A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Post-Release - Page 2

The Real problem with this film?

No Will Smith

Wanted to see it, as I am a pretty big Freddy fan, but all the buzz kind of soured that.

I don't know, maybe I'll catch it after the Pens game tomorrow.

Do they show Haley making the glove at any point in the remake? Englund making the glove at the beginning of the original while making those content grunts is one of the best scenes in the entire series.

You don't see him make the glove. I'm guessing they didn't want to bring any more attention to the fact that the glove really makes no sense in the context of his new rapey back story.

Not that this needs any more piling on (yes it does) but any excuse to link to a Beaks evisceration: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/44873

So...the only real difference in backstory is that this Freddy simply raped the shit out of kids whereas the original Freddy raped AND murdered them?

And yet a large chunk of people value his opinion which is quite sad.

I'll be honest....I liked it. It's hugely flawed, but by the end it's still standing thanks solely to the work of one Jackie Earl Hayley. Much like the wretched Friday The 13th reboot, it doesn't so much as climax as peter out at the end, but the pre-end credits stinger leave you with a smile on your face. Unlike Ft13th, this at least FELT like a Freddy movie, and two or three of the jump scares actually got me. It's definitely been in the wringer in the editing room, and the "Did he or didn't he?" aspect that one was of the few well done things in the draft I read gets totally screwed up, but cobbled together it's just enough for me to recommend a matinee or a rental. If the rest of the flick had been as good as the pre-title card sequence, it would be up there with the original and New Nightmare.

Sebastian, I'm really curious how your cut was, as the second half especially seems to be laden with rewrites and reshoots, especially the end. If you're a fan of the character, it's worth the price to see Hayley.

To compare it to Zombieween 1 & 2 is ridiculous, and this is coming from someone who desperately wanted to like both of those flicks. This is pretty average big studio horror claptrap - the Zombie Halloweens are nonsensical abortions that will live in horror franchise infamy.

Jeremy Smith liked it.

Nice little evisceration from Beaks.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/44873

He makes the most important point: whether you can forgive its faults or not, this film was made in contempt of its audience.

Just saw it. The audience was very receptive to all the jumps scares, and that's all the movie was. Endless hollow jump scares. Fortunately for me I hate Plat-Du and everything they do, so my expectations were pragmatically low. I was entertained enough for my $. Now I will go to sleep and wake up barely remembering the film.

Yes, Crazy Nancy and her dad. No one else sees Freddy kill Nancy's mom. You neglect to mention that Freddy's on fire at the point he attacks her, by the way. And that the film explicitly shows her mom as a charred corpse when she majestically sinks into the bed.

Having just watched the original in a theater last night, I completely agree with this.

Saw this at a midnite showing. I knew it was gonna suck, and sucked it did, but dare I say it, it was sorta...fun? Pointless, unmemorable, unimaginative, but fun, nonetheless. And I don't know how this is tracking, but the show I was at last nite was packed to the rafters, and likely sold out.

While Jackie Earle Haley did a commendable job with what he had to work with, the mask and makeup didn't live up to the original incarnation of Freddy. And his voice sounded more like a creepy old man/molester than some boogeyman in your dreams about to give you the scare of your life. Kinda deflated the tension in most of those dream sequences.

I'm just kind of curious, how was the print you saw? Newfangled? Last time I saw the original on the big screen, in the 90's, I think they dredged up the very first print struck.

Well, it was all I could really expect it to be I guess. That's not saying much. It's missing a lot of the character, imagination and charm of the original. These kids aren't real and they don't seem like real friends. They never laugh with each other or joke or smile for the most part, it's just doom and gloom from minute one. They're not real people they're horror movie characters. The soundtrack permeates every fucking scene making it seem like one nicely shot "horror film scene" after another... nothing ever feels "real" in a normal sense.

Nancy's mom isn't a drunk which is a terrible change. Nancy figures out she needs to pull Freddy out but really has no plan beyond that which means there is no build up to a big real world showdown like the original.

