The key moment in A Nightmare on Elm Street occurs around the 40-minute mark, not long after Freddy Krueger's third victim meets his demise. It's really something, too: A gaggle of lights illuminate cell phone screens around you. Seats groan and bodies rise, silhouettes stalking toward the bathroom. The film's little-known interactive component has kicked in: A whole audience battles its urge to fall asleep.
That's about the most you can say about the remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic -- "classic," I guess, compared to this. The imperative to invent is obsolete in this one; you can almost picture some archetypal studio boss chomping on a cigar, telling rookie feature director Samuel Bayer, "Burned guy, razor glove, deep voice... 'Dja see the first one?" Then handing Bayer off to some fork-tongued assistant who would show him the way to producer Michael Bay's bungalow. Or maybe Bay himself is the cigar chomper in this equation, and Bayer is just hurled out on his ass on the Warners lot with a deadline and a duffle bag full of $30 million. Is that being generous? These guys don't even have the budget to license Google or Yahoo! as a search engine. (GigaBlast? Say whaaaa?) This bad boy is all Dell computers and half-obscured Red Bull cans and appalling "rahhhrrrr!!!" CGI and sparklers taped to the end of prop knives. You really can see the money on screen.
Not to make this a big "Your Nightmare's on welfare" joke or anything. Really, your Nightmare is on life support. Have you seen the first one? Teenagers? Bound by the same nightmare? Where Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund then, Jackie Earle Haley now) avenges his, um, history of child molestation with a murder spree? Forget it. Bottom line is to stay awake lest the disfigured, sweatered, fedora-ed killer track you down and terminate you in your nightmare. Die in your sleep, die in real life. That sort of thing.
Not to be facile about it, either. But I can't exaggerate how little Bayer and Co. even tried in their remake. A quasi-atmospheric intro features Kellan Lutz (spoiler alert) introducing steak knife to throat and downtrodden young waitress Nancy (Rooney Mara) flirting with Joaquin Phoenix in a Joy Division T-shirt (Kyle Gallner). They're half of a cluster of teens who went to the same preschool where handyman Krueger abused them all, and now, somehow, they're all having the same dream that plunges them into one of several fashionably lighted chambers where he can finish the job he started years earlier.
How many years earlier remains an open question (these actors all look like they're pushing 30, despite the presence of childhood photo archives dated 1997), but it's an unpleasant sign of our times that a mainstream horror film can actually get away with a teenage victim dressed up like a little girl while a leering, licking, caressing villain growls paeans to child rape before pledging to kill her. "You were always my favorite," Krueger says to the trembling young Nancy -- after throwing her around the room like the rag doll on which she likely once pointed out his gravest offenses. Nice. Nicer still is the vigilante justice of Krueger's origin story, culminating in the parents of the abused preschoolers torching the warehouse where he's taken refuge. This all unfolds in flashback as Joaquin-alike watches in a Speedo, literally pulled into a nightmare during swim practice.
It's not as though Bayer is totally without imagination, but years of music-video directing have withered his attention span to about three minutes -- the time it takes to mount a visually effective if generally unscary drugstore set piece, or to frame one of Nancy's preschool classmates in a vlog documenting his struggles to stay awake. The last installment of the videos -- when he nods off -- predictably doesn't go so well for the subject. But for the viewer, at least, it yields a more authentic sense of dread than any of the labored, portentous glam-horror in its orbit.
Had Nightmare on Elm Street simply strung a succession of these mishaps together in Final Destination or Saw style, it could have been a serviceable exercise in screen sadism. But the choice to pretend that there's a story here is worse than insulting to the audience, which outwardly demonstrated its incapacity to give a shit after a while. (And dear Michael Bay: I viewed it with the general public, not a room full of stuffy critics sharpening their own knives for your latest exercise, so shut up already.) It was boring. So, so, so boring. It doesn't even give Haley the courtesy of a bad-guy showcase; his face frozen and obscured behind burn prosthetics, he spends most of his time spitting distorted one-liners from the shadows, like some anonymous mob witness on an episode of Dateline NBC. It's boring and a waste.
Of course, in his devil's baritone Krueger does have the last word, so maybe the inevitable sequel will make it right. It can't hurt to be optimistic; it can only hurt to endure it.