I distinctly remember going to see Platinum Dunes’ Friday the 13th remake last year. I thought that Jason was phenomenal in that movie, but the victims and heroes were totally unremarkable. Still, the approach worked in that movie. After all, the film was about a masked killer offing a bunch of deserving teens in creative and gruesome ways. You couldn’t ask for anything more or less from a Friday the 13th movie.
But you could — and should — ask a lot more from a Nightmare on Elm St. movie.
It’s common practice to blame Michael Bay for the faults in Platinum Dunes movies, on the grounds that he’s a shallow and untalented hack who makes movies purely for commercial value. But I’ve read the interviews and set reports from Friday and from Nightmare. Trust me when I say that Michael Bay is purely leverage. He’s a name on the poster to get asses into seats. He’s a rolodex full of connections to talent. He’s also got the box office cred to protect filmmakers from studio execs, which is a key part of what it means to be a producer.
No, the real culprits here are Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, the other two producers who make up the Platinum Dunes trio. These guys were on the set literally every single day while Friday and Nightmare were being filmed. I’ve read dozens of interviews from these guys about both movies, but not a single one from Bay about either. They’re the common denominator here.
In particular regard to Nightmare, I also lay a lot of the blame on Samuel Bayer, a respectable music video director here making his feature debut. To be fair, the man does know how to set up a camera. The cinematography of this movie is very good indeed. I’d love to see what Bayer can do with a straight action movie or even a drama piece, but not until he learns how to get some solid performances out of his actors.
Nightmare very pointedly makes an effort to cast young actors who don’t look like they’ve stepped out of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog and that’s to its credit (as well as an instant improvement over Friday). Unfortunately, the teens in this movie quite literally can’t act to save their lives. This does improve slightly as our leads decrease in number and grow more paranoid, but the performances in this movie are uniformly awful in the first half, especially in the prologue.
I’d like to single out three in particular. The first is Thomas Dekker, mostly because I’m still upset with Fox for canceling The Sarah Connor Chronicles (and for a number of other reasons, but that’s another rant). I will gladly risk blasphemy by saying that Dekker made the best John Connor in the history of Terminator to date, so I really had hopes that he would elevate this material. Alas, not a second of his screen time went by when I didn’t ask “Good God, Thomas, what have they done to you?” I don’t know if it was the writing, the direction or if the SCC crew just got lucky with him, but Dekker plain sucks here.
Next is Kris, the character who clubbed Nightmare in the kneecaps at the starting gate. The first problem with her — in case you hadn’t guessed — is that she’s played by Katie Cassidy, who can’t act. The second problem is that she takes point on investigating Freddy at the movie’s start. She serves as our protagonist until she’s killed off in spectacular fashion at the first act’s end. Sadly, she does this at the expense of our real protagonist. Nancy spends the entire first act barely present in the movie, always in Kris’ shadow. Which brings me to my third character highlight.
Nancy, as played by Heather Langenkamp, was a strong and worthy opponent. She was the Ripley to Robert Englund’s Xenomorph. The Clarice to his Hannibal. The Van Helsing to his Dracula. Unfortunately, Rooney Mara’s portrayal of the character is stunted by her first-act snubbing. Even when Kris is killed off and Nancy takes her place, the damage has clearly been done. Not that I ever grew to care about Kris, but it’s like I was barely ever given a chance to care about Nancy.
The weakness of Mara’s Nancy really becomes obvious in a side-by-side comparison with the original. In the climax of the remake, Mara basically says “Now I know what I’m up against. I’m going to face him, even though I’m probably going to die.” Langenkamp, on the other hand, was like “Enough of this shit! One of us is going down and it sure as hell won’t be me!” Mara figuratively turns into a kid going bear hunting in a dark forest with a baseball bat. Langenkamp quite literally turned into what Kevin McCallister from Home Alone would’ve been like if he was raised by John Rambo.
To be clear, I can understand and respect what Bayer was going for with Mara’s Nancy. I just don’t find it as strong, satisfying or well-executed as what Langenkamp did.