So these are the things that make the original great and the fact that they are missing really hurts this one. That said, the micro-naps and induced coma were a nice touch. The possibility that Freddy was innocent (while the flashbacks blew the fact that he wasn't) was nice. They handled the original story well while changing enough to not feel like a shot for shot remake. The kills were all you should expect from a Freddy movie unless you want to go The Dream Master route. I liked them just fine.

Overall, it was very much on par with the Friday the 13th remake which I enjoyed enough on it's own but came up short when compared to the past films. Save this one for Netflix I guess.

Oh yeah, it was pretty beat up. Sync issues, couple moments where I worried about the film breaking, scratchy sound. And weird enough, I feel like if it was too clean a print, something would've been lost.

The final scare the remake actually trumps the same gag in original in terms of fake-lookingness.

Is it possible to out-fake the visual of a mannequin being stuffed through a hole in a door? If so, I might have to see this movie just to witness that.

The CGI in this movie makes the original's FX look like documentary footage.

Ha, it wasn't even a mannequin. It was just a doll through a door of a dollhouse.

This was an awful, awful movie devoid of nearly any entertainment value. The first is one of the best slasher movies there is - this was a complete and utter waste of time and money.

Jackie Earle Hayley was fine, but he had almost nothing to do.

Surprised they didn't off the boyfriend actually. And that ending? Sweet baby Jesus, that was bad. Had to have been a reshoot.

What happens at the end? In the cut I saw they just got in an ambulance and drove away. It was the most boring end shot ever. Anything would have been an improvement.

It's a poorly done repeat of the original's ending only the mom gets pulled through a mirror screaming instead of the door hole, but only after he like punches through her face(?). It's really, really, really terrible.

that ending was...uh..whatever...


so one of the main theatres i go to is one of thoses theatres that serve food...booze..etc


a weird moment today...so after homeboy does what he does at the beginning and the opening title flash come up,,theres a dude in the theatre clapping his ass off...then he says thats how you start a movie...and no lie...less than 10 minutes later...he got up...and was talking to some of the servers in the back saying "this is shit....when does the j lo movie start?".....and he left....i was so dumbfounded and confused....


but yeah this sucked...

Hmmm. Ok. This is post credits, right?

Isn't this the end of PHANTASM?

Movie basically did nothing for me. It kind of failed from the jump in that it had the same uninteresting teenagers that plagued the Friday remake. That whole stretch of film from where the boyfriend dreams about Freddy's origin until they go to the pre-school just had me scratching my fucking head. The "did he or didn't he do it?" twist wasn't needed. I really felt bored with this film very early in. Maybe I've just become that cynical about this kind of filmmaking but I honestly wanted to just take a nap through it. The sound designers did a good job with the jump scares but that was about it. I feel like anybody who's watched more than twelve movies in their life could not possibly be impressed with this. And please, tell me, the scene where a character named Quentin stabs his girlfriend in the chest with a adrenaline shot, was coincidence? Please. Soembody?

Wow, so clever a scene!

Definitely the second worst Platinum Dunes offering so far, barely besting The Hitcher, only due to Jackie's performance.

Unrefined thoughts:

Best part of the movie bar none was the Asian dude's posthumously updated video blog. I will non-sarcastically say that Nancy's computer going into "sleep mode" was clever - now I want an installment where Freddy is able to come into the real world when our gadgets and appliances go into standby.

Agree with the sentiment that "micronaps" were unexploited. Seems like the only reason they even conceived it was to do the Pirates of the Caribbean visual of the dream world and real world being toggled between while Nancy was being attacked in the Kwik-E-Mart.

The lecture given to the kid about how "the brain keeps working for 7 minutes after the heart stops" or whatever is not something Freddy would ever say, I don't care what the take on his character.

Probably my least of favorite of, as Ebert points out, a series of 8.5 installments. It's not like it ruins the franchise or anything - it's long too late for that - but it didn't do anything interesting (in some cases after insincerely insinuating that it will) and retreaded the original way too much. My previous least favorite Nightmare was Dream Child, which also committed the sin of blandness, but at least that one had an OK concept and the part where he force feeds the chick her own intestines while saying "bone appétit, bitch." (And Freddy's Dead was simply a delight, I don't want to hear any arguments to the contrary.)

