A Nightmare on Elm Street

An expectedly worthless horror-movie remake from Michael Bay’s production company, A Nightmare on Elm Street follows several teenagers as they’re stalked and killed in their dreams by a mysterious figure named Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley). It’s clear almost immediately that A Nightmare on Elm Street, which boasts the same glossy sheen that accompanies all of Platinum Dunes’ releases, possesses few attributes designed to win over either fans of the original or newcomers to the franchise, with the film’s pervasively unpleasant vibe compounded by an emphasis on hackneyed and flat-out stale elements. And although there’s certainly plenty to choose from in terms of the movie’s less-than-enthralling attributes, it’s the myriad of underdeveloped characters that stand as the most frustratingly incompetent aspect of the proceedings – as screenwriters Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer offer up a selection of protagonists that couldn’t possibly be less interesting and somehow manage to transform one of the most iconic villains in screen history into a bland, hopelessly by-the-numbers boogeyman (ie Freddy, with his generic burn-ward makeup, primarily comes off as a garden-variety psycho with a penchant for spouting laughably repetitive chunks of dialogue). The atmosphere of tedium extends even to the movie’s dream sequences, as filmmaker Samuel Bayer has infused the majority of such moments with a grimy and off-putting visual sensibility that’s exacerbated by an astonishing lack of creativity (ie a dingy boiler room seems to be the primary locale for the various characters’ nightmares). The end result is a thoroughly wrong-headed endeavor that manages to disappoint despite Platinum Dunes’ abysmal track record, because it really takes a special kind of incompetence to mess up something as obvious and foolproof as Freddy Krueger.

*1/2 out of ****