A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): C-

A rotten retread in the vein of Platinum Dunes’ Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th do-overs, A Nightmare on Elm Street regurgitates key visuals from Wes Craven’s iconic original but nonetheless fails to mimic or update with any competence. Helmed by Samuel Bayer (director of Nirvana’s classic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video), the story once again focuses on a group of teens hunted in their dreams by Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earl Haley). The knife-gloved fiend’s backstory has here been modified from killing children to pedophilia, an alteration that affords Bayer numerous opportunities – beginning with an opening slow-motion montage of children’s alphabet blocks, sidewalk chalk drawings, and tykes frolicking in a playground – to ramp up the prurience. However, despite providing a flashback to Krueger’s abusive past and fiery death at the hands of outraged parents, this Nightmare doesn’t appreciably develop the Krueger myth, as the monster’s literalized sexual deviance drains him of the mysterious, otherworldly menace that defined Robert Englund’s version. Encased in make-up that’s decidedly burn victim-ish, Jackie Earl Haley attempts to rectify the jokiness of numerous Nightmare sequels by gamely trying to turn Freddy back into a figure of fear. Yet the undead psycho’s lascivious pining for his victims before nearly every kill makes him seem less an unholy terror than merely a perverted ghoul.

While Bayer’s glossy aesthetics and preference for loud-noise jolt scares are in keeping with modern horror-remake dictates, they’re also at odds with the film’s apparent desire to go more gritty and hardcore, as its car-commercial sheen and sub-Wolverine CG knife effects leadenly position the material as hokey cinematic fantasy. The teens’ repressed preschool memories from 1994 prove not only the reason for Freddy’s reign of terror but also the key to his destruction via a Pulp Fiction-style epinephrine shot to the heart. Such plot points are irrelevant, though, since the saga’s Abercrombie ciphers are so featureless that it’s nigh impossible to care about their fate, meaning that Bayer inadvertently repeats one of the very mistakes that doomed the Nightmare franchise to campiness: making supposedly villainous Freddy the only one worth rooting for. Clumsily inserting Craven’s standout imagery into its slapdash story (a schoolgirl in a body bag, a face and arms trying to emerge from a wall), the set-piece-challenged film never expands on its predecessor by fleshing out the connection between Freddy’s human crimes and his supernatural reappearance in dreams, nor does it adequately delve into its characters’ struggle to reconcile the present with the past. Instead, substituting Craven’s disquietingly surreal atmosphere for straightforward shocks, it’s just another hack-and-slash cash-grab unaware of what made its source material unique.

Comments

[Blue Sullivan]

hey nick,
love your work, but are you mellowing in your old age or something? Only a C- for the terrible new Nightmare remake, and a C for the Losers?

One other query: is that little icon/pic of you on rotten tomatoes really you? The little 70s-ski-instructor 'stache confuses me...

In all sincerity, I love reading your stuff. It's nice when a critic actually takes the meaning of the word to heart, rather than slavishly fawning over almost everything to the point that the ratings have no meaning.

Sincerely,
Blue

[Nick]

Thanks for the kind words, Blue.

Is giving the new Nightmare a C- really a sign of mellowing? That grade seems pretty negative to me. I guess I haven't yet seen a film this year that deserved zero stars, but on the whole, the first half of 2010 has been significantly worse than 2009; at this point last year, I'd already seen a handful of great movies.

As for my RT pic, yes, that's really me, '70s mustache and all. I'm auditioning, in advance, for the inevitable big-screen remake of CHiPs.

[Blue Sullivan]

Hey, I can hardly cast stones, as my recent birthday (38) finds me becoming increasingly socially irrelevant and given to maudlin sh*t way more so than when I was an angry young man.

Hey, have you seen Chris Morris' "Four Lions"? Does it have American distribution yet? I am a huge fan of his, and if you have never seen the Brit series "Brass Eye," I urge you to go pull it off the internet somewhere or buy it on Amazon post-haste. Both Terry Gilliam & Michael Palin have been quoted as saying it's the only thing they've seen that is a proper heir to Monty Python.

Keep it with the realness, uberstache.
-Blue

[Nick]

Blue,

I haven't seen Four Lions or Brass Eye, but I'll keep my eye out for them.

Thanks.

Nick