‘Nightmare’ is exactly that… in a good way
Promotional Art for A Nightmare on Elm Street (PHOTO CREDIT: ctpatriot1970.files.wordpress.com)
When you go to a horror movie, what do you expect to see?
Do you expect to see a high-end piece of cinema, chock-full of spectacular special effects, unparallelled acting, and an intense, gripping, thought-provoking storyline? Do you expect to see innovative camerawork, envelope-pushing CGI, and Academy Award-winning performances by well-known, established actors?
Don’t be stupid, of course you don’t.
Since the dawn of the genre, people have gone to horror movies to see low-budget, craptastic gorefests. It’s what they’ve been, what they are, and what they forever will be. From Norman Bates to Jason Voorhees to the subject of this review, ol’ Fred Krueger himself, horror movies and their archetypal villains have always opted to spill copious amounts of young, ruby-red blood instead of telling an enrapturing story.
Luckily for those few moviegoers who enjoy horror movies for what they are and not what they fail to accomplish in terms of cinematography, the 2010 remake of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street does exactly that.
Produced by Michael Bay and directed by Samuel Bayer, this by-the-books remake of the original Nightmare on Elm Street tells the disturbing story of Fred Krueger, a lonely elementary school gardener-turned-child molester who is hunted down and burned alive by the vengeful parents of the children he molested.
That’s actually the furthest the remake deviates from the original – although Wes Craven initially wanted Krueger to be a child molester in the 1984 film, he ended up making him a simple murderer so as to not alienate audiences.
Other than that, however, Nightmare’s plot is exactly what one would expect: teenagers go to sleep, Freddy attacks and kills some of them in their sleep, they resolve to stay awake until they find a way to stop Freddy, and steadily lose the battle against exhaustion and, by extension, Krueger.
But why am I going on about the plot? You, along with everyone else, already knows how it goes.
Let’s talk about the acting; for a horror movie, I thought it was pretty good. Jackie Earle Haley reprises Robert Englund’s role as Krueger and does so beautifully – he’s dark, he’s legitimately scary at times, and he delivers a profoundly disturbed sense of humor that, in a way, is far more terrifying than any of the atrocious actions he commits during the course of the film.
Rooney Mara plays Nancy Holbrook, one of only two teenaged cast members who survive Krueger’s onslaught, as well as the killer’s love interest (if you can call it that; she was his ‘favorite’). I will say that her performance struck me as a bit odd; for the first half of the movie, while other characters were being haunted and butchered by Freddy, Mara’s acting was, for lack of a better term, robotic. It’s only in the film’s second half, when it becomes clear that Nancy is the movie’s main protagonist, that Mara brings life vibrance and real fear to the character.
Mara’s co-star, Kyle Gallner, who played the role of Nancy’s friend Quentin Smith, faired far better; his character possessed depth, and, along with Mara’s, broke the stereotype of the fantastically attractive horror movie protagonists in favor of two who were more plain-looking and, as a result, more identifiable.
Overall, A Nightmare on Elm Street is exactly what one would expect it to be: a deliciously campy horror movie at its deliciously campy best. The plot, although delving a bit deeper than Craven’s original, lacked any real ingenuity or surprise, the characters and their actions were predictable and unoriginal, and Krueger himself was the movie’s obvious high point.
It was a typical horror movie, and if you can accept it for what it is, go see Nightmare.
| Rating: | R |
| Starring: | Jackie Earle Haley Kyle Gallner |
| Location: | Theaters everywhere |
| Stars: | ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ |
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