A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010) - April 30, 2010
A bad though suprisingly not terrible remake -- this is probably the best of the Platinum Dunes remakes, though that's really not saying much.  Samuel Bayer's direction was decent enough (though the film still definitely had that Platinum Dunes look), and some of the dream sequences were actually fairly effective.  One of the film's bigger problems is that none of the characters were really worth caring about -- the Freddy shenanigans were afoot right from the first second of the film, and we never really get a chance to know any of the characters, who are all fairly generic and who are never developed beyond the superficial.  They're marginally better than the annoying douchebags from something like Friday the 13th, but they're pretty dull.  Still, I was pretty much going with the film for the first half or so, as it was reasonably well made, and there was a death every ten minutes or so to liven things up.  But there came a point, about half-way into the film, where the two surviving characters try to uncover the mystery behind Freddy's origins.  The film seriously slowed down at this point.  Oh well.  Considering how bad I feared this would be, it was kind of a pleasant surprise.  **