'Nightmare' not the remake it's sliced up to be

One, two

Freddy's after you!

Three, four

What a bore

Five, six

Same old tricks

Seven, eight

Don't bring a date

Nine, Ten

Not this, again!

Samuel Bayer's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" squanders a grand opportunity to reinvent and update Wes Craven's 1984 horror mini-classic about a diabolical pizza-faced boogeyman who kills tired teenagers while they dream.

Instead of a bold re-imagining - such as Zack Snyder's kick-butt remake of George Romero's classic zombie sequel "Dawn of the Dead" - this "Nightmare" merely recycles the original work right down to its bloody, showcase killing of a screaming teenage girl gutted by razor-happy Freddy Krueger while pinned upside down to her bedroom ceiling.

Granted, Bayer's "Nightmare" doesn't stoop to a simple-minded shot-for-shot remake (as Gus Van Sant did for Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"), but his uninspired retread offers nothing new.

The most disappointing aspect of "Nightmare" has got to be the great Jackie Earle Haley's generic interpretation of Freddy, the horror icon created by Robert Englund.

Englund gave his hideous villain an entertainingly nasty persona and a distinctive physicality all his own.

Haley's Freddy is such a - dare we say it? - snore that he risks falling asleep and killing himself in his own dreams.

Sounding like Christian Bale's growly, monotoned Batman, Haley delivers hammy Freddy lines ("That's music to my ears!" he purrs after hearing screams) with nary a note of fun or sarcasm.

All razor-bladed fingers point not to Haley, who delivered a brilliantly nuanced performance as a pedophile in 2006's excellent drama "Little Children," but to Bayer, whose long resume of music videos suggests he's strong on visuals, but not experienced in staging scenes with dramatic emotions between characters.

"Nightmare" begins with a bleary-looking teen (Kellan Lutz) cutting his own throat while screaming "It isn't real!" at a diner.

Soon, his classmates Nancy (Rooney Mara), Quentin (Kyle Gallner), Kris (Katie Cassidy) and Jesse (Thomas Dekker) begin to catch on that they're all having the same dream.

"We're having the same dream!" Kris announces.

Nothing in this movie - shot at Northwest suburban locations, including Elk Grove High School, Hersey High School, Bluff City Cemetery in Elgin and Maple Street in Barrington - feels genuine or realistic when it needs to be.

Teens never use cell phones to warn each other or shoot photos of Freddy to prove he exists. (When they do use phones, they might as well be land-based devices anchored in houses and offices.)

Nobody sends text messages to anybody at any time. There's no such thing as e-mail in this "Nightmare."

It's as if the screenplay (a perfunctory, dumbed-down work from Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer) wanted to remain in 1984 and not be bothered with how teens actually function in 2010.

As for the "teens" in this picture, they hardly resemble the ones at the real Elk Grove High. They look old enough to be graduate students going for their ph.Ds.

In 1984, Englund's Freddy was a mentally deranged child rapist who murdered his tiny victims. Arrested, he got off on a technicality, so the parents went vigilante on Freddy, burning him alive so he could return as an avenging demon.

I judged the "Nightmare" franchise to be morally impaired, because good never wins against Freddy's evil. If a teen is lucky enough to survive one movie, she/he gets snuffed out in the next.

What does that say to teens, the principal demographic for this horrific work? That you might as well give up, because there's no way out of a desperate situation?

Then again, what did it say about parents in the 1980s who allowed their kids to make a child rapist/killer the No. 1 Halloween costume in America for two years running?

"A Nightmare on Elm Street"Rating: #9722 #189;Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Clancy Brown, Kellan Lutz, Katie Cassidy, Thomas DekkerDirected by: Samuel BayerOther: A Warner Bros. release. Rated R for language and violence. 95 minutesFalse1920832Child molester Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is about to be transformed into a dream killer in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." False