A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

A Nightmare On Elm Street (2009)
Written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer
Directed by Samuel Bayer

Platinum Dunes are really only known as a 'horror remake' company. Yeah, they've done one or two 'original' movies, but mostly they stick to remaking classic horror movies, badly.

So far (since 2003) they've done Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and made a prequel), The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher and Friday The 13th.

In remaking ANOES, one of their biggest obstacles was their own reputation. Aside from their Texas Chainsaw remake (and its prequel - the thing about these is that I was never a huge fan of the original movie) I kinda hated everything else they did. Souless horror by numbers movies, in my opinion. Crammed the bursting with jump scares and bad CGI gore.

My favourite horror franchise has always been Friday The 13th, and as a friend of mine says that remake felt "more like a porno" then anything else. In my opinion the guys at Platinum Dunes don't really 'get' horror and are only interesting in making a quick buck.

This latest attempt to screw the public out of their hard earned cash (with promises of a good movie and cookies) was always going to be the most difficult. Freddy Krueger is not Jason Voorhees, who was played by multiple actors and stunt men during his reign as King-Of The Slashers. There is no one Jason.

Freddy, on the other hand was always associated with the one man who played the character over EIGHT movies and two seasons of a TV show - the horror legend Robert Englund. And this remake seriously lacks any Englund.

Automatically the company are at a disadvantage because they expect us to accept a new actor playing the Freddy role - and to be honest I'm just not interested in seeing someone else play the part.

Yeah, okay they got Jackie Earle Haley - an underrated actor who was one of the few good things about the Watchmen adaptation a couple of years back... but it's still not Freddy is it? Every time Freddy appeared on the screen in this... I dunno, he just felt bland.

Not that that is necessarily JEH's fault. I think his performance of the material he had was fine. It's just that the material was garbage. Boring Freddy? What the hell... Perhaps if the character was more 'Freddy-like'?

Even the original Freddy (even prior to becoming a walking punch-line factory) had a sick and twisted sense of humour about him. Robert Englund seems to display that same sense of humour in real life. Freddy is Robert Englund and Robert Englund is Freddy - no one else can play that role and still be Fred Krueger.

New-Freddy is just bland... he doesn't really do anything. Just shows up and kills, not normally saying a whole lot. Yeah he blabs A BIT... but there's not much here to differentiate him from Jason or Michael. The kills are uninventive to say the least - whilst I thought the original series went over the top with outlandish kills (to the detriment of pretty much everything else) the first three had some pretty awesome moments, without getting silly. This thing doesn't even try.

So I had followed this flicks development with cautious interest - with so much riding against it I didn't have high hopes. To be honest I expected a car wreck.

And that's just as well, given that this film is one of the worst of the bunch. To put it another way, I watched a great fictional character get raped for an hour and a half.

It is completely devoid of any character or individuality as a film. You know how every horror remake recently has had that look? Kind of glossy like an expensive Hollywood production that someone has put into photoshop and added grain and messed with the lighting and contrast? That's what this looks like - every other horror movie being made today. The original flick looked and felt different. it stood out from the crowd in my opinion. This doesn't.

All the performances are phoned in and Jackie Earle Haley proves that no one should play Freddy apart from Rob Englund. He's a good actor, nay, a great one - but he just delivers a one note character. Not the lunatic, scary as shit funny-man that we're used to.

One of the biggest problems with the film is the alteration to Freddy's backstory. In the original series Freddy was a child killer - this remake turns him into a kiddie fiddler. Now... I don't want to get into some insane moralistic debate here - but is it worse just to kill the kid, or to fiddle with them? Difficult... but Freddy is not a paedo Platinum Dunes! Fuck you.

But this is what Platinum Dunes does - they take movies with outlandish premises and try to make them 'high-brow'. They attempt to take the original story of 'Child Killer gets revenge on parents who torched him' into 'Perhaps innocent man, accused of being a paedophile seeks revenge on the kids who perhaps wrongly accused him - let's consider the morals of this story'.

