Nigtmarish indeed

Let me start off by warning you all, I am a slavering, dyed-in-the-wool Nightmare on Elm St. fan. I have all of the original movies and watch them through at least once a year. I saw Freddy Vs. Jason in the theater – twice! So understand that I was predestined to think that the reboot was substandard. I acknowledge that. But just how substandard it is was an utter shock to me.

I could wax rhapsodic about the original Nightmare movies for days on end. Though they did get downright silly toward the end, there was still enough actual creepiness to make them worth repeated viewing. And you can’t tell me that the first movie isn’t one of the scariest films ever made. It strikes a perfect balance of monster movie, slasher flick and existential psychological horror that few if any movies since have been able to match. Honestly, what can be more terrifying than a creature that stalks your dreams, torturing and eventually killing you in them, which in turn leads to your death in the waking world? The inevitability of it alone is staggering – you can’t stay awake forever. Eventually, everyone has to sleep. And when you do, he’s waiting. This premise was enough to scare the wits out of me as a child, and still does to this day, but the way that Wes Craven executed his vision was extraordinary. Nancy Thompson and her friends (and countless others to follow) found themselves in surreal, strange places, often scenes from their lives that were slightly skewed in the way that dreams skew your real experiences, or sometimes in utterly fantastic and bizarre landscapes (this was, of course, taken to ridiculous and often comical extremes in later films, but the premise still held solid), and as is the way with dreams, strange things happened that were inexplicable until that awful moment when they heard the blades scraping against metal and knew he was there waiting for them. That terrible moment of tension, of “what the fuck is going on?” that stretches just a bit too long before the inevitable appearance of Freddy, was what made the original Nightmare on Elm St. so brilliant.

The remake has absolutely none of that.

This movie’s cardinal sin, as a reboot of one of the most seminal and influential horror franchises of the past two decades, is that it is absolutely not, in any way shape or form, scary. How exactly you take a premise so time-tested and proven to provide thrills and make it boring is beyond me, and is clearly the unique genius of music video director Samuel Bayer, who manages to squeeze absolutely no tension or anticipation out of the movie. Bayer is one of the major faults of this film, and I am willing to lay a large part of the blame for its suck directly at his feet. But more on that later. I feel I ought to be fair and give this movie a good, ok and bad treatment.

The good: I was shocked at how good the acting was in this movie. Jackie Earle Haley I was expecting to be good, as creepy as he was in Watchmen, and he delivered. He played a largely understated Krueger, more menace than one-liners, and boiling with fury. His scenes at the end of the movie, when he is finally confronting Nancy, are handily the best of the film, and I couldn’t see them being done by anyone else. What surprised me was the quality of the young unknowns in the other roles. Usually in a movie like this, a reboot of a decades-old horror franchise, acting is thrown by the wayside in favor of big boobs, sculpted abs and pretty faces. But thankfully this remake retains the aesthetic choice of the original series to use actual character development over the usual slasher film reliance on nudity and sex to build sympathy, and that requires solid acting on the part of those about to be slain. Yes, there were pretty teenagers (the couple who replaced Tina and Rod, who were in this version named Kris and Jesse, were very good looking…and both died in the first hour of the film) but they weren’t just looks. I can’t stress enough how impressed I was by the acting.

There was also a delightfully creepy scene at the end of the movie that I won’t spoil, but plays off of the somewhat baffling choice to recast Freddy as a child molester instead of a child murderer. It was literally the only scene in the entire film that in any way made me uncomfortable, and was well executed despite the aforementioned questionable revision of the villain’s character.

And, I suppose the makeup wasn’t too bad. I don’t mind the redesign of Freddy’s face. It’s more realistic as a burn victim, and wasn’t so thick with latex that Haley couldn’t be expressive through it.

And that’s it for the goods. And as there was nothing about this movie that was merely ok, I’m going to just skip right ahead to what was bad. And buddy, there’s a lot. Get a drink, settle in. I’ll wait.

The bad. Let’s start with the revisionist history. Freddy is now a gardener who works at a preschool, where he lives in the basement. The kids love him, and he loves the kids, and apparently nobody is even the least bit suspicious of someone living in the basement of a preschool and playing with their children. The new Springwood has some of the worst parenting on earth. Freddy lures the kids into his basement hideaway and allegedly molests them, and for some reason scratches their backs up pretty bad, though that’s never really explained. The parents, understandably perturbed by their children’s accusations and their utter lack of foresight, chase Krueger down angry-mob-style and burn him to death in some sort of industrial building with a lot of boiler room-looking equipment in it. This is, ostensibly, why he appears in a boiler room in the kids’ nightmares. So Freddy comes back to either finish off torturing the kids or to force them to admit that he was innocent and was murdered for no reason, depending on which moment of the plot you’re in.

I for one do not like replacing “child murderer” with “child molester”. Of course, sexually abusing a child is possibly the most heinous crime there is, but it lacks the sick, outlandish evil that murdering children has. It also doesn’t jive with Freddy’s M.O – he doesn’t come back to diddle the kids in their dreams, he comes back to hack them to fucking pieces. To me, this alteration moves Freddy from the world of unabashed evil into the world of sick uncle, and that’s just not doing it for me. It is part of a greater trend in this movie to, as strange as it’s going to sound, bring the franchise in a more realistic direction. I don’t want my nightmare-stalking murderers realistic. I want them outlandish and pure, twisted evil. Even if you want to ditch the son-of-a-hundred-maniacs-child-of-a-raped-nun-made-a-deal-with-ancient-spirits-of-evil-for-his-powers back story, you can’t turn Freddy into just another molester and victim of mob justice or it entirely negates his raison d’etre.

