The story is unchanged: Freddy Krueger, the guilty secret of Springwood, Ohios parents, menaces their teenaged childrens sleep: If you die in your dreams, you die for real, One, two, Freddys coming for you, and so on. This Nightmares director, Samuel Bayer, was vouched for by the films producer, Michael Bay (giggle). Its Bayers feature debut, after a music-video career very tied in with '90s alt-rockbut dont take my word for it. Just look at Kruegers lair, an improbably cavernous crawlspace where you can pretty easily imagine Bush rocking out.
Its first half-hour devoid of the most basic sense of timing, showmanship, and atmosphere, Nightmare gets a grip after a couple of bad dreams winnow the focus down to two nice-looking goth-y kids (Rooney Mara and Kyle Gallner). Established as different by funky tights and a Joy Division T-shirt, respectively, the teen outcasts speed around the burbs by night, trying to find out what exactly their parents are hiding while shooting adrenaline and self-mutilating to stay awake.
The job of making Freddy Krueger plausibly frightening again goes to Jackie Earle Haleyfantastic in his small part in Shutter Island. No small task, this, after we've seen Robert Englunds Gloved One battered by multiple heroines, Jason Voorhees, and Dokken over the course of eight films, until the scariest thing about this undead Bruce Vilanch was his dreadful one-liners. Well, the makeover is goodthe stringy melted-mozzarella complexion is replaced by a head thats a singed, featureless knot of meat, with charcoal nubs for ears and a nose boiled away to a socket. Haleys Krueger is scrawny and gerbil-faced, and thats even with his skin still on. (Theres an enjoyable flashback to Freddys vigilante lynching by suburban parentsincluding Clancy Brown!which does little to hide how silly Nightmares premise is.)
With a greater budget and ostensibly superior technology, Bayer & Co. prove mostly content to record cover versions of Cravens analog nightmares. All your favorites are here, including wallpaper Freddy, the dancing-on-the-ceiling number, the slithering body bag in the school halls with its crimson slug trail, the periscope-glove-in-the-tubas well as slight variants on the melting staircase and gore geyser. Notable updates include CGI blood spurts, which look like showers of jellybeans, and characters using Internet search engines. Detectable in all of this is a lack of ambition. This franchise relaunch may have been inevitable, but thats no excuse for it to feel automatic.