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The infamous glove of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) returns in the horror remake of “Nightmare on Elm Street.” |
One, two
Freddy’s after you!
Three, four
What a bore
Five, six
Same old tricks
Seven, eight
Don’t bring a date
Nine, Ten
Not this, again!
Samuel Bayer’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” squanders a grand opportunity to reinvent and update Wes Craven’s 1984 horror mini-classic about a diabolical pizza-faced boogeyman who kills tired teenagers while they dream.
Instead of a bold re-imagining – such as Zack Snyder’s kick-butt remake of George Romero’s classic zombie sequel “Dawn of the Dead” – this “Nightmare” merely recycles the original work right down to its bloody, showcase killing of a screaming teenage girl gutted by razor-happy Freddy Krueger while pinned upside down to her bedroom ceiling.
Granted, Bayer’s “Nightmare” doesn’t stoop to a simple-minded shot-for-shot remake (as Gus Van Sant did for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho”), but his uninspired retread offers nothing new.
The most disappointing aspect of “Nightmare” has got to be the great Jackie Earle Haley’s generic interpretation of Freddy, the horror icon created by Robert Englund. (Read more…)
Join Dann Gire (film critic of Chicago’s suburban newspaper THE DAILY HERALD, as well as the founder and president of the Chicago Film Critics Association, and adjunct instructor at Aurora and Harper Colleges in Illinois) and Raymond Benson (novelist, author of 20 books, former official author of James Bond books, film historian, and Film History instructor at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) as they examine how Hollywood handled the touchy issue of sex up to the creation of the Ratings Administration. Included are clips from such films as “The Kiss,” “It Happened One Night,” “Tarzan and His Mate,” “The Outlaw” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” See 
