Things I Like and Other Miscellaneous Musings

Snarky Cinema: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Posted on August 31, 2010. Filed under: Snarky Cinema |

This is a movie review, as you might have guessed from the title. I’ll  be doing these pretty much whenever I feel like I can be bothered. Occasionally they’ll be newish movies because my college is nice and shows movies a couple months after their release date in the basement of our technology center – for free. Which is good because a lot of these movies I wouldn’t pay to see.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010, directed by Samuel Bayer, distributed by New Line Cinemas)

Warning: If you actually, you know, care about spoilers, well…there are some below. Of course, if you don’t know what’s going on in Nightmare, then you’ve probably been living under a rock. And don’t have an internet connection.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a remake of the 1984 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was directed by the master of horror himself, Wes Craven. In the original, a group of teenagers start dying in their sleep in gruesom, creative fashion after a psycho with knives for hands stalks and scares the crap out of them. In the remake, three teens die after they have some trippy dreams where they briefly encounter a creepy guy. Not really scary.

Here’s my main problem with this movie: in the dark theater, with about fifteen other people, as Freddy was running around slicing and dicing people (and I use that pretty loosely because there really wasn’t a lot of violence on his part, and technically speaking he only actually killed four people), I was falling asleep. I will say that again – while watching a movie about people being murdered in their sleep, I couldn’t be bothered to stay awake. The movie was just flat out boring. (Although the night was redeemed by the two guys sitting behind me playing MSTK3000. My personal favorite was when the protagonist of Nightmare said (exact quote) “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” and one of the guys behind me came back with “Well, maybe you should have made a totem, b*tch!” And when the protagonists couldn’t wake up: “Should’ve synchronized your kicks through all four levels, retards!” For those of you who haven’t seen Inception and don’t get those references, you should really, really watch it. I would not be surprised if it got best picture at the Oscars this year. Unlike Nightmare, which was so mediocre that it probably won’t even get a Razzie.)

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1.) While I am grateful that the screenwriters and directors refrained from taking each character and then giving them one trait that they would then ride into the ground for the rest of the movie or until they die (as most horror movies do), the fact is that that would almost have been preferable to the little to no characterization that actually happened in the movie. Almost everybody’s got a trait, yes, but all of the characters are pretty much interchangeable. All of the players are just so darn inoffensive and uninteresting. Nancy (played by Rooney Mara, who has done nothing of note but yet somehow has had her name thrown up in conjunction with the titular role in the Americanized version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the intrepid protagonist, is an artist and one assumes the awkward shy kid. (She interacts so little with other characters that you kind of have to assume it.) Quentin (played by Kyle Gallner, who was fantastic as Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas on Veronica Mars), the kid hopelessly crushing on Nancy, has meds that help him focus. Dean (played by Thomas Dekker, who played John Connor on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) likes Kris. Kris (played by Katie Cassidy, who has been in a lot of B-horror movies and was Liam Neeson’s daughter’s friend in Taken) likes Dean and was the one who did a lot of the expositing in the beginning of the film. Oh, and the dude that played Emmet Cullen in Twilight: The Saga of Robert Pattinson’s Hair was in this too. He died. I rejoiced.

All of the actors in this for any length of time are capable of playing (if not dynamic) then at least not-static characters. And yet I spent a substantial amount of this movie laughing at flat line deliveries and really not caring about who died.

2.) There is a fine, fine line between letting tension build and boring your audience with long, would-be tense scenes. Bayer doesn’t even know where that line is, let alone how to toe it. I will say that while I was just about spot on for when a jump-out scare would occur, Bayer did tend to put them in what would (for other people, at least) be slightly off from the expected place in a scene (ie, there is a scene where a character wakes herself up from a Freddy dream and goes to the bathroom to wash her face and wake up and what not, and darn it all if Freddy’s face didn’t appear in the bathroom mirror over her shoulder after she closed the medical cabinet. I was impressed by Bayer’s restraint in this instance. However, thirty seconds later she gets back in bed and I said (out loud) “Have fun waking up next to that face” and thirty seconds later Freddy rolls over and kills her.) This movie is maybe 0.097% jump-out scares and 87.3% exposition and tracking shots through dark hallways. And only 7% teens getting killed (counting the big long fight scene at the end, and (hihglight for spoilers) nobody actually dies during that fight. This is a bad, bad ratio.

3.) I know I’m spoiled, but I watch a lot of crappy made-for-TV Sci Fi original productions. And while the makers of those movies by and large don’t know how to write dialogue, cast people who can act, direct coherent fight scenes, or create anything resembling a clever or coherent plot line, what they do know how to do, and well, is come up with clever, outrageous, gruesome deaths and ever more interesting ways to throw gore around. As a professionally produced and budgeted project, Nightmare 2010 has no excuses for the pathetic kills in this movie. The stupidest (and funniest) death in the movie was when Kris got tossed around her bedroom like a ragdoll and then got sliced from sternum to navel. I think that they were trying to channel echoes of The Exorcist, but mostly I just thought it looked stupid and was pretty freaking hilarious. There are four deaths in this movie, and not a one of them so much as pays homage to the gore-soaked death of Johnny Depp in the original Nightmare (there’s a minor allusion to it once (and not during a kill), but nothing approaching the original). (*Highlight the empty space if you want to know how he died: He gets eaten by his bed (in his dream, but what happens in the dream happens in real life because every time I get bitten by a zombie or blown up in my dreams or stabbed by a monster I fail to wake up soaked in blood or in little itty bitty pieces or with a ravening taste for human flesh) and then what must be around 50 gallons of fake blood and gore gets regurgitated out of the bed. This scene kind of set the standard for gratuitous gore use until such delights as Saw and Hostel came out. That was a sarcastic “delights” because while I do enjoy scary violent movies, I do not enjoy toture porn which is what the latter editions of Saw and pretty much all of Hostel are.)

4.) Jackie Earl Haley is not Robert Englund (the original Freddy). Usually, I would be able to accept this and move on, but in this case it peeved me greatly. First off, somewhere along the line the decision was handed down that they would try to make Freddy 2010 look more “realistic” as a burn victim. I want to be clear here: the point of Freddy’s face is not to accurately reflect what the flesh and face of a burned man come back to life to haunt your sorry butt would look like. It is meant to scare the ever-loving snot out of you. As my roommate put it after she saw it: “He seriously looks like a mouse.”

You can judge for yourself:

These were actually the best pictures I could find out there in cyberland. They don’t really convey the depth of boringness and terror, respectively, that each iteration encompasses.

Haley just doesn’t capture the playful glee that Englund had. That makes me sad. And it makes Freddy a lot less scary.

5.) Today is just rag on Haley and Bayer day. One of the most striking things about Englund’s version of Freddy is that he is funny. (Admittedly, in a really, really dark way.) It’s not so much on display in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but in the sequels he will be quipping at you as he strangles you with your colon. We only get a couple of quips out of him during the entirety of Nightmare 2010. Granted, those are some pretty good quips, but there were not nearly enough of them.

That’s about it – this movie is just bland.

5/10 – bland

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