The fate of the Nightmare on Elm Street series is a good comparator with its main character and anti-hero Freddy Krueger — just when you think that it’s finally dead and gone and everyone can be happy, it pops up again, seemingly sustained by its own bloodlust and insatiable appetite for destruction and revenge.
Also, both don’t do anyone any good.
This is another reincarnation of a former horror series and once again brought to you by Michael Bay, a guy who knows how to breathe life into things that go bump in the night. He already has producer credits on the updates of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher and Friday the 13th, so why not this one also? It’s already a given that Hollywood has no original ideas anymore so these movies only make good business sense. They’re relatively cheap and already have a built-in audience; all you need to do is make sure that you give them what they want.
Sadly, it seems that all the audience wants is the safety of familiarity when it comes to serial killers. Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is already well known for his appearance as much as for how he torments and kills his victims through their dreams. This Nightmare can be classified as another in the line of re-imagined horrors that provide some back-story detail to flesh out the bad guy’s reason for turning out rotten. We always knew that Freddy wasn’t so nice with the kids of the Elm Street neighbourhood and the parents took the law into their own hands with a can of gasoline and a match. Now we actually get to witness it all unfold! Aren’t we lucky?
Actually no. There’s nothing interesting about it except that it starts to ramp up the audience’s sympathy for a villain. We are led to question why Freddy got fingered. Did he actually do what he was accused of? None of it really matters because now he’s come back to take his vengeance on the class of former grade-schoolers who called him out. Strangely none of them can remember anything of their childhoods, let alone any incidents of abuse. One by one, the man with the melted face picks the now high school aged kids with his glove of knives and sinister sneer.
Isn’t it strange how a movie like Date Night can have a run time of 90 minutes but contain enough story and character development to fill a two-hour movie? Compare that to this Nightmare, which has the same run time but it just goes nowhere, does nothing, has nothing interesting and feels like an all-nighter where the minutes just drag on and on. Sure Haley is a truly great character actor and he does an OK job of playing Freddy, but he doesn’t really revel in the campy glee like Robert Englund did as the original Freddy. This movie is only good for the jolts when the bad guy jumps out of the mirror and all of those scenes can be seen coming from 10 miles away. This dark fantasy is really just an inane vision that didn’t need to exist and certainly doesn’t warrant the sequel that will surely come in the next year or two. Somebody wake me up from this bad dream!
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Directed by: Samuel Bayer<br />Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara and Clancy Brown<br />Now playing at: Grandin Theatres, North Edmonton Cineplex, Westmount Centre Cinemas and Scotiabank Theatre<br />Rated: 18A<br />Stars: 0.5
