A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 Remake Review

I mean that. If you haven't seen the new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie yet and you kinda give a shit about it, then don't read this.

Like I said in my Friday the 13th review a year or so ago I am not against the idea of a remake but I still think that they are a pussy way for Hollywood to make a quick buck. It is like anything else would actually require the big money makers to actually have an imagination instead of just business degrees and ties to money and power, but I digress.

I hold the A Nightmare on Elm Street series in high regards because the original Nightmare movie was the one slasher movie that made me shit myself the most when I first saw it 20-something years ago. Every slasher horror film up until the first A Nightmare on Elm Street movie was getting stale. You had a retarded or psychotic mute behemoth behind a mask killing equally retarded and psychotic teenage dicks and cunts for no fucking reason except that they were there. The slutty chick gets a blade in between her naked tits. The annoying-as-fuck geeky kid got maimed by an axe. And the crown jewel in the brainless gore-fest would be that the macho asshole closet-homo would get the worst death in the entire movie.

But the Nightmare series was something new and unique to the genre. What really scared me to death was that these same stupid teens weren't being off'd in the waking world but instead when they and indeed everyone is at their most vulnerable. In their sleep. There weren't as many avoidable conditions to be killed. You didn't have to be at a camp by a lake to be killed and a killer didn't only come around one day out of the entire year. No, if you just did something as thoughtless and natural as falling asleep you would be fucked. Proper fucked.

So yeah, teens were still getting butchered like a slaughterhouse pig but the murders weren't as interchangeable as the masked-maniac films that came before it. Instead you would be killed by your worst nightmares… in the later Nightmare movies since the custom-tailored deaths weren't really in fashion until A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors.

But you get the idea of how much freakier the Nightmare movies were than the typical 1980's slasher flick.

So when I heard that they were making a remake of the A Nightmare on Elm Street movie I got my hopes up, again. Like a jackass. I mean, I sat through the remake of Friday the 13th and we all know what kind of disappointment that turned out to be. But the difference between the Friday the 13th movies and the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies was that the early Nightmare movies were actually decent. There's a ton of nostalgia I have for Freddy Krueger just like I have for Jason Vorhees, but the Friday the 13th movies are campy and no where near as imaginative as the Nightmare series has been.

So on to the new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie I guess.
After Hollywood turned Jason Vorhees into some ultra-survivalist moleman I couldn't even begin to guess how they could fuck up Freddy Krueger but apparently they started by giving him a nose job that even Michael Jackson would have thought was a bit too much.

The new Nightmare movie takes the logical approach by starting fresh with the first film and without the laughable mythology elements of being the mentally abused son of a woman who was raped by 1000 maniacs, living a normal life until killing his wife and mentally scarring his daughter, being burned alive but becoming a dream demon thanks to three dream tadpole spirits that come with their own 3D glasses, which in the end is nothing but a story within a story of the real life actors and Wes Craven. So yeah, they start with the first of the only three Nightmare movies that make any fucking sense. But hey it is better than fighting psychics, being resurrected by lightning, hopping a cruise ship to Manhattan, and fighting androids with rubber detachable nipples in space. I'm looking at YOU Jason Vorhees.

The movie starts off in a diner of all the possible places. You know, where the coffee flows more than water and most teenagers go to nap in the company of their girlfriends. So some preppy douche who looks too close to Dane Cook for my tastes sticks around for about five whole minutes out of the entire movie before he goes under the knife. And all we ever knew about the guy was that he couldn't sleep.

Well no fucking shit. I guess that's a kind of revelation for the teens in A Nightmare on Elm Street right? Teen 1 can't sleep. Teen 2 can't sleep either. Hot shit.

But just because this one character is just Freddy's scratching post doesn't mean that all of the other characters are as equally underdeveloped, does it?

Yeah it does. It gets really fucking bad when the four teenagers -basically the same reworked characters from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street- don't really fall that hard into the typical horror archetypes of nerds, dicks, sluts, jocks, preppies, and the one outstanding girl who actually survives because she didn't drink alcohol, smoke weed, or suck cock. No instead these syndromes are only shown in trace amounts and though you may think it makes each character even less developed than they would have been if they actually had a whole 15 minutes of screen time to better flush out the characters like in The Dream Warriors.

