Nightmare On Elm Street

3 1/2 out of 5 Stars



In 1984 Wes Craven brought us the original nightmare in Johnny Depp's first major film role about a child murderer named Freddy Krueger who kills people in their dreams and when they do they die in reality ... and of course the parents of the tortured teens years before hunted him down and burned him alive. Now in 2010 Samuel Bayer directs a much more visually intense remake that takes Wes Craven's idea to new levels and adds in more back story to Freddy. The result is a visually striking recreation of the original hailed slasher film.

This remake is definitely still a slasher and very much so in the vain of modern day films of the genre. But at the same time there is a story behind the villain, no matter how disturbing it may be, and as much as I enjoyed the original there really was no story. For the time the original nightmare holds up and if I would have seen it when I was a kid I was have been scared too. But when I watch it now I feel less like being frightened and more inclined to try and reason with Freddy. The acting in the original is often mediocre to awful and Krueger feels more like a clown than a sinister killer. The only aspect of the original that would make it more frightening is the slightly more mysterious aspect to this character.

But in the remake we are given more story. We know where Freddy came from and what he did by the end. Why the characters are being hunted down makes sense. The supernatural aspect of the dreams begin to make sense to what happens to them in reality. The acting is also a heck of a lot better than the original and Jackie Earle Haley definitely pulls off Freddy quite well. They took Freddy and turned off any sense of him being a clown, still kept his dark wit and molded Freddy back into a cold and sadistic killer. The only real big flaw (other than explaining how Freddy got his claw hand) was not following the lead character of Nancy closely enough at the beginning of the film. But for the most part the new nightmare is the old nightmare with some slight tweaks. The deaths are just about the same and the basic plot is followed to so closely it's almost like when Zack Snyder makes a film based on a graphic novel. Some people may not enjoy the back story, but I personally was grateful to actually have a story.