Holy Crap is the 2010 Remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street Abysmal

It's not good!

I can only imagine the uproar that would ensue if Channing Tatum were cast as Darth Vader in a Star Wars remake and said, "I hadn't seen (the original Star Wars) since it was first in theatres, so I watched it in my hotel the other night- and it was just the worst movie I have ever seen!” 

Tatum wouldn’t just lose the role for his unforgivable effrontery; he’d probably lose his life as well. It would go beyond that: enraged nerds would hunt down his family and slaughter them. Then they’d lustily desecrate their graves. 

According to a stand-in who worked on the film, Jackie Earle Haley uttered those words of hyperbolic criticism about Wes Craven’s revered 1984 masterpiece. If so, Haley has either seen very few movies or has the abysmal taste to consider one of the greatest and most influential horror movies of all time an unforgivable nadir. 

I can think of at least one movie way worse than Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s also called A Nightmare on Elm Street and stars Haley in a wildly misconceived role and performance. 

Wes Craven rightly had nothing but contempt for the cynical remake, but Robert Englund gave it and Haley his blessing. Being a gracious gentleman, Englund passed the torch to Haley. He might not have been so generous if he had been aware of the character actor’s withering take on the iconic original. 

It’s also possible that Englund was playing a game of five-dimensional Chess and understood that an absolutely dreadful remake, with a wrong-headed performance by a Leprechaun-sized actor, could only make the original and his performance seem more impressive. 

If Englund wasn’t considered the definitive Freddy Krueger before the remake, he sure was afterward. 

Before I tear into the movie as a whole, I’d like to discuss the many ways the movie fails Freddy Krueger. Wes Craven’s original screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street depicted its villain as a child molester as well as a child killer. 

He abandoned that aspect of the character and the script to avoid accusations that he was cynically exploiting a real-life explosion of child molestation accusations throughout California. 

The remake made Freddy a child molester instead of a mere child killer because doing so is more self-consciously edgy but also because if a prolific child murderer made Springwood his base of operations, a single Google search would give everything away. 

Exploitative garbage like this rancid retread doesn’t have the substance or gravity to deal with an issue like child molestation. Making Freddy an unapologetic kiddy diddler is in unconscionable taste. It makes an already dodgy endeavor even more misguided. 

The filmmakers cast Haley because they were impressed by his Oscar-nominated performance as a child molester in Little Children. Unfortunately, Haley is also the size of a little child. Let’s just say that there is a reason that Mickey Rooney didn’t get cast as vicious slashers with impressive body counts. It’s hard to be scared of someone you tower over.

Haley is three feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet. It’s not a positive development when the teens in your slasher movie could easily pick up the villain like a baby and plop him in a stroller and/or give him a piggyback ride. 

When it comes to finding a suitable replacement for Robert Englund, the remake came up short. 

Oh, but there’s more! To make the performance even wonkier, the filmmakers used computer trickery to make Haley’s voice sound deeper and more malevolent. The creeps behind this stinker similarly used CGI to make its villain’s burns look more realistic. 

First-time director Samuel Bayer, a music video and commercial veteran best known for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” wanted to return Freddy Krueger to his original form as a primal figure of darkness, not the razor-clawed and razor-witted wisecrack machine of the sequels. 

That would be an admirable goal in a better film. Here, however, it results in something dour and depressing but never even remotely scary. 

Rooney Mara stars as final girl Nancy, a role she hated so much that she nearly quit acting before David Fincher and The Social Network restored her faith in film. 

She’s a teenager whose dreams have been invaded by a burn victim with a gaudy sweater, a funky hat, and a penchant for bad-taste wisecracks. Bayer wants to de-campy, yet he still delivers a fair amount of zany zingers.

For example, when prey falls into a pool of blood, he quips, “How’s this for a wet dream?” 

Some of his one-liners are borrowed from previous entries in the series, which just makes everything feel even more derivative and unnecessary.

Shabbily conceived high school students are losing their lives after going to sleep and experiencing killer nightmares. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street doesn’t reveal its villain’s backstory until halfway through. The filmmakers recruited Haley because he breathed life and humanity into monsters like the child molester he played in Little Children or Rorschach in The Watchmen. 

We get glimpses of Freddy Krueger, the child molester with the unburned face, but that’s all we get. Krueger is not sympathetic in any way. He’s not scary, either. He’s just a grim shadow of an infinitely better performance from an infinitely better film. 

I didn’t expect A Nightmare on Elm Street to be good or essential, but I didn’t expect it to be completely worthless. I could not find a single redeeming facet to this ugly retread. Even Mara seems lost by a role that was iconic when Heather Langenkamp played it but thankless and bland in the 2010 desecration. 

The nice thing about A Nightmare on Elm Street is that even though it was the top-grossing film of the series, seemingly everyone involved realized that it was a terrible mistake that should not be repeated. 

Platinum Dunes, Michael Bay’s production company, stopped remaking classic slasher movies after this proved a commercial success and a critical failure. Haley signed on for sequels that thankfully will never be made, while a disillusioned and unhappy Bayer happily returned to the comparatively ethical and creatively fulfilling world of commercials and music videos.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was so badly received that a film designed to re-launch the franchise with a new lead actor in a familiar role became a one-off. It made money, but the buzz was so bad that Platinum Dunes chose to end the series in its infancy. 

That was the right move, but A Nightmare on Elm Street never should have been remade in the first place.