If you are a film fan who was born in the seventies, the last couple of years have been rough. Hollywood has basically been reinventing your childhood with systematic remakes of everything they can think of. Well, they finally got to Freddy.
Now I’m not saying that the original “A Nightmare On Elm Street” was cinematic genius, but they definitely had something there. Those movies were scary for their day. Practical effects made all that viscera look so, well, real. A young Johnny Depp getting sucked into his own water bed and being reduced to a blood geyser… that image will stick with you forever. Robert Englund, with his sly grin and vaudeville-esque puns, made Freddy not only scary but also fun. Repetitive as they may have become, those movies were fun. They were so bad that they were good.
Unfortunately, in 2010, some people would rather rehash an old idea than try to come up with a new way to get kids into movie theatres. So we have the “re-imagining” of “A Nightmare On Elm Street”. “Re-imagining” is a made-up word that means, “Sanctioned rip-off”. It also seems to mean stripping every fiber of creativity from an idea. And that’s exactly what they’ve done here. There are a lot of problems with “Nightmare” 2010, not the least of which is that it’s entirely unremarkable. There are plot holes, poor line delivery, poor lines, and lots of lazy C.G. Frankly, I’m having a hard time remembering any of it because it’s all so bad that it’s actually bad…
Read the rest at Film Threat.
