As far back as I can remember, I knew a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street was always going to come out someday. Freddy Krueger is even regarded as a horror figure. He may not win any prizes for literary origin like dimensions of Dracula and Frankenstein, but he still is probably as recognizable and the tale will be exploited repeatedly, in all probability when we are all long gone.
Finding themselves onboard the cousage that is all described above and occurred. Who would have found it all impossible to cope with? Surely had the tormentors around seeking nourishment from Japanese animation pure fuel’d falsifies meant Carl Scully and Battlestar. Now, 26 years later after Wes Craven’s classic film came out – and after five long “real” sequels, one delightful meta-hybrid (if you have not seen, i recommend Wes Craven’s New Nightmare) and even a Jason Voorhees cross over film, Elm Street is once again being fitted with a brand new set of windows which happens to be this attempt from Platinum Dunes, the Michael Bay run zaakviller tory, production company of a mathematically insane estimation that devised remakes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher and Janet headism franchise remakes.
As was the case of its predecessor, the 1984 one, Nancy (Rooney Mara) is the teenage character again. The child in this one realizes that her friends are having the same kind of dreams as she ‘s having, only nightmare dreams, Brede: A terribly burned man with the name of Freddy – Jackie Earle Haley. After one of those friends having a pretty horrible death during the rather impressive opening sequence of the movie, Nancy starts understanding that Freddy isn’t part of people’s imaginations and that if Freddy kills you in your dreams, you die. But why in the world do these specific children have the attention of such annihilator?
Samuel Bayer, who has become a renowned video clip director and works with such greats as Nirvana and directs their “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, takes the camera in his hands for the first time in a new A Nightmare on Elm Street. Bayer’s definitely got a good eye and the film is visually competent, more so than other films in the sense of the more effective, especially hypnotic shifts from reality to that of the nightmares. For example, there appeared this technique where the lighting changes quite dramatically as a character goes to sleep which was rather effective. Or in one exceptional case, Kris (Katie Cassidy) is trying to stay awake in vain and the students around her self-implode into a cloud of ashes.
It is quite pleasing to the eye but in terms of keeping up the pace or building up real tension, the new Elm Street is quite a letdown and more so the central part, which seems rather tedious, slow with occasional interludes that hint of something more thrilling that never blossoms. I’m not one of those people who are automatically averse to remakes – the originals are still there and they won’t ‘destroy’ the original version; last I heard, there was no strategy to wipe out every Nightmare on Elm Street offensive copy. But if there is going to be a remake, why can’t one do something inspiring about the material? Instead, one place the new Nightmare falters is in its attempts to imitate or rather replicate the original. There’s lots of parts in here already said and done in the previous film, those are landmarks of the movie. The difference is that the last one had reasons for those attributes whereas the current one does not.
We have watched that horrifying scene in which Nancy’s bed is flowered by Freddy’s face and hands protruding from the wall and that was in 1984, and it is pointless to recreate it here with in your face CGI that makes what was once terrifying and just makes it laughable. A specific example would be the famous death of Tina in the very first one when she is taken from her bed and into midair, this is again done, only in a “bigger” way, this time, the helpless prey is spun around and around like a ‘wire-fu’ feat due to the reason where the victim is taken round equal to heaven above, however, and it surely isn’t better than the one we saw 26 years ago. What for? For dreaming at least those dream sequences completely from scratch with hardly any borrowing.
The cast and crew are robust, thanks to Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Freddy which is scary yet savage and, I may add, does not qualify as a rehash of Robert Englund’s work on the role – the only, of course. However, it is however a very different character to the experienced actor who played trenched and that’s because of the close-up of the character’s mask. His makeup, while far more blurred and more realistic than we have been accustomed to with Freddy, is strange too restrictive to allow full scope of physicality. In parallel, the kids attempting to such as teenagers actors, actors playing h6 whom include Mara Thomas Dekker Cassidy and Kyle Gallner Gaumen, all are quite dressed.
Especially well cast would be Mara in the role of the artsy, weird Nancy, which lacked credibility in some of the Hollywood movies when it came to such roles, as she is convincing as this quirky and yet appealing young girl, and she and Gallner are a rather strange and nice central pair. Now this is more like it; Elm Street saves the best for the last leg of the race. A nice touch is the use of “micro naps” throughout the story: the over fatigued characters drift in and out of some semi-conciousness and out of the grasp of Freddy. This leads to some of the worthiest and the most interesting sequences in the film — for instance the, when Nancy has a search in a pharmacy, where she keeps falling asleep only to find the setting kept changing into and out of Freddy’s boiler room. It is just sad that this liveliness and originality could not be felt throughout all of the movie.
With each subsequent film, the Nightmare on Elm Street series progressively evolved Freddy Krueger from a dreaded monster into a smooth-talking, one-liner spouting performer losing most of the surprise effect he once had. Quite clearly, Bayer and Strick and Eric Heisserer are attempting to restore the former evil and malevolent Freddy Krueger from deep within the creepy bears’ belly, and while there is, regarding the true scary stuff, nothing all that horrible, there are at least some nice and quite well executed jumps and and ‘scares’. Schiller, however, is to be surprised that even a little lunacy of jester Freddy is retained – the one jester-turned-character who belongs to Ever Billy made fun of the punch line “What a dreadful day” and each resounded his words in appreciation in the very in-joke about A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master that tends to be out of context and self-aware vis a vis the movie.
However, the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street will never make sense within itself with all the portions of the story included, as is the case here. The plot has very nice backstories as we discover that Freddy was not really guilty of his crimes but framed for them along with other crimes that got him killed by those that cannot be killed on when they die in that world and resurrect in the dream world, but even this beautiful aspect does not seem to be as captivating as it could have been.
On the other hand, in the original Nightmare quite simply called Freddy as a “child murderer”, this one becomes a lot more about details prominently tackling the nasty subjects dealing with child abuse along with whether Nancy and her company were all child abuse victims or not. It is definitely disturbing, which some might say suggests it was meant to be such a film. But it also is such heavy subject matter, it is more than A Nightmare on Elm Street – especially a Michael Bay produced version – would ever be able to bare. Let’s put it that way, you are not even going to come close to any such real examination in any such film about trauma as this one. When you see the filmmakers attempting to tackle such a disturbing issue when they have no intention of addressing it comprehensively only widens the sense of unfulfilment and disappointment that such Dummy offers.
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