Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Let me start this review by saying that i am against remakes and sequels in general. With few exceptions, there are few or no reasons to do this. There are exceptions, such as Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong and Tron: Legacy. With the Jackson film, he had the opportunity to bring the Kong story to life in a way that those of us who grew up loving the original film could only imagine, and with the leaps in computer technology over the last thirty years, a sequel to Tron was inevitable.

So when i heard about a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a horror film that i love and that legitimately gave me nightmares after the first time that i saw it, i shuddered... and not in a good way. Especially after the terrible remakes of House of Wax and Friday the Thirteenth.

THEN i heard that Jackie Earle Hayley, who played Rorschak to perfection in Watchmen, was going to play Freddy Krueger. I thought that if anyone could pull it off, Hayley could. And did.

THE GOOD: Hayley's performance, to start. He's probably the only actor who could have picked Freddy Krueger up and run with him, given his own performance without consciously or unconsciously aping Robert Englund.

They also stayed amazingly true to the original story. This time around Freddy is a child molester instead of a child murderer, which, if anything, makes the story even creepier. But they were smart enough not to mess with a good thing too much. Some of the lines from the original film ("I'm your boyfriend now...") made it through.

THE BAD: I don't usually use sports metaphors because i don't like sports or watch a lot of them, but i'm going to do it here. Imagine watching a football game where one team was comprised of Peyton Manning and a really good high school football team. That's kind of what it was like watching this. Hayley's performance as Freddy was so above and beyond any of the supporting performances that it overshadowed them. When Freddy's off the screen, you are just dying for him to get back on. Although the kids' performances are okay, you kind of start feeling like they're whining after a while, and honestly can't wait for Freddy to off them.

THE UGLY: Or, really, the potential ugly. The sequels. As the original franchise makers discovered, there's really only so much that you can do with this story. The sequels got progressively worse until the last film of the original franchise, The New Nightmare. In that one, Freddy started killing people on the set of a new Nightmare movie, and he was eight feet tall and scary as hell. If you haven't seen that one, watch it. It's really good. And i fear the same for this franchise. A movie makes a gajillion dollars and sequels are inevitable. I only hope that the filmmakers here are smart enough to do MAYBE two and then end it well, before they are reduced to Freddy doing knock-knock jokes like the first franchise.

Speaking of sequels, the cinematic genius/whore who made the first film, Wes Craven, is in the process of releasing Scream 4. I wonder if they're ever going to get tired of beating money out of that particular dead horse.

Peace.

Rev. Randal