Screenhead

Sometimes, this is not the easy gig that most would think it is.  Today, for example, we’re tackling the Nightmare On Elm Street remake, and the problem here is is that the remake is better than many would expect…but not by all that much.

Nightmare on Elm Street is the terribly familiar (but still pretty fundamentally altered) story of a gardener by the name of Fred Krueger, who worked at a preschool and loved playing with children.  As it turns out, he loved playing with children in pretty much every sense of the phrase, even in the more disgusting senses.  Following a spectacular vigilante killing staged by Lex Luthor himself (seriously, it’s Clancy Brown, like the voice of Lex Luthor from the Justice League cartoons), somehow, Krueger has come back from the dead and is killing the young stoolies who spilled the beans about the extracurricular sex ed program going on at Badham Preschool.

It’s hard not to spoiler when it comes to a remake, because after all, you know what’s going on here because you’ve probably already seen the movie several times before it was actually released.  I just reviewed it not too long ago on Blu-ray right here, but I tackled the original as opposed to the remake.  In fact, just in case the FCC wants to get squirrely on me, I saw this one via a free ticket offered with every copy of the Blu-ray.

This one brought a lot of surprises with it, as they did a really nice job building tension, and then releasing it on a fairly regular basis with some good jump scares throughout.  It’s actually possible to think of this as a little scarier than the original for a while.  The upgraded effects lend a little extra punch to the parts that were merely kind of surrealist in the original–for example, the infamous “bedroom ceiling” killing, which started out as an odd sort of upside-down action is now a wild, hyperkinetic romp of gymnastic murder.

Nightmare on Elm Street is actually a pretty good horror flick, for a while, which was a whole lot more than many were expecting.  But then, the truest Elm Street curse reared its ugly head and shot the remake right in the foot.

See, Nightmare on Elm Street has never really been known for its attention to canon.  Seemed like every couple movies or so we were getting a new explanation for Freddy’s powers–from being the living embodiment of a bad dream gate guardian to being the recipient of dream demon powers to just being the expression of our collective unconscious.  But you could always at least count on the movie to stick with the canon it established through that movie.

The last ten minutes of this installment will actually manage to violate ITS OWN CANON.  Sure, I understand they’re just setting up a sequel, but for crying out loud, at LEAST stick with the plot you set up for this movie!  I won’t give away the ending, but rest assured, they won’t be playing by the same rules in the end that they started by in the beginning.

So, yes–Platinum Dunes managed to not too badly bungle this remake, as opposed to the total hatchet job they pulled on Friday the 13th. The end result is at least occasionally scary, and Jackie Earle Haley is a worthy successor to Robert Englund.  But there are still too many problems with this one to make anything much better than mediocre, thus the Screenhead Ten Scale hands it a passable six out of ten.

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