A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010)

Ahh, the dreaded remake. Let's make one thing absolutely clear: there is one, and only one, reason for a studio to remake a film and that reason is money. You take an in-house property, rewrite it to fit the industry trends, cast it pretty and usher it out, knowing full well that the film you just remade has a built-in fanbase just frothing at the mouth to see it. It's an almost guaranteed success. Taking a look at the remake cycle in hindsight, the films that weren't successes are the films virtually no one outside of the diehard horror fanbase had ever seen before. PROM NIGHT and HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW are just two examples. Horror fans know these films well. Mainstream audiences don't. So the chances of a remake succeeding were slim. And guess what? They didn't.


But the big four - HALLOWEEN, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, FRIDAY THE 13TH and now A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET - are huge enough franchises that the cross-over from horror fans to mainstream fans is virtually guaranteed. The first three I listed were all successful. I have no doubt that the overall box office take for the NIGHTMARE remake will be great as well.


But why not just release another sequel? Why bother going back to the beginning and start all over? Well, for the same reason you upgrade to a new operating system instead of downgrading to an earlier one. Bells and whistles. The underlying film stays the same but the new looks and fancy new toys ensures the capture of a new, younger audience and that ensures a viable product for years to come.


Let's face facts... The current horror franchises in play are tired. They need a break. Stuff 'em full of Red Bull and energy bars, pretty them up, give them a shot of adrenaline and still, at the end of the day, you have plodding old men huffing and puffing their way to the finish line. FRIDAY THE 13TH was dead long before Jason went to hell, Michael Myers really only needed to return to Haddonfield once and Leatherface... Well, the good old boy hasn't been the same since he had that little scuff-up with Dennis Hopper. As for Freddy... It's my humble opinion that once a horror icon gets his own prime time TV series, has a Fresh Prince rap done in his honor and starts tossing out one-liners like a Comedy Central reject, it's time to hang up the fedora, put away the claws and take an early retirement.


But here we go again. Freddy is once again at the multiplex and, I must admit, I was a little stoked by that idea. It wasn't because I missed these films - I am really not a fan of the franchise - it was because the advances in CGI and practical effects have been so great since Freddy last slashed his way across the silver screen that the idea of a fully realized NIGHTMARE film really had me excited. But then, 15 minutes into the film, all that excitement died away.


So what went wrong?


When you're making a remake, you can do one of two things: You can simply repackage the material, like in FRIDAY THE 13TH, or you can expand on the material, like in HALLOWEEN. The FRIDAY THE 13TH remake was just another damned FRIDAY THE 13TH movie. Sure, it tossed in a few origin bits here and there but it really did nothing new. HALLOWEEN, one of the more maligned remakes out there, at least attempted to do something new. I can give it credit for that. What Rob Zombie attempted was a complete overhaul of the series, a true "re-imagining" of the material. Had he not attached a virtual carbon copy of Carpenter's original to the last half of his movie, it would have been a much better film. The first half was SO different and SO unique that the last half felt tacked on and weak. If you're going to mess with the very DNA of a franchise, go all the way. Don't sell out and retreat to the familiar.


What Samuel Bayer does in his remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is take the easy route. The new revelations in the film - a more fleshed out Krueger back story that ties Freddy more closely to Nancy, for example - add nothing to the franchise. It's on autopilot for just about the whole running time, bouncing in fits and starts from one murder to the next. This is A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET re-imagined, all right...


It's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET re-imagined as FRIDAY THE 13TH.


Now, I don't like comparing remakes to originals for the plain and simple fact that the remake of a film is a separate entity from the original film. So let me just sum up my feelings about A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET as a stand-alone film first.


It doesn't work. On any level. The film's opening ten minutes sum this movie up perfectly. All of the film's tricks are utilized in this opening. We know immediately that there are not going to be any teases. This is going to be a film that thinks it's audience is a bunch of idiots. Every time the film shifts from real-world to dream-world, the entire film changes with it. The color pallet changes, the imagery changes, everything is distorted and nasty... it saps any suspense from the proceedings by telling you that something bad is going to happen. You know you're about to run into Freddy every time this happens. It no longer becomes a question of suspense. It becomes a question of when Freddy is going to pull a Jason and just show up standing behind the victim.


