The last time I did any kind of horror movie review it was of Rob Zombie’s ‘Halloween’… since then I didn’t feel like reviewing anything else because well, Halloween traumatized me for a very long time… seriously it was that bad god damn it.
For the past year or so we’ve been deluged with a plethora of news about the Elm St remake. I started to think to myself… Hey… it doesn’t look half bad. I’m going to put this out there for people who don’t like to read too much; flat out it was just bad. No soul. The direction was sub par and the cinematography was too hectic for its own good.
Well the opportunity arose last night to attend a midnight showing of A Nightmare on Elm St. The Platinum Dunes Baymake much in the line with other classic Baymakes as Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. However I went into this with an open mind. Completely open ready to just watch and enjoy.
The film was directed by first time film director Samuel Bayer, whom you can’t talk about at all without mentioning the fact that he was a music video director first — known mostly for his video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Like most music video directors everything is horribly stylized, cock-eyed, crooked, and hyper out of focus when it shouldn’t be. There’s absolutely no flow to the film at all and quite literally no pace at all. From the very first 1996 esque CGI shot, to the final shot of the film everything just reeks of amateur hour, and every instance of CGI in this film completely drains any spark it may have had towards being a legit scene in an Elm St film.
Much like the original Nightmare, we focus on a character other than Nancy for the beginning, the problem with this in the remake is they never show the fact that any of these people are friends in ANY way so when the focus swings to Nancy it feels like a brick to the head. This is exactly what you do not want from an Elm St film — big bombastic clubs to the head. There’s an unlimited amount of things you can do with the plot of – “Child killer/molester comes back from the dead in your dreams to extract his revenge” and we were force fed a typical slasher film with absolutely zero creativity — and the one thing they WERE creative with, the micro-naps, — they mostly ignore.
Now I’m sure you all want to know exactly what I think about Jackie Earl Haley as the man himself, Freddy Krueger. It pains me to say this but it was just, mediocre. In fact I feel that a melted Rick Moranis spouting lines from Honey I Shrunk The Kids would be more terrifying. Why? THE MAKEUP DESIGN. I understand they wanted to really go for realism with the design but I am sorry, an Alien Cat is not what I want my Freddy Krueger to look like! Do I think it was Haley’s fault? Not so much. The character had to look and act a certain way, which unfortunately makes his job harder because he couldn’t bring his own swing into it at all.
While I was watching the film all I could hope to myself is that maybe they were going for an Avant-garde kind of feel where they purposely made the movie worse than it should have been to hammer home the feeling of being trapped in an inescapable nightmare. Because that’s exactly how I felt.
Sorry Freddy fans… it just fails completely and makes you wish you were watching one of the original films. Yes, even Freddy’s Dead.
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