“Remember me?” This is one of the half-clever, trailer-ready catchphrases (“Let’s play tag: you’re it!,” “Fooled you!” and so on) uttered by Freddy Krueger in the newly rebooted “Nightmare on Elm Street.” But really who, apart from Freddy’s terrified and bewildered new victims, could have forgotten? This maniac, with his jaunty hat and striped sweater, his ravaged face and murderous bladed glove, has been a fixture of pop culture for more than a quarter century.
Celebrity takes its toll, though, and after the first “Nightmare” in 1984, as sequel followed sequel, Freddy, originally played by Robert Englund, became almost lovable in his familiarity, a figure of camp affection rather than mortal terror. But that first installment in the franchise, directed by Wes Craven and featuring a young and pretty Johnny Depp, was a canny and potent exercise in fright.
Concocted out of a sinister blend of primal terror, childhood memory and urban legend, Freddy represented something authentically scary: the unconscious brought to literal, murderous life. That his rampages singled out mostly privileged suburban teenagers — kids whose innocence and security is a collective national obsession — made them even more frightening.
To its credit, the remade “Nightmare on Elm Street,” directed by Samuel Bayer from a script by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, tries to recapture some of the grisly wit of the original. Freddy is played by Jackie Earle Haley, whose career has revived nicely thanks to his skill at playing creeps and maniacs. Freddy shows up in the dreams of a group of high school students who live in the leafy town of Springwood, and who don’t understand why the same creepy figure menaces them all in their dreams, leaving them afraid to fall asleep.
It has something to do with repressed memories of a trauma that befell them in preschool, but the deeper “Nightmare” delves into this sordid back story, the less haunting it becomes. Some of the early set pieces — the opening sequence in a diner, for example, or another that unfolds after one of the victims has dozed off in class — dispense their shocks inventively, but for the most part the movie traffics in overly familiar scare tactics, setting up predictable false alarms and telegraphing in advance just when Freddy will pop into the frame and utter one of his labored witticisms.
The filmmakers’ use of computer-generated effects doesn’t help much, and makes a few of the scenes that should be horrifying look silly. The cast — notably Rooney Mara and Kyle Gallner as Freddy’s longest-surviving prey — are reasonably adept at screaming, crying, looking sleepy and earnestly delivering expository information they glean from research on the Internet and at the local bookstore.
Much of what they uncover has to do with sleep deprivation, and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is sufficiently effective to keep you awake for the duration of its running time. It is unlikely to trouble your slumber afterward, though. This movie is an acceptable specimen of a currently popular genre, carefully trying to balance the sly humor and low-budget resourcefulness of earlier horror films with the bloodiness and digital showing-off currently in fashion. It’s moderately entertaining and instantly forgettable. Poor Freddy. I can’t help thinking he deserves better.
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