loud sound in conjunction with a shocking image or a flash of Freddy’s blades. After the second time this happens, every scene with Freddy follows this structure and becomes absurdly repetitive. Scaring someone with a loud noise isn’t so much the production of a real emotion as it is the production of a tepid shock.
Similarly, this film, made more than a quarter of a century after the original, has less interesting and less realistic visual effects. There is a strong reliance on poorly rendered computer generated images, whereas the Craven version had to use entirely real visual trickery and set design to create its wonderfully appalling gore. Many scenes reworked for the new film, including the infamous zero-gravity bedroom murder, have been marred by bad camera angles.
The original Elm Street is often reputed as one of the greatest horror films of all time, and even appears on Empire Magazine‘s list of 500 Greatest Movies of All Time at a very respectable position of 162.
So the question arises: Why remake such an accolade of the horror genre? Audiences more than likely wouldn’t stand for a remake of something as important to the history of filmmaking as Gone with the Wind, so there is no reason to waste time recreating one of history’s quintessential and revolutionary horror movies. Whoever had the idea to remake this movie made a serious mistake — unfortunately some terrible dreams really do come true.
diversions@umdbk.com
RATING: 1.5 stars out of 5
