Director: Samuel Bayer
Cast: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy
Have I Seen It Before: Here’s a funny one. There were a couple of years there where I’d buy practically anything at the right price off the Apple Movie Store. It’s why I have access to every Friday the 13th movie, even though I kind of hate them. All of them. Such was the case with the various adventures of Mr. Krueger. Some I liked. Some I didn’t think much of.
Then came the remake. For some reason, the film was perpetually out of sync. I even tried to complain to Apple Customer Service, but the AI platform that responded didn’t seem to grasp that something could be wrong with their tech. Between my Playstation 3 flat-out refusing to play my DVD of Halloween II (2009), or Disney+ steadfastly refusing to remember where I was in the process of watching Kraven the Hunter (2024), I’ve never felt more protected by the technology of today.
Did I Like It: That last sentence pretty much gave it away. I don’t even particularly love the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). I’m more of a Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) kind of guy. So, I’m not coming to this from the position of a purists. There could be a remake that might work, and still manage to draw the ire of those purists. Make it about the parents of Springwood who are positively shark-eyed about their kids making good on their failures and keeping them awake for as long as possible to study. There. That’s a movie.
Aside from the exact same amount of screen time to uppers as the original, there’s not much new explored here. In fact, it almost seems dutiful at putting the exact same material in the same ratios as the original. Jan de Bont, eat your heart out. The only new material explored is a twenty-minute stretch (subsequently abandoned) where the film considers the possibility that Freddy (Haley, content to get a check, and nowhere near as fun as Robert Englund at his worst) might not only be mis-understood, but is in fact the only character in the film who spent any period of their life doing nothing wrong.