And so we get to the remake. Some sixteen years after the
last of the A Nightmare on Elm Street film, it got the remake treatment from
Platinum Dunes, Michael Bays’ horror remake studio, responsible for the Friday
the 13th remake. That movie was watchable, but brought low with bad
writing, horrible characters, stupid decisions, weak kills and a few other
issues. This remake however has all those problems and more, sapping all the
fun and fear out of the horror movie in an effort to be grim and gritty. This
is closer to a straight remake than Friday 13th remake was, keeping
mostly to the original film’s plot, only changing the detail around. It’s a
movie full of problems, but there’s a major one: it’s boring. You won’t have
nightmares at all. Instead you’ll fall into a deep, black sleep, entering a
void of nothingness where ninety minutes of your life will be swallowed up. Why
even bother? It’s an exercise in tedium, so devoid of passion and creativity
that the entire experience feels like a waste of time. This is a remake almost
made to a template, doing what other contemporary horror remakes had done
before, throwing in the same technical polish and visuals, the same grit and
seriousness, the same adherence to what executives think will make money
because it’s been done before. The movie does have a few things going for it –
it has the sheen of money, with a good technical polish and some nice visuals. This
is a bad movie and a bad remake.
They try to go for a change in Freddy. He’s no longer a
child murderer. No. Instead he’s a paedophile. All of the teens were bad
touched by Freddy in his secret lair (a small crawlspace room in a kindergarten
janitor’s room). Every single one of the characters had repressed the memories.
This is a bad decision, since it gives the iconic Freddy Kreuger a dirty feel
and the entire film a horrible unpleasantness. I know that sounds a bit of an
odd thing to say, what with him being a murdering psychopath, but the
implications of him being a paedophile take things down a route the film isn’t
equipped or capable of traversing. The kids were meant to be five years old,
which makes it even more gross and uncomfortable (especially the implications
of his ‘secret cave’). It just cheapens Freddy’s character, if you could
believe that. For a very short period of time they try to put some ambiguity –
was Freddy guilty? The answer is yes of course – this sort of movie isn’t going
to play with hard moral concepts.
The visual redesign is good though. He still has the sweater
and fedora, but now he actually looks like he’s been severely burnt, a
combination of make-up and special effects giving his face the appearance of
somebody with horrible, flesh-rending burns. I like it actually. Jackie Earle Haley does a decent
job at making this version of Freddy his own – he doesn’t try to imitate Robert
Englund, he goes his own route with the character. It’s not a scary route, or
even a memorable one, but at least it was different. He actually gets more
screen time and lines than original Freddy ever did – he talks a lot actually,
taunting his victims before killing them. I will say that while he looks
freakier, as a character he’s not as menacing – he doesn’t run after his
victims, he spends more time slowly advancing on them or conversing with them.
It’s a big change from original Freddy, who basically made a beeline for you
and tried to kill you. There was an urgency and panic. This time you seem to
have a fair amount of leeway in getting away from him. There are times though where they try and make him imitate old Freddy, giving him some of his classic lines, but this doesn't feel natural. His Freddy isn’t memorable
or impactful – really the redesign is the only thing good about it. The role
didn’t really do much for the actor though, since Robert Englund will always be
Freddy Kreuger forever and always. It also contributed to Jackie Earle Haley’s
typecasting. Family Guy said it best about Jackie Earle Haley. Do you remember
him from Little Children, Watchmen or A Nightmare on Elm Street? He played the
paedophile, the serial killer and the serial killing paedophile.
You probably know the story in advance – a bunch of
teenagers, including our dour heroine Nancy, are having horrible nightmares
about a horribly burnt man with a clawed glove who stalks them. They begin
dying in their dreams and have to stay awake to survive. It’s mostly the same,
though the details have been changed to give it a more serious edge. This time
all of the teens find out that they used to know each other years earlier – as
five year olds they played together at the same kindergarten, which is where
Freddy, the janitor, molested them, especially his favourite Nancy. The parents
found out and went after Freddy, burning him alive. Now, over a decade later,
Freddy has returned to kill the kids in their dreams as revenge for ratting him
out.
The cast is horrible, with characters largely being dull and
unlikeable and the actors sleepwalking through their roles. Nancy is played by
Rooney Mara, the sister of actress Kate Mara, who also played Lisbeth Salander
in the American remake of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. She’s said in an
interview (after getting the Dragon Tattoo role) that she didn’t want to be in
the ANOES remake, that she didn’t want the part (but knew she would get it)
and, as a result, purposefully did a bad job. Besides being a show of bad
professionalism and acting ethics (a good actor gives 100%, even when they know
they’re in a bad movie), it’s par for the course for the Mara sisters
apparently, riding the publicity train for a movie they star in, but once the
negative reviews come in they suddenly switch sides and badmouth it (Kate was
happy to ride the publicity for the Fantastic Four Remake, but once the
negative reviews came in she switched into defensive ‘I didn’t want to do it’
mode). Her version of Nancy isn’t likeable – she’s a waitress and she likes to
draw, and that’s all she has going on. The other teens aren’t any better –
there’s Kris, who fills the Tina role from the original (seemingly the main
heroine, then gets killed in the first third). There’s her boyfriend (who is
arrested for her murder and killed by Freddy in prison), and her ex-boyfriend
(who is killed in the opening scene). Then there’s Nancy’s friend/boyfriend
Quentin, who just looks like a stoner. None are likeable or memorable. These
characters are actually a lot more angsty than the teens from the original,
which is weird but fits into this movies ‘everything must be gritty’ mantra.
