Nightmare On Elm Street Review: How To Fail At Remakes 101

With Such A Memorable Impression The Original Nightmare On Elm Street Left On Fans, This Remake Sought To Destroy All Hope Of Fond Memories Of The Franchise. Mission Accomplished.

Nightmare On Elm Street fails as, what one considers, a bad horror movie. Think about a movie like Twilight. A movie where all compelling action and horror thrives on characters behaving in a manner that goes against logical thought, but somehow the cast of idiots manages to survive a near death experience. In this remake of Nightmare On Elm Street, director Samuel Bayer decides to go against conventional wisdom by constructing an absolutely conventional failure of horror film. There is no form of realistic horror in Bayer's remake. There is no character worth vying for and worse off, Freddy isn't funny. Nightmare On Elm Street has no entertainment value because every aspect of this movie is devoid of anything interesting. How do you make a movie about killing dumb privileged teenager's in their sleep this awful? 

Katie Cassidy. Actress. High School History Student. [We Don't Believe You]

From the first scene you can smell your brain-cells burning as they struggle to evacuate the many folds of your two hemispheres. A feeling of paralysis locks your body into a prone position as a scene between two twenty-somethings -- impersonating high-school students in a diner -- plays out before your eyes. Always a good idea to have the movie's entire cast in one room so you can place bets on who will die first and in what grotesque manner. The one compliment I could give to Nightmare On Elm Street would be the lighting. Within the opening diner scene you get a sense that this manufactured setting could work out well for our ... oh no, he cuts his own throat. During our stock male characters downward spiral into Throatslashyville you hear Freddy Krueger for the first time. Something is off, his voice sounds like some sort of ADR mix-in. I guess the audio on-set wasn't thought about enough on account of how intricate the scene of a young man slashing his own throat would play out. I should warn you, this is all prior to the title sequence.

I Presume The Prosthetic Mask Haley Wore Muffled His Words. Whenever He Spoke It Sounded Like Yarn Was In His Craw.

Jackie Earl Haley plays Freddy Krueger, which seems like a perfect fit based off his performance as Rorschach in Watchmen. Unfortunately, due to a script written by -- I would assume a head trauma victim with no use of their eyes or fingers, Haley's role as Krueger is reduced to a computer generated world where he only knows how to jump out and spew short bland one-liners prior to quickly slashing away at an uninteresting victim.

"Could You Call Our Parents? We're Stuck In A Movie We're Not Capable Of Carrying."

Where the original Nightmare relied on painfully slow tension-filled scenes, this cheap imitation relies on characters too dumb to search in an attic or library for this legendary child-torturer's rap sheet. What makes this remake such an exceptional waste of life is that at any point in this film there is no reason to trust any character's relationship with any other character. There are two tacit love stories where one is immediately killed within ten minutes of the film. The other deals with the eventual heroine [Rooney Mara] and a kid who consistently looks sleepy from possible heroine dosages between takes [Kyle Gallner]. If you can't empathize with at least one protagonist in a horror movie there is no horror movie. By the way, since when did we need to dig so deep into child molestation past? Having a creepy burned guy, who haunts children's dreams isn't enough?

The Only Truly Touching Scene In The Movie Was Marred By A Benny Hill-style Parental Chase.

There is actually a fairly poignant scene nearing the middle of the film where our idiotic faux teenage duo confront their parents. In what could only be an act of accidental brilliance, a flashback scene showing the townspeople hunting down Krueger in an act of stupefying vigilantism, depicts Krueger as a meek soul. But this is an exceptionally terrible movie and as such it found a way to ruin a competent scene. By showing yet another garish CG scene of Krueger's burning remains running towards the camera. Since when did Kruger need CG to make an already terrifying shadow-on-the-wall character a totally in your face bogeyman?

I'll end this review with actual lines from Nightmare On Elm Street remake. One of the worst horror movies I have ever watched. "Wait here in the car, I gotta go get some pills." "Get out of the tub, I need your help." "Rufus? Rufus where are you Rufus?!" "We didn't want you to remember! What was I supposed to do? Have my daughter testify in court?" "I like this dress on you. It's my favorite."

I Give Nightmare On Elm Street...

Because This Single Image Is More Entertaining Than This Truly Abysmal Remake

The "Single Image Of An Open Heart Surgery" Award