No running in the halls!

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

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Released: 2010
Director: Samuel Bayer
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, and Thomas Dekker
Website: Official Nightmare Site
Buy this movie at Movie Phone (In Theatres)

So the same question is on everyone's mind: Should I or should I not go see the new A Nightmare on Elm Street? Well, I'm gonna let you decide after you read my review and point out the things that bothered me and things I liked.

First let me start off with this: Jackie Haley was a good Fred Krueger. Was he as good as Robert Englund, the answer is no. It's going to be hard after all those movies for us to see another actor play the character like Robert Englund did. We are just so used to him as Freddy an his voice alone is all too familiar. But Haley was really good and I gave this movie an extra "bloody axe" because of it.

A big complaint I have is the transition between Freddy in real life and Freddy in dream life. As you will see in this film, without giving away any spoilers, that there is a bit more back story in this film than the original had. It's a back story we all already are aware of, so there is nothing new and exciting really about it. But here, Freddy is a child molester versus a child killer. I preferred killer to be honest, the whole molester thing bothered me.

I'm sure they were trying to creep out the audience more with that sort of back story, but they could have done without that. Freddy though, before burned is sort of a timid weird guy that seems to be more stand off as a person. In death and in these kids dreams, he is all of a sudden this crazy badass bent on killing these kids. It didn't sit well with me.

They also gave him away too fast. What scared the shit out of me as a kid watching the original is that Freddy was still in the shadows, hiding in the darkness, and when he was shown the camera had quick cuts. The element of fear was lost when they showed him right away.

Here is a list of dumb shit that bothered me:

1) Police make an arrest in a small town dressed in full bullet proof vests like they are storming Waco. WTF?

2) How can an entire group of kids and a town forget about a notorious molester who was burned to death vigilante style?

3) The scene where Freddy stretches a wall like in the original was bad CGI that looked like something from Brendan Frasier's The Mummy Returns.

4) They kill the only hot chick right away.

5) Nancy's mom wasn't as cool as the drunk and spaced out Ronee Blakley in the original. I was waiting for her line, "He's dead, honey, because Mommy killed him."

6) The original score written by Charles Bernstein was nowhere to be found. Are you fucking kidding me? We all were craving to hear it somewhere.

7) Falling asleep for brief seconds at a time while your awake allows Freddy to get you at any second. It also takes away from the allure of Freddy really haunting you.

8) They should have had Clancy Brown in the movie a lot more than he was.

9) Kill the cool kids right away and save the emo kids for later to fight throughout the movie. I'm sorry, but I am sick of this formula. The emo have enough trouble surviving high school let alone a killer in their dreams. It's time this formula dies already.

10) Freddy's make up looked too CGI. Don't get me wrong he looked burned, but he looked more like that nurse in Silent Hill rather than the pizza faced Krueger I've grown accustomed to.

I am not one who is always against remakes or rebooting a franchise. I like the fact that their may be more Nightmare movies possibly coming back again. Unfortunately, this film is not made for old school fans who know these movies inside and out.

Michael Bay, in my opinion of course, seems to have this "I can do better" attitude with his new franchise remake craze and I'm sorry to say, he reminds me of an American Uwe Boll.

If your going to recreate a movie, don't drag a girl across the floor in the school hallway, show up in the bathtub, have Nancy sink into the floor when running, and throw a girl all around the bedroom walls. The best part of that scene in the original is when Tina was crawling upside down for her life. They just tossed the Tina character played by Katie Cassidy around aggressively and missed the mark.

If your going to do a remake, bring more of the original flair back to the film. Use the original music, recreate the things that made the original amazing, and follow the formula Wes Craven invented.

I'm not sure what direction they were going here, but they missed the mark. The thing of it is, with and remake (or what they keep calling a re-imagining) of a film that made an impact such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, people will flock to the theaters to see "the new Freddy."

There was no way I could miss this. I just wished it lived up to all my expectations and wasn't made for fans of Sorority Row and Saw Ten - or whatever number they are up to now. Fans of Twilight that get done watching New Moon and say, "Now that was a fucking good vampire movie," will love this film.

I suspect the film will have a good opening weekend, but with Iron Man 2 coming out next week, A Nightmare on Elm Street is going to definitely loose some traction. I hope Michael Bay, who is going to be around for a long time cashing in on these remakes, starts giving a shit about the die hard fans instead of what the general population is into.

But that's like saying, "I've seen an elephant fly!"

I have to give props to director Samuel Bayer who made the step from music video's and documentary's to motion pictures. The filming aspect was awesome and for his first full length movie I was impressed.

In conclusion, I say go see it. You read that correctly - because you know your going to rent it, buy it, or watch on cable. So you might as well see it in the theater where the movie will look cooler. Even if you don't like it, you'll regret it later.

 Here is the trailer in case you live under a rock or have been in a coma!

Part 2 is already in the works with S.O.D. as co-stars.