I finished the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but at what cost?
After this movie was brought into conversation during a club meeting, I realized I had seen every Michael and Jason movie, but this was the only Freddy vehicle I had yet to watch. Maybe sometimes you don't need to complete a franchise.
Off the bat, the movie goes too big, too soon. This is similar to 'Scanners' for me (except the opening scene of 'Scanners' is great), in that it goes too big, too soon, making the rest of the gore feel toned down. Freddy Krueger is one of the best slasher villains, and while much of that is due to Robert Englund, the motivation of somebody killing kids just because is startling. I'm glad they tried to do something different, but given the history and pop culture significance of Kreuger, the motivation they gave him feels out of place. I believe that the original was going to state that Freddy was a child molester, but Wes Craven turned away from it to avoid accusations of sensationalizing a ring of child molestations at a pre-school in California at the time of writing. I'm glad Craven made that decision, because when you try to make the dialogue of a child molester quirky, it becomes a tonal mess.
Something that makes these horror remakes hardly ever work is that they reintroduce a character that we already know. Even if you know about Freddy before watching the original, you are given a sense of mystery that keeps you interested. They never try to hide Freddy here, and the sense of mystery feels undercooked.
Otherwise, this is a fairly boring and standard fair horror film. Loud jumpscare cues? All of the place. The CGI is distractingly phony, the movie looks fairly hideous, the acting is weak, and the dream sequences are incredibly uncreative. The microsleep aspect was fun, but this movie gave me nothing.
