Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Growing up the 1980s, Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" was one of the first "scary" movies to which I was ever exposed, so when I heard about a remake of the film I had very mixed emotions. I recall that as a child the original was terrifying for the creepy, surrealistic visuals and the notion of an evil, horribly disfigured monster being able to kill you in your dreams. On the one hand, I wanted to revisit Elm Street for the nostalgia factor but on the other hand I have yet to see a remade version of a horror movie that has been able to stand up to the original.

Director Samuel Bayer stuck to the basic premise of the original movie but also changed some of the elements to reflect his own vision of the plot, as most remakes do. Jackie Earle Haley was cast in the iconic role of Freddy Krueger, the villain of the movie. In the 2010 version Freddy Krueger was a gardener at a preschool who was accused of committing heinous acts against some of the students. As in the original, he was hunted down by the children's parents died from burn-related injuries. Years later he would emerge in the dreams of those students, able to kill them in "his world." In order to keep themselves from dreaming and possibly being killed by a burned man wearing a red and green striped sweater with a glove fashioned out of sharp blades, the teenagers do everything they can to stay awake. As the movie goes on, these methods become more desperate, from drinking copious amounts of coffee to taking amphetamine-type pills, and eventually one teen ends up stealing a shot of adrenaline from a hospital cart to keep from falling asleep. As the teenagers die off one by one under mysterious circumstances while they're asleep, the surviving friends begin to put together the pieces and discover a common thread: they all went to the same preschool and were victimized by the gardener in his secret "cave". The parents deny knowledge of anyone named Freddy Krueger initially, but the truth finally comes out.

One area where the movie's plot differed from the original's was that for awhile the viewer is led to believe that Freddy was falsely accused and that the parents killed an innocent man, making his revenge seem justified. Even though eventually the last surviving pair of teenagers find out that he was actually guilty, I felt that the false path towards feeling empathy for Freddy took away from the story. I also didn't find Jackie Earle Haley's make-up to be as grotesque as Robert Englund's, even if it might have been more realistic in terms of burned skin. The characters were poorly developed, the acting bland, and overall the film wasn't even scary. After all of these years and all of the sequels, this version of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" might actually be what kills Freddy Krueger.