A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) - 1 star

I'm getting really tired of bad remakes of good movies. The only reason to remake a movie is if you can improve upon it. Take a bad movie, fix what didn't work about it, and make a good movie. But the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street was a great movie and it holds up just fine, so there was no reason for this.

Jackie Earl Haley did a good job as a psycho killer, but he is no Freddy. Only Robert England can play Freddy. The rest of the cast kind of sucked. It's like Freddy meets the cast of The Hills or something. A bunch of pretty actors who can barely act. Of course, the screenwriters gave them nothing to do in the first place.

In the original Nightmare, Heather Langenkamp looked like the girl next door. She didn't look like a supermodel. And Wes Craven gave her, her parents, and her boyfriend enough screen time to create really good characters. Think about how much screen time Freddy actually had in the original. I bet it isn't more than 15 minutes total. The rest of the movie was spent with the other characters, you know, the ones that we don't want to die. The problem with the new Nightmare, as well as most horror movies nowadays, is that we don't get to know any of the characters enough to like them, or root for them. We are basically only rooting for them to die.

The new Nightmare gives a lot of screen time to Freddy. We also see his back story. In the original, we were told about it (through good dialogue and good acting), and it was very effective. But seeing how Freddy became what he is takes some of the mystique away from him. Just like learning how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, or seeing Boba Fett as a kid, too much back story can ruin a character.

This movie was worse than Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.