My Blog for Fun

Alright, the time has come for me to write about whatever I want. What on Earth could that be? How about a movie review? Yeah, there aren't too many people doing that on the Internet, so why not.

By the way, this review will contain spoilers and film clips featuring graphic violence!

The original Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, and is considered a horror movie classic.  Freddy Krueger would go on to become one of the most iconic characters of horror.  Despite it's classic status, the film is not without it's problems, namely of which, the film definitely shows it's age.  A remake was inevitable, but given the dated nature of the original, I wasn't scoffing at the idea.  I should have known that this film would be a disaster after realizing that Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes was releasing the film.  However, I tried to stay optimistic, the film was directed by Samuel Bayer, who garnered some notoriety for directing Nirvana's music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and recent Oscar nominee Jackie Earl Haley would be playing Freddy.  The film had to be half-way decent, right?

Let's start out with the films biggest misstep: Jackie Earl Haley as Freddy Krueger.  He plays the character to closely to Rorschach from Watchmen, instead of playing an entirely different character.  His motivations are inconsistent throughout the film.  In the same dream sequence at the end of the film, Freddy goes from a serial killer to a pedophile at the turn of a dime.  His appearance is also a major problem, not because the makeup is bad, but because it's too good.  Freddy looks like a real burn victim.  While the original Freddy looked burned as well, his scars were more exaggerated, giving him a monstrous look.  The same goes with Freddy from New Nightmare.  That incarnation of Freddy didn't look like a burn victim, instead, his skin looked as if it were tearing off of his face.  Both of the original Freddy's appearances were almost uncomfortable to look at, but that's not the case with Freddy redux.  It's almost as if you begin to feel sympathetic for him, which is a big "no-no" for slasher villains.

 Scary

 Scary

Not Scary

Next up is the fact that the film has no central character until halfway through the film.  The film opens with a five minute prologue.  We follow a 25 year old high schooler through a "creepy" kitchen where Freddy is lurking behind him.  Freddy slashes at him, and he wakes up to realize it was all a dream.  Will this be our main character?  That certainly would be clever if we followed a set of characters different from the original, but being clever isn't what these filmmakers had in mind.  Instead, this guy just falls asleep two minutes later and gets killed by Freddy; what a shame.

Our next character is an equally bland 25 year old high schooler who actually goes through some length to figure out the circumstances of her friend's apparent suicide.  You see, she was with him at the time where, in the dream, Freddy redux slashed his throat open with a kitchen knife, causing the guy to slash his own throat open in the real world.  Anyway, we spend around thirty minutes with blonde victim #2 before she is killed in a scene that is a remake of Tina's death scene from the original.

Finally, nearly forty minutes into a ninety minute film do we meet this film's boring replacement for Nancy.  Rooney Mara delivers one of the blandest protagonists of recent years.  She is unsympathetic to the deaths of the people around her, she is emotionally neutral in the face of death, and only delivers the most basic of horror reactions when Freddy redux is confronting her.  She is a waste of a character that in the original was smart and resourceful.

Next up are the pathetic excuses for dream sequences.  What does this film have to offer in the nightmare department: dilapidated schools, grimy boiler rooms, and dirty kitchens.  That's it people, aside from Nancy's house which remains unchanged in the dream world.  What happened here?  Doesn't anybody remember Nightmare 3, the first nightmare film to truly bring out the dream world's full potential?  There were hellish corridors, transforming rooms, unnatural city streets, superpowers, and imaginative kills.  The dream sequences in the remake have been scaled back to the point where they aren't interesting.  Yes, the nightmare sequences in the original weren't as extravagant as it's sequels, but it made up for it with a menacing killer, which, as discussed before, this movie doesn't have.

As for the kills, they are even blander (more bland?) than the dream sequences themselves.  We have a slit throat, a slashed chest, and an impalement (and a second throat slit if you count Freddy's death).  Kris (substituting for Tina) has the most disappointing death scene in the whole film.  Watch Tina's death scene up above so I don't have to describe how it plays out when comparing the two.  Kris, instead of being slashed right away, is instead thrown around the room several times before being lifted into the air above her bed, and being slashed once across the torso, all without waking up.  What made Tina's death so horrifying was the fact that she was awake for the entire thing, and that she was literally begging for her life.  We don't get that with Kris, she is treated as a completely disposable character.

Sure, it's more polished, but does it have the same impact?

We're running a bit long here, but don't worry, we're nearing the end.  The last thing I want to bring up is newly added mystery surrounding Freddy's origins.  The mystery in the original Nightmare was simply: who is the killer.  The remake keeps this element, but adds a new layer on top of it: did the parents kill an innocent man?  All I can say about this was that it probably sounded good on paper.  There's nothing wrong with keeping the motivations of a psycho killer a mystery, but when you present me with a suspicion at the beginning of a film, then force me to question my original assumption, only to bring me back around to my original suspicions, then you have just successfully wasted an hour and a half of my life.  Why does the movie have to have a mystery that only leads back to where the movie started?  That's not intriguing, that's just a waste because the mystery literally doesn't go anywhere different from where it started. 

There's more crap to sift through here, but at this point I'm way over my word count.  Suffice it to say that I do not recommend this film.  If I made "Worst of the Year" lists this would definitely hold a spot right next to Vampires Suck and Iron Man 2.  Okay, that's not fair, I haven't actually seen Vampires Suck.