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70A fine copy.
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67It's not every day that one of our rogues' gallery of iconic psycho killers gets to be played by a creepy and fascinating actor -- in this case, Jackie Earle Haley taking on the role of Freddy Krueger.
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50By today's standards, it is only medium-bloody, though it's more than usually grim, its young protagonists sullen enough to qualify for the "Twilight" movies. Yet it affords precious little sadistic pleasure, partly because it "dares" to lay out more directly the pedophiliac demons plaguing Freddy the serial killer.
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50Freddy simply isn't as scary as he used to be, even though Jackie Earle Haley, taking over from Robert Englund in the role, plays Krueger essentially straight, keeping the one-liners to a minimum.
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50So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short. By that standard, this new "Nightmare" is a fairly decent effort.
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50The energy is missing in the remake because the techniques, which are replicated in a straightforward fashion, are stale.
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50The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won't freeze the heart or fire the imagination.
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50Jackie Earle Haley, the fans' choice to take on the role of Freddy Krueger in the remake of the 1984 boogeyman blockbuster A Nightmare on Elm Street proves stunningly, rousingly…adequate…for the job.
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This "Nightmare" is mostly stale goods. You'd think Bayer's music video background would jibe well with the playful surreality of Craven's premise. But when not paying homage -- the claw in the bathtub, the morphing wall -- Bayer surprisingly traffics in factory-level horror atmospherics and loud, saw-it-coming shocks.
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50It's moderately entertaining and instantly forgettable. Poor Freddy. I can't help thinking he deserves better.
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42Somewhere, Wes Craven is laughing up his sleeve, and Robert Englund is grinning. It's nice to know that you're irreplaceable.
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40It was boring. So, so, so boring. It doesn't even give Haley the courtesy of a bad-guy showcase; his face frozen and obscured behind burn prosthetics, he spends most of his time spitting distorted one-liners from the shadows, like some anonymous mob witness on an episode of Dateline NBC. It's boring and a waste.
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40Call it what you want, but the best word to describe it is: unnecessary.
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40Less a nightmare than a case of bad indigestion, this '80s horror reboot is a primer in the humorless recycling of potent pop culture.
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40The basic feeling you get out of this version is 'been there-done that.'
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38It's the Bay touch you feel in the way actors register as body count, characters go undeveloped, and sensation trumps feeling. A nightmare, indeed.
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30The back-to-the-beginning approach unimaginatively goes through the motions, offering scant justification for its boring existence, at least from an artistic point of view.
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30For all the filmmakers' talk about reinvigorating the franchise for a new generation, and all their attention to technical details, this is a sloppily conceived remake with no passion for the genre or this story behind it, a movie that assumes its audience is brain-dead and likes it that way.
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30While the 1984 film has aged, its now-familiar jolts still pack more punch than this pic's recycled ones, which sometimes register so tepidly as to cause snickers.
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25I stared at A Nightmare on Elm Street with weary resignation. The movie consists of a series of teenagers who are introduced, haunted by nightmares and then slashed to death by Freddy. So what? Are we supposed to be scared?
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25Though Freddy is basically the same guy as in the 1984 original, his back story is different. For a few minutes the movie threatens to become interesting -- then retreats.
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25Director Samuel Bayer, a veteran commercial and music video director responsible for Nirvana's "Smell Like Teen Spirit Video" back when the original Nightmare series was still a going concern, brings a slick visual sense but not a hint of vision.
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20Don't blame Haley, though. Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer's screenplay goes in the wrong direction entirely, dropping Freddy's sick sense of humor while turning him into a generic bogeyman.
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20Using blasts of shrill, high-decibel noise in place of actual scares has become a common horror-movie tactic, the cinematic equivalent of botox, silicone, and penile-enhancement surgery. Producer Michael Bay and director Samuel Bayer deploy the tactic so regularly in this remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic that after a while I just plugged my ears.
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Good ol' Fred loses any sense of playful shock he once possessed and turns into a generic figure meticulously manufactured to simultaneously gross and freak us out. It doesn't work.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 28 out of 70
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Mixed: 17 out of 70
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Negative: 25 out of 70
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A remake horror movie that's worst than "Friday the 13th" (Remake version). It sure did give me 'nightmares'.
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