#26 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
(dir. Samuel Bayer)
Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the best horror films of the '80s, and maybe of all time. It spawned a franchise not only because it was popular, but also because the premise - a monster who enters your dreams and kills you as you sleep - allows for lots of cool and creative visuals and ideas to be used. Over the years, Freddy transforms a woman into a cockroach, replaces his finger knives with hypodermic needles, and controls an unlucky guy by pulling out his tendons and moving him around like a marionette. The wild and often goofy dream scenes are what most people remember about the series, and for good reason. With nearly 30 years of improvements in CGI and a bigger budget, this remake could've really gone nuts with the dream sequences, but instead it completely shits the bed by trying to replicate scenes from the original film and doing an incredibly bad job of it.
I've heard this was bad, but it's even worse than I was expecting. Robert Englund's Freddy didn't just look like a burned guy - he was demonic and tormented his victims with glee. Here, Freddy just looks like an actual burn victim covered in scar tissue, and under all the makeup Jackie Earle Haley isn't able to really emote at all. He spouts a couple of forced sounding one-liners but is otherwise devoid of any personality. The rest of the cast is made up of the most generic stock characters ever, and I didn't like or care about any of them for even a moment. Actually, I didn't like or care about any aspect of this movie at all, so I'm going to stop writing about it.
What a piece of crap.
PS - A lazy trope that I really dislike is when a film gives us an exposition dump by having a character go on the internet and do "research" by just googling stuff. This movie does this FOUR FUCKING TIMES.
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