The new Nightmare is much better than I expected despite a few flaws. First with the bad. The new Freddy make-up is awful and seems to change during the course of the film. Sometimes Freddy resembles the killer in Popcorn, other times he looks a lot like the rich villain in Hannibal. Jackie Earle Haley is not Robert Englund and it’s hard watching someone other than Englund play the character. Nancy and her boyfriend are a couple of emo’s instead of fresh faced kids-next-door types. The film is full of jump scares instead of building up to a scare.
Okay, now for the positive bits. Jackie Earle Haley as human Freddy is amazingly creepy and sleazy. Freddy is scary again, not a two-bit Henny Youngman impersonator with a bad complextion. The glove is pretty bad-ass, the theater went ape-shit when it made its first appearance. The story never slows to a bloody crawl like the TCM and F13th remakes.
I had an amazing experience watching this in a theater full of teens who weren’t even alive when the original Nightmare hit the big screen. Listening to their screams and howls reminded me what it was like to see a slasher movie back in the 1980s. The theater erupted in cheers and applause at the end. I haven’t seen this kind of response to a horror film since Scream 2. Maybe my views would be different if I’d rented the dvd instead of seeing it in a theater, but I found the Nightmare remake to be entertaining and by far the best slasher remake Platinum Dunes has made.
Um, sorry if this mini review is rambling but I’m trying to leave out plot details on purpose. Plus, I’m still buzzing off the heavy dose of nostalgia.
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