One, two, Freddy’s made anew.
Three, four, it’s a giant bore.
Five, six, who greenlights these flicks?
Seven, eight, for these films I hate.
Nine, ten, never remake again.
There’s usually an expected period of let’s say mourning before a remake may occur. We’re talking slightly under three decades typically, which is about the gap separating The Thing (From Another World) and The Thing – and The Thing is always any argument’s default “good remake!” Likewise, the ‘00s systematically remade horror classics 29 years later. It’s the same, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Halloween (1978) to Halloween (2007), Friday the 13th (1980) to Friday the 13th (2009). That’s all thrown off by 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, which follows Friday by a mere year rather than four. If this indicates general remake acceleration, we should’ve already gotten remixes of Hellraiser and Child’s Play and so on until remakes come out in the same year as the originals.
Rather, it’s perhaps an anomaly. Because A Nightmare on Elm Street is now forever associated with Friday the 13th (officially, ever since Freddy vs. Jason), doing one simply makes the other an inevitability – the most inescapably needless remake yet. Might as well get it over with. But for a movie to exist simply to satisfy an unwanted pattern, creating something remotely useful out of it would stymie even the most caring remaker…or Platinum Dunes.
At least Platinum Dunes’ Friday the 13th took some liberties with the property, as that franchise holds no one film worthy of remaking in the first place. The Elm Street franchise has a good movie – the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). So instead of that Friday franchise collage, Elm Street’s gravediggers go the dispiritingly uncreative route, and simple remake A Nightmare on Elm Street. Which wasn’t so riddled with flaws as to warrant an updating anyway (the eternal remake dilemma: bad movies with good premises most warrant reworking, but good movies are usually redone because people recognize them). The only really apparent issue with the original is its 1984 timestamp; giving it an equally blatant 2010 timestamp (complete with the same damn color filters as always) doesn’t really fix matters.
We know this project is a shameless bid for idiotic youngsters’ cash, but still asinine producer Michael Bay attempts some justification: It’s for “a new generation.” What is that shit?! Are you to suggest that modern audiences simply cannot, or should not, expose themselves to movies that are too old? That short-sighted, unseasoned moviegoers (i.e. today’s teens, though I’m ashamed to say I was equally narrow-minded in my youth) demand newness as a virtue above all else? This is reductive to cinema as a whole! It speaks to the most common concern about our modern remakes – that they undermine the power of the originals – which isn’t true for an older viewer (I’ll still watch and enjoy Wes Craven’s Elm Street once video director Samuel Bayer’s grotesque abomination is long gone), but who knows how it’s stunting the evolution of the youth. It creates superficial viewers, more concerned with a movie’s surface gloss than the more timeless craftsmanship underneath it.
So as a filmmaker, presented with a structure as arguably perfect as A Nightmare on Elm Street’s, this is your challenge: Change nothing, like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (an interesting movie, in hindsight, because of its intended purposelessness), and you’ve just masturbated with Michael Bay’s money (which is pretty grody to begin with). Make changes, and they’ll simply make things worse. Hence why something like A Nightmare on Elm Street shouldn’t be remade – and Wes Craven would agree with me, and offer up his New Nightmare as the cleverer alternative to the same.
But a remake they made (obviously), so we mostly have a cavalcade of arbitrary, ornamental details shifted around. The story’s the same: A small group of high schoolers shares the same dream of a burnt boogeyman with knives, who kills them in their sleep. Actually, that’s just the premise; even the structural details are mostly unaltered, which makes the film a phenomenally tedious slog when events happen slower than they did under Craven. Seriously, the Tina analog ain’t even dead yet by the time the original already had Nancy fully aware of Freddy Kreuger and fighting him.
Yeah, it’s all analogues, technically “new” characters so underwritten, they’re only power is as stand-ins for the original cast. So for Tina we have Kris (the CW’s Katie Cassidy, who loves horror remakes – When a Stranger Calls, Black Christmas), reduced to the role of “blonde and has sex.” There’s some effort to make her a decoy heroine as before, but less successful (the operating term for the day) because it doesn’t even register…not unless recalling the first.
Rod is now Jesse (Thomas Dekker, who’s voiced Fievel and Littlefoot [!]). It’s clear he’s Rod because he is sent to prison over Tina’s – er, Kris’ murder, and himself dies there. It isn’t obvious until that point, because Jesse lacks any identity, let alone Rod’s hooliganism.
Glen analog Quentin (the CW’s Kyle Gallner), identifiable as such simply because he’s Nancy’s boyfriend. That’s the only connection. Gallner sure ain’t no Johnny Depp, and they’ve specifically removed many of the best portions of the first by altering him.
