UK Release Date: 07-05-2010
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Thomas Dekker
UK Certificate: 18
Director: Samuel Bayer
Country: US

Hollywood’s mania for remakes continues unabated, and horror films are subject to more than their fair share of pillaging. The latest is a remake of Wes Craven’s cult shlocker from the 80s, which spawned some sublimely awful sequels. Some remakes opt for soporific scene-by-scene Psycho replication. Others re-imagine as much as they remake. Each successive version of Don Siegel’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers has something going for it because each in its own way was an inventive departure from the original, containing a sub-text pertinent to the decade in which it was made (and I include in that the most recent and coolly received Kidman and Craig Invasion).

In Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street special effects take the place of any inventive departure from the original. You know the urban myth that if you die in your dream you die in reality? The teenagers here start dying in their sleep. Horribly. They all have the same dream in which they are terrorised by a hideously disfigured, fedora-wearing man sporting monstrous secateurs for a gardening glove. Imagine; an even worse grinning nightmare than Alan Titchmarsh already is.

Robert Englund’s Freddy Kruger had a cheesy garishness about him (even more than does Alan Titchmarsh), and his portrayal had the effect of adding to the seedy atmosphere the Craven original evoked, an atmosphere from which much of the dream-like horror derived.  The effect of Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy in the midst of lots of slick CGI is akin to the lights being switched on when you were just beginning to get spooked from standing in the dark. Freddy’s cheesy puns, no longer sandwiched between the seedy dream corridors and the general tackiness only a 1980s film can muster, are just cheese. What is offered up to us is kinetic horror, a reflex shock that is not real horror at all – that’s the stuff which eats like an acid beetle crawling around in your brain. Here, you have the feeling here that you’ve seen all this before (in more ways than one, many have) and the would-be shocks are telegraphed. Even the Psycho ‘lead character trick’ in the film’s first third doesn’t have the impact it might. And after seeing Scorsese’s dream sequence in Shutter Island everything here is psychologically tame by comparison.

I am no doubt missing the point. Again. This is not a film for horror aficionados but a film with a teen cast for a teen audience who want to watch a horror film. But if you are going to remake a film it will by default have to bear comparison with the original. Only, I fear this is a reboot and not a remake. What’s the difference? Actually, there is none. A reboot is simply a remake by any other name made by recylers. The youthful cast are up to the task of running around and screaming, among them the promising Thomas Dekker (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) who possesses an edgy intensity as an actor that’s ultimately underused here. He might not be another Johnny Depp, in whose steps he retreads, but he does give to his part more sides than it deserves. Jackie Earle Haley has little else to do but flash us a scimitar smile through those prosthetic burn scars and wiggle that iconic oversized glove in close up somewhere at the bottom corner of the screen from time to time, the next cowering victim looking very scared and very small in the distance as Freddy moves closer. This is by no means the nightmare it could have been. Unfortunately, even with an 18 certificate which flatters to deceive, it isn’t the nightmare it should have been, either.