A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
FYI: I am obviously back to posting again, yay! I moved to a new host, then back to the old host, who then moved me to a different server—It was a long process, but I’m settled again and will resume posting daily as of now. As previously mentioned, I will be backdating posts in addition to my new posts, and you probably won’t get those on your feed readers. So, if that’s how you browse the site and you actually care, you might want to pop by every once in awhile and see what I magically added in ~the past~. Anyway, onto the review.
By: Samuel Bayer (director), Wesley Strick, Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Wes Craven (characters)
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, Kellan Lutz, Clancy Brown, Connie Britton
A re-imagining of the horror icon Freddy Krueger, a serial-killer who wields a glove with four blades embedded in the fingers and kills people in their dreams, resulting in their real death in reality.
I am, amazingly, a fan of the original Nightmare on Elm Street series—For a certain value of “fan,” at least. Since I was a kid, I’ve seen most to all of the original films (Most of them tend to blend together), and while I enjoy them, it certainly isn’t because I think they’re high art. I will say this much, though: Freddy Krueger has always terrified me on some primal, human level, and I think that’s why I’ve always liked the Elmstreet films. It’s fun to be scared, even if it’s mostly ridiculous.
Color me disappointed in the recent reboot of the first Elmstreet movie, then, which lacks both the utter ridiculousness (Johnny Depp being eaten by a bed, anyone?) and scariness of the original. Not unlike Rob Zombie’s reboot of Halloween, the film becomes bogged down by serious themes and back story that was more terrifying being merely hinted at in the originals. We get extensive scenes of Freddy’s origins, the filmmakers first setting him up as an innocent man wrongly accused and burned to death by vengeful parents, and then later the cheerful child molester. The trouble here is that there is nothing remotely sinister about this added material, and as such the only purpose it serves is to detract from the point of the movie.
I enjoyed Jakie Earle Haley in Watchmen, and was eager to see how he would handle the iconic role of Freddy, but I was disappointed there, as well. Haley’s Kreuger lacks the expressiveness and chilling glibness of Robert Englund’s take on the character. Both his expression and voice are flat, perhaps in an effort to seem menacing that ultimately loses the root of what made Freddy such a great, scary character.
Overall, this wasn’t a horrible film, as horror goes, but it really doesn’t hold a candle to the entertainment value of the original, and it didn’t even have anyone get eaten by a bed.
