Lookit... I'm not one to get all weepy and sentimental about the current wave of remakes doing the rounds. Remember when Peter Jackson was fat? Yeah, well they let Fat Jackson remake 'King Kong' (badly) so clearly nothing is sacred (but Fat Jackson is a film that I would so watch... Or maybe even write). Any film you hold dear is liable to come around on the 'Hollywood Remake Awesome-O'. It's only a matter of time before 'Jaws' or 'Short Circuit' or 'Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go To College' gets the CGI do over... Best to just get over it and treasure the memory of the original.
Think of it as being a Grandparent. You might love your kid dearly but hate your grandchild for being a lame, watered down version of the original... Could happen. If it does, just ignore them. You can still visit your kid, just do it when the grandchild is at school or swimming or whatever and pretend it doesn't exist.
Voila! Remake problem solved.
Which brings me to Nightmare On Elm Street.
Firstly, I've never been the biggest fan of the original series.
I know right... SAY WHAT?!
I dig 'em, don't get me wrong... I just don't think they're the most amazing thing to ever grace the face of the Earth. I like the premise, I like the character of Freddy Krueger and I think the work of the effects and prosthetics artists involved are tip top. But... Somehow the films never hung together in a way that left me satisfied in way that, say, 'Let The Right One In' or 'Martyrs' did... Hell, even 'C.H.U.D.' packed more bang for my VHS renting buck in 1984 (when you could rent anything you liked as a ten year old).
However, Nightmmare's 1 through 6 AND New Nightmare all sit dutifully on my DVD shelf and I love them as steadfast rainy day views and fine examples of a franchise gone mad... A nasty, sordid premise slowly evolving into some kind of Cirque De Soleil for the children of nice middle class folk who were too young to realise that they were the children of nice middle class folk who really just wanted to go and see Cirque De Soleil.
What is nice about the Nightmare series (as opposed to say, the Leprechaun series) is that a decent sized mythology and back story begins to develop around the character of Freddy. Sure, it also means pissing hell hounds and sub Argonauts stop motion skeletons but, amidst the Nancy this and Tina that, a character is evolved that becomes more than the sum total of his cinematic parts. Plus which, he has yet to go into space... So there's life in the old dog yet!
And there, dear reader, lies the problem for anyone contemplating a remake.
You see... We know.
We know what he is, what he did, what he wants to do, how he does it, how he got this way and how he'll end up being beaten.
We know.
So what do you do?
You can't make a film called 'Nightmare On Elm Street' and not have it be about Freddy (just ask the makers of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch... That shit does NOT fly!). You can't just start all over and change everything. You have to be faithful to the original but somehow find a way to fleece folks of their dollars with the promise of something new...
So what do you do?
You change the actor! The result? Didn't hate him. Robert Englund will always be Freddy in the same way that Connery will always be Bond. But you can't go on forever...
You change the makeup! The result? I liked it. It was pretty gross... Like finding a slug in your shoe or a dog skid on your bed. Not horrific exactly but enough to start your day off wrong. The original makeup is too much to do with Englund's physical face anyway... It would be a reminder of times past to try and mimic that.
You change the story! The result? Yeah, sure... If by changed you mean diluted it down and tried to pull a needless 'Here's your final girl but WAIT now she's dead and this OTHER girl is your final girl!' and then slapped on a Scooby Doo-esque jaunt to an old haunted house ending that smacks of screenwriters who've seen too many B-Grade J-Horror DVD's and not enough 80's Horror VHS madness.
Look, unless you're going to change the names of the characters then this attempt to wrong foot the audience isn't going to work. Nancy is one of THE most famous final girls in slasher history... Tina is the one that gets flung around the room and sliced. WE ALL KNOW BECAUSE WE'VE SEEN THE ORIGINAL! Plus which, the lead character switcheroo works a lot better if you pull it early on (as in the 1988 remake of 'The Blob') because it allows you time to actually develop your real lead enough that the audience, you know, gives a shit. Thirty minutes into an hour and a half long film is, as this movie demonstrates, nowhere near enough.
Also, why is Nancy now Laney Boggs from 'She's All That'? Bit of an aside, I know, but I found it really distracting as I was half expecting the shoehorned in Jump Rope Girls to start singing Sixpence Non The Richer songs... Well, the one Sixpence Non The Richer song that anyone knows anyway. Which makes sense because it's the one from 'She's All That'.
So, having seen the original, we've also seen ALL OF THE GOOD BITS FROM THIS ONE! Do something fresh with it if you're going to do it at all... Even Fat Jackson threw in some new sequences and ideas into his King Kong... They may have been shit but at least the man tried for the love of God! Actually, there were a couple of interesting morsels thrown in... The notion that Freddy was innocent was a good curve ball. Hell, if I'd been burned alive for something I didn't do then I'd very likely come back as a dream demon and smash shit up too. I hope to die peacefully having lived a good, honest life and I STILL want to come back and smash shit up, so that's a new take on the character that would have worked for me. Actually, that's about the only new thing I liked (apart from the very snazzy lenticular cover of the Blu Ray... But I'm easy to please like that). The good bits were rehashed from the 1984 original and the 'new' ideas involved lots of swearing, some CGI blood splatter, lots of randomly googled facts about sleep deprivation that allowed the writers to have Freddy pop up when people were essentially awake and an ending that took everyone away from Elm Street to have a show down in a basement somewhere else... But that doesn't matter as it was clearly the BASEMENT OF A MADMAN! You could tell because it had a workbench and lots of drawings taped to the wall. They were black and white and Tim Burtony and clearly the DRAWINGS OF A MADMAN!
And the greatest crime of all? No John Saxon!
I don't really know what else to say...
It was a mess that took the very simple idea of the first Nightmare and mixed in a little too much of the mythology from the subsequent films and some half baked, not very clever story ideas that belonged in someone's shot on DV movie that they made after having seen too many Christopher Nolan films. It wasn't a decent remake or a smart reinvention of a cinema icon... It was a run of the mill horror film trading on the Krueger name, the cinematic Gwyneth Paltrow to Craven's orginal Blythe Danner. It is, in short, a film that could have done with one clear idea at the helm and a few less maniacs for fathers.
Suffice to say, if I were Wes Craven and this was my grandchild, I'd certainly phone ahead to make sure it was at Summer Camp before taking a break from writing 'Fat Jackson' to go and visit my son.
