A Nightmare on Elm Street: Sleeping sickness

A Nightmare on Elm Street offers a host of scenarios blurring the lines between reality and dream.

At one point, the newfangled Freddie Krueger, a molten mess, with a penchant for limp one-liners, taunts his next victim with the sentence, “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep!” It was a directive I was unable to follow, nodding off, as I did, several times during this infantile remake of the genre-defining horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Hollywood’s incestuous relationship with its past, the stock it places in remakes, the way its list of priorities reads, “large budgets and small ideas”, is only going to get worse with the terror of recession. Risk-averse studio executives must be the only people on earth who do more recycling than radical environmentalists. As such, it was inevitable that the insomnia-inducing Wes Craven slasher was going to find at the mercy of nervous executives eager to repackage it for a younger generation. The new version is an insult to a cine-goer’s intelligence, even if the intended cine-goer is American, young, dumb and raised on reality TV.

The premise, which is simple enough, is that Freddie Krueger, a mystery man in a striped sweater with blades bound to his hands, is able to enter dreams, thereby doing away with the pesky problem of existing, in turn, doing away with the pesky problem of being stoppable. His preferred targets are teenagers (and why not, who amongst us doesn’t enjoy watching high school-ers being eviscerated?), whose only defence is to stay awake. The film thereby offers a host of scenarios blurring the lines between reality and dream, throwing off the viewer and amping up the suspense. At least this was what Wes Craven did with his original. Watching it side by side with this one then, becomes a great exercise in observing just how terrible a director Samuel Bayer is.

This remake appears to have no coherent storyline, we don’t know why this man is after these teenagers, we aren’t even clear as to their relationships with each other. The director rushes from one murder to another, blithely indifferent to the fact that killing off characters whom the audience hasn’t been given time to relate to is a fairly pointless exercise. Would you squirm more if you saw a random blonde being sliced into ribbons, or if you saw one whose hopes and fears you could sympathise with? Yes, I thought as much.

As appalling is the way this version has picked and chosen as if from a buffet, some characters and sequences from the Craven original, and strung them together without narrative logic. Some memorable set pieces, the girl ripped apart and dragged across the ceiling, the girl falling asleep at school and following her friend walking down the corridor in a body bag, reappear here, slicker, more expensive but not even mildly scary, nor even entertaining. The original had people fighting off sleep, this one works better than a Valium.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 9^th, 2010.