Jackie Earle Haley Added to Spielberg's 'Lincoln' Cast

The cast for Steven Spielberg's Lincoln just added it's first Confederate role player.  Deadline reported earlier, Jackie Earle Haley (Nightmare on Elm Street,Watchmen) will play the vice president of the Confederate States, Alexander Stephens in Lincoln.  Stephens was strongly opposed to Lincoln's anti-slavery legislation, which was put to an end by Lincoln.  It's good to brush up on American history from time to time.

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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?

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New 'Nightmare on Elm Street' Clip

We still need to see what happens next after this clip to flesh out what kind of horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street will be, but it appears as though it might slow down and take its time, building tension over the body count.

That's usually a good sign, for reasons I don't need to explain, and it's actually one of the reasons the original film works. Wes Craven let the dreams fully develop before Freddy would pounce, so if Samuel Bayer follows that blueprint, maybe this will be a pretty good flick. The clip features a little bit of Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy, but it's mostly Katie Cassidy aka the blonde victim. I don't know when she dies, but I doubt she lives through the whole movie. She is, however, a fighter. There are probably four or five scenes of her battling to wake up. Rooney Mara is technically the lead - Nancy from the first film - but she doesn't scream as much or something, because she's not as big a factor in the trailers and commercials.

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New 'Nightmare on Elm Street' Photos, Motion Poster

I'm still holding out hope for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Good casting with Jackie Earle Haley in the main role, excellent trailers, easy story to get right, a touch of the backstory, and the opportunity for lessons learned from previous horror movie remakes. Latino Review has a ton of new photos from the film, which we've generously sampled here.

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Three New 'Nightmare on Elm Street' TV Ads

Thanks to Bloody-Disgusting for these three new Nightmare on Elm Street TV commercials. The movie's two weeks away, and the original series enjoyed more commercial success than any other in the genre, so I expect not only the carryover audience to be stronger here than it has been for other Platinum Dunes slasher remakes, but it should keep that younger demo, as well.

Put it this way: The casting of Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy could at least intrigue some 30-somethings, whereas the other famed slashers - Jason, Michael Myers, even Leatherface - don't have much personality, so there's no real excitement about those reboots for fans of the originals. In fact, I'd argue that casting Haley is the single best move Platinum Dunes has made in all of its remakes. It could pay dividends. But not for long, right? I mean, this is a week before Iron Man 2. Bad timing, I think. So, New Line's got to be hoping for a huge opening weekend on April 30th, because otherwise, this just won't have any impact at all.

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