And now we turn to the slasher himself, Freddy Krueger, with former Watchmen heartthrob Jackie Earle Haley taking the glove from Englund. Movie fans the world over were expecting great things from JEH, and damned if he didn’t deliver. As much as I hate to hear him recycling his Rorschach voice, there’s no denying that he made for a creepy and scary Freddy. But attention must also be paid to the flashbacks, in which we see Freddy before he was being accused of child molestation. In my humble opinion, Jackie really shined in those scenes, showing us a gardener just as likely to be very sweet and great with kids as he is to be a pedophile. The screenwriting and direction hobble him as much as it does the kids, but JEH still manages to deliver a great villain in spite of this.
But let’s be clear: This is nothing like Englund’s Freddy. Englund played a more impish killer, portraying Freddy as a truly magical and supernatural demon. JEH plays Freddy as a flat-out sadist, like he’s doing everything as a rapist that he wished he could do when he was still alive. Englund would walk slowly toward a victim, extending his arms 20 feet to better trap his prey. JEH, on the other hand, impales one of his victims through the heart and then tortures him for the 6-7 minutes it takes for brain death to set in (offscreen, thankfully).
Once again, I completely understand and respect the different road taken here, but I would’ve preferred a bit more of Englund’s take mixed in. Suppose, for example, a scene where two of our leads are talking with each other, with one pulling a zipper over his face to reveal that it’s actually Freddy in disguise! That would’ve been such a fantastic way to reveal that the other character is actually in a dream, not to mention a great scare and a wonderful show of Freddy’s powers as a nightmare creature… Oh, wait. They actually shot that. And it was inexplicably cut from the final movie. Come on, people, what the fuck?!
That leads me to one of the remake’s primary weaknesses: A big part of what made the original so effective is that you could never tell if a character was dreaming until it was too late. Hell, it’s never exactly clear where the dreams end and reality begins after the original’s climax. Here, it’s like Bayer was trying to recapture that, but he shows such a crippling inability to be discrete that he may as well have put “THIS IS A DREAM” in subtitles. Bayer does utilize the real-life phenomenon of microsleeps, which could have been a fresh and creative way to blur dreams with reality. Unfortunately, Bayer’s film-making repertoire is such a vacuum of subtlety that these micro-naps are only ever used as jump scares.
In fact, when you really boil it down, this movie is nothing more than a series of cheap jump scares. A lot of this is due to Bayer, but Steve Jablonsky also deserves blame for his over-the-top score. In a strange way, I suppose JEH’s treatment of Freddy is also part of the over-reliance. His character could have shouldered even more of the fright if the camera had stayed on him longer, but his Freddy is such a violent sleazebag that if he were allowed to threaten our leads with sado-masochistic torture for any longer, the film would have to be rated X.
(Side note: Quite a few scenes in the movie take place in “Powell’s Book Store.” As a native Portlander, I really got a kick out of that. “That’s not Powell’s Bookstore,” I thought. “That building downtown taking up an entire city block? That’s Powell’s Bookstore.”)
Last but not least, it’s worth noting that this film ends *with Freddy inexplicably returning after clearly being killed onscreen, just long enough for one last kill before a smash cut to black. This ending was a cheap kick in the nuts when the Friday remake did it, and time has not sweetened it.* There are better ways to set up a franchise, Platinum Dunes. Cut this shit out!
In case I haven’t made it clear, I don’t like the original movie so much that I don’t think there’s room for a newer, better remake. But at the same time, I like the original movie enough to recognize that this remake isn’t it. JEH succeeded in making the role his own, but he had to do it in spite of weak protagonists, a wretched screenplay and direction as blunt as a ball-peen hammer. Additionally, this movie fails not because of the opportunities that were taken, but because of the opportunities that weren’t. With today’s VFX technology, there’s no excuse for not making Freddy a more creative and fantastic monster, especially when his more creative and fantastic kills were ALREADY SHOT!!! The ending to this movie is also a verbatim copy of the ending to the Friday remake, and that’s as inexcusable as it is transparent.
In the end, this is a movie about dreams that suffers for want of creativity and imagination. What poetic justice.