Movie Review - 'A Nightmare on Elm Street'

A Nightmare on Elm Street Starring Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner, and Jackie Earle Haley Directed by Samuel Bayer Rated R

As any Sin City tourist already knows, Las Vegas is overflowing with celebrity impersonators. For a meager cover (or maybe not), you can see a guy dressed like Elvis, Prince, or even Cher belt out familiar tunes. But that's all it is, and no matter how good the stage show is, it's still a phony, in part because that's how the shows are sold. Where it actually counts, A Nightmare on Elm Street is just like that. Trading more on a familiar name than its own merits, the new horror remake gives us some of Freddy Krueger's classic cuts (pardon the pun), but you never believe you're watching the real thing. This is, obviously, a remake of the 1984 horror classic by Wes Craven. That film introduced the world to one of the most enduring villains in all of cinema, Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger. And the story behind the film is even more interesting: Craven read accounts of Cambodian refugees in Los Angeles in the 1970s who began complaining of disturbing nightmares. Some refused to sleep, and others mysteriously died in their sleep. What a great springboard to a killer that haunts you in your dreams. Unfortunately for the new installment, the originality is all spoken for. There are a few nice additions and a few that simply don't add as much as they should. But what's really missing, just as a film trying to make its own way in the horror genre, are legitimate tension and thrills. The opening sequence, featuring one teen's quick downward spiral into a horrific dreamscape ends with a bang (or more accurately, a slash), setting the table for the story that follows. A group of the teen's friends soon realize they're all having the same dream, and they fear that if they fall asleep they, too, won't wake up. Director Samuel Bayer presents the characters almost in chapters, overlapping them ever so slightly. The first teen to catch Freddy's gaze is Kris (Katie Cassidy). Those who are new to the franchise will get a good primer on how Freddy operates here, and the Kris section of the film is probably when Elm Street is its most consistent. But soon, the other teens have to be terrorized in their sleep, so Jesse (Thomas Dekker), Quentin (Kyle Gallner), and Nancy (Rooney Mara) are thrown into the mix. They all suspect their shared fears aren't coincidental, but nobody can explain what the connection might be. They each get visited and tormented by a burned-beyond-recognition man in a fedora name Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley), but why him and why them? Fans of the original film know all about the Krueger backstory, and it plays a curious role in the new film. Without going into the way it's incorporated, the origin of the character should be an all or nothing scenario here. It gets lip service in this remake, but the first film provided more or less the same history without dwelling on it, and the idea of a prequel is too good for a flashback to get the job done. Haley's Krueger is something of a departure from the iconic Freddy developed over way too many films. He's not the prankster the first Freddy was, so in those moments when Freddy is given something sarcastic to say, it doesn't fly. He's also more of human predator here than in the originals, where he could shape shift or do whatever he wanted because he only existed in dreams. Certainly for a more contemporary audience, this depiction of Krueger might seem like a better way to go. He's meaner, darker, and more believably burned, although the makeup effects are either too good or too bad; they're distracting no matter which way you look at it. But the script has a couple good moments and the Krueger reinvention, whether or not it fails, is at least a reinvention. But the way Krueger inhabits the dreams of the characters simply shows no imagination and, indeed, tips the fedora to Wes Craven's film far too often. But there's the rub; if the film branched out too far on its own, we wouldn't immediately identify all those choice cuts off the greatest hits album people are paying the impersonator to play.

Comments

[turdburgalur]

terrible. i hope the writer of this article hasn't wasted to much time in college or pursuing a career is mommy proud of your mediocre career or is she just glad u finally decided to go into the community center in town and take another shot at that general education diploma thats evaded you for years i hope u get cancer you pompus piece of shit

[Anon]

This was actually good!