With the release of Platinum Dunes' A Nightmare on Elm Street all of the horror icons of my youth have been brought kicking and screaming into modern day. Yet another remake, excuse me "re-imagining", of a beloved genre classic, there's so much wrong with this Elm Street that it's no wonder original writer-director Wes Craven has seemed to distance himself from this whereas he was quite involved with the Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left reduxes. In the hands of long-time music video director Samuel Bayer this is an insult to fans and relies way too much on cheap jump scares while telegraphing every wannabe suspenseful moment.

The basics behind the story of Freddy Krueger are here in Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer's script but they've taken away pretty much all the character development that Craven offered up in the original making the true impact of what happens to our teenage protagonists secondary to an overuse of CG effects, a bunch of complete hokum about Freddy's back story involving a preschool and new takes on set pieces from Craven's film, that still stand as memorable and tense over twenty-years later, stripped of everything that worked and made me more angry than anything - this is especially true during re-do's of the bloody wall drag death of Amanda Wyss' Tina in the original and the "body bag" moment that freaked the Hell out of me when I was a young tyke.

The film opens on a Springfield diner where Dean (Kellan Lutz) is trying his damnedest to stay awake. He's been plagued by nightmares of a dirty sweatered, finger-knife glove wearing psycho with a burnt visage and is about to learn that dreams and reality can easily collide when he ends up being bloodily killed in front of his new girlfriend Kris (Katie Cassidy).

Soon after his funeral, Kris and a small group of her friends, including the eccentric, arty Nancy (Rooney Mara), find that they've all been sharing the same dreams involving the malicious Freddy and soon find all their efforts to stay awake as long as humanly possible are for naught as Freddy is gunning to kill them all of in their dreams as apparent revenge for something that happened when they were small children - and was covered up by their parents.

If you know the basics of A Nightmare on Elm Street then you'll be well aware that Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) was once an accused child molester who became a victim of mob justice at the hands of his victim's parents and was burnt to a crisp. But what they've done with the structure Craven built-up so well in his 1984 film only manages to muddle things more as our characters spend most of the movie popping in an out of the dream state seemingly at random while they try and figure out just why they've become targets of this nocturnal maniac. What's truly unfortunate is when the finale rolls around, after many of those fake scares and poor twists on Craven's dream sequences, the script has tried so hard to build up a bogus red herring about Krueger's past that it just comes across as ridiculous. Then there's the shock ending which again lays waste of Nancy's mother and gives the flick its bloodiest moment.

It's hard for me to really fault Haley (Watchmen, Bad News Bears) taking over for Robert Englund in the role of Freddy. There's absolutely no way he could ever bring justice to the portrayal Englund provided over the years but he's also hamstrung by having to deliver some bad dialogue peppered with lame one-liners (they even bring back the "How's this for a wet dream?" line from the fourth entry) and I really despised the new look of Freddy which made him look like some weird, flat-nosed alien. They've also cranked up the creepy pedophilia of the character, which I suppose is better than him being a complete cartoon like the later sequels, but it's taken a bit too far.

The rest of the cast, however, doesn't fare that well. Mara also has the big task of taking over for Heather Langenkamp as Nancy and really doesn't do anything with it but that might be because the character is so diluted in the first half of the film. They also manage to waste Clancy Brown (one of my favourite character actors) in a role intended to be similar to John Saxon's in the original.

I'm not alone with my hatred of 2010's version of A Nightmare on Elm Street. If you have any sense of affection for the series, or even if you're a horror fan in general, you need to stay far, far away from this awful piece of shit - just make sure you don't insult director Samuel Bayer's debut film too much in public or he might tell you, like he recently did to all genre fans in a Fangoria interview, to "Get a life". Eff you, Bayer, you hack. (Chris Hartley, 5/11/10)

Directed By: Samuel Bayer.
Written By: Wesley Strick, Eric Heisserer.

Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy.