One, Two, Freddy's Making You Snooze

A favorite trick in horror movies is to have a character suddenly bolt awake from a nightmare.

In the breathtakingly pointless remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” as in the original, that’s all there is. In this new version, it happens at least nine times.

Repetition is never a good idea in a movie, and it is especially bad in a horror film. Once you’ve experienced something like this in a movie, you become acclimated to it and it doesn’t have the same effect the next time you see it. Or, in this case, the next eight times you see it.

Similarly, if you watch a person fall from the ceiling to a bed once, that’s pretty cool — in fact, it’s part of the most iconic sequence in the original. But when it happens twice, you wonder if the writers just didn’t run out of ideas. And each successive time we see serial killer Freddy Krueger run his finger knives along a random surface, usually producing sparks, it becomes exponentially less scary.

Along with the groundbreaker “Friday the 13th,” the 1984 original version of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” helped pave the way for a new style of horror films. No longer would they be subjected to the same expectations of other movies. After these two films, the genre was freed from the shackles of character and story; no more would they be harshly bound to the tyranny of a script or logic. They didn’t have to be well made, or even adequately made, and no part of them had to make sense. All that mattered is that they showed young people being chased around by a faceless guy with a knife and other instruments of evisceration, that the victims screamed and squirmed as they were being killed, one by one, and that their bright red blood spread prettily across the screen.

This version is an awful lot like the original version, but at least it tries an experiment: It wonders if it would make a difference to use a genuinely talented actor — Jackie Earle Haley — as the killer, Freddy.

All good experiments deserve an answer, and the answer to this one is: Nope. It doesn’t make a bit of difference in the long run, although the portrayal of Freddy is notably superior here.

Once again, we are brought into a typical small town where all the parents keep deadly secrets and all the children are still in high school in their mid- to late-20s. A group of these kids (think of them as being in their very late teens) realizes that they are all having the same dream. They all dream that they are being chased by a weirdo with a burned face, a goofy hat, an ugly sweater and knives on the tips of his gloves. Bizarrely, none of them has seen the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but they soon realize that if they fall asleep they run the risk of being killed by this dream.

These characters are basically indistinguishable, but eventually our heroine turns out to be a waitress played by Rooney Mara, the unconventionally attractive younger sister of actress Kate Mara. The younger Mara is perfectly acceptable in her role as Nancy, which requires little more than a lot of screaming. The rest of the cast is generally worse, to varying degrees, although Haley shows promise as Freddy.

Here, as in earlier versions, Freddy is the sole character of any interest whatsoever. But the writers feel compelled to have him make little quips, like the hero of a 1980s action film, in the hopes that these will make him more frightening.

They don’t.


Note: This review originally ran at www.theboomermagazine.com