Fucking bullshit, it's about a guy with a scabby face who kills people in their dreams. Stop trying to turn your slasher movies into psychological thrillers - these stories are not Silence Of The Fucking Lambs - and none of you are good enough to make a movie like that anyway. Give it up and just let the movies be fun for fuck sake.

The original Nightmare films delved pretty quickly into being cheesy and laughable - but at least they were fun. This film is neither scary nor fun, it's quite boring. And a film about an all powerful killer who haunts you in your dreams should not be boring. I didn't care about any of the characters, especially the weird looking Chick playing Nancy. Maybe it was because they totally ignored Nancy (the FUCKING MAIN CHARACTER) for the first half of the film, but when it focused on her all I could think was "So fucking what?"

Oh yeah, you could tell she was deep because she draws shitty pictures that look like scribbles with eyeballs in black chalk. One does kinda resemble a penis. Oh and at one point she says "she doesn't exactly fit in". That's the extent of her character... brilliant writing there, you fucking hacks. The chick was actually a decent actress (I think) - but the material she was given to work with... not so much.

Some of the worst sequences in the film recreate scenes from the original. Remember that really creepy bit early on in the original where Freddy stretches out of the wall - you can barely make him out - theres just this shape of his face and two hands hovering over Nancy as she sleeps. Creepy as fuck. In the new one it looks like a giant wallpaper slug with claws wants to attack her - and it looks like crap... bad CGI all the way. How can an effect in a 26 year old film look SO MUCH BETTER than one done in 2010. Cause Platinum Dunes have no imagination - that's why.

The movie is obsessed with Nightmares. The good thing about the original film is you could never be sure if someone was dreaming or not - then something small would give it away. Most of this film plays out in the Nightmare World and they might as well have a big flashing sign on screen that says:

"THIS BIT IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE, FOR ALL YOUR AUDIENCE MEMBERS TO STUPID TO FIGURE IT OUT. WE'RE SMART AND YOU ARE DUMB, HA HA HA!"

The Nightmares in this film also lack that surreal quality that you'll find in the original. Yeah, someone drops through the floor in a pool of blood that then sooks back up through the hole - but it's done so badly all you'll be thinking when you see it is "that's some pretty shit CGI!" In the original, goats show up for no reason. Then you think "What the fuck, a goat? What's the deal with that?"

I don't know about anyone else - but my dreams are random as fuck. Weird shit shows up that has nothing to do with the rest of the dream (I remember one being accosted by a man with a wheelbarrow full of potato peelings and fish...) and random goats fit that description better than anything that goes on here.

They also introduce the idea of micro-naps. The brain, being exhausted by the person staying awake starts shutting itself down for a few seconds after the 70 hour mark. People dream without being asleep - and it allows Freddy to pop up anywhere he wants. A brilliant idea - when Freddy was after you, you were safe if you were awake. Not anymore!

Except it's just used for more jump scares. Nothing of note happens during one of these micro-naps.. and they would have just as well been left out of the flick.

Another negative - this film keeps cribbing lines from earlier flicks in the series. Take this for example:

Nightmare 4: Joey falls asleep on his waterbed, and dreams about a hot chick swimming naked in it. Phwoar! Then... FREDDY BURSTS OUT OF THE FUCKING WATERBED! "How's this for a wet dream?!"

Not-Nightmare: Not-Nancy runs away from Not-Freddy and the floor turns into blood... "How's this for a wet dream?"

Exact same line, only in this one is gets a shitty set up and a shitty delivery. I like Haley, but you can tell he knew this script was crap. He doesn't care. Freddy is also dispatched in the same way (and with the same line) as he was in Freddy Vs. Jason - the last Nightmare film. Yawn.

But if you really want to waste some money - go see it. It's crap, and if you have any sense you won't enjoy it in the slightest... but yeah... go see it if you want to waste nearly two hours of your life wanting to tear your own eyes out.

The assclowns at PD have no fucking idea how to make a horror movie.