'Nightmare on Elm Street' 2010 Review Roundup

by Jordan Yerman | April 30, 2010 at 09:56 am

459 views | 10 Recommendations | 0 comments

Nightmare on Elm Street Gets Mixed Reviews

The Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, starring Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, gets its general release on April 30. So far, the reviews are mixed, skewing towards negative. The film follows the story of the 1984 original, with a few modern-day updates, including explicitly stating that Freddy Krueger is a pedophile; this was only implied in the original.

Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman liked The new Freddy, both in terms of Jackie Earle Haley's performance and Freddy's less-comical appearance, though laments the fact that the remake is too much of a copy and not enough of a re-imagining.

In the new version, he's more of a rotting, glowering, basically dead-serious ghoul. Haley knows how to make his own toxic sullenness show through the makeup, and he gives Freddy a touch of gravitas.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle says that, no matter how good a remake or sequel is, the basic premise of Elm Street dooms it to mediocrity at best.

So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times took no joy in watching Nightmare on Elm Street, seeing it as another iteration in a series of films that are identical to one another:

I stared at "A Nightmare on Elm Street" with weary resignation. The movie consists of a series of teenagers who are introduced, haunted by nightmares and then slashed to death by Freddy. So what?

We saw Elm Street, and man it was def,
And everything seemed alright when we left
But when I got home and laid down to sleep
That began the nightmare, but on my street!

- DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Nightmare on My Street