Then there’s Nancy Thompson (Rooney Mara – Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend in The Social Network), who – no, wait, Nancy Holbrook. Ooh, changes! So she’s our Final Girl, which the movie makes obvious right out of the bat by giving her the longest (content-free) character scenes. They then do nothing with her until the hour mark, which is damnably counterproductive. Once she’s finally experiencing bad dreams (around minute 60, versus Craven’s minute 25), we’re totally beyond caring.
On paper, the cast appears promising, in that sense that every fucking slasher movie after Scream randomly, heedlessly casts flavor-of-the-month TV actors – in other words, not promising at all. Still, the actors are better than they give here, credit to Bayer’s Lucas-esque anti-concern with performers, and credit to a stuffy script by people I’m not even going to look up. And when characters don’t work in an Elm Street, that’s a pretty fundamental problem, because you don’t have that Friday nicety of blood and boobs and excess to fall back on.
So far, I could’ve written most of this before 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street even existed, so slavishly does it follow the common remake problems. The X-factor is Freddy Kreuger himself, a more interesting problem. In the name of pointless change done for the sake of itself, Kreuger is recast, not because Robert England wasn’t anything but the best aspect of the series, but because it’s “for a new generation.” AKA, it’s arbitrary.
I’ll hold off on revealing the actor until after the bombshell is dropped. There’s more to discuss first. Namely, they’ve changed Freddy. Just because. So his makeup now resembles an actual burn victim, ala The English Patient (ooh, scary!), though adding so-called realism to A Nightmare on Elm Street seems to completely miss the dream point to begin with. Freddy’s makeup is unexpressive and lacking in mythic grandeur. And why redesign Freddy?! He’s not something generic, like a vampire of a werewolf. Freddy is his first cinematic incarnation, complete with many specific details – that red-and-sweat sweater, the fedora, knife-glove…Any alteration screams of redundancy, because there’s no getting to the truth of a character who was already at his truest!
This goes the same for all minor changes, which don’t do a lot to explain why a remake exists. Given how scrupulously the 2010 version apes the 1984 version, there’s room for only one substantive change, to really make a difference. And because it’s the only major alteration, the filmmakers hug it oh so tight, making it the movie’s theme more than even dreams. It’s the bombshell, and here it comes…
Freddy Kreuger, once a child murderer, is now a child molester.
Okay, so Craven toyed with this very same notion, before wisely rejecting it. Grossness and terror are two different things. Besides, Freddy’s backstory is simply a detail, unsubstantial in the greater dream scheme. But Platinum Dunes loves to overemphasize the past, because they fundamentally do not understand that fear comes from the unknown. So where 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street comes off the rails and abandons the original is in the second half, when Freddy’s former molestation comes into play.
And knowing that, it warrants mentioning Freddy’s actor: Jackie Earle Haley. In Little Children, he played a child molester. In Watchmen, he played a psychotic killer. In The Bad News Bears, he played a baseball-playing punk kid, which has nothing to do with anything. Reprising your old roles, in the shadow of Robert Englund, under inexpressive latex…this cannot be the most rewarding acting experience. It’s no wonder Haley’s Freddy doesn’t register, leaving us with a vague glob instead of a wholly defined nightmare entity.
Paradoxically, the original Elm Street was all about puberty, about the metaphorical movement into adulthood, represented by Freddy’s sexualized attacks. Freddy resembles a vampire in his subtext. But under Bayer, and a specifically sexual Freddy, the blatant sexual imagery is gone. Kris gets the ceiling dance same as Tina, but the new movie is so preoccupied with jazzing the moment up with CGI show-offery (often so lousy, the cheap, practical 1984 effects are more convincing), it forgets the original point entirely. This is what A Nightmare on Elm Street would’ve looked like, had it been done by a hack and not a writer/director with a point to prove.
That extends to the wasteful moments which completely mimic the original. When Nancy takes her bath, we all anticipate this moment:
And then get this moment:
Since you know it’s coming, playing it as a shock wouldn’t work. Not that Craven did that anyway; it was a suspense moment from the get go (and more highly sexualized, to do the grotesque thing and compare angle of spread and such). Naturally, commercial director, ADD editing-obsessed Bayer goes with the jump scare. It highlights where this Elm Street falls short, when a keen remake would’ve twisted the moment to use our expectations against us. (Of all the times when Bayer’s film eschews change!)
Actually, jump scares are the name of the game, something which doesn’t befit the in-and-out dream logic of an Elm Street as well as it does a standard horror flick. We’re generally assured of certain “safe” non-dream scenes, for all these movies blur that distinction. Like a later Elm Street sequel, the remake struggles to find a new form of sleep to capitalize upon. It trumps up a totally fictional thing, the “micro-nap,” simply to engender a progression of Freddy shocks while our characters are awake for days later on. Without having earned dread to begin with, this isn’t functional.
