A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: One, two, Freddy's gonna bore you...

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
Starring Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner
Directed by Samuel Bayer
New Line Cinema
Review by Louis Fowler

I am not one of these critics that feels the immediate need to poo-poo remakes, reduxs or reimaginings. For the record, I tend to honestly like remakes; they excite and interest me. I want to see another artist's take on an established piece of pop culture history, especially in the genre film arena. You can go ahead and lament about the lack of “original ideas in Hollywood”, but, when Hollywood hands you lemons, you snort coke. And these remakes, love them or hate them, are pure uncut Colombian these days. The street value has gotta be in the millions.

Sometimes, you get better-than-the-original results, like in the cases of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN, Chuck Russell's THE BLOB, Neil LaBute's THE WICKER MAN or David Cronenberg's THE FLY. Not only were they bold, brave and ballsy variations, they were also inspired enough to deride audiences straight down the middle, creating the sweatiest factions of geekdom not seen since, well, whatever George Lucas did last week.

But, most times, the results are so lacklusterly bad that they inspire all the warring clans to come together and convene around the fire, passing the peace pipe and breeding a new generation of hatred and backlash that, like an wonderfully thick oceanic oil-spill, is a mess that will take years for the studios to clean up. See Roland Emmerich's GODZILLA, the CGI-nonsense that was the FOG and pretty much anything Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes touches.

That brings us to sheer indifference. While, yes, the “Dunes” (as the fans call them) did produce the remake of 1984's horror classic A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, they've gone ahead and done the absolute worst thing possible: they just gave up. It's not a good movie, it's not a bad movie, it's just...a movie. A generic, faceless, reprehensibly boring movie that has absolutely no purpose for it's existence other than to make a couple of bucks and, possibly, keep copyrights from expiring. No one cared about this movie whatsoever.

Honestly: how hard is it to screw up a Freddy Krueger movie? The makers of the original series have run the entire gamut of a cinematic Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief, twice over, and always maintained a fresh, appealing sense of fun to the whole thing, even if they weren't fully appreciated back then. There were no rules, no limits, no sense of having to pander to anyone. Not even the fans. With every entry, a new filmmaker with different tastes and ideas was brought in and they were allowed to run wild, with proudly varying results. In retrospect, it was an amazingly creative and philosophically freeing franchise.

But those days are long gone. Those days of wine and roses have been replaced by Red Bull and a stock portfolio. If you want to experiment, get an 8-millimeter camera and go fuck yourself, nerd. You don't belong in this game. Get on the assembly line, don't make waves and collect your gold watch. That's the way Hollywood produces most of these slick horror remakes. Businessmen wanting a return on investment, not fans, are the target demographic.

Assembly line. Yeah, that's the best way to describe A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. It's nowhere near as aggressively bad as Dunes' prior act of blasphemy, FRIDAY THE 13TH, but, instead, it just opts out and cops out to an even greater sin: laziness. Screenwriters Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer don't have total disdain for the material, they just don't care. And why should they? In this age of GOSSIP GIRL and TWILIGHT, these studios just bring in failed tween dramedy script-writers and give them a case of Monster energy drink and a stick of guyliner. The new ELM STREET feels like it was a recycled pilot for a CW project that was passed on and just had the words “Freddy Krueger” interchangeably replaced with the previous villain's name.

There's are no actual characters in this movie, just caricatures of how 40-year-olds think “cool” emo kids act. Everyone is interchangeably sullen, reacting with drama club pathos under the constantly flickering fluorescent lights, make-up girl on hand to make those cheekbones shallower and shallower. The two main “characters” are Quentin and Nancy, played by utterly charisma-less Kyle Gallner and Rooney...ugh...Mara.

Kyle Gallner is the rosebud-lipped mouth-rape baby offspring of Robert Pattinson, skin sickly-white and Joy Division shirt permanently in check, because, you know, he's a sensitive outsider. He skulks around, always on the verge of tears, threatening to burn a hole on the screen with a “no-one-gets-me” stammering intensity that gives fellow walking coagulation Jesse Eisenberg a run for his money.

