A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) *

Everyone's favorite maintenance man returns (sort of) to ruin the night emissions of any teenagers with an Elm Street address in this update of Wes Craven's 1984 masterpiece. The film examines the interrupted sleep patterns caused by a mysterious man of their dreams named Freddy Krueger (Jack Earle Haley), a horribly burned spectre sporting a glove fitted with razor blades on the fingers. One by one each victim is picked off by Freddy in the dream world.

We now live in a world where what is old is new again. Sometimes it's great (Star Trek, Casino Royale). Sometimes it's acceptable (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Sometimes it's horrible (Halloween). Michael Bay and Platinum Dunes has become the Ray Kroc of remerchandising dead horror franchises for a new generation. Nightmare on Elm Street represents the last of the "Big Three" to be re-cast, redesigned, and re-tooled for the next generation. The problem is that they're not very good. Not that some of the originals were that good in the first place, but they had this kind of feel to them. They were fun cheese. And when the era died out they tended to die out with it.

The Nightmare remake takes into account the film that created it's built in audience. There's the blond flying around the room being ripped to pieces, then appearing in the body bag. There's the Stay Puft floor, made bigger and better with CGI. There's the new and improved make up that makes Krueger scarier than Robert Englund's performance.

The problem with A Nightmare on Elm Street is that it's basically a paint by numbers film. You know when a scare is going to happen and how it's going to go down. It also eliminates the Bogeyman vibe that the original film had by giving the audience a nice flashback to show just what happened. In 1984 we heard a nice short story about Krueger being a child killer that got torched with the help of John Saxon. That's it. You learn a little bit, but he's still and shadow in your mind at night. He's everyone's nightmare man. Of course the sequels ruined this, but going original to re-make there's that lost fear. The Halloween remake also failed on this point, making both films to go from making you fear what lurks in the night to watching a snuff film. We don't care because these psycho's aren't coming after us. We're all cool.

One of the issues that have come up with this film is that it's a new direction for the Krueger character. Gone is the funny man. This time he's sadistic and serious. The thing is that going back to the original film (and its sequel) the character was a sadistic bastard. Sure, the sequels had him coming out of a TV, being in a comic book, and riding a skateboard. The first two films featured a sadistic villain with Englund giving his portrayal a hint of sarcasm. He was a true psycho. Our new version sounds like a heavy breather with no sense of purpose. It's like a character spinning his wheels.

With a script that pays homage to the original and little else, Nightmare is another tick on the re-make headboard, but was there a need for it? Can't we come up with new bogeymen to replace the old ones? Hell, why should we? These films have a built in audience which translates to built in $$ that equates to not mattering if the movie is good or not- the fans will show up. The days of originality in horror are dead. It's just the bogeymen that keep coming back.