Directed by Samuel Bayer
Written by Wesley Strick, Eric Heissener, Wes Craven
Stars Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara
Run Time: 1 Hour, 35 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/3DWK5L5
Synopsis
It’s 4:30 am at the Springwood Diner. Dean asks for more coffee, but the waitress walks right past him. He gets up, and there’s no one there. He goes into the kitchen, and it’s not what one would expect in a diner. Someone with a glove that has knives for fingers sneaks up on him… Then he wakes up, back in the real diner. Only now, his hand is cut.
Kris comes in and says Dean looks like he hasn’t slept in three days. We see that Quentin likes the waitress, Nancy. Dean explains that he’s been having nightmares. She goes to the restroom, and Dean has another nightmare, during which he cuts his own throat for real with a steak knife.
At his funeral, we meet several new characters. Gwen is Nancy’s mother, and Alan Smith, Quentin’s father, is setting up a crisis center at the school. Kris sees a photo of her and Dean when they were very little, but she says she only met him in high school. Kris’s mother doesn’t know exactly where Kris’s childhood photos are; packed away in the attic maybe?
That night, Nancy has some dreams that involve poor CGI wallpaper. Kris goes up into the attic to look for photos and finds a child’s dress that’s all slashed up in the front. A scarred man jumps out from nowhere and tries to strangle her, but then she wakes up; it’s all just a dream. The next day, she falls asleep in class and we finally get a good look at the man, who looks like a more-realistic burn victim than in the old series.
Kris talks to Jesse about her dreams, and it turns out, he’s been having nightmares about the same burned man. She goes to sleep and he throws her all around the room before slashing her apart right in front of Jesse. Jesse puts his clothes on and runs away, setting off the alarm on the way out.
Jesse runs to Nancy, who is still awake. Nancy talks about dreams of a rhyme, “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…” Yeah, she’s having dreams too. The police catch up with Jesse and arrest him; he’s covered in Kris’s blood. Nancy calls Quentin to talk, and she fills him in on what’s been happening.
The next day, Quentin researches “sleep deprivation” and nods off in the coffee shop. He dreams of a little girl in a library. Nancy wakes him up when she arrives.
Jesse dreams that he’s in a factory and hears Kris calling for help. There’s more little girls there, and he soon runs into Freddy. Jesse dies a bloody death in the jail cell, but Freddy gets to “play” with Jesse for several minutes after his physical death.
Nancy asks her mother, Gwen, if they know anyone named Freddy, and Gwen is elusive in her answer. Gwen then calls someone on the phone and says Nancy is starting to remember. Nancy goes to sleep and dreams about a place called the Badham School. Freddy’s there, and he wonders why Nancy doesn’t remember him.
Quentin comes over, and they do research. Badham School was a preschool, but neither of them remember it. Nancy does know that her mother is hiding something. They find a photo of all the kids; they all went to that school together. Gwen comes in, and she has to explain what happened. Fred Krueger was a gardener at that school who lived in the basement of the preschool. Nancy was Fred’s favorite, but he abused all of them. She explains that Freddy left town before the police could catch up to him.
Quentin’s at swim team practice and passes out in the pool. He sees still-normal Freddy being chased through a factory parking lot by a bunch of people in cars including Quentin’s father and Nancy’s mother. They trap him and burn down the building with Freddy inside. Jesse wakes up, now knowing what really happened.
Nancy researches all the kids from the preschool, and they’re all dead. Nancy and Quentin are the only ones left. Quentin confronts his father, claiming they killed an innocent man. Quentin says none of it was true; Freddy never hurt anyone.
Barely awake, Quentin and Nancy run off to the closed Badham School. They break in and go down into the basement where Freddy lived. They find Freddy’s secret room, full of paintings and artwork done by a younger Nancy. Quentin finds dozens of photos that prove that Freddy really was a pedophile. Freddy simply wanted them to remember what he did to them, not to prove his innocence.
Finally, they decide to lure Freddy into the dream. There’s a lot of cat and mouse suspense, but they outsmart him, bringing him into the real world with an injection of epinephrine. In the real world, they easily kill him and set the place on fire to be sure.
The ambulance shows up to take them both to the hospital, and it quickly becomes clear that Freddy never dies.
Commentary
All of the main cast is from 23-26 years old, playing high school kids, which always manages to trigger Kevin. That doesn’t usually bother me too much, but clearly Katie Cassidy as Kris and Rooney Mara as Nancy both look way too old to be in high school. Jackie Earle Haley is in heavy makeup here, and his burn scars look a bit more realistic than Robert Englund’s ever did, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Englund’s version was far more interesting and believe it or not, more expressive.
Rather than everyone trying too hard to stay awake and making drama out of the need for sleep, they introduce the idea of “microdreams,” so there’s no real way to avoid Freddy at all now. This makes Freddy more or less invincible.
Kris is the main character for the first half hour, and then she’s killed. Jesse was looking like the main character for about ten minutes before he died. Finally, the film settles on Nancy and Quentin as our heroes for the final half of the show.
There are numerous scenes from the first film that are reproduced here, but most of them don’t have the same payoffs, so you have to wonder why they bothered. Actually, so much of the film is the same that you still have to wonder why they bothered. About the only new idea was the unconvincing doubtfulness of Freddy’s guilt, which Freddy’s own behavior had confirmed early on (“You were my favorite” plus mega-lick and sniffing her hair).
Robert Englund was too old and they wanted to keep the franchise going, but they could have simply recast the actor; a complete reboot was not even close to necessary here. That’s my main complaint; it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t innovative, and it wasn’t particularly good. This one left out all the humor that was a big part of the later Freddy movies, but the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) didn’t have any of the jokey silliness either.
The worst part is that it made me want to go to sleep.