And then there is the dreamin' demon Freddy himself. Sorry but Jackie Earle Haley just doesn't do it for me as Freddy Krueger and it isn't because I am a Robert Englund purist but that Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger is a cultural icon. I'm not saying that Jackie Haley doesn't do a bad job because he is a creepy chomo-looking kinda guy and he is a brutal Freddy Krueger but Robert Englund had the charisma and had a ton of fun torturing teenies like he was sticking pigs. I think that if I had to dream about a Freddy Krueger I would NOT want to dream about Robert Englund BECAUSE WHEN HE IS KILLING YOUR SNOOZING-ASS, HE IS ENJOYING THE HELL OUT OF IT. But the look of the new Freddy Krueger didn't do it for me either because the entire time the scarred-up Freddy Krueger kept reminding me of the of The Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz crossed with the noseless facial features of a goat.

The cool thing is that Jackie Earle Haley used to be a teenage girl's heart-throb and now he's in a movie killing teen girls in their sleep. Life's ironic like that.

At least they got Freddy Krueger's character flushed out a little better. Sort of. The new nightmare movie takes some liberties to the core A Nightmare on Elm Street mythology that are actually not that bad. In all of the original Nightmare movies Freddy Krueger is a child molester and murderer before he's killed by the moms and dads of Springfield roast his ass like a pig at luau and he comes back to get revenge on the parents by going indirectly through the children.

The new Freddy Krueger is a much more tragic figure who was actually a good person who loved children -in a platonic non-chomo kinda way- who was set up by the real child molester who got the kids of the preschool that Freddy worked at to make up stories about him. He was set up and chased down by all of the other parents and burned alive. So in the modern version, Freddy actually has a motive and a grudge against the teens themselves and is why he's attacking them instead of invading the dreams of the parents like you'd think he actually would have done in the original Nightmare.

PSYCHE! Freddy is still a chomo and he's killing the kids who narc'd on him and got his ass flash-fried.

So the movie isn't exactly a carbon copy of the first movie but it is really a re-imagining. So the film takes some liberties and that results in a lot of fake outs in the remade scenes of the original Nightmare. But there are some shout outs to the first film like the blonde sort-of-slutty girl getting thrown around the room in her sleep and the dream sequences of that same girl bloody in a clear body bag being dragged around a hallway.

But now for what you want to hear about. The nightmare sequences are awesome and there's a ton more than the original A Nightmare on Elm Street so that is a definite improvement. Some awkward and unneeded scenes from the original like the dream-therapy and research that Nanci goes through are thankfully absent so the movie keeps moving but then it doesn't explain the wake-up-and-Freddy-is-in-the-real-world scene.

Now here is where I turn into a hypocrite. I hate some of the special effects in the new Nightmare movie. The example in question is the iconic Freddy-in-the-wall scene over Nanci's bed which is now in all of its shitty computer graphics glory. I know that the Nightmare series has always been big on special effects but CGI just always looks like shit to me and it doesn't matter how it's done.

There was one really cool and almost genius part of the new Nightmare on Elm Street movie and that was when the slick asshole was killed in prison and in the nightmare world Freddy tells him that "after the heart stops beating, the brain stays alive for seven minutes and we have six more minutes to play." My heart leapt like it was Christmas and at that moment my hopes for the movie were resurrected and the new Nightmare got better ever since then.

But with one moment of genius is still counteracted by a few of the moments of complete stupidity. For example the parents said that they all tried to find Freddy Krueger's special cave where he molested the children but they couldn't find it. It turns out that the damned cave was actually hidden behind some posters Shawshank-style. Shit even Stevie Wonder could have found it. The other part that didn't make any damned sense was the big BOO moment at the end of the movie that defies all of the A Nightmare on Elm Street logic unless Nanci was sleep.

So what's the verdict? The new A Nightmare on Elm Street remake is actually pretty fucking good. Is it as good as the early classic Nightmare movies? No but that is purely because of nostalgia but it ranks way higher than the later chapters. Jackie Earle Haley does a good job of being a more vicious and cruel Freddy Krueger but Robert Englund was always more fun, sadistic and charismatic. The nightmare sequences are way more intense than in the original movies and that is a big plus but I missed the custom-tailored nightmares of the later movies in the series.

So if you actually read this before seeing the movie then go check it out. The new A Nightmare on Elm Street ranks high on the list of good horror movie remakes along with "John Carpenter's The Thing" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".

And here is some trivia for you horror nerds: Did you know that in 1984, Jackie Earle Haley's friend Johnny Depp accompanied him to the auditions for Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Instead of being chosen for a role, it was Depp who was spotted by director Wes Craven, who asked him if he would like to read for a part.

And 25 years later Jackie Earle Haley is now playing Freddy Krueger in a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.