Speaking of mob justice, another terrible revision in the new movie is the removal of Nancy’s father from the picture. In the original, Lt. Thompson (played delightfully by John Saxon) was the leader of the mob of angry parents, and did so with the authority of a rogue lawman who couldn’t pin a series of terrible murders on the clear perpetrator. In the new version, Nancy’s father is never mentioned (in fact, it seems that nobody in Springwood has two parents), and the closest thing to a male authority figure is Nancy’s boyfriend Quentin’s father, who is a school councilor. Really? A school councilor? Nobody ever rallied into a lynch mob around the authority of a school councilor. This revision drastically changes the dynamic of the movie from something that worked really well in the original: there is almost no sense of the kids-vs-parents conflict that drove so much of the first movie. Sure, the parents of Springwood are still guilty of the crime that has loosed this maniac on their children, but they wield absolutely no authority in this version, and the threat of “my parents don’t understand what’s happening and are forcing me to go to sleep” is utterly lost.

Another disastrous choice, in my eyes, was the general effort to make the whole thing more realistic, presumably for the modern taste. Sure, I don’t mind cutting back the camp factor or even eliminating it entirely (this is not the case, by the way, as in the third act of the movie Freddy gets his chops back and delivers a string of pretty awful one-liners, including an utterly botched take on the famous “I’m your boyfriend now”), but trying to make a movie about a burnt husk of a man with razor claws murdering you in your sleep into a pseudo-realistic thriller is just ridiculous. The net effect was to lose the dreamlike quality that made the originals so unsettling. Gone are the random dream images and wildly distorted sets, in favor of the typical boiler room and an infuriatingly reused dilapidated school set. And very little else. For me, this depersonalized the movie. It’s no longer about the dreams of the victims, it’s about Freddy’s personal hangups. And there are no, read NO creative killings in this version. Aside from the very first death, which is pretty creepy and well done, every other character is gored with Freddy’s claws. No geyser of blood from the bed, no bedsheet winding its way around someone’s neck and hanging them. Just impaling. Over and over again. I ask you, what is the point of a Nightmare on Elm St. movie with no creative deaths? That’s like making another godawful Austin Powers movie with no jokes about how fucking bizarre the English are.

There are some more character revisions that irked me as well, starting off with the choice to re-cast Nancy as a bumbling, awkward outcast. Nerd alert: this next sentence will go over 90% of your heads. In the remake, Nancy is portrayed as Alice from Nightmare on Elm St. 4, The Dream Master. She is shy and awkward like Alice, she’s not the pretty one like Alice, SHE WORKS IN THE FUCKING SPRINGWOOD DINER LIKE ALICE! So why even name her Nancy? Call her Alice and be done with it. The choice to make her awkward and therefore have to build an awkward relationship with Quentin seems to have been done to allow one of those budding teenage romance stories that seem to be so crucial to selling movie tickets nowadays. But the old version, where Nancy and Jesse lived across the street from each other and were secret sweethearts, worked on a much more visceral level. You liked them both from the start and wanted them to succeed, survive and be happy. The new awkward kids give you nothing to like from the start, and the only real sympathy you feel for them is as victims, not as people. You want them to survive because it means you might survive, not because you like them and want the best for them. Also, the neighbors-across-the-street angle led to some great tension moments in the original, not the least of which was Nancy watching Jesse’s death from her window and being unable to do anything about it. There is nothing like that here.

Next I’d like to discuss the cursory and insulting nods to the original movie. Yes, they remade some (but, puzzlingly not all – where was the damned geyser of blood, possibly the best special effect in the original) of the most famous scenes from the first movie. But they did so with clearly no intention to pay homage to them, just to tick them off of the list of things they had to do to make a successful reboot. None is given any screen time (the bathtub scene lasts a grand total of about thirty seconds, and the body bag being dragged down the school hallways about five), and things that were incredibly creepy in the original because of the low-tech way they were done (Freddy stretching out the wall over Nancy’s bed, Tina being thrown around her bedroom ceiling) were ruined with crappy CGI and wire work. Again I ask, why bother? If you’re  not going to remake it with love, then leave it out. I would have hated this movie a lot less if it hadn’t even attempted to tie itself to the original.

Last but certainly not least, let’s discuss the direction. Which is to say, utter lack of direction. You can tell that the actors are doing their best to overcome a crappy script, but that the director is actively working against them. Bayer, whose first feature film this is, has no handle on how to craft a story more than three minutes long. The shots are quick and short, and very functional: establishing shot of Kris in bed; closeup on Kris’ face as she hears a noise; longer shot of Kris standing; cut to boyfriend to establish that he’s still asleep; cut to Kris walking to the window to look out; and on and on and on. These shots last between five and fifteen seconds, and the entire movie is constructed this way, short utilitarian shots that are enormous flashing neon roadsigns pointing to exactly what the director wants you to take away from that moment. There is no ambiguity and no need for thought or interpretation on the part of the viewer. Bayer controls the horizontal, and he’s fucking it up proper. As was the case with The Wolfman, these short shots leave no room whatsoever for environment or tension, thus depriving the movie of anything even remotely scary. Sure, there are a lot of flash-cut jump out scares, but that shit just doesn’t cut it in 2010. A movie about nightmares with no atmosphere or tension is going to fail by definition.

I could literally go on like this for hours, and have. This is an atrocious movie, barely deserving of the name “Nightmare on Elm St.”, and as a fan of everything that name has come to mean over the years I am appalled at what New Line has allowed to happen to its flagship horror franchise.