One MInutes Review - NIghtmare on Elm Street

No one, I think, with a logical mind will be able to accept anything that happens in the remake of Wes Craven's popular slasher flick Nightmare on Elm Street. That was a problem with the original too, but at least that one had a sense of fun about it and was derived from an interesting concept. This new one pads all of it's illogical wanderings with a cold and ugly palette to boot.

The problem is Freddy Kruger. He doesn't make sense and with no rules to govern his existence and power he's less a horror movie villain and more a convenience for a screenwriter who wants to make it up as he goes along. The first scene takes place in a diner. A kid follows a waitress into the back only to find Kruger. He wakes up at his table, his hand bleeding from the dream attack. This scene of course presupposes (maybe correctly, but regardless) that everyone will be familiar with the character and understand his existence. Then the kid is greeted by a teen girl. He tells her he hasn't slept in 3 days until nodding off and stabbing himself in the throat in front of her.

Now here's the kicker. After the funeral, 3 other teenagers all start getting haunted in their sleep by Kruger. If we're to believe the plot (Spoilers if you care) they have all, unbeknowst to them, known each other since grade school, where they all came into contact with Kruger before he was murdered by their parents. Weird. Have they not been sleeping since; did they just not realize Kruger was in their dreams until today; or did he just magically decide that hey, now that one's dead, I might as well take the other 3 now as well?

This is all wrapped up into an incoherent mess by a music video director who directs the film as if each dream is one in a sequence of vignettes until each teen is picked off one by one by this mysterious force who comes and goes as he wishes, follows no logical arch as a character and goes through the motions that we've all been accustomed to since the original film dropped in the 80s.