It sucks.
Wow, did this movie suck. Save your money, save your firends, and save yourself. Go rent the original, written and directed by Wes Craven, and the third, which was written by Frank Darabont (you know, the guy who did Shawshank Redemption). I wasn't expecting to be so disappointed. The original is so solid that you would have to really, really work to screw it up. And wow did these people work.
The story: a group of kids are having nightmares about a horribly scarred man with razors on one hand. The scarred man appears in their dreams, but can affect them in real life, like when he makes a kid slit his own throat in a diner. Then he slices up a girl while she is next to her boyfriend. The boyfriend is thrown in jail where he too is sliced up. Meanwhile, the two remaining kids, have learned that they all are having the nightmares about the man who is named Freddy. The remaining girl (Nancy) realizes that all of the kids knew each other in kindergarden. She confronts her mother who tells her that Freddy was a gardener at their school and that he hurt the kids, but was later arrested. The remaining boy thinks the nightmares are just repressed memories, but then has a nightmare while at swim practice where he sees what really happened: the parents of the children burned Freddy alive. The boy and girl confront the girl's father saying that he burned a man alive with no evidence and they are going to prove Freddy is innocent. They find Freddy's "secret cave" but realize he is guilty and now they try to pull Freddy out of the dream into reality so they can kill him. Which they do. But at the end, when the girl is talking to her mother, Freddy appears and kills her mother. The end.
WTF was that? If you write it out fast it almost makes sense, but let's stop at a few details. Like the middle, when the kids confront their parent's about killing Freddy and say that he is innocent. WHAT??? This is the guy who has killed three of their friends and now they are on his side??? This is now a pro-Freddy movie? And if Freddy wants them on his side, why is he killing all their friends? For that matter he can talk, why not just ask for help? And why do they think he's innocent? This is the nightmare monster that is stalking them and killing all of their friends -- so the natural thing to assume is that he was probably nice guy and the parent's had it all wrong? Maybe the fact that he's this monster that has killed all the other children is even more reason to think of him as a monster, instead of being his cheering squad?
I could go one, but why bother? This thing is just a massive fail at every moment. It's like they took all the cool things about the original, intentionally cut them out, and stitched back what was left in an aftrnoon, knowing they'd get a crappy director, lame actors and knock this thing out in a day and a half. So those cool dream moments, like when Freddy walked through the metal bars or had those long arms with his razors scraping both sides of the walls? Gone. Those fun long chases through the nightmare worlds? Gone (why chase when you can just pop up and kill people). That great moment at the sleep clinic when Nancy pulls Freddy's hat out of the dream? Gone. The mystery of who he is and the kids? Gone.
I could go on. Basically think of everything cool about the original and it's gone. Now I'm not saying that they shouldn't have changed anything. By all means -- screw around with everything if you want -- but it should be to make it BETTER, not changing things just to change things. The original had a great story core -- the parents killed this child molester and now he is coming back to kill their children. In this version, it's like he wants their help, or they want to help him, and then he wants to kill them, but he says he gets power from their memories so why is he killing them...it's all a mess.
Trust me -- watch the original.
*** AVOID AVOID AVOID ***
(more later)
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