All of the characters are trying not to sleep, so they all
look like zombies barely able to open their eyes. Some are heavily medicated,
others are just sleepy. We get a stupid new concept – micro-naps, which are
exactly what they sound like. Apparently with intense sleep deprivation the
brain starts to have times where it shuts down for a few seconds. This means
that nightmares can happen at any time for stupid jump scares. So whenever a
character is walking, swimming, sitting in a chair or even just remaining
motionless they can suddenly have Freddy jump out at them. It doesn’t stop them
being stupid though. Nancy knows she needs to stay awake and avoid sleeping or
she’ll be attacked in her dreams, so what does she do? She draws herself a warm
bath and falls asleep in it, just so we can re-do the scene from the original
with Freddy’s claw emerging from the water. We also get the scene of Nancy
seeing her dead friend in a body bag.
The first kill really sets the tone for disappointment – one
of the youths is having a nightmare of Freddy attacking him in a dream,
struggling to prevent him slashing his neck. In the real world he’s actually
holding a knife to his throat, and when Freddy wins in the dream he slashes his
throat with the knife himself. The effects are as low-budget and untechnical as
possible – he’s holding a prop hilt that’s like a marker – he basically just
draws a red strip on his throat. You can clearly see there’s no knife connected
to the hilt – it’s like that scene in the Friday the 13th remake
where the spike clearly doesn’t enter the guy’s neck but goes next to it. Kris’
death, meant to be a more modern and horrific version of Tina’s death from the
original film, plays out more like something from a parody horror movie, like
Scary Movie. She’s spinning and cartwheeling around on the ceiling before she’s
slashed to death. Nancy watches a Youtube video of one of Freddy’s victims get
killed – he just falls forward onto the camera. It’s as un-scary as you’d
imagine – of special note, the kid is the same Asian guy from the Friday the 13th
remake who got the neck spike. Considering this had a bigger budget than the
original you’d think they’d deliver some better kills and gore effects but no,
this is amateurish stuff completely lacking in both creativity and originality.
The parents are lying to their kids and covering things up
not to protect themselves (they did technically murder somebody), but to
prevent their children from remembering they were abused. It makes sense, but gives things a bit
of a weirder bent, since the characters keep finding physical evidence
everywhere all the time that they were all in the same school as children and
the parents have to unconvincingly lie. Nancy’s mom is even more annoying here
than the drunk version in the original – she tries to lie to Nancy even when
Nancy is holding evidence. At least the reason makes more sense. I do find it
strange how every single one of the teens forgot everything about it – they all
repressed the memories simultaneously, and somehow didn’t remember when they
met again in high school. It’s also funny that the parents would do what they could
to collaborate and make sure the kids wouldn’t remember, yet still leave all
this evidence around. Seriously, there are photos of all the teens as kids
playing together everywhere.
The movie has the requisite modern polish and sheen these
factory-made remakes tend to have – it looks good, but that’s part of the
problem; this is as superficial as remakes come. The nightmares have one of two
themes to them - an industrial theme, made up of rusty factories, furnaces and
vents full of steam and flames, and a dilapidated school. They also have a
yellow tint to them, making them more otherworldly and differentiating them
from the blue tinge the real-world scenes have. The switch is good looking, but
I can’t say it has an original feel – this is all stuff we’d seen before. If
anything, the adherence to the first ANOES movie is to the films detriment, and
to attempting to be scary again means they squander any potential creativity
new technology affords. It’s a remake made solely to cash in on the series’ and
characters’ past popularity.
In the end Nancy and Quentin head to the old abandoned
kindergarten and find Freddy’s secret molestation chamber, where he has a stash
of photos of him abusing Nancy. They then decide to take the fight to Freddy,
so they do Nancy’s plan from the original, where Nancy falls asleep and tries
to drag Freddy into the real world. But in Nancy’s plan she prepared first and
laid traps – these idiots don’t do that. They both end up in the dream, Freddy
attacks both until they manage to pull him into the real world, and then they
fight him. Nancy uses a paper cutter as a makeshift machete and cuts off
Freddy’s hand and slashes his throat open, and then they set the entire room on
fire for good measure. Quentin goes to the hospital and Nancy heads home, then
in a requisite final scare Freddy appears in a mirror and kills Nancy’s mother
while Nancy screams and the credits roll. Big fucking deal.
This is a bad movie and a bad remake. It’s so thoroughly
boring and unlikeable, only surpassing the original in unpleasantness and
lacking in every other quality that made that movie as popular and enjoyable as
it was. The ANOES Remake is just unpleasant. The characters are unlikeable, the
acting is awful, the new ideas are horrid and the tonal change from making
Freddy a paedophile makes it all uncomfortable. The call-backs and references
to the original feel out of place. It’s all so forgettable as well – this is
not a movie you’ll be remembering Really the only thing this film has going for
it is superficial – the manufactured sheen and the Freddy redesign. Everything
else is worthless. This essentially masks the current end of the ANOES series,
though another remake is apparently in the works. Now that we’ve covered both A
Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, we can take a look at the
time the two movies combined, bringing Freddy Kreuger against Jason Voorhees.
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