A Nightmare on Elm Street Review

The words ‘produced by Michael Bay’ should serve as a warning as to the quality of any film they are unfortunate enough to describe. Samuel Bayer’s ‘re-imagining’ of A Nightmare on Elm Street is one such a film. As you are probably aware, the film concerns various teens being dispatched by the stripy-jumpered fiend, Freddy Krueger, who kills them gorily in their dreams. Another dispatch from the Platinum Dunes production house, a studio that specialises in remaking old horror films to little or no acclaim, the new A Nightmare on Elm Street is a tiresome plod with little to recommend it.

Jackie Earle Haley, who received much love for not sucking as Rorschach in Watchmen and an Oscar nomination for his role in Little Children, is largely wasted in role that doesn’t demand any of the subtleties he is quite capable of bringing to a character. The teen cast, which includes alumni from the Twilight, Supernatural and The Sarah Connor Chronicles franchises, give workable performances, though none are revelatory, and Clancy Brown, The Kurgan himself, stars all too briefly as a secretive father.

For a film in which the concept is heavily steeped in dreams, the script is tediously unimaginative, piling on lashings of dumb exposition and clichéd dialogue. On the plus side, the direction occasionally shows hints of flair, as you might expect from the chap behind music videos for Nirvana, Marilyn Manson and David Bowie, but any promise is not sustained. The film also nips along at fairly agreeable pace, though this is at the expense of any build-up of suspense. Typically in a horror film, you might expect the monster to be kept under wraps long enough to allow for the fear of the unknown to settle in the audience, but A Nightmare on Elm Street shows its hand pretty early on, as if eager to get silly little things like tension and character development out the way quickly and get on with the bloodshed.

Bayer’s biggest missteps however, are that he forgets to make the film either scary or amusing. A big orchestral blast on the soundtrack to make the audience jump when the villain appears is not the same as providing properly unnerving the viewer. Paranormal Activity, for example, easily out-scares Mr Kruger and co. with a just swinging door and some talcum powder; compared to the bluster, noise and bloodletting that Bayer employs. This would be less troubling if there were any sense of irony, amusement or fun in the film. Haley states that they were going for a ‘more serious, less jokey’ version of Kruger. Definitely a mistake. Without its tongue in its cheek, we are forced to try and take the film seriously, where it inevitably falls down.

Perhaps all this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the cast and crew were working with new material, in which case you’d have a pretty bog-standard slasher. Unfortunately, as with all remakes, the historical baggage of its original incarnation hangs heavy over the production and fans are unlikely to compare the ‘re-imaging’ favourably.

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