It Came From Netflix Streaming: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

It Came From Netflix Streaming.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Note:  This was actually watched on Comcast On Demand but you should be able to find it in any Redbox for a buck.

Elm Street is a reboot of Wes Craven’s original Elm Street from 1984.  It was produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, a company that seems bound and determined to reboot every horror movie you’ve ever seen. 

 I’m still patiently waiting for that gritty reboot of Ghoulies, where unconvincing puppets are replaced by unconvincing CGI.  

A reboot, in case you are wondering, is more or less a remake of something but the kids love that computer shit. 

 I’m semi-kidding.  A reboot is a restart of a film series that somehow lost its way and folks decide to start it over and take it back its roots.  Sounds nice, right?  A reboot is really just a remake of a movie that you liked where studios target a couple of markets.  The first is people who can’t be bothered to watch a movie that is older than they are but they may recognize the title.  The second are people who have seen the original and may want to go so they can bitch about it later.  Occasionally, a reboot works out well like with Star Trek.  Mostly it is just crap.  Crap in 3D these days.

Elm begins with a nod to everyone’s nightmare of getting terrible service in a greasy spoon late at night.  Lord only knows how many times I’ve had to wait for my chicken melt at Huddle House at 2 in the morning.  Throw in the fear of salmonella and finding long greasy hairs from the recently paroled short order cook and you have my life in the 90s and 00s.  Sleepy guy who is not the main sleepy guy falls back to sleep meets Freddy and appears to slit his own throat.  Greasy spoon knives can’t cut chicken fried steak but have little trouble with throats.

We get a funeral and a brief dream sequence where blond girl who isn’t Nancy has a vision of a little girl with four cuts on her dress.  I think it is supposed to be her but honestly couldn’t tell you for sure.  I’m slightly amused at how quickly these kids enter REM sleep.   Blond girl begins investigating some boxes with helpful dates on them or doesn’t.  It was all a dream.  Her mother conveniently skips town and her ex-boyfriend shows up push the plot forward.   She dies.  The ex is accused and he dies in jail.

We are left with Nancy and sad looking guy who begin investigating and nodding off pretty much in that order. 

 Their investigation leads them to realize that they are smack dab in the middle of Final Fantasy 8.  In that game, all of the party member went to a school as kids and had the main baddie as their teacher or something and conveniently forgot until the plot required them to remember.  It’s the same thing here except Ultimecia is the gardener and a pedophile.  

A brief word on our main characters.  In the original series, Krueger went from legitimately scary creation to hackneyed standup comic.  I always imagined him in his downtime hitting up the Chuckle Hut and wondering aloud what the deal with airplane food was.  In this movie they attempt to make him menacing but still give him lame jokey dialog.  Plus, I couldn’t help notice that he looks like a be-nosed Voldemort who tends to write Indiana Jones fan fiction and whose aunt sent him an ugly Christmas sweater.  He is played by Jackie Earle Hailey who brought a lot of menace to Rorschach and even played a pedophile to great effect in Little Children. 

  Nancy in the original was pretty much a teenaged girl who ends up in peril and has to overcome it.  Here she is Lanie from She’s All That.  She draws poorly, feels like an outcast and works in a restaurant.  The only thing missing is being asked to prom by Freddy Prinze, Jr.  Why does she need to work in a diner?  She and her mother live in what looks like a 500,000 dollar house in a really nice neighborhood.  I’d imagine her mother has a good job and could hook her up with an after school job in an office somewhere.  Finally, we have sad looking kid who is sad looking, I suspect, because he dad is Clancy Brown and he knows he’ll never be as awesome as the Kurgan.  He also has a crush on Nancy.   

So anyway, the investigation leads them to their old pre-school which is pretty out of the way and has a boiler room that could heat the water of a hotel or hospital.  They both fall asleep and get attacked by Freddy.  Nancy pulls him into the real world and slits his throat. She then sets him on fire because being set on fire was such a set back the last time.  Then we get the ending of a Phantasm movie as the sequel bait ending of this.

Elm makes the same sort of mistakes that the modern reboots tend to make:  giving the killer far more back story than is actually required.   They even try briefly to make him sympathetic when sad looking kid tells his dad that they murdered an innocent man.  Bear in mind that everything that Freddy has said up to that point has an “I have candy in my bitchin’ van” tone to it.  It tries to build tension with the “will they fall asleep?” contrivance. 

 Of course they are going to fucking fall asleep the entire movie is predicated by them falling asleep.  In the original, Craven built suspense by creating a specific mood and maintaining it.  Sure some of it was silly.  Ronee Blakely being yanked through that small window comes to mind.  Here, the writer and director are incapable of doing that so they go with lazy ass jump scares, the biggest crutch of modern horror.  Ultimately, they do the unthinkable.  They make Freddy boring.

Should you watch this?  No.  The original is still out there and pretty easy to lay hands on.