A Nightmare On Elm Street remake

Well, the wife and I saw the Nightmare remake tonight, and what did I think about it? We raved about it all the way home. I loved it. Did it have a couple problems here and there? Yes, absolutely. But I was not expecting the level of crap being shoveled upon this film by not only professional reviews, but by bloggers within the horror fan community.



Granted, I have read a couple reviews that seem to like it almost as much as I did, but for the most part, either people hate it, or refuse to see it because they are dead set against it. Really? Come on, seriously?!?!



With as much crap as we had to endure throughout the last couple Nightmare films (not including New Nightmare) I can't believe ANYONE would have a problem either with this film being made, or with what the end results turned out to be. There is nothing that was either implied in interviews or trailers, nor actually produced in the new film that was even remotely as bad as what was done in Nightmare 5 and Freddy's Dead. Don't believe me? How about the power glove sequence?





I looked on Rotten Tomatoes and here is what I found out: currently the Nightmare remake is sitting at 15% on the tomatometer. Freddy's Dead is at 21% and Nightmare 5 is at 30%. Now I understand that all 3 of those figures means that all 3 are "rotten" based on the criteria of the site. BUT, numbers don't lie. It tells me that more people would rather see something like THIS in a Freddy movie:



Did everyone on the planet go batshit crazy and forget the possibilities of this franchise? Does everyone actually want Freddy Kreuger to be a Henny Youngman wannabe who constantly spouts bad pop culture reference jokes? By the end of the series, the character was so over saturated and so steeped in mediocrity that nobody was the least bit frightened by him. In fact we all rooted for him. I for one like my monsters to be monstrous I want my villains to be evil without any hope of sympathy from the audience, and finally I got that version of Freddy Kreuger for probably the first time since Nightmare 2.

There have been great remakes that have come out in recent years, specifically the Dawn Of The Dead, Texas Chainsaw was quite decent, and though I haven't seen it yet, I have heard very great things about Last House On The Left. People act like these remakes replace the original films. Almost as if every single print and cassette and DVD in the world is torched in a bonfire never to be seen again. Which is of course ridiculous. If you prefer the originals fine, go watch them all you want. If I had to make a choice between getting a sequal to a film series that already ended which would force me to endure continuity to some truly awful films, and getting a fresh start with hopes of making the franchise what it should have been in the first place, well, do the math people.

If movies like this end up not doing well, then we will be right back to having nothing but PG-13 thrillers and J-horror pablum spoon fed to us by the shovelfull in all of our multiplexes. You remember, just like everyone was bitching about a few years ago.

Or would you rather have something like this: