Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) by Johnathan Z — 18 Jan 2016

Without question one of the least necessary horror re-makes to surface, this one proves itself to be a disaster pretty much from the beginning. The original film's premise was interesting for its time and became a classic of the slasher genre that was popular during the 1980's.

Of course that movie had Wes Craven presenting an original story of his own crafting. This re-make sputters because the film-makers attempt to tackle an idea that long ago became stale. Consider all those terrible "Elm Street" sequels and you will be reminded of what I mean.

Instead of seriously considering how they might save themselves, the teens (all looking 10 years older, for good reason) in this movie spend the first half of the movie reading sobering facts about sleep deprivation and futilely try to remove sleep from their lives.

Yeah, like that will work, not to mention it just feels dull to an audience. The characters are all paper-thin and indistinguishable, which was always a staple of past "Elm Street" films, and their actions are endlessly stupid.

.. right up until Freddy offs them, of course. Haley returned from obscurity in recent years and had produced a string of excellent performances, but has little room to stand-out in such a lazy film as this.

His take on Freddy, while different from Englund, comes off as a snickering, light version of Rorschach, his character in "Watchmen." Determined fans of the Freddy character and earlier series will likely appreciate that so many scenes are recreated.

Personally, it just seems additional proof that an honest-to-goodness vision about how to make the re-make good was lacking from the start. Still, I was really pulling for Bayer in spite of my misgivings going in, seeing as how the man probably directed more classic music videos of the 1990's than anyone I can think of.

I just hope he gets another chance to direct a feature, and armed with a better project, bid to overcome this dud.