The latest Platinum Dunes remake, a year on from FRIDAY THE 13TH, is their weakest. It displays mild promise at the outset via an effectively eerie title sequence accompanied by Steve Jablosnky’s otherwise generic score offering a creepy appropriation of the original’s memorable Charles Bernstein theme. Thereafter, NIGHTMARE 2010 stutters, meanders and, even more so than anything Michael Bay’s horror remake outfit has yet produced, pales in comparison to the Wes Craven movie which possessed all the wit, shock value and imagination so lacking here.
As with FRIDAY THE 13TH 2009, this remake of the original is selective about what it directly quotes from the original and steals elements from some of the sequels to throw into the stew (including a diner right out of PART 4 THE DREAM MASTER). Freddy wisecracks are taken from various sources (“How’s this for a wet dream?” is used in a different context) and there’s a bunch of iconic images borrowed from Craven, albeit with a tiny fraction of the impact they once had. Thus, the haunting dead-friend-in-a-body-bag recurring image of the 1984 film is used once, seemingly just for the sake of a reference rather than providing any resonance with the story. Freddy’s glove still appears between the legs of the heroine (Rooney Mara) as she bathes, but this time there’s no pay-off. And there’s still the moment where Freddy’s grim visage protrudes through the wall of a sleeping character – though we’ve moved on in cinematic terms to the point where it’s now fully CG and looks totally ridiculous.
So what else is new? Freddy Krueger is now played by Jackie Earle Haley, a clever casting choice (Haley played a genuinely unsettling neighborhood pedophile in LITTLE CHILDREN) though the actor does more for the film than it does for him. The heroine is still called Nancy, but someone forgot to order a personality and the charming Heather Langenkamp (among others) is sorely missed. All the teen protagonists – pithily drawn in the original – are now interchangeable, glum “survivors” of child abuse committed by school gardener Freddy and suppressed in their memory banks until now.
Perhaps because merely murdering children is now less shocking and unforgivable than merely molesting them, the living Freddy is no longer a child-killer, though the parental lynch mob that burned him and turned him into what he has now become, remains the same. The difference being that the pursuit and killing of Krueger is now depicted in straight-forward nightmare flashbacks ; somehow, the event was far creepier when described by the excellent Ronee Blakely in the Craven flick. In place of the memorable Johnny Depp, Amanda Wyss (who did more to make an appealing character in ten minutes than anyone here does in 90) and Nick Corri are a heroine with no zest whatsoever and a hero (Kyle Gallner) in the Depp role who wears a Joy Division T-shirt that turns out to be the most upbeat and interesting thing about him.
Notable for their absence are unforgettable moments from the original, like the phone tongue, the geyser of blood that represents Johnny Depp’s demise and various other bits of scary business…but when you see how weakly the “Tina” stand-in character’s demise is duplicated, you start to feel grateful for small mercies.
Oddly, this new version, which cost $35 million, moves far slower than the low-budget 1984 movie, and somehow looks and feels more dated than Craven’s film ever has. Its shortcomings serve to highlight Craven’s gift for economic storytelling, and it replaces his superbly disorientating rubber-reality and surrealistic nightmare imagery with a listless structure and no sense of terror in or out of the nightmare world. One-note performances and repetitive, visually unimaginative dreamscapes keep it from ever truly engaging.
Haley does his best. The revised, more authentically charred make-up is certainly grim, though this concession to realism and other modifications to the iconic character do the film no favors. The efforts to reinvent Krueger as fairly pitiful paedo results in some unnerving moments (Nancy in a child’s dress at the finale being leeched over) but the plodding script (let’s give a big yawn for internet-based exposition!) is often misguided, with a detour in which the protagonists insist Krueger was actually innocent of the crimes and the parents made a grave error in burning him! Adding further insult is the reliance on loud jump scares and hackneyed shocks that reduce the scariness rather than increasing it.
Significantly, the one and only bum note of the original was a silly shock coda built around a goofy effect that bore all the hallmarks of having been added in post-production and made no real sense in the context of what had gone before. This has been replaced by a silly shock coda with a goofy (CG) effect that has all the hallmarks of having been added in post-production and…ah, you get the picture.
Kudos for one thing : neat use of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have To Do Is Dream” ; demerits for re-using the ghostly kids singing the Freddy rhyme despite the fact that, as this Freddy didn’t’ actually murder kids in his former existence, there shouldn’t’t really be any ghostly kids around to do this kind of thing.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
