A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Rating: **
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner
When the 2003 redux of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) made bank at the box office, the decade went on a "reimagining" craze when it comes to a bulk of its slasher films by redoing cult classic titles from yore into lean, mean, modern horror cuisines with varying results of passes and failures.
More often than not, these reimaginings simply take the name and concept of the movies they're reworking and create entirely different stories around them, all the while paying tribute to the originals with a few jabs and nods, maybe a famous line uttered here and a familiar kill over there. This, in turn, usually rub a good chunk of dedicated fans the wrong way as they argue that some of these remade films hardly resemble the originals they've known and love so it's no surprise that some titles did try to stick to the source material as much as they could, like this 2010 modernized take on a slasher classic about nightmares and a little Ohio landscape called Elm Street. As you would see, that may pose its own shortcomings as well.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) opens at a diner where a group of teens witness their friend, Dean Russell (Kellan Lutz), seemingly ends himself by running a steak knife across his own throat. The core cast within the group did take notice of how odd this apparent suicide unfolded, like how Dean uttered at someone that they're not real before the darkly deed was done.
Next to bite the big one is Dean's girlfriend Kris Fowles (Katie Cassidy), who just hours after attending her late-boyfriend's funeral and getting comforted in her room by her ex, Jesse Braun (Thomas Decker), gets sliced across the chest in her sleep by invisible blades while being levitated and hurled from wall-to-wall. Jesse is blamed for the murder and thrown in jail, but he too falls victim to whatever murderous force is picking off the kids one by one. A murderous force burnt like hell, wearing a fedora and a stripey sweater, wielding a glove with knives for fingertips.
Quickly noticing that their friend group is dropping like flies, our lead duo Nancy Holbrook (Rooney Mara) and Quentin Smith (Kyle Galner) starts looking into a few cryptic clues dropped by the others before they croaked, these including the possibility that they all once knew one another at long-forgotten pre-school and, too, the fact that they all been getting similar nightmares involving a burnt fedora-wearing man lately. It isn't long then that Nancy's mother finally reveals the truth to the two, that they and their late-friends were indeed under the same pre-school class many moons ago and that the school's caretaker, a fella named Fred Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), allegedly molested them. In an act of vigilante justice, the man was chased into a boiler room and set on fire by mob of angry parents and the kids, somehow, forgot all about this ordeal.
That is, until recently; somehow, from beyond the grave, Krueger has returned to eliminate all the children from that preschool class by killing them through their dreams, as revenge not only against the folks that roasted his arse, but also against the now-teenage kids who ratted him out. With time running out and Krueger getting closer to killing them, Nancy and Quentin have no choice but to figure out a way to stop and end a killer who only exists in their nightmares.
Now, I wanted to like
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010); it's a shot on making Fred Krueger scary again and, on a certain weight, we did get that as not only the plot tackled the grim characterization of Fred being a child molester and abuser, an idea that was dropped from the original 1984 film for being too heinous, but Jackie Earle Haley also did a fine job giving us a creepy and menacing supernatural killer with his drawl speech and sadistically perverse body language. (Also, I'm probably among the minority who's actually okay with the new look. It strongly implies that he's hardly human anymore) The problem, sadly, is the story and its execution as the movie practically replicates the original to a near tee so there's very little room for creativity and hardly a reason for this to even exist. The only points that set this remake from the original is a new set of teens with updated classes of stereotypes and the idea of micro-naps which, admittedly, works well on the scenes implementing them as it shows the teens slipping in and out of Freddy's reach in real time as they struggle to keep themselves awake. I would also add the little red herring attempt in which we're supposed to question whether Krueger did abused those tykes or not but, let's face it, anybody with common sense would know that he did terrible things to those kids so we might as just well drop that pointless hook. (I mean, again, he's played by Jackie Earle Haley here. Remember Ronnie McGorvey from
Little Children (2006)?)
Any attempts for a scare fall dull and cheapened by this movie's use of CG effects for its supernatural elements, as well as jump scares that mostly looked too silly to genuinely frighten. The characters outside of Freddy are also unapologetically bland, basically among the most boring line of victims-to-be which isn't helped by the fact that most of these dead meats were killed off before any worth of development was done for them. The kill scenes, thankfully, are done with a good deal of practical effects with some digitalized enhancements, and some of the visuals that go along with these scenes do echo a familiar vibe of an early
Elm Street movie, where Fred is mostly in the shadows and everything around him is grimy and, well, nightmarish. Apart from that,
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) barely stands out and while not a completely bad film on its own as, again, it still delivers on what we expect from an
Elm Street movie, a supernatural kill count committed by a nightmare-woven paranormal killer, it fails to bring any sense of charm or creative grit to make itself a rightfully enjoyable watch.
Bodycount:
1 male had a knife stabbed and sliced across his throat
1 female slashed down her chest with a razor glove
1 male stabbed though his chest with a razor glove
1 male set ablaze (flashback)
1 female stabbed through the head with a razor glove
Total: 5
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