Nightmare on Elm Street

Title: Nightmare on Elm Street (remake)
Rating: 1.5/5
Genre: Horror
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner
Director: Samuel Bayer

Ah glorious is the day I discover we get all the movie channels at work, and still this is the best I can come up with; a remake of a film that, if I'm honest, I was never too enamoured with though I wont deny its position as a quintessential slasher flick that went a long way to defining the genre. Just one of a number of horror films that have been revisited by Hollywood in recent years, it's not an idea i've ever enjoyed much, just proving the lack of cinematic ideas and the drive for a cash in, making a film they know at worst will make its money back due to sheer morbid curiousity as to how badly they'll screw up this time. The premise for those who don't remember it is simple; the mass murderer Freddy Kroeger already met his grizzly fate, but even in death manages to find his revenge on all those who wronged him by attacking them in their dreams. And thus the stage is set for young teens to be killed in horrific ways, and there is no way to stop him, or so it seems...

Credit where its due, the cast of unknowns, many of which have now gone onto bigger and better things, and relatively budget appearance feels very fitting to the original, and in keeping with the times there's no shying away from bloodshed; knives used in a menacing display to strike fear into our hearts, or y'know... look cool. The fact that half the cast are only there to end up as gory victims for our real protagonist means learning a backstory becomes unneccesary and gladly it dispenses with such formalities as quickly as possible (save for Kroegers history which gets strung out over the course of the film) so we can get on with it. The lighting and atmosphere feels constant, creating a tension that never really dissipates though fails to become any the more climactic as time goes by. Much of the skeleton elements for the first film is present, but it's where the meat of the classic becomes considered that everything spirals downhill.

It's a sad state of what horror has become that a film can be considered fitting by having a man jump out and yell 'boo' - and I mean quite literally saying 'boo' here - in an effort to make you jump and that this can be deemed enough to suffice. It wastes no time getting to the scares but the actual scares themselves when limited to this aren't particularly frightening. Kroeger has lost his demonic persona, using the iconic image but never coming across as particularly evil, save for the fact he's killing seemingly without reason. There's no attempt to build him up, to create a larger than life nemesis to be faced, and as a result theres no sense of emergency, or attempt at weaving a tale of suspense. The audience doesn't care for their fate, except in some cases we pray for their death to be sooner rather than later due to their bad acting, and so it fails to invoke a sense of terror on pretty much any level.

Likewise, the film has been stripped from the camp cheesiness that makes much of these 80s flicks so much fun to revisit, particularly as we get to the later entries in this series. I don't often watch these sorts of films because I know what to expect, and this seems like another great example. They're trying to remake a film in all its glory with a new cast, bigger budget, and no new ideas. It can at best be almost as good as the original, but this isn't even that. The death sequences at mostly just remind you how great the originals were by comparison, the new Kroeger pales in comparison to Robert Englund's iconic character, the gore is generic and limited to CGI and blood packs, and everything in between feels like just an interlude between what we came to see. There may be some fun deaths, if nothing particularly unique, and it may not be slow paced, but you never do shake the feeling that you're just waiting for the good bit to happen.