Tuesday, May 3, 2011

A Nightmare On Elm St. (2010)




I'm going to keep the first entry of May short because I'm working with one good hand right now. I'm not upset over that either because I'd probably get pissed off if I had to write anything of substantial length about this movie.

In 1984 Wes Craven introduced us to Freddy Krueger the child murderer who has since become one of horror's biggest icons. Last year we got the inevitable remake and from the early stages it seemed doomed for failure. Robert Englund who had embodied Freddy in every ELM ST. movie up to this point had been replaced by Jackie Earle Haley (Bad News Bears, Watchmen), the early makeup tests looked awful and the teasers didn't do any better. After an awful word of mouth I decided to wait it out, no amount of morbid curiosity would get me in to a theater for it.

We all know the plot, Fred Krueger worked at the preschool of the main characters and got a little to close with more than a few of them. The parents wanting to to save their kids from the lifelong memories decide to handle it themselves and burn down the building Krueger is hiding in. Flash forward several years and the kids are in high school now, and Krueger is ready to get his own revenge. Krueger haunts and attacks in their dreams, so no sleep for these kiddies or they're dead like Fred.

Who did the world piss off for us to deserve this movie? Simply put this movie is fucking terrible. The writing sucks, instead of making a dark film like the original it simply comes off as a late sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer through the majority of the film. Its corny, it is filled with sad attempts at the one liners used in the sequels of the original franchise, Jackie Earle Haley's makeup looks like he was hit in the face with a frying pan a few hundred times and every cliche is there including an attempt at most fake jump scares (and real ones) in a single movie. None of them being effective. The majority of Krueger's lines sounds like they were added in post production and no one bothered to mix them properly, they stand out like a sore thumb.

The movie does have an upside though. It made me realize how good the original truly is. It is everything the remake isn't and never could be. If I'm your last bastion of hope from getting you to not watch this movie then heed my warning.


1/10

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Movie was shit, I watched the original the other day.

It's a shame the guy that wrote it did it after writing this (http://www.dionaea-house.com/) which is actually quite creepy.

<3 Keke

Celluloid Terror (Seth Poulin) said...

I just read the first few pages, I'll have to finish it because it was cool. Too bad he went on to do utter shit.