Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) by Chads. — 30 Apr 2010

Of equal pertinence, once the moviegoer is done with vying Jackie Earle Haley against Robert Englund in the battle for Freddy Krueger's avenging black soul, exists the fact that Krueger becomes the ex-Bad News Bear's second go-around at playing a child molester in less than five years.

Todd Field's "Little Children", the 2006 film based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, starred Haley as Ronald James McCorvey, who like Freddy, was a school custodian with a pedophilic streak.

A monster lives on 44 Blueberry Court by Larry's estimation(Noah Emmerich plays a neighborhood watchdog who orchestrates a witchhunt), which incites the suburbanite mothers and fathers to treat Ronald accordingly, in a scene meant to conjure up Steven Spielberg's "Jaws", where Ronald is ostracized at the community pool with a hysteria usually reserved for great white sharks.

Seen through the prism of the Kate Winslet vehicle, Haley, because he was so sympathetic as Ronald, lends a presence that demythologizes Krueger's reputation as the very typification of a sick and depraved sex offender, because this sad-eyed actor makes Freddy seem more pathetic than evil, vulnerable even, thanks to a misguided sequence where we see his real face, untouched by burn scars, in the previously unfilmed backstory of Freddy Krueger's origins.

It's a mistake to show Freddy being chased down and burned alive by a parental mob, especially since this new version of Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" opts for being coy about the extent of the school custodian's malfeasance.

The film restores Freddy's humanity. Bad move. In order to eradicate any poetic justice from the grudge that gives Krueger the licence to kill, this latest installment of the wildly popular franchise needed a scene like the one in Amy Berg's "Deliver Us From Evil"(the 2006 documentary about the pedophile Catholic priest Father Oliver O'Grady), where an angry father, concerning his young daughter, cries out, "He raped her!".

The moviegoer never knows for sure if Krueger was deserving of the little children's parents' vigilantism. This wholly unnecessary remake raises the possibility that the previously one-dimensional killer from the original series, like Ronald McCorvey, could have been deemed worthy of rehabilitation.

Worst of all, nothing this revamped "...Nightmare..." is scarier than the scene between Haley and Jane Adams(in "Little Children"), where Ronald caps a reasonably successful first date with Sheila by offering the maladapted waif something more idiosyncratic than a goodnight kiss.