Hola all. Massawyrm here.
From its opening moments one can tell exactly what sort of film A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET will be. Long time readers will remember that I don’t have a problem with remakes; in fact, I tend to champion them. I love seeing a great story retold in a new and interesting way. But that ain’t what this is. This is terrible; a half assed meandering through some of the better – but mostly the worst – ideas of the entire franchise, propelled by a script riddled with problems not only with dialog, but on fundamental levels. Characters act inexplicably, Freddy doesn’t make any fucking sense and worst of all, the film doesn’t actually have a solvent protagonist – instead it chews through them finally settling on a pair of characters it uses to usher us to its weak, uninteresting climax.
From the very beginning characters want to believe in a supernatural explanation. Despite this film actually possessing a framework to dismiss the supernatural – in that there is actually a shared history that could explain a handful of kids all sharing the same dream element in nightmares – we are instead treated to people immediately thinking some dream demon is after them and never, ever looking for a rational explanation. It feels like these characters have grown up watching the same ELM STREET films that we have and want there to be a real guy after them rather than suffering the effects of, as Dickens put it, a bit of undercooked potato. The original had such a great, natural way to deal with this: the guys were too macho to tell the girls they were scared of a dream and the girls didn’t want to believe their dreams were really connected. Here the slightest hint of something in common and rationality flies out the window to set us on a course watching kids trying desperately to stay awake - when they’re not lingering creepily on the outside of other people’s conversations, ready to swoop in and exclaim “I believe you!”
But it gets worse. Somehow entrenched in the belief that staying awake is easy enough and that this town –mystifyingly stocked entirely with single-parent families – doesn’t have any parents that take an active interest in their kids, we learn about “micro-naps”, the idea that when you are awake too long, the brain shuts down for a few seconds trying to reboot itself. In other words, it gives the filmmakers full license to have Freddy show up wherever and whenever they feel like. Driving a car, walking through a store, swimming in a pool. The idea of Freddy patiently waiting for you to fall asleep - something you are going to have to do eventually - is gone, replaced by an impatient murderer killing seemingly without motive.
And that’s where things really began to go off the rails. You see, Platinum Dunes is so giddy that they get to introduce an abandoned element from the first film (abandoned because it wasn’t appropriate for a mass distributed film at the time) that they forgot that they also needed to make that element work. Freddy Krueger isn’t a child-killer; he’s a child-molester. And without the single hint from the film of why he’s back, we begin to wonder why a sweetly retarded groundskeeper/child molester living beneath a school would, upon death, become a wise-cracking serial killer bent on harassing and murdering a bunch of 20-somethings trying to pass themselves off as 17. It’s not for sexual reasons, and he doesn’t seem very interested in revenge like the first Freddy Kruger was. He just likes killing.
So now we have an admittedly cool looking Freddy Krueger, running around with Rorschach’s voice and mannerisms, killing kids as fast as he can like he’s in some sort of race to get the body count up before the credits roll. He doesn’t spend much time fucking with the kids, and almost every beautifully surreal element from the first film is gone, leaving only badly replicated ones. Remember that dated Freddy-through-a-latex-wall bit from the first? Imagine it done with CG that rivals the mind-shattering visual effects of THE HAUNTING remake. But gone are some of the brilliant centerpieces like the stretch-arm alley-way, the Johnny Depp Gusher o’ Blood and the telephone call. In fact, this Freddy doesn’t seem interested in creating fucked up dreams; he’s hell-bent only on some razor-glove-on-torso-action.
And if you can’t get a bead on the logic of Freddy Krueger, just try to wrap your head around the bullshit actions of an incompetent cast of characters. Given such far reaching personalities as Emo boy & Emo Girl, Pretty boy & pretty girl, the film never settles on who we’re supposed to be following or who they are as character. It takes three tries before we spend any time with a character who plans on staying around through the picture, and that takes place in the beginning of the second act. Things get murkier still by the time you’ve come to the end of the film, knowing the whole story and begin to wonder “Hey, why the hell did anyone think THIS at all, when there are half a dozen reasonable explanations to what it really could have been?”
But by the time one character rushes in to definitively claim “He died in his sleep!” when all evidence is to the contrary (but doesn’t actually have to be – because someone was inexplicably put in the same room as the expiring character) you are fully aware that this film is just another masturbatory effort of recreating a horror masterpiece without understanding what it is that made it a masterpiece to begin with. There is no logic, nothing and no one to care about, and the one interesting, original angle this film manages to come up with itself turns out to be a red herring designed to try and add weight to the film’s final few moments (but robs it of that weight instead.)
There is nothing redeeming about this take of NIGHTMARE. That’s not to say that I don’t think there isn’t a great story out there to be told and that this is a series that shouldn’t be messed with. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: FREDDY’S REVENGE (otherwise known as the one we like to pretend never happened) did that well enough on its own. The NIGHTMARE series has a history of bad episodes, cheesy ideas and poorly executed takes on the concept. This is just another one of those.
Until next time friends,
Massawyrm
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