Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street
3 min read
A Nightmare on Elm Street opened on April 30th and that means summer blockbuster season is finally here. Before I get into my review of the new A Nightmare on Elm Street, let me just say that this is the summer of the remake. We covered Clash of the Titans, now Nightmare and very soon I hear that Jackie Chan’s Karate Kid will make its appearance. That doesn’t include sequels which include the much anticipated Iron Man 2. So why does it feel like this isn’t just the summer of blockbusters, sequels and remakes…but also the summer of letdowns? If the remake of the classic Wes Craven horror movie is any indication of what is yet to come, we might all want to consider staying home for the summer and breaking out our old VHS copies of Cocoon and Cocoon 2.
So what’s the gripe?
***Spoiler Alert – please do not read beyond this sentence if you don’t want to read about how bad A Nightmare on Elm Street sucks.***
Nightmare sucks.
***End of spoiler***
I haven’t been this disappointed with a movie since…well…since I saw Demons 2 as a teenager and wanted to throw my rented copy of the movie at a small woodland creature for wasting my time. Nightmare isn’t just a poorly executed feature; it’s a bloody nightmare when it comes to every conceivable angle from dialog to direction. I really couldn’t think of a single redeeming quality about it. Well except for the effects. The effects were good. But a few decent effects really don’t add up to much. And the dialog is so bad that my only thought after seeing Jackie Earle Haley as the new Freddie Kruger was that his efforts would have been better served playing an aging Kelly Leak in the Bad News Bears the Geriatric Years.
The bottom line is that in a quest to be different the movie completely lost the campiness that made the original series of A Nightmare on Elm Street movies worth its weight in laughter.  Freddie Kruger’s story arc – though twisted – really does not nor should it call for us to find compassion for a child molester. This major point in the plot calls attention to the question – what the hell were they thinking? Having the characters sympathize with Freddie? Seriously? I lamented at the very idea that the filmmakers actually took the time to weave in a mystery about who Freddie was and why the tormented teens were having nightmares in the first place. Well…let me just say that this is a character that took compromising pictures of little children…and molested them! We don’t need to suddenly think, “Oh no…they might have killed an innocent man!” He wasn’t innocent and we don’t need to feel sorry for him…EVER.
Now I don’t fault the actors on this being a terrible movie. They were probably just doing what they were told. And that’s the other problem, isn’t it? They were just told to walk around teary eyed and scared to fall asleep. They were told that they needed to make sense of crappy dialog. They were told that people should be afraid of doing research and going to the library or using their webcam. They were told they should be afraid of books…and essentially insult the intelligence of the audience. Sorry, but I can’t do it. I can’t be retarded enough to willingly allow myself to suspend that much disbelief. I can’t do it. In fact being retarded enough to be able to do this is an insult to those who are mentally challenged.
Anyway…after all has been said and done I can only leave you with a few ideas of remakes that did work. Try watching Fist of Legend, which was a movie starring Jet Li – a remake of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury. Or try renting My Sassy Girl, a remake of a Korean movie by the same title. Or even go back and rent Internal Affairs and then watch The Departed. Now those were some good movies. No suck guarantees. Wish I could say the same for the new A Nightmare on Elm Street which I can say was the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
