I won’t bother burdening you by having to introduce the original film; we all know where it stands in horror film history, blah blah blah, and yakkidy smackidy.  Unless this new installment was being handled by someone like David Fincher, there was a snowball chance in hell it was going to come close, so there’s no point in trying to do a compare and contrast.  Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare On Elm Street is yet another remake shoe-horned into the multiplexes for audiences that have nothing better to spend their cash on.  But is it worth spending that ten, sometimes eleven or twelve bucks, not counting popcorn, soda, candy, liquor?  Well, maybe the liquor helps.

The story is about a bunch of teens, that have been left back many years in high school to look as old as they do, who hang out at a diner (Springwood must be incredibly boring) until one of them reveals he has been having some bad dreams, making him not want to go to sleep for fear of being killed.  After the kid dies rather publicly in what looked like a sleepwalk state with a knife, these “teens” begin having similar dreams of a little burned man with a fedora and knives for fingers, wanting to kill them.  The film struggles to find a protagonist to settle on for 30 minutes, until we settle on Nancy and Quintin, Nancy being the arty outcast girl who’s Freddy’s favorite object of desire, and Quintin, some mish mash of an emo kid that has a strange desire to be involved in extracurricular school activities like the swim team (I’ll give some points for thinking outside the box a little for that one) and somehow being a wussy looking son of Clancy “I’m the fucking Kurgan” Brown.  Quintin must take from his mom’s side.  Nancy and Quintin go on a Scooby Doo quest to find out who this nightmare boogeyman is, and find out why their parents are acting fishy about their own history as well as the name “Fred Kruger.”

The movie wants Nancy (played sleepily by Rooney Mara) to be the main hero, but one of the main issues with the movie is that she just seems to have no initiative to doing anything until Quintin comes along and pushes her because he’s got nothing better to do.  It’s like they wanted their hero to have a transformation from wallflower to active heroine, but even with the final confrontation with Freddy, she still feels like she’s a cold fish.  Remember jokes about super hot girls that just lie there in bed while their boyfriend plows away and she seems to do little more movement than blinking, only to give a forced groan or thrash at the end?  Her character development feels kind of like that.  Quintin is played by Kyle Gallner, previously seen in the rechid Jennifer’s Body and Haunting In Connecticut, and manages to bring some level of talent to the troop of teens.  He’s earnest, and his panic scenes feel genuine, but he also feels burdened with having to carry Mara most of the movie.  Not only does he play an outsider emo type, he’s addicted to a prescription to keep him awake…long before the scary events of the movie.  Why is he on the prescription?  Well, the lazy screenwriters forgot to add that, and I found it far more intriguing than the dark dirty history the children have with the long dead Fred Kruger.  

For a slasher movie, even a high concept one such as Nightmare On Elm Street, the deaths were remarkably unmemorable.  If you’re going to have the bodycount low, you should make each one really really count.  Sure, there’s blood, we get some CGI cutting (not bad CGI either, but you can tell) and Freddy gets to deliver some good sinister lines, but the actual death needs to be the final punchline, and they unfortunately fell flat. 

There is the reveal of the parents confronting a then-alive Kruger and of course burning him alive for what he is accused of doing to the children.  It’s generally familiar, as it was pretty much there in the original, only in this universe, it feels much less justified.  Just before any of you preachy types start harping on me for not being sympathetic to parents harming their child’s “toucher”, let me just say that they seemed to just jump the gun on stories rather than bothering with any investigation, police, or even bothering searching for a “secret cave” that the children mentioned.  I guess it’s reflective of the “guilty before proven innocent” America we actually have today, but that’s giving way too much credit.  There’s much more going on in the situation, but it all just feels like fluff and filler just to try to give Freddy Kruger, one of the unwavering meanest bastards in American Cinema history, some sympathy. And it doesn’t work. 

