To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. To close; the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street…
Over this year’s Countdown to Halloween, one movie has been mentioned more than any other – Platinum Dunes 2010 remake of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. Whether we were talking about Evil Dead, The Fly or even Bride of Chucky, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake’s name has been brought up in an incredibly negative light and has been used as the best example of “missing the point”.
So, let’s look at why Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t just the worst remake of an 80s slasher movie, but also the biggest waste of time.
When Platinum Dunes announced the movie back in 2008, the idea was to follow the model of their Friday the 13th remake – which was to cherry pick moments from the entire franchise and create a new story from them. Their second point was that they were going to make Freddy “scary” once again after he became somewhat of a stand-up comedian in the later sequels. However they then rescinded their first statement when they told interviewers that their movie would be a straight-up remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 classic, but the idea of making Freddy a lot darker remained true.
The biggest difference between the two movies however is that the 2010 remake positions Freddy in a different light – that of a wrongly accused man.
In Wes Craven’s movie it is very clear that the parents of Elm Street, while wrong in their public execution, burnt Freddy Krueger alive because the justice system failed them and let this child predator free. In Bayer’s remake, they plant a seed early on that perhaps Freddy was wrongly accused and that the children he supposedly molested were making stories up. Sadly while the idea is perhaps an interesting take, it fails badly because not one person in the audience of the movie believed he was anything other than guilty. So what we’re then presented with is an overly-long and bloated waste of story because we know that in the end our teenage protagonists will find that he really did touch them inappropriately. Maybe if the script had been a bit more daring and actually went through with its ‘wrongly accused’ story it could have been forgiven, but as it stands it creates no tension or emotion as there is no surprise or twist when all is said and done.
But this is really the least of the movie’s problems. It’s incredibly ironic that a movie about dream-killer Freddy is so boring that it makes you want to fall asleep. Not one of the actors (outside of Jackie Earl Haley) is putting any effort forward with the biggest culprit being Roony Mara who is outstandingly dull as Nancy Holbrook (renamed from Nancy Thompson so the script feels like it has some originality?). Not one of her dialogue reads is convincing and she never conveys the emotion needed to carry the movie’s, albeit pointless, plot. Her co-star Kyle Gallner (taking on the Johnny Depp role) is equally as mundane, but he at least attempts to ham it up during his more sleep deprived state during the final act – even though he fails miserably.
Furthermore, the movie requires its audience to accept a lot more of its stupid ideas like kids falling asleep while swimming, a blogger uploading a video to his website after he’s been killed and – the biggest of all – every single one of the children repressing their childhood memories so much that none of them remember that they all grew up together. Repressing memories is quite a common occurrence for victims, but the idea of these kids going to kindergarten together, remaining friends and not remembering their younger days is an astounding jump in logic. It’s these examples of lazy writing that really highlight why the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street is a complete waste of your time. All of its claims of ‘darker tone’ can not make up for this caliber of laziness.
One of the biggest point of contentions during the movie’s production was the re-casting of Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Most fans knew that it was highly unlikely that Englund would return to the make-up chair and with Platinum Dune’s “re-imagining”, it would have been a stupid choice to bring him back. And in all fairness, the casting of Jackie Earl Haley was a very good choice as the actor brings a good shape and a creepy factor to this version of Freddy that was really needed in order not to be compared to the iconic Englund. The problem however is not in Haley’s performance, it’s in the scripting of the character. He is given the most asinine dialogue that is supposed sound threatening but just comes off goofier than the original’s intentional comedic moments.
But, as has been stated throughout Countdown to Halloween, the movie’s biggest issue is the fact that it missed the point of not only Wes Craven’s original, but the series overall. We discussed the “wall scare” scene back during the Evil Dead entry, but there are other examples that actually come in for the form of the dialogue. There is a moment towards the end of the movie in which Freddy has Nancy struggle through a river of thick blood that was once the hallway of her home. Not only is this an example of the movie’s feeble attempts to one-up the original (the steps turning to marshmallow), it takes the line from Joey’s kill from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master – “how’s this for a wet dream?” – but uses it in the wrong context. The reason why line works for Joey’s death is because Freddy is drowning him in a water bed that he tricked him into using a naked woman as bait. In the remake, Nancy is just struggling through a river of blood – so where’s the joke? Why use that line? Wesley Strick clearly knew the line was from one of the original movies and used it as a nod to the fans, but didn’t think as to why it was used in the first place. To make matters worse, the scene would have played the same even without the line so it just comes off as a desperate attempt to appeal to those who loved the original.
The Platinum Dunes remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is a massive waste of time, effort and money. It does nothing to celebrate the original, it does nothing to top the original and it does nothing for the legacy of the franchise other than cash-in on it. Everyone who worked on this movie, including Robert Shaye, should be ashamed of what they churned out. For everything wrong with the original’s sequels, they at least attempted to do something new with Wes Craven’s creation. Be it good or bad, they at least tried. When you see interviews with the cast and crew of those movies in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, you feel their emotion and love for the series even if what they produced was less than stellar. With the 2010 remake, you just hear cash registers ringing.
It will take something monumental to top A Nightmare on Elm Street as the worst remake of an 80s slasher.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Flickering Myth will be presenting a one-night only screening of zombie-comedy Stalled at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London on Novemeber 14th 2013. For more information on where to buy tickets, click here.
