Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) by Solutions10 — 26 Dec 2011

It's great they finally put Freddy into his original role (a child molester, which Wes Craven was barred from using in the originals, changing him to a child murderer to avoid controversy), and it's nice that they give him some extra pretext.

But it just doesn't work that his character is simply removed from this film in favor of a generic slasher villain. As has been stated, Freddy's appeal was largely his creativity in messing with his victims before murdering them in a very sadistic way.

That's absent from this version. This Freddy has almost no sense of humor, and shows very little of the psychological torture Freddy Krueger is known for. The characters are certainly nothing special and are just generic teenagers, the kills are pretty weak and mostly come down to Freddy taunting them until he eventually simply stabs them, and it just doesn't work like the first ones did.

It's not absolutely horrible and might be worth a watch if you've got nothing else, but it's definitely not the Freddy we've enjoyed watching up to now. The new character they put in his place is boring and almost totally humorless, completely lacking creativity.

Fans of the originals probably won't like this. Fans of slashers with no background of Nightmare on Elm Street (which is sort of a contradiction) might enjoy it, but the rest of us will be wishing we were getting something more the whole time than a generic, humorless slasher flick like any other.