Nightmare On Elm Street 2010 DVD Review

Nightmare On Elm Street 2010 DVD Review

By Jose

Plot:

A re-imagining/remake of the horror icon Freddy Krueger, a serial-killer who wields a glove with four blades embedded in the fingers and kills people in their dreams, resulting in their real death in reality.

Review:

So we now officially have remakes of pretty much all of the main horror icons of the 70’s and 80’s. With some more successful than the others. The new Nightmare on Elm Street, to me, got things half right. They got everything from the look, the atmosphere, the scares, and basic story right. But they left out “fun” factor and transitions between dreams and reality. But let me start with what I liked with the new version.

We start off in a diner with Kellan Lutz character Dean, experiencing the nightmares. Right off the bat the creep factor is intense with a dirty and dark kitchen with the store on full blast with fire everywhere and pig heads and parts burning and boiling. Then we see a glimpse, for the first time, of the new Freddy as he slices Dean in the hand as he is woken up. Where he looks down to see a pool of blood underneath the hand that had gotten sliced. We are then introduced to the new Nancy (Rooney Mara) and Quentin (Kyle Gallner) as Dean tells Nancy about his nightmares. Soon after we get a gruesome and quite unexpected kill when Dean falls asleep and Freddy kills him with a steak knife. But what we and everyone at the diner see is Dean stab himself in the neck with the steak knife and then slowly slice and pretty much decapitates himself considering the length of the knife. Really great kill scene right off the bat.

As the movie progresses we learn more and more about what is going on and more and more deaths. We get a remake of the bed room death, where one of the girls gets thrown around the ceiling of her bedroom then sliced from head to crotch. Later on a nice arm through body death. Toward the end Quentin learns what really happened and why Freddy is out killing all these kids. So here is where they change a bit of the origin story and background of Freddy turning him from a child killer into a child predator/molester. Now that kind of made me a bit upset. Keeping him as a child killer would have made him seem like a monster that just wants to kill. Turin it into a pedophile makes it seem very uncomfortable and turns the Freddy character from a monster to a pervert. Wanting revenge on the kids who told on him rather then just wanting to kill and terrorize. This is something that should have been left alone and not changed the way they did for the new one.

So in addition of the origin change some other things that was changed was the fun factor. Most horror movies, for the most part, have a few bits of comedy in order to take the audience away from all the gore and scares and also to give a slight break. But by omitting humor all together all your doing is bombarding the viewers kill after kill and scare after scare. Causing a fatigue on the audience. That is why I see the Friday The 13th remake as a successful movie. It gave us those humor spots between all the killing and scares. Robert Englund provided that sick humor that worked so well in the originals that was lost here in the 2010 version. But that is not saying that Jackie Earle Haley didn’t give a good performance because he did. A great scaring performance. But too serious. Jason, Michael Myers, Leather Face all don’t talk. Freddy was the only one and he used his voice as much as his claws. But here he essentially became one of them. Which is a shame. Another thing that upset me was the lack of transitions or let me say it like this. When the dream or nightmare scenes came you didn’t know it was a dream until Freddy popped out or something really weird or out of place happened. It took you off guard and added a dimension to the movie because you didn’t know if the character was in a nightmare or not. In the 2010 version it was obvious. They fell asleep and here comes Freddy. No suspense, no misdirection. It was just “oh look he fell asleep” or “oh no don’t fall asleep”. It could have been really great to see that carried over to the new movie especially with the technology we have today. Imagine all the fun they could have had with it.

Final Thoughts:

Even with the flaws I really did enjoy this movie a lot. All the actors and actresses did a good job overall. And it was good to see Kyle Gallner again. Love this kids acting. But I am in the minority when I say this but I am very happy to see these horror icons coming back in new versions and in modern times.

Ratings: 3.5 out of 5