Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

(SPOILER ALERT, SERIOUSLY THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY)

… I don’t know how to open this. Should I just talk about how remakes are usually pointless again? Should I mention the fact that the original “Nightmare on Elm Street” is one of my favorite movies? Should I bitch about the producer Michael Bay being a man with no actual talent that has seemed to make it his goal to screw over anything that has made movies good? No, I should really just start with the fact that I saw this movie several weeks ago and it’s still got me angry! This movie is just bad. It doesn’t even seem to be trying and it’s just a cash grab using the name only. I actually felt dirty after leaving this movie. I literally felt like I had to sit there and watch the director rape a franchise and character that I love by turning it into a sloppy, stupid, poorly executed, idiotic mountain of pure failure.
Those who have lived under a rock for the past 26 years, the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series put New Line Cinema on the map as a studio. The plot was there are a bunch of teenagers that are being stalked by a killer in their dreams. This killer, named Freddy Kruger, was a child murderer and molester that was killed be the parents of the children that he hurt after he was released due to a technicality and this is his revenge. It was simple, yet at the same time had a nice new angle to the slasher craze, not to mention that most every video store in the country has the image of Freddy Kruger on the wall somewhere if you actually go look. So this is a movie with a large fan base to say the least. Did it really need to be remade?!
I could understand “Clash of the Titans”, hell “Friday the 13th” didn’t bug me because honestly the first one wasn’t that great a movie to me. Yeah it and “Halloween” set up the slasher standard, but it really didn’t impress me that much. “Nightmare” was an interesting idea and actually was genuinely creepy. I was 16 when I saw it and I had nightmares that night.
The remake just takes everything that made the original good and fucks it up so bad. No, it actually goes even farther! It takes things that are good ideas in theory, and then executes them so poorly on top of fucking up the original ideas! Like the idea that after staying awake for too many days you can dream while still being awake, but the kids can usually just suddenly snap out of it, so it’s a mute point really. This is without doubt one of the laziest scripts I’ve seen since “Highlander 2: The Quickening” or well, everything Eli Roth has ever written. Here are some examples: The parents were some how able to make their kids not only forget Freddy molested them, but that they even went to the same school together before junior high school. (HOW???) The kids believe that Freddy is actually going to be able to kill them after about one line usually. (WHY???) And, oh I almost forgot, they try and play off the idea that maybe Freddy was innocent, right before they prove that he wasn’t. I mean, that is just… Wow, I was sitting in the theater just watching these events unfold and all I could see was plot hole after plot hole after plot hole. I’m not saying that they have to give us crap tons of exposition, because that just gives us “Legion”, but really all the things I just talked about are either never explained while insulting our intelligence, or just makes the characters look incredibly stupid. Try this on for size, one guy shows up, unannounced at the main character’s house, covered in blood. He then says he didn’t kill the girl he was with, it just happened and it was someone that was in her dream. At this point they’ve kind of sort tried to establish that the characters are all having the same dream like in the first movie, but they didn’t really say that they felt like they were in that much danger, at least Nancy didn’t. So when a guy covered in blood shows up and says it’s ok, he didn’t do it she was killed in a dream AND this person just buys it right there I call bullshit!
In the first movie, they show that everyone had the same dream yeah, but they were all there when Tina was killed too, so it made much more sense for Nancy to believe that the guy could kill them in their dreams! And even then she still wasn’t convinced at first! It’s like the script to this movie was only half finished, but they decided to shoot it anyway! I could go on and on listing the problems with it because that’s really all this movie is, but there is way more to get to.
These performances are just bad, and I mean bad in a way that makes people from “The Final Destination” look like they could successfully pull off Shakespeare. True I never expect greatness from horror movies as far as acting, but seriously, these people are fucking pathetic! None of them stand out at all; they’re all just the dumb stereotypes that we always see. The jock, the bad kid, the dumb girl, the awkward couple that both like each other but neither of them actually have the guts to ask the other out. It’s just clichéd and really really gives us no attachment to these people and gets to a point where I was actually laughing when they died a few times. And Nancy, played by Rooney Mara, is the worst of all because she basically does absolutely nothing for half the movie while we follow another character and then when she is portrayed as doing something, she just goes to the library and looks through old files telling us things that we pretty much already knew. So she does next to nothing through out the movie! Her would be boyfriend Quentin, Kyle Gallner, is also fairly bland but he at least has some personality so I actually kind of liked him, kind of. He at least wasn’t annoying or super boring like everyone else.
But aside from the shitty script, the terrible performances and the plain fact that this movie didn’t need to be remade, Freddy is a joke. Yes, I know in the sequels he became the punch line king of killers, but I don’t mean he’s a silly character, I mean here he’s not threatening at all! The one thing that seems like it might have actually saved this waste of film was that Jackie Earl Haley got cast as Freddy. I was holding out the faintest hope that this guy could give us a really creepy Freddy, just like Robert Englund did in the first movie. But sadly, while Haley has his moments of creepy, he’s given way too many bad jokes, his presence is surprisingly un-menacing and really he looks like crap! I’m not kidding, he looks like one of those aliens from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” if it was put in the microwave. That’s not scary! Nothing about this movie is! And fucking up Freddy’s appearance was the first problem! Add in the fact that he just utters bad, and I mean really bad jokes, and the fact that when his claws touch ANYTHING they spark and that doesn’t even begin to make sense! HOW DO YOU FUCK UP SOMETHING SO GODDAMN SIMPLE?!
And don’t even get me started on what this movie actually tries to scare you with. Jump scares, that’s it. I hate jump scares. The moment that you have one in a movie, that’s it you can’t do it again. But this movie seems to have been dropped on its head as it does them over and over and over. That’s all we get! There is no tension, no atmosphere and the dream world is drastically under used, mostly because that would probably be good and get in the way of the jump scares. God this movie doesn’t give any effort at all!
Is there any point in continuing? This movie was just stupid. It actually took an interesting idea, and just makes it shit pure and simple. I think it should come as no surprise that I just hated this fucking movie, and don’t recommend it at all. If I could have my way; the negative, script, every print made and Michael Bay would be dropped down a volcano to never blight the cinemas ever again. Who’s with me?