Further hurting A Nightmare on Elm Street, it adds other arbitrary, non-real sleep rules. Did you know if you’re awake for three straight days, you suddenly fall into a permanent, irreversible coma? Tell that to my fellow grad students! And permanent comas can be overcome with shots of adrenaline. Inception made up its own dream rules too, but in an appropriate context; you can’t make Freddy more “real” while completely misrepresenting slumber at the same time.
But getting back to that central issue, which I’ve been circling around: Child molestation! (Blogger is so going to flag me for this post.) Dreams double as flashbacks, and we get an overdose of Freddy’s time as a mortal – And anyone else think this franchise could’ve sustained a Rob Zombie-style prequel far better than Halloween? Fulfilling the almighty God of the Arbitrary Alteration, Freddy was now once a school janitor and – Wait, I’ve seen this before.
“Simpsons” did it!
Anyway, Freddy worked at the Badham Preschool – so named by administrators totally unschooled in the ways of irony. (The day care in Toy Story 3 is still creepier.) Freddy serially [CENSORED] his way through a never ending roster of five-year-olds – damn you, movie, for forcing me to write that sentence! So the parents of Springwood came for him, and torched him in a boiler room basement.
See what a problem this little murderer/molester change makes? Vigilante justice against a known serial killer is sensible, though regrettable. Intentionally murdering a pedophile instead of taking him to trail in the first place…you can understand the rage, sure, but the parents’ effort to justify their lynch mob one decade later doesn’t really work. (Though adults remain a presence in the new Nightmare, thematically the movie is far beyond actually considering the generation gap, or any such nicety.) It’s all an attempt to keep the children from remembering what happened – and present day repressed memories work with the same narrative whateverness as standard-grade amnesia.
The movie really and truly dwells upon this particular version of Freddy’s past as it nears the climax. Though the solution – pulls Freddy out of dreams, kill him here – is the same as always, somehow the heroes get it into their heads to track down Freddy’s sex dungeon first. And isn’t it just lovely, a horror movie whose final half hour occurs in a sex dungeon? Actually, many of the more sordid ‘70s exploitation epics commit similar lapses of taste, but things like Cannibal Holocaust have a genuine concern with disgust, and are valuable in their excess, whereas the new Elm Street is a mainstream effort that can never fully commit. So moments where Nancy scrolls through Polaroids of her unwanted sexual past are hidden from our view, but fully present to the characters – this is mean-spirited, to me, in ways Hostel and its ilk never dared. But never constructively off-putting, either, simply calculated and wrong.
Freddy was originally a personification of the boogeyman. Falling asleep meant death, pure and simple, an existentialist cosmic terror given universality and flesh at once. Freddy is now an agent of perversion, whose ultimate goal is to trick Nancy into a coma for an eternity of dream rape. Tasteful! Again, icky ≠ scary. Not to mention, little innocuous details like the finger-knives become arbitrary in this new setup. Freddy wasn’t a murderer in life (though still an awful, awful, awful, awful man), so the knives are now just a kewl weapon, nothing more. So many of Freddy’s attributes, the boiler room and sweater and whatnot, lose meaning by how heavily Michael Bay’s minions embrace child molestation for all it’s worth. (Again, this is the same juvenile producer who was off-put by the heterosexual fornication which permeated the Friday remake.)
I’m about done with this movie, which makes a mockery of the original and is distasteful in its own right. It doesn’t even leave the room for sequels as the first did (at Robert Shaye’s insistence – how I miss him). Freddy circa 2010 has a limited victim pool – the kids that he, well, you know – but so did 1984 Freddy, and he branched out eventually to just target teens at random. This was acceptable, as that Freddy was a personification of evil in general. I can’t see Haley’s Freddy stalking new dreamers, not without that personal past to fuel him.
But making sequels isn’t necessarily a good thing – I’m in favor of them now, for the stupid reason that my movie diet has become almost nothing but sequels (damn blog). But in the case of Platinum Dunes and their habitual franchise assassination, sequels don’t matter. Nor do the originals. This company is itself akin to a franchise, only they can just acquire new properties to lambast instead of stretching out a single movie ad nauseum. (Next up: Christine. Thankfully abandoned: The Birds.) They don’t care about making sequels to their Nightmare on Elm Street (good riddance!), nor do they care about doing it right anyway. They’re a cold and cynical company; take solace at least that the original Elm Street still exists, and is good, and shall endure while this one has certainly already faded away.
RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• No. 2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
• No. 3 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
• No. 4 A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
• No. 5 A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
• No. 6 Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
• No. 7 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
• No. 8 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
No comments:
Post a Comment