Steve Jablonsky’s music is still unsure where to place his moody music, so he randomly decides to have some swelling to bring up tension into scenes I guess to keep the audience awake.  The man seems to be a minimalist, and that’s fine, especially with horror flicks that actually don’t rely on scares (like Friday the 13^th), but Nightmare relies on tension, dread, and the creep factor, so randomly placed music cues destroy potential suspense the film might have had going for it.  Is there no attempt at a theme anymore?  What happened to musical hooks in horror scores?  Audibly, this wasn’t the worst thing the movie had going for it.  There better be a Golden Raspberry for the sound department for having Freddy’s voice go all over the place.  I understand in the older flicks, the tech wasn’t probably quite as good to keep that voice balanced, but it eventually got better, but now it was like it went back to square one, and so we get to hear every EQ setting Jackie Earle Haley’s voice registered at.  There was no balance to it, it would be ear-bleedingly loud, to muffled, and he would be speaking at the same general volume level.  The originals may have been tonally different, but they never punished the audience by being loud for the sake of loud.  Perhaps the sound department wanted to add some extra “jumps” to the movie by bouncing Freddy’s tone up and down, and while it might have worked to get the jump, it was more annoying than like a charming amusement park ride.

Beyond the sound messing around with Freddy’s voice, Jackie Earle Haley did a bang-up job with what he was given, and even had some good dialogue to play with.  He took on the role of Fred Kruger, did his own thing, and it works.  He keeps him creepy, unflinching, sadistic, and keeps our red green sweater wearing fedora man afloat as far as great horror villains go.  Freddy hasn’t been this villainous in a long time, and it feels great to have him back, until we feel dirty rooting for him, something we never felt before, and unfortunately I don’t like it.  We can blame the change up in the back story on that one rather than Haley’s good work.   It would be welcome to see him continue playing the character, but much preferable with a different creative team.

The Make-up FX are actually pretty damn good.  They went all out to really make him look burned the fuck up, and the effort shows, with one unfortunate drawback: it seems that Jackie as Freddy had a hard time smiling.  Sure, burn victims may have wind up stiff and they may not be able to smile, but isn’t it much more grotesque and frightening that Freddy will still give you a wicked smile in spite of how horrible his burn scaring looks?  Yeah, I thought so too.  I hope this film will serve as an argument that practical FX still look far more real on screen than CGI Fx.  There’s a moment in the film that redoes Freddy coming off the wall like it’s melted over him, and it’s suppose to be a creepy scene, but instead it’s so cartoony it’s distracting.  It could’ve been completely left on the cutting room floor and no one would’ve missed a thing because it seemed like it was forced to even be there, just to remind people of the first movie.  Of course, I’m aware there was some CGI polishing on the make-up FX, and it was done very well, and that tends to be the best use of it in a horror film, but prosthetics could’ve been used for arms bursting through chests and it would’ve been a whole hell of a lot more convincing.  And would’ve likely been cheaper.

Other than a few lines Freddy gets to utter, where the hell was the joy in the flick?  Sure, it’s trying to be scary, suspenseful and all around creepy, but there’s still got to be some amount of fun and entertainment watching a slasher film.  The pace of the “mystery hunting” subplot we have going on is so sluggish that it seems like it would’ve benefited from the later Looney-Tunes style Freddy, just to liven things up a bit.  Jump scares seem wedged in just to keep the audience awake.  It’s like the only entertaining non-Freddy scene was Jesse (the replacement for the character of Rod in the original) in the jail cell, and he’s got a cellmate that witnessed the aftermath.   

The bottom line is that this wasn’t awful, but I have an uncomfortable time trying to call it “okay” as well.  It’s somewhere in an abyssal in-between.  It could’ve been better, should’ve been better, and Jackie deserved better, but what we got is a yawning slasher flick who’s knives are dull but no one seemed to care.  If they go for a sequel, and they probably will, they should have some more fun with it, that way the audience at least can too.  Save the 10 bucks and use it to booze it.

Grade: D+