Monday, April 26, 2010

Your Worst Nightmare









A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010)

I had a dream.

I had a dream that Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes would somehow manage to deliver something worthwhile with the upcoming A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake. The original Wes Craven film, while being one of the better slasher movies of the early 80’s is hardly an irrefutable masterpiece, and while the role of the iconic dream slasher will always belong to Robert Englund, the casting of Jackie Earle Haley as the new Freddy Krueger was an inspired choice. Anyone who saw Haley as Rorschach in WATCHMEN or as the child molesting creep in LITTLE CHILDREN had every reason to believe he’d knock this one out of the park with a razor-fingered glove tied behind his back. Why, for horror fans, this could be a dream come true!

Keep dreaming little dreamer.

An admission -- while I have seen the remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, the cut I saw was at a test screening that was shown back in October of 2009. There were reshoots as a result of that screening, so it would be unfair to call this a proper review. But I did see a finished cut of the film, and I have held my tongue as the hype for this thing has grown, and I simply cannot hold it any longer. My tongue is coming through the internet, slathering slime all over your face as you scream in terror like a teenage girl. I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.

So here’s the plot -- It’s the plot of a 1984 film called A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Have you seen that yet? If not, go watch it. Then we’ll be up to speed. I’ll still be here when you get back.

The new film follows the original so closely that for most of the running time the dream sequences/kills are basically the same, shot-for-shot. This decision baffles me since in every instance the sequences are done worse than they were in 1984. Think about that for a second. In the original, when Freddy’s form comes through the wall to swipe at a sleeping victim, it was done with a latex scrim. In the new version, it’s done with powerful computer software. AND IT LOOKS WORSE.

But I can forgive bad CGI, maybe the guy working on that one got food poisoning and had to run to the hospital or something before it was finished. Who knows. But this lazy attitude carries over to all of the dream sequences. The director of the remake is Samuel Bayer, who is best known for directing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. You kids won’t remember Nirvana; they were a good band that everybody liked and then the singer killed himself. Then he started stalking people in their dreams, starting with his ex-wife who was scary looking in her own right. Just kidding, that didn’t happen. The point is, Samuel Bayer is no Wes Craven. And Wes Craven is a world class hack who had a few decent ideas. Sorry, but it’s true.

The real crime of the new NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is lack of imagination. You’ve got this great concept and you just decide to redo the things that were done better the first time? That is just lame. Around the halfway point, new story elements are introduced, the only promising one being (SPOILER WARNING) the idea of ‘micronaps’. This leads to the best scene in the film, which takes place in a pharmacy. The ultra-bland and weirdly emotionless Nancy (Rooney Mara) is micro-dreaming of being stalked by Freddy in a boiler room. He’s swiping at her, hitting pipes with his claws while in reality stuff is being clawed off of the pharmacy shelves by an invisible force. Sound confusing? To Bayer’s credit, it isn’t confusing in the movie and is in fact very effective. I’ll give Bayer that one. But that’s all he’s getting.

Which brings us to the red-and-green striped elephant in the room. How is Jackie Earle Haley? He’s OK I guess. I’m gonna let that one sink in. Jackie Earle fucking Haley, brilliant actor and star of the original BAD NEWS BEARS is just OK as Freddy Krueger. To be fair, he doesn’t have a lot to work with; he mostly just mutters creepy things from the shadows, like an evil Bob Dylan or something. He gets to play Freddy pre-burn in flashbacks, and does as good job as you’d expect, but there wasn’t much to those scenes either. And that’s a real shame, because there’s a big reveal late in the film that could have been interesting and a good showcase for Haley’s talent.

WARNING – THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS ARE RIFE WITH SPOILERS!

In the new film, Freddy is a groundskeeper (which must be a sly reference to that Simpsons episode where Groundskeeper Willy was Freddy with a giant rake) at a kindergarten. All kids love groundskeepers, so naturally they befriend this fedora wearing creep. They start coming home with claw marks on them, and the parents accuse Freddy of the crimes. He is arrested, gets off on a technicality, and is burned to death in a warehouse by the parental mob. The point being that there is some ambiguity as to Freddy’s guilt this time around. This could have been an interesting twist on the original premise, but it all comes to nothing because Freddy really did abuse the kids. Oh well, never mind.

This type of missed opportunity is at the core of what makes this remagining (I’m copyrighting that word so don’t even try to use it) such an abject failure. It’s not that it isn’t scary. Freddy is the modern equivalent of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and hasn’t been scary for years. It’s not that the film is paced poorly and lacks even a single moment of genuine suspense. It’s not that the screenplay, by Wesley Strick and God knows who else, feels like it was actually written while sleeping. It’s that every time the film has the chance to go in an imaginative new direction, it pulls back to ape what the original did. The new film just doesn’t have the balls to be its own thing.

I could go on about how sad it is that no matter how much this movie sucks it will still make millions of dollars on brand recognition alone, or how it was a bad costuming choice to go with the iconic striped sweater because horizontal stripes don’t do Haley’s diminutive stature any favors, or how the boiler room imagery made no sense in the context of the remake because Freddy didn’t abuse the kids in a boiler room. I won’t even go about discouraging you from seeing A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2010. I saw an early cut of the film. I’m sure they fixed all of the glaring problems and will deliver a masterpiece of modern horror that will thrill and delight audiences in years and years to come.

Yeah right. In your dreams.

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