Home / Movies channel / News | Thursday 09 February 2012 |
"A Nightmare on Elm Street" with Jackie Earl Hayley |
One credit that I will give the film is, just like the original, it toys with the audience’s understanding of what is real and what is in Freddy’s control, but it is done so formulaically that by late in the film, no matter how normal everything looks, you know that someone has drifted off to la-la land. From the very first scene it goes: 1) character is acting normal in a normal environment, 2) character begins to explore presumed normal environment, 3) character begins to slowly notice something is off, 4) Freddy shows up and shows off his claws, 4) character is startled awake. It’s as though Bayer didn’t have the attention span to let things build and the longest interaction with Krueger in the first half of the film couldn’t be more than 10 seconds. That’s not how you treat one of the greatest villains of all time.
The reality is that there is nothing here for anyone that has seen (and not even necessarily liked) Wes Craven’s masterpiece. Bayer tries to placate these people by remaking scenes shot-for-shot, but, as we learned with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, this can be just as much an insult as the concept of remaking it in the first place. Helping create the slasher genre back in the 80s and still holding up in both scares and quality today, Wes Craven’s film is a quintessential horror classic. This remake is simply worthless.