And Nancy? Oh, Lord, sweet Nancy...what did they do to you?

Rooney...ugh...Mara's Nancy is no longer a strong, pretty, likable girl-next-door that you root for, but a raccoon-eyed sullen “artist” who sums up her own persona by saying, simply, “I don't fit in.” She's Rachael Leigh Cook in the first half-hour of SHE'S ALL THAT, with about half the life-threatening drama to make it all worthwhile. Rooney. Ugh.

Together on the screen...well, let's just say that the next time scientists discover a new black hole, I propose the name Gallner-Mara 2010-B. Their dialogue consists of entirely of finishing each other's
sentences:

“There's a man in my dreams with these...”

“...knives on his hand. I've seen him too!”

“That means we're both having the...”

“...same dream. But that's....”

“...impossible...I know!”

In-between all of this low-rent emoting, there are nightmares, of course. And, just so you know that you are in one and you don't have to waste precious time wallowing in suspense, every time a kid's eyelids shut, one second later, they are on the abandoned set of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, complete with rusty walls and dolls with burnt faces. But that makes sense: the thing was directed by Samuel Bayer, an affected “artist” who has directed the same video multiple times for imbeciles like the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and, yes, Nirvana. Did Jonas Akurlund have a prior commitment? Was Mark Pellington out of town and missed the phone call?

The one saving grace of NIGHTMARE? That would be Jackie Earle Haley. After such creepy turns in LITTLE CHILDREN and WATCHMEN, he's the sociopath du jour and does a great job in making Freddy scary again. Too bad that every time he opens his mouth he has to dribble out the words of Strick and Heisserer, who feed him jokey asides that would even have Robert Englund asking for massive rewrites. And that's the guy who directed 976-EVIL. He obviously doesn't know better.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is the cinematic equivalent of a hot summer afternoon's nap on a lumpy vinyl couch while flipping channels only to find that womens' golf is on. It's uncomfortable and boring and your sweaty thigh-skin will probably get a minor rash, but, hey, at least you caught a couple of sound Zs, right?

Welcome to nap-time, bitch.

NEW BIGFOOT PRINT ANTHOLOGY “MONDO SASQUATCH” CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS!

Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Skunkape. Whatever you call him, this cryptozoological American legend has entertained and befuddled us for generations. From grainy Zapruder-like film to family fare such as “Harry and the Hendersons”, the Bigfoot is an ingrained part of our culture. And, now, we're gonna tell the other side of his story...the further adventures of Bigfoot!

Conceived in a fever pitch this past Horrorhound Weekend, Louis Fowler, editor of DAMAGED 2.0 and Casey Criswell, editor of “Cinema Fromage”, are teaming up with Rod Lott at BOOKGASM for MONDO SASQUATCH: The Bigfoot Anthology, to be published under the new “BOOKGASM PRESENTS” banner. And, as with any anthology worth it's salt, we need quality writers wanting to tell their own version of the Sasquatch myth!

Think that you've got an unique story to tell? We want it! Anyone can do a typical Bigfoot-scares-teen-campers tale...we want something different. Stories can put the creature in anytime or anyplace or any situation, as long as it is entertaining! Think your story is too “B-movie”? Chances are we'll like it even better. Think your “take” is too insane? We want to read it!

Short story submissions need to be at least 1500 words, but feel free to go longer to tell the story that you need to. Additionally, flash fiction of at least 250 words will also be considered, but, please tell a story.

NO POETRY.

All submissions should be sent as a .doc file, in 12 point Times New Roman font. No crazy fonts, please. Number all pages and please include name, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address in the top left corner of the first page.

For work accepted, authors will receive a complimentary copy of the anthology in which their work appears.

We will be accepting submissions from now until AUGUST 15TH. Authors will be notified of acceptance shortly thereafter by email.

Send all submissions to damagedhearing@gmail.com with the subject “BIGFOOT SUBMISSION”.

Thanks, and we look forward to seeing your stuff!