A Nightmare on Elm Street Review (2010) Worth Watching?

It's about a group of friends who dig into Freddy's past to figure out why their parents torched him.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was directed by Samuel Bayer and stars Jackie Earle Haley (from The Dark Tower and RoboCop), Kyle Gallner (from Ghosts Of War and The Cleanse) and Katie Cassidy (from Wolves At The Door and When A Stranger Calls).

Never Sleep Again.

This is the divisive remake of the original Nightmare on Elm Street from 1984. Some love it, some hate it. Not only is it a remake of an iconic horror classic but it was remade by Michael Bay, two things people love to hate.

I was personally gripped by the opening scene, it was darker and way more brutal than any of the previous Nightmares. Freddy not only looks different in this one (now played by a guy named Jackie Haley instead of Robert Englund) but he's not the wisecracking clown he became in later Nightmares. This new Freddy doesn't play cat and mouse, he cuts straight to the murder.

The movie starts at the funeral of a murdered friend where one of our Elm Street kids, Kris, has a vision of herself as a little girl being pulled into an open grave by Freddy. She then finds a photo of herself as a kid playing with her dead friend, which she finds odd since she didn't meet the guy until they were in highschool. This all triggers her curiosity and she starts to dig into the past of herself and her friends, uncovering a lot of dirt along the way.

The first half of the movie follows the general storyline of the original, just with re-imagined scenes. The second half goes off in a creative new direction that really drills home Freddy's gruesome past.

So far so good, but then come the jump scares. This movie throws them at you left and right. Sometimes they work, but most of the time they're just obnoxious. I think they're the only thing that cheapens an otherwise super dark and grungy horror.

I liked this remake overall, but as its own movie. It doesn't stand up well against the franchise itself. It doesn't feel like A Nightmare on Elm Street at all. One cool thing about it is the story has more twists than the original. It's one of only a few remakes I can think of that changes the story enough to where talking too much about it could venture into spoiler territory.