Teens all across Elm Street are dying mysteriously in their sleep. It can only mean one thing… Freddy’s here. Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley) is back to terrorize his former victims, this time in their dreams. These nightmares that Freddy creates then manifest themselves in the real world and therefore end up killing the children having these horrific dreams.
After Dean (Kellan Lutz) dies under some more than odd circumstances the gore fest that is a Freddy Krueger reboot is on. I found this movie more than just a waste of my time but really just filled with story and plot points that made absolutely no sense. Now some may question the level of criticism that I’m about to heap on this reboot of a more or less B level horror movie, but if this is supposed to entertain me then consider me thoroughly disappointed in not only the end product but the overall effort. Thinking back I’m left to wonder if the producer thought that casting Jackie Earle Haley, someone who has been typecasted in the last few years as generally a creepy guy, in the role of Freddy Krueger was all he needed to do and all the other pieces would just fall into place.
The story of this film is so disjointed that at times you forget what actually pertains to it. The writers string you along for almost forty-minutes without giving you any hint as to what the hell is going on other than taking you from kill to kill. It feels almost like the film would last another twenty-minutes just to kill off the only other teens left alive in the film and be over and done with it, but I’m sure at this point the producers slapped the writers and director in the back of the head and told them that they needed to fill a ninety-minute quota or something. I probably would’ve liked the movie more if they actually had just killed them all in an hour and shoved me out the door. Unfortunately I was forced to experience this mindless drivel which I imagine is a true fanboy’s re-imagining of the original.
What this movie does a lot of is killing. Creating the world of the dream that Freddy frightens his victims is something that at times looks so beautiful that you just want to stay there a minute longer each time seeing what’s going on there. However, due to the blood-lusting style nature of the genre and the character we never get to enjoy it as much as we want to. A few of the dreams did strike me as so interestingly conceived, especially a couple of times with how it transitioned from being the conscious world and the unconscious. One such point was when Kris (Katie Cassidy) was sitting at her desk at school and suddenly we see all the students just turn to ash only to realise she’s fallen asleep. Those moments were great to see, but not worth the other eighty plus minutes of personal snores I experiences watching the movie.
After around an hour we finally find out the story behind this claw wearing fright. When I mention how much I hate the writer’s need to create this sympathy for a character that we know we shouldn’t like please don’t be alarmed. I think the biggest problem that this movie suffers from is that it feels as though if you’ve never watched an Elm Street film before you will be completely lost. The story for this movie is so pieced together that I think that it could’ve been an editing issue. I feel like the director felt the need to focus in on all the violence and kill/dream sequences that he cut it all around the story that was supposed to be there. Then after a while he just lumped in a few key plot points that felt as if they weren’t even supposed to be there anymore.
This is a bad movie. It’s not worth your time or money. Besides a few cool looking dreams the movie is really worthless. I walked in not knowing what to expect since I’ve forgotten what the Freddy movies were really like back in the 80s, but now I’m glad I’ve forgotten and look forward very much to the day that I will have forgotten this one too.
IMDB says 5.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 14%
I say 1.5/10