Lovefilm: A Nightmare on Elm Street Review

From: LoveFilm

You know you're getting old when they start remaking the movies you watched as a teenager.

It seems like only yesterday that I was knocking back a few beers with friends and sitting down to a late night video session featuring some pasty-faced psycho called Freddy Krueger.

We were all pretty freaked out as a I remember, and I spent an uneasy night, alone, sleeping on the floor of my dad’s office…

I can’t claim to have kept up with all of Freddy’s activities since. He’s been busy: seven more films – I quite liked numbers three and four if I remember – a TV series, a comic book… I know I was rooting for him over that dull kid in the hockey mask when it came to Freddy vs Jason, but by then he’d turned into more of a quipster than a monster. He was actually more fun to be around than most of the teenagers he liked to eviscerate. I also met Robert Englund once, at the Venice Film Festival, where he told me how the scariest movie he’d ever seen was The Bad Seed, the 1956 movie about a ten year old psychopath, which he had sneaked into see as a kid…

Will this so-called ‘re-imagining’ of the 1984 Nightmare Elm Street film have a similar impact on a new generation of impressionable minds?

I doubt it, though it’s close enough to the letter and the spirit of Wes Craven’s original that it’s not a complete wash for anyone who hasn’t already been there, done that.

If that includes you, and you’re wondering what it’s all about, this basic pitch is this: a dozen teenagers in suburban Springwood have fallen prey to terrifying nightmares so real they feel they’re in physical danger. Stranger still, they’re all haunted by the same dream-stalker: Freddy Krueger is easily identified by his red and black stripy sweater, his fedora, his disfigured face and gloves with long, lethal blades on each finger.

They don’t know Freddy, but he knows them – and he means them mortal harm. The only solution seems to be to stay awake, because when they sleep they’re at his mercy.

It’s a scary and original idea – or it used to be. Despite the success of the franchise, Freddy presents significant challenges for moviemakers: if he’s only a threat in dream-time, how to keep up the suspense when his potential victims are awake?

Directed by pop video director Samuel Bayer and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, the new Nightmare sticks to Craven’s strategy of blurring the lines between reality and dream, and makes as much as it can of Krueger’s backstory, which is revealed in bits and pieces by the teens’ less-than-forthcoming parents and by dreams that look suspiciously like flashbacks (presumably controlled Freddy himself).


It might have been more productive if the filmmakers had gone the whole hog and made a sequel. Here they toy with the notion that maybe he was the innocent victim of a lynch mob, but you can be sure they’re not going to go too far down that road.

Bayer’s work is efficient but he’s working in Craven’s shadow here – duplicating the best bits from the original film and failing to make much of the few original angles the writers have provided him with.

"This Nightmare won't give you sleepless nights..."

And the casting is a problem. Jackie Earle Hailey (from Little Children and Watchmen) is a real actor, but he’s too short to carry off the costume that Englund made his own, and his make-up bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

Worse, these high school students look like college grads, with that plastic surgery catalogue look that’s de rigueur in California now. At least Bayer has the smarts to kill off his most synthetic actors first.

This Nightmare won’t give you sleepless nights – and in the end that’s the only possible justification it could have had.