A Nightmare On Elm Street

My favourite horror villain from the 80's is Freddy Krueger. I liked that he was a lot more vibrant than other horror villains. While most of his one-liners were corny at least he spoke. The others were just boring and faceless.

Remakes are sadly a fact of life in Hollywood today. Studios are run by corporations who run them like a business and not an art form. There are remakes which are excellent and look like effort has been made to actually take the original idea and create something new and fresh. The exact opposite has been done here. I think Michael Bay is the worst director ever and he has brought this skill and creativity to producing a series of remakes of classic horror films. This remake is one of the perfect examples of lazy film making I've seen. I'm sure that writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer were given the job of writing the film with a strict deadline and it shows. I don't think any care has been taken to create a new film experience based on an old idea. All they have done is use some characters from the original film then create a boring story around them with a few iconic moments to make it seem familiar and connect it to the original. Director Samuel Bayer has come along and taken this script and used a few ordinary visual elements to create the boring film it has turned out to be. I will say there was one 10 second bit in a dream sequence I liked but otherwise it was lazy stuff.

Despite the story and dialogue being so bad I think most of the actors do a fairly decent job with the bad material they are given. Jackie Earle Haley was a very obvious choice to play Freddy Krueger and does an excellent job. He is not as light hearted as his predecessor but is still able to get the right balance of menace and humour to the role. Rooney Mara is excellent as Nancy, even though the story does not focus as much on her like in the original.

This is not a good example to further the cause for more remakes. Hopefully if they turn out as badly as this more people will maybe go get the original and see how it was supposed to have been done.