So, will this be like most Platinum Dunes movies? In six months' time people's memories will be replaced ("it wasn't that bad, i actually liked it")?

Maybe it's the trauma.

No mention of the Pulp Fiction reference at the climax? The character's name is Quentin for fucks sake.

What a piece of shit. Kevin Smith is off the hook for the worst movie of the year.

Um....

Did anyone else notice how much the two boring leads resembles the boring leads from Twilight? It was all I could think about after a while.

You can't even compare this to Cop Out. It was a Freddy movie, so I expected Freddy killing teenagers. Cop Out was a comedy, so I expected jokes and the urge to laugh. One delivered on its premise, one did not.

They both sucked, but I think I had zero expectations going into COP given Smith's decline. NOES was boring and terrible. I recall laughing at one, maybe two gags in COP OUT, whereas nothing in Nightmare interested me at all. Oh wait, that's not true, I wondered why swimmer boy had a micro-nap in pool regarding a flashback he wasn't present for.

Oh and good catch Swicegood (and uh, Crazy Jim), glad someone else was scratching their heads at the weird PF rip.

In fairness, I think that Freddy was giving Quentin that dream intentionally to show him what a great "injustice" he had suffered.

Hmm. So they ripped off Stir of Echoes too? Great.

I will say that judging from the crowd I saw it with, the effectiveness of jump-scares has not been diminished AT ALL. Seeing as though that's what 95% of the "scares" were.

Does anyone know what pull Bay has on these films at all other than his name? Or is this all Form/Fuller?

I don't know how involved he is with the creative side of things, but he does oversee it all. The dude was sitting right behind me at the test screening. It was unnerving.

About the only thing I enjoyed about this film was just how malevolent and cruel this new Freddy was. The best scene for me was when he killed the kid in jail, said something about how long the brain still functioned after the heart stopped pumping and then continued to torture the poor kid.

That was terrifying and I really wanted more of that. But they pussed out.

And why the fuck was the pre-school condemned? With all of Freddy's shit still in the basement? Or was it all just one big micronap?

I could have forgiven that if they had just thrown in a goddamn boiler room down there.

Full disclosure: I saw it (again) yesterday. Some friends wanted to see it and I wanted to see how it had changed since the test screening. It was improved, as hard as that may be to believe. The opening and climax were much much better than what I saw in October. (In the version I saw, Freddy is dressed like a monk at one point at the end, I shit you not. It made no sense.) The scene where Freddy has Nancy on the bed in her little girl dress was actually kinda creepy and effective in a pervy way. I liked the idea that Nancy was going to be stuck with him in a dream forever.

Still it was bad, but I'll give them credit, it had been improved.

EDIT: And why did Nancy just burn Freddy again? That didn't exactly work the first time.

I just enjoyed how her immediate reaction to having corporeal proof of the killer boogieman who was stalking her dreams was to incinerate it.

My friend made a funny comment about how they should have just left Freddy in the real world as this little burned up dude with no powers and turned him in to the police. That would have been a far worse fate.

Haha, and he guest stars on Law and Order.


DUN DUN!

...

Well...it was funnier than Cop Out...

I just don't find the new version scary at all...

In the flashback scenes, did they ever show Freddy with the hat? I don't remember them ever showing it.

And there you see the difference between Wes Craven and the Platinum Dunes hacks.

It's not like realistic burn make-up was impossible to do in '84. Savini did a horrific job on Cropsey in The Burning, for instance, three years prior. The thing with Englund's makeup is that it allows his personality to come through. Jackie Earle Haley seems smothered in Silly Putty, and he has a hard time acting through it (not that the movie as written requires much acting from him in the make-up).

It all goes along with the supposed new direction they were going in with Freddy — no cheesy one-liners and all that. Of course, the one-liners are still there, but there's no diabolical fun in the character any more; it's just this unpleasant disfigured child-torturer mowing down indistinct, boring teenagers.

Such a waste.