EXPECTATIONS: I grew up watching the original series of Elm Street films; surreal horror that got pretty silly and crazy but was always fun. Robert Englund played the role of Freddy Krueger with a great mix of nasty scary deep voice and maniacal black humour. Can Jackie Earle Haley pull it off?
REALITY: The whole time I was watching this remake I had this niggling feeling that something was missing. It ticked all the right boxes, the gore was pretty decent and the plot didn't deviate too drastically from the original; but something just wasn't working for me. I think this film was just too much of a box ticker and had no heart of its own.
Jackie Earle Haley is great casting as Freddy in flashbacks, a pedophile working at a school, but as postmortem Freddy Haley's face just with all the make up just makes him look completely inhuman, like some kind of alien, rather than a dead guy with a gross burned up face. It takes away any kind of human characteristics from the killer, and with it the scary part of Freddy also disappears.
The whole thing just felt like an expensive and pointless waste of time, but a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is in the works, so I guess it ticked the right boxes for its financiers: it made lots of money.
**
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