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A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara Directed by Samuel Bayer
I’m starting to think that music video directors aren’t really great directors of movies…for every Michael Gondry (who directed the brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…#3 on my “Best of the Decade List”) there is inevitably 3 or 4 Samuel Bayer’s apparently. This first time feature director totally whiffs on the Freddy reboot by being boring, predictable, and worst of all not funny.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is the retelling of the legendary Fred Krueger story. I actually had high hopes for this one (ok reasonably high) because of the (at least what I thought) great casting call of Jackie Earle Haley (from The Bad News Bears fame…too old?? Ok how about The Watchmen which I gave him high praise for his Rorschach role) as the creepy Freddy Kruegar. The movie is yet another yawn of a horror film that doesn’t take any notes from the only really good horror reboot of the last several years, Rob Zombies Halloween. Similar to the recent Friday the 13th remake (crap as well), Nightmare just doesn’t do anything with the story except polish up the cinematography and recast a bunch of good looking kids to play old fashioned roles…oh yeah it also wrote Freddy as snooze, instead of a charismatic, kind of funny, almost likable maniac. Rooney Mara is decent with the badly written role of Nancy, but isn’t really aloud to add much to the crappy story. I saw it is a total whiff of a reboot. They could’ve made Freddy more disturbing (a la Rob Zombie) or maybe more charismatic (they had a real good actor in Earle Haley to work with), instead they did neither as they (the crappy screenwriters) obviously just dreamed of dollar bills (as we know all horror movies are cheap to make and kids go and see them no matter what so they can make out) instead of having nightmares. Oh well I suppose if you are 16 and want to make out, you won’t miss much (because there isn’t much to miss in this 90 minute bore) with this film, for the rest of us, just go rent the old ones which are better…and keep in mind those weren’t that great either.
(The Shawshank Scale 1-10) Nothing worse than a boring Freddy with a dated and lazy script…I’ll be generous with a 4.5 on this one…giving it anymore than that would give me nightmares.
Food For Thought: Jackie Earle Haley tries to redeem himself in the film Louis, which is a silent film actually about Louis Armstrong…I think it is going to be done in two parts. You can also see him regularly on the Fox show Human Target, which I was watching but gave up on…its ok (Earle Haley is the best part of it). As for the one “sort of” bright spot Ronney Mara, she has The Social Network coming out later this year about the founders of Facebook…I can’t wait to twitter about it.
I want my money back!
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