A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 Review

If you go into watching this movie expecting to be scared like the original scared you 26 years ago, you will be severely disappointed. In all honesty I think if you have ever seen and enjoyed or were terrified of the original movie then just stay away from the new one because you will not be able to help but expect what was given to you in the original films. I know this starting to sound like a burial but it is not my intention of doing so. It is just this remake was misleading. I will write the synopsis of both the new Nightmare on Elm Street and the original Nightmare on Elm Street. I will then explain why if you have ever seen the original and loved it or were scared to death from it, this is not the movie for you.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010: "Five teenage friends living on one street all dream of a sinister man with a disfigured face, a frightening voice and a gardener's glove with knives for fingers. But when one among them dies, they soon realize that what happens in their dreams happens for real and the only way to stay alive is to stay awake. Buried in their past is a debt that has just come due. To save themselves, they must plunge into the mind of the most twisted nightmare of all: Freddy Krueger. Jackie Earle Haley plays the legendary evildoer in this contemporary REIMAGINING of the seminal horror classic." There is a reason why I bolded and enlarged the word Reimagining.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984: "Years after being burned alive by a mob of angry parents, child murderer Freddy Krueger returns to haunt the dreams -- and reality -- of local teenagers in Wes Craven's spine-chilling slasher classic. As the town's teens begin dropping like flies, Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp, in his big-screen debut), devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world."

Now before my comparisons lets get some definitions. Lets start with the word Re Imagining. According to Merriam-Webster.com: Definition of REIMAGINE: to imagine again or anew; especially : to form a new conception of: re-create. Now lets move onto the word Remake: A new version of something; A new, especially updated, version of a film, video game, etc; To make again; To make an enhanced remake of (a computer or video game). Finally I want to get the definition of the word seminal which was used to describe the original movie in the synopsis for the new movie. According to Merriam-Webster.com: Definition of SEMINAL: 1: of, relating to, or consisting of seed or semen 2: containing or contributing the seeds of later development : creative, original.

Okay so according to those definitions the only comparison to the original film should have been Freddy Krueger and the title A Nightmare on Elm Street, or even just the title of the film. However what we got was the same title, two of the same characters and just about every death scene being a carbon copy of the original. Oh yeah and even though it is not in the 2010's synopsis and I must warn those who have not seen the movie yet that this could be considered a spoiler, the new director has changed Freddy Krueger from a Child Murder into a Child Molester. The new mask is a thousand times less creepy than the original and the new guy's voice makes me think of Christian Bale's Batman voice. I am a huge fan of both Halloween series. To me the originals and Rob Zombie's are what an original franchise and re-make or re-imagined franchise are supposed to be. I am a wuss when it comes to scary movies and yet here I am on my second movie review of a scary movie proclaiming from my soap box that this movie did not scare me. When I was a kid I could not watch the original Nightmare on Elm Street before Noon without staying up all night. I slept like a baby after watching the new one at 8pm.

Once again people went to see a scary movie and instead of scares they got startles. The horror movie genre is dead. When we go to see a horror movie we get treated to a bunch of gore or we get a mixture of gore and suspenseful music and something pops up seemingly out of nowhere. I think most people can recover from being startled after a few minutes, however if a person truly gets scared they will fall a sleep with the television on tuned into Cartoon Network.