mysilentfury

Wow, has it really been that long since anyone posted here? I’d like to apologize on behalf of MSF to the readers out there as it was very unprofessional of us. Steve and I have had a lot going on lately with his schooling, my new job and just life in general. I did, however, try to have a couple others post here while we “away”, but they never sent me anything. Eh, such is life.

On to the post:

I first mentioned the fact that Michael Bay was producing the Nightmare On Elm Street remake in my Just Effing Stop… post and even from the previews I saw at the time, I knew that disappointment was right around the corner.

I won’t be the guy that complains it wasn’t Robert Englund starring as Freddy, because I understand why he didn’t. The man is almost 63 years old and the role of Krueger requires a lot physically because of the make-up and action sequences that Freddy’s involved in. Even though I’m a sort of purist when it comes to the actors that portray my favorite bad guys, I think that Jackie Earle Haley was by far the best Englund alternative they could have found. He did such a superb job and it was evident to me that he  studied hard on what Englund had become via Freddy’s mannerisms and speech characteristics and stayed true to them while making Freddy his own at the same time.

Another aspect of the film brought a tear of sadness to this Freddy enthusist. A lot of scenes from the first Nightmare were recycled which gave the film huge predictability issues. Without going too much into detail, the bathroom scene quickly comes to mind along with several others including a few of the death scenes.

The writing for the movie was particularly horrible, especially the way they presented Freddy before he become the monster of nightmares. In Wes Craven‘s version of events, you could see that the human Freddy had the monster he would eventually become boiling just under the surface of his personality. In the new one, he is presented as the Mr. Rodgers of Elm Street turned evil pederass who runs away from the mob of parents screaming like a little girl that he didn’t do anything. Though, while we’re on the subject, I did like how the movie explained why he moved from molesting kids to killing teens, which is something that the old movies don’t do very well.

Another aspect of the writing that got my goat, was the story. I know that as a horror movie fan I shouldn’t be too upset at a bad story line, but it seems to me that in remaking such a prolific movie, you’d want to make sure that you do the original justice by not skimping on the story. A Nightmare On Elm Street is not your typical slasher movie in that most of the “good” parts happen in a dream world. This lends itself to a sort of creativeness that is not achievable in movies such as Friday the 13th and Halloween, etc. They could have done anything they wanted during these scenes and yet they chose to do the same old-same old.

Finally, the biggest reason why I’ll probably never watch this movie again is the way they made Freddy look. I totally understand that they were going for realism over the almost comical look of the Englund-era Freddy, but I think they took it a little too far. The new face of Freddy is just not scary to me and I think that it’s because of the realism. I don’t want to look at an actual burn victim and immediately think of Fred Krueger. A happy medium between comical Freddy and burn unit Freddy would have been preferred. I guess that on the positive, they did stick with the ugly red and green sweater and the tattered Fedora.

All in all, if you are a fan of the series, by all means go see it. Just because I didn’t care for it doesn’t mean you won’t. You’ll at least be impressed by Haley’s performance as Freddy rebooted.

Just out of curiosity, how well did any of you like the movie?