Nightmare on Elm Street lacks a bit of oomph, but doesn't suck at all
Disclaimer: I love the Nightmare movies. I loved the scares of the original, the campiness of the sequels, the 4th-wall-breaking genre-deconstructing eighth film that no one seems to have seen (but everyone really should see). I think Freddy Krueger, with his demonic laugh and sadistic kills, is one of the best movie villains ever. So when the Nightmare re-make got critic-slashed to bits faster than a co-ed being chased by a possessed Slap Chop, I was expecting a campy hackneyed mess of film that had more in common with Saw, Hostel, and Rob Zombie's lamentable forays into slasher films than the original Nightmare.
I was pleasantly surprised.
The film follows the original fairly closely, to be sure, and doesn't even attempt the half-assed self-awareness "fake-out" scares that have pervaded the American horror scene since Scream. Instead, director Samuel Bayer tried really, really hard to make a very visually-cohesive film that never ever, ever loses its backdrop of tension in favor of cheap screams. He doesn't always succeed, and since he doesn't try to avoid any tropes, he hits quite a few of them on the way (he's more than a little too fond of the "cutaway slash"), but it's actually oddly subtle to see a horror director deliberately avoid youtube-length spectacles in favor of keeping the underlying tension alive.
The plot, even for a horror movie, is pretty paint-by-numbers, and though Jackie Haley gives it his all (and does very well), his lack of Robert Englund's terrifying eyes combined with an obviously over-CGI'd face mutes his otherwise terrifying performance. Haley tries less to imitate classic Freddy, and more to recreate him as a new character. Whereas Englund's Freddy truly was the Dream Demon, killing and torturing with gleeful, disturbingly sexual abandon, Haley's Freddy seems just as much motivated by unquenchable rage as sadism. Unfortunately, as any Nightmare fans know, the make-up really does (in part, at least) make the man, and Haley's look in this film just doesn't work as well as it could have.
The kills are a bit ho-hum in creativity, especially in this day of Eli Roth movies, but I thought Bayer did a good job making it clear that despite pop culture constantly demanding bigger and flashier, a knife slash to the throat is, in reality, brutal, fatal, and traumatic; there's a visceral, visual viciousness to the kills that keep them from being disappointing, despite the lack of imagination that went into it.
This brings me to the teenage heroes, those horror staples whose brutal deaths are often the reasons many people go to see horror films. Lovers of this particular trope will hate this movie. Completely unexpectedly, the teenagers of this film are possibly the most realistic high schoolers ever seen in a teen scream/slasher movie. Yeah, sure, they're all pretty, but none of them acted to type. "The blonde" isn't stupid, "the bad boy" isn't sarcastic, the "stoner" has no weed-inspired wisdom, and "the quiet, pretty not-pretty girl" is neither especially quiet, nor not-pretty. They aren't a group of former best friends who drifted, no worst enemies learning to how survive together. They aren't one-dimensional cardboard cutouts tragically *eye-roll* pretending to be adults. In fact, they are simply scared adolescents who don't know what to do. There's a blunt honesty to Bayer's portrayal of these teens, which, while hardly brilliant, dares to not insult the audience, and it's genuinely refreshing.
I really don't understand the poor reviews of this film. I can understand a desire to see more spectacular kills, as a staple of the genre, or the dissatisfaction with the unoriginal plot, but I don't understand the apparently heartfelt disgust with the portrayal of the characters or Bayer's decision to play the film as straight as possible with the greatest cinematic care for coherency and visual consistency (which Richard Roeper liked, incidentally). Not amazing cinema, for sure, but a definitely solid slasherfest.
Then again, this same pool of critics gave Twilight a 50% fresh rating. I guess, despite their snooty film credentials, more than a few critics prefer their teen heroes vapid, polished, and sparkly.
I was pleasantly surprised.
The film follows the original fairly closely, to be sure, and doesn't even attempt the half-assed self-awareness "fake-out" scares that have pervaded the American horror scene since Scream. Instead, director Samuel Bayer tried really, really hard to make a very visually-cohesive film that never ever, ever loses its backdrop of tension in favor of cheap screams. He doesn't always succeed, and since he doesn't try to avoid any tropes, he hits quite a few of them on the way (he's more than a little too fond of the "cutaway slash"), but it's actually oddly subtle to see a horror director deliberately avoid youtube-length spectacles in favor of keeping the underlying tension alive.
The plot, even for a horror movie, is pretty paint-by-numbers, and though Jackie Haley gives it his all (and does very well), his lack of Robert Englund's terrifying eyes combined with an obviously over-CGI'd face mutes his otherwise terrifying performance. Haley tries less to imitate classic Freddy, and more to recreate him as a new character. Whereas Englund's Freddy truly was the Dream Demon, killing and torturing with gleeful, disturbingly sexual abandon, Haley's Freddy seems just as much motivated by unquenchable rage as sadism. Unfortunately, as any Nightmare fans know, the make-up really does (in part, at least) make the man, and Haley's look in this film just doesn't work as well as it could have.
The kills are a bit ho-hum in creativity, especially in this day of Eli Roth movies, but I thought Bayer did a good job making it clear that despite pop culture constantly demanding bigger and flashier, a knife slash to the throat is, in reality, brutal, fatal, and traumatic; there's a visceral, visual viciousness to the kills that keep them from being disappointing, despite the lack of imagination that went into it.
This brings me to the teenage heroes, those horror staples whose brutal deaths are often the reasons many people go to see horror films. Lovers of this particular trope will hate this movie. Completely unexpectedly, the teenagers of this film are possibly the most realistic high schoolers ever seen in a teen scream/slasher movie. Yeah, sure, they're all pretty, but none of them acted to type. "The blonde" isn't stupid, "the bad boy" isn't sarcastic, the "stoner" has no weed-inspired wisdom, and "the quiet, pretty not-pretty girl" is neither especially quiet, nor not-pretty. They aren't a group of former best friends who drifted, no worst enemies learning to how survive together. They aren't one-dimensional cardboard cutouts tragically *eye-roll* pretending to be adults. In fact, they are simply scared adolescents who don't know what to do. There's a blunt honesty to Bayer's portrayal of these teens, which, while hardly brilliant, dares to not insult the audience, and it's genuinely refreshing.
I really don't understand the poor reviews of this film. I can understand a desire to see more spectacular kills, as a staple of the genre, or the dissatisfaction with the unoriginal plot, but I don't understand the apparently heartfelt disgust with the portrayal of the characters or Bayer's decision to play the film as straight as possible with the greatest cinematic care for coherency and visual consistency (which Richard Roeper liked, incidentally). Not amazing cinema, for sure, but a definitely solid slasherfest.
Then again, this same pool of critics gave Twilight a 50% fresh rating. I guess, despite their snooty film credentials, more than a few critics prefer their teen heroes vapid, polished, and sparkly.