A Nightmare on Elm Street Review

I grew up watching Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers slash their way through a seemingly endless parade of horror movie sequels.

(My parents were cool with me seeing R-rated horror movies — I think they figured I’d either be into it and things would be fine or I’d freak myself out and get the horror movie phase out of my system early in life. Either way, they win.)

Twenty years later, your kids are growing up watching Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers slash their way through a seemingly endless parade of horror movie sequels (that are sure to come). I’ll save my musings on what a drag it is that this generation of horror movie fans doesn’t have its very own original boogeymen to freak them out — there’s Jigsaw and…who else?! — for another day.

Right now, we’re going to talk about the remake/reboot/(insert euphemism here) of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” It’s not very good.

Ok, so going into a remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” you figure there’s a better than not chance that it wouldn’t be very good. Still, I was encouraged. I was swayed by the trailers and commercials that actually made the movie look scary (as opposed to downright gross, which is where most horror movies these seem to go). I was especially encouraged by the casting of Jackie Earle Haley.

Jackie Earle Haley is enjoying a career renaissance due in large part to his Oscar-nominated performance as a pedophile in “Little Children” and his mostly-masked role as Rorschach in “Watchmen.” In “Elm Street”, Haley takes over the role of Freddy Kruger, a pedophile with a burn-scarred face. If I were Haley, I’d start taking stuff like this personally pretty soon.

Haley — taking over for the iconic Robert Englund, who played the role for almost 20 years — is predictably solid. Whereas Englund’s portrayal sometimes veered too far into jokiness, Haley plays it relatively straight, scary and creepy. He also succeeds in emoting and acting through the heavy makeup and effectively anchors the flick with his performance.

Unfortunately, almost everyone around him lets him down.

Co-writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer give us a bit more back story on Freddy than Wes Craven’s 1984 original. However, did we NEED more back story? I subscribe to the notion that movie villains are MUCH scarier when we have little or no idea as to why they’re crazy. On top of that, the writers and director Samuel Bayer recreate — almost verbatim — a few sequences from the original flick. (Yes, the effects are more impressive today, but what’s the point?)

Still, I place most of the blame on Bayer, who is making his feature-film debut. The biggest problem is that the long-time music video director appears to have confused LOUD SOUNDTRACK JOLTS and jump scares with actual terror. Honestly, I could come over to your house, hide behind doors and scare you whenever you enter a room (accompanied by a deafening screech), but it doesn’t make me a horror genius. It doesn’t even make me clever. It makes me annoying — which is what happens in this movie.

Look, I jumped a few times, but how can you not when there are approximately 75 jump scares in this thing?I guarantee you this movie is 98% less scary for the hearing impaired.

I do like that the director and his writers structured the movie in a way that it served as a mini-showcase for their young cast. It’s probably a good idea to have each of the actors take turns carrying the movie for a while because none of them — except maybe for Kyle Gallner as Quentin and Katie Cassidy, who, it turns out, has an EXCELLENT horror movie scream — is really good enough to do it on their own. On top of all that, I'm annoyed on a personal level that the movie wasted the underappreciated Clancy Brown as well as the excellent and criminally underappreciated Connie Britton in nothing roles.

In the end, the movie mostly squanders the fact that they scored a terrific lead actor by saddling him with an unimaginative script and an even more unimaginative director. Then again, these seem to be particularly unimaginative times, so what did I expect?

A Nightmare on Elm Street…C