The first five minutes of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” spank the just-released remake as if it were a pouty child who refuses to behave.
Writer/director Wes Craven knows a little something about what makes us squirm – suspense being at the top of a long list of qualities M.I.A. in the new “Nightmare.”
Craven’s original shocker isn’t a classic, but it outpaced its slasher contemporaries and gave us one of the genre’s most enduring monsters.
Seeing it today isn’t a revelation, but it does make one wonder why the minds behind the reboot didn’t study what made the original click.
The sweet-faced teens on Elm Street are having variations of the same creepy nightmare. A scarred freak with talons for fingernails and a muddy striped sweater wants to slash them to bits.
They quickly realize these dreams can kill, and one by one their friends are slaughtered by Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), the man of their nightmares.
Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) might be the only teen in town savvy enough to stop him, but no one above the age of 18 in town believes a bogeyman is to blame for the murders.
“A Nightmare on Elm Street” clicks on an elemental level, turning our dreams into something concrete – and deadly. But Craven doesn’t deliver much more than that chilling template.
The characters are interchangeable save for a few surface tics, and watching Johnny Depp’s screen debut hardly hints at the wonderful performances still to come.
Yet Craven understands the genre better than most, keeping Freddy lurking in the shadows so we’re never quite sure when he’ll appear. The writer/director harnesses a spare symphony of sound to unnerve us, from the screech of Freddy’s talons to the quiet hum of those killer dreams.
Craven’s handiwork hasn’t aged beyond the early ’80s hairstyles, but it still can’t shake free from its indifferent acting and a nonsensical ending that paves the way for a sequel.
Here’s guessing Craven had little idea what his imagination had unleashed at the time.
(Photo: Robert Englund concocted a screen villain for the ages in the 1984 chiller “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”)
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree that the original “Nightmare” should not be labeled a “classic,” (but may have that adjective added by hyperbolic writers over time) but I always appreciated its intelligence – sometimes 80s-era ironic – with regard to its content.
I never found similar acuity in other alleged “classics,” to include the original “Halloween.”
D.
I think the first Halloween is both raw and real – and that combination is still formidable when seen today. It’s superior, in my view, to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which remains a grisly treat but is a tad overrated.
And yes, we throw the word ‘claasic’ around far too loosely!