The film also makes a huge mistake in this opening: it reveals Freddy full-on. "Less is more" is a statement often made in respect to the horror film and it is a statement I completely agree with. Once the opening sequence of the film is over, there is no more mystery to the character. This full-on reveal saps Freddy of his, pardon the pun, nightmarish qualities. That Freddy also kills his first victim by forcefully shoving a knife into his throat should tell you where the heart of this film lies. It's a slasher, first and foremost, and a head-fuck last. Like Zombie's HALLOWEEN, Bayer's NIGHTMARE is a film dedicated to a fanbase truly in love with the villain. Both films make their psychopaths the true lead character. Both suffer for it.


As the film wears on - and wears your patience thin - some of the more interesting ideas are buried beneath a RINGU-style search for an old preschool and tired, cliched parental conflicts. The interesting ideas I'm referring to, such as the notion of "micronaps" where your brain lapses into a dream-state while still operating consciously, are nice and dandy but the whole thing peters out in predictable fashion. The "I can bring Freddy out of my dreams" plot development that is a staple of the genre is pulled off with little to no fuss - it barely even registers with the characters - and the final battle between our last two surviving protagonists - and you won't believe how boring the new Nancy is until you see the movie - and the now-material Freddy is over so quick and is so terribly unexciting that the term "anti-climatic" can barely do it justice.


The remake assumes too much. It assumes you know the original film, how the franchise operates and what the rules of the game being played are, that it seems unlikely that anyone other than NIGHTMARE fans will get much out of it. Unlike Zombie's HALLOWEEN, which didn't require you to know anything about the series beforehand, Bayer's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET does. If you were to walk into this movie cold, you'd leave scratching your head.


Now let's compare this NIGHTMARE to Craven's original.


Craven's original film was released in 1984, smack-dab in the middle of the don't worry, be happy years of the Reagan era. It is a film set in the middle America suburbs, where the green lawns and clean vaneers of the houses just scream "everything is alright". But Craven knows better. It's little wonder that the central protagonist, Nancy, is part of a broken home. Her parents are divorced, her father is largely absent from her life and her mother is an alcoholic hiding a very dark secret - that she and an angry mob of parents toasted child molester Freddy when he was released due to a legal faux pas. The Freddy Krueger of Craven's film represents repression. His murderous activities occur within the subconscious, the very seat of repression. In Craven's film, Nancy manages to defeat Freddy by releasing her inner fears and doubts. It is an act of self-empowerment that destroys the monster. That is a far cry from the remake, a film which ultimately solves it's problem with a bloody slit throat.


Craven's film deals very closely with the idea of the forgotten and abandoned youth paying the price for the sins of their parents - social stigmas in conservative communities usually follow children around as they get older and the reputations of their parents become part of their own social identity. He decides to have Freddy wreak vengeance upon the children of the people that murdered him, all under the disbelieving, dismissive eyes of the true causes of their misery, but Bayer's film decides to lay the blame not on the parents but on the now-grown children themselves. Freddy is seeking vengeance not for his murder but because the children who had promised not to tell of his molestations eventually broke their promise and reported him to their parents. This little shift in motive makes the whole thing seem especially distasteful. It really doesn't sit well with me. Seeing this film with a receptive audience - people were whooping and cheering - was particularly disquieting. It's not unusual for people to cheer on the villain in slasher films because the teenage characters are usually obnoxious caricatures with so little in the way of personality that they are little more than bobble heads with targets drawn on their foreheads. The characters in this film are not obnoxious but likeable - though, as I've pointed out earlier, Nancy is quite the drag - and the fact that people were rooting for the death of kids whose only crime was stopping their physical and sexual abuse seems to be a gross, disgusting and offensive thing.


Craven knew well enough to use the slasher film as a template for something new and interesting. Bayer doesn't seem at all concerned with breaking new ground. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET feels lifeless and overlong, completely devoid of any of the subtext and interesting ideas that flowed throughout Craven's film. Bayer's remake is nothing more than a body count movie and a rather poor one at that.


Not recommended.