After finishing the movie, I took some time to watch various scenes from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. What's interesting about Craven's version is, for the most part, the scares are telegraphed fairly well in advance. By this, I mean that while something scary might happen, generally it comes out of some sort of lead-up. For example, take the death scene of Nancy's blonde friend from the start of the movie. The earliest sense something is really wrong is when you see the garbage can lid roll from the fence and hit the ground. There's a good two seconds of the lid rolling before it hits the ground. Only then do we see Freddy, and not in some quick-cut closeup, but in the distance, a shadowy vision. Of course, there are sudden jump scares (such as when Nancy runs into the Freddy hall-monitor), but for the most part, scares are delivered by the impact of the images, not simply by impact.
Guess what I'm trying to say about the remake! Every single goddamned scare in the remake is some sort of lameass "ooooo things are sort of creepy when is the spooking happening huh huh huh NOWWWW BOOOOOOO VOLUME SO LOUD GONNA PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS." If you're the kind of idiot that freaks out during "scary" video games (truth Amnesia is fucking garbage) and want some more of dat fear factor, then by all means rent this movie because there is not a single five-minutes scene without something like Freddy jumping out of a pipe or a little girl getting a monster face happening. For gentle viewers that need something more than loud sounds to scare them, prepare to, at best, be gently amused as the movie does its best to imitate your high school's haunted house. Nothing, of course, is going to stick with you. I'm not even 24 hours from when I finished the film, and already all the scenes are sort of awkwardly merging and fading together, one after the other, with nothing valuable to remember a week from now aside from "god how do you manage to not include one affecting scene even 976-EVIL II managed that."
The plot is sort of the worst of both worlds as far as remakes are concerned, somehow both mechanically reproducing scenes from the original and adding unnecessary, stupid as fuck complications to the plot. The first two-thirds of the film are basically the same as the original, save for the previously mentioned jump scares being fucking everywhere, and that Nancy's boyfriend is now a fat ugly Robert Patterson. It was about at this point I said, "god, can they not do anything original in this movie aside from adding dream scares going no where?"
My girlfriend murmured, still watching the movie, "so you wish for them to alter the plot?"
"Sure, I mean it can't be any worse than what I'm already seeing."
"GRANTED"
"FUCK YOU WISHMASTER"
The film suddenly swerves into new territory at the last third of the film, and boy is it a total mess. It is now revealed (spoilers I guess) that the remake wasn't happy with Freddy pre-demon biography being "creepy dude who did bad stuff to children." No, in keeping with the Bay philosophy of leaving nothing to the imagination aside from the full extent of your slackjawed stupidity, it is agonizingly demonstrated that Freddy was in fact a total baby rapist. The remake tries to trick you by implying at first that hey maybe Freddy was just an innocent victim of childhood overimagination but I can't imagine someone thinking there was a possibility of gray morality in a shitty horror remake, so that's given up like fifteen minutes after.
Of course after the interminable backstory parade the film can't come up with a cleverer way of dispatching Freddy than the "okay I will bring him out of the dream with the power of HUGZ" idea (which was by far the weakest concept in the entire original film), except now Fat Ugly James Patterson remains alive instead of being eaten by his bed. I don't even know why they kept him alive because he is awful, except probably they couldn't figure out a way to make a blood puking mattress into a cheap scare. Then ending jump scare because fuck this pissy earth.
Ultimately, I just want to talk about what happened with Freddy.
I don't really mind the new design. After all, the iconic Freddy is substantially different from the original film's version, which was almost never seen in full light (presumably because the make up was bad, or Craven's reaction to not being able to make Krueger into a skull monster as he originally planned. The voice, while hokey in its modulated deepness compared to Robert Englund, isn't bad. The problem is that the remake apparently couldn't decide between the original, dread-filled Krueger and the later sequel's wacky, joking spouting Krueger, and thus decided that what was needed was a jerk Freddy who talks as much as the later iterations, but doesn't make jokes but just acts all weird and rapey. In other words, they decided the best version of Freddy was the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 version.
Oh yes, the rapey. So, from a strict perspective, I guess this isn't that surprising. After all, Freddy has always been more lascivious than most other horror icons, "I'm your boyfriend now" and all that. And yeah, Craven apparently wanted to make Freddy a child molester before cooler, more intelligent heads prevailed. That doesn't change the fact that, like pretty much anything else in this movie, making Freddy into a rapist ruins everything good about the film series. It also doesn't help that the only real ramifications of this change is now we have to have a scene where the main character sees pictures of herself being abused and then get changed into a weird fetish dress (which afterwards I realized was the same one used in Freddy's Dead so I don't even know anymore). It's just some sort of rat dropping on top that in this hokey, ineptly filmed disaster we also have to get the feeling that the director thought he could even broach real life serious topics.
were it not that I have bad horror...
No comments:
Post a Comment