Tuesday Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Geoff:
Drag Me to Hell was fairly slapstick, and Orphan was scary but not much of a slasher, so Susan and I thought we’d finally take in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and offer some thoughts on a true flick of the blood-and-guts genre. Anything for the blog, right?

If you’ve even caught a whiff of the major horror franchises in the U.S. anytime in the last twenty-five years or so (I don’t know the exact year the original Nightmare came out, but I believe it was sometime in the mid-’80s … maybe I should Gigablast the answer [you'll know what this means if you see the movie]), you’re probably already familiar with the basic premise of this Michael Bay-produced retread. Basically, a bunch of teens suddenly find their dreams haunted by a burned and disfigured man wearing a tattered fedora, a red-striped sweater and a truly nasty set of claws on his right hand. His name’s Freddy Krueger, and when he kills you in your nightmares, you die for real, and the group of high schoolers is picked off one by one even as they try to stay awake and figure out what’s happening and why Krueger is after them. They eventually discover he’s a pedophile who was burned alive posse-style by the kids’ parents when they were young (I think this slightly deviates from the original, where he was a child murderer … but the point either way is that he’s a supremely bad dude), and the finale of the movie involves a plan to go into the dream world and pull Freddy out so they can kill him in reality.

All of this could be very interesting, but the film instead chooses to go through the motions. There’s virtually no character development to speak of, outside the brief establishment that the lead female is a misfit painter and that the lead male likes her, and it becomes clear early on just how much the other teens are there simply as meat for the plot to grind. I’m aware that horror films are supposed to have stock characters that can be killed off easily, but here they’re barely fleshed out enough to even fit archtypes, and they all die so quickly, too. Out of the main cast of six teenagers, four are killed off seemingly before the film’s even half over, and then you spend the rest of the time waiting to see how the final two will survive rather than feeling any suspense about an increasing death toll. The climax is similarly disappointing, Freddy getting dispatched in less than a minute after entering the real world. I mean, c’mon, at least escape briefly into the shadows and make it a challenge.

No doubt thanks to Mr. Bay, the film certainly looks good, and it still induces a jump at one or two points, and there are a scant few moments where the filmmakers betray a sense of humor about the whole thing (Freddy’s claw going back under the bathwater when there’s a knock at the door). But on the whole the remake of Nightmare is without much of a heartbeat.

Susan:
GEOFF WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU THIS MOVIE WAS AWESOME.

I laughed!  I jumped!  I sat tensely in my seat!!  Cheesy maybe, and yeah, the kids do start dying off right quick, but so what?  Even if they didn’t fit specific archetypes, they all read as “teenager in a horror movie” which was enough for me.  Also, I am a sucker for any film with a brooding arty couple that band together.  She draws!  He wears a jaunty stocking cap!  They are victims of child molestation!  Oh tortured youth!!

Blame it on my lack of exposure to horror films as a child/young adult, but I found the movie charming in its kitsch.  I laughed at Freddy’s cheesy horror/action movie lines (“How’s this for a wet dream?” for example, as our girl Nancy drowns in a hallway full of blood) and most of the jumper scenes totally got me.  I’d not seen the original either, so I really enjoyed watching the psychological backstory develop.  (Although I’ll admit I wanted him to be wrongly accused and turned evil by the monstrous acts of the suburban parents, but I guess whatever, he’s a better slasher villain if he’s just a monster and then the audience doesn’t have to feel conflicted about being somewhat sympathetic to his plight.)  The sets were creepy, the dreams were dreamlike, and the cast did a good job of seeming really tired and really, really scared.  TWO THUMBS UP FROM THIS GIRL.

My one complaint about the film would be the casting of the new Freddy Kruger.  There is just no way to out-creepy Robert Englund.  I think they tried to make the burn makeup more gruesome, but without Englund’s crazy eyes, your new Freddy just isn’t going to hold a candle to the old one (no pun intended).  Also, I don’t know if they did the dubbed voice in the original, but I found it distracting and silly.  It sounded like the guy who does horror movie trailer voiceovers — not very scary.  So the Freddy character wasn’t as creepy as I might have liked, but other than that, this movie got me hook, line, and sinker.

Geoff:
It’s not that they start dying off right quick — it’s that all the deaths happen right quick. There’s just very little to even be nervous about after the one dude’s killed in the prison cell. By then, you’re down to just the two leads, and you can tell the movie’s too gutless to kill either of them off, so you spend the rest of the time just watching Nancy scream and/or run and/or struggle while Jaunty Stocking Cap shouts “WAKE UP!” Freddy can do all the chasing and dream haunting he wants, but you’ve already established he’s not so creepy, and you know nothing’s going to happen, so what’s keeping you on the edge of your seat? Loud noises?

I guess we’ll just have to disagree on this one, Susan. But I’ll see you at the sequel.

Susan:
Oh Geoff, just because you’re so sure that the movie won’t kill one of them off doesn’t mean everyone is.  I kept waiting for one of them to die and the other one to have to battle Freddy all alone.  I assumed Nancy would be left for last, and frankly, I was kind of looking forward to a #beingasinglekickasslady ending to the thing.  It’s okay that Jaunty Stocking Cap survived, I guess, but waiting for him to get killed off was what kept me on the edge of my seat.  Also, just because Nancy doesn’t die doesn’t mean awful things aren’t going to happen to her.  It’s sort of morbid you only feel tense if someone runs the risk of death as opposed to just bodily injury.  Geez, Geoff.

It’s not my favorite horror movie of all time, but it had pretty high levels of awesome factor.  Certainly higher awesome factor than I anticipated going in.  I enjoyed it.  I was entertained.  It made me want to see the original. What more can you really ask from a Michael Bay remake of a cheesy 1980s slasher flick?