One,Two,A Nightmare on Elm Street remake is coming for you...

The horror movie remake train is still rolling along and it's next stop is Elm Street,the home of Freddy Kruegar,the Ultimate Night Man. New Line Cinema is working with Platinum Dunes to create a new NOES film that focuses on Freddy's backstory(sounds similar to the approach taken for Rob Zombie's Halloween).

Naturally,they have to wait for the writer's strike to be over before hiring a screen writer but so far,there's no word on whether or not Robert Englund will be part of this revamping of the killer character that's he made famous. It's very possible that they might even dare to cast a new actor as Freddy,which will not go over well with die hard fans of the series.



As a Freddy fan myself,I can attest to the fact that one of the key ingredients to the success of the Nightmare films was Englund's performance. Unlike many of the slasher villains of the eighties,Freddy had personality(and actual dialogue) along with a sick and twisted sense of humor that not only heightened the tension as he stalked his teen prey but added some extra surrealism to the dream sequences.



That sense of humor wound up being overdone and overexposed as the films went on;I'd say it started with Nightmare 4: The Dream Master(a movie that does have some pretty cool scenes,my favorite being the one where Alice is literally pulled into the movie theater screen)and grew even worse by the time Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was released(I think I have still have the 3D glasses that they gave out at the theaters for the truly bad gimmicky Freddy confrontation in the film).

The hokum decreased the horror of the character,turning Freddy into a commercialized cartoony figure,with toys and games and even a brief TV series where he was the wisecracking Rod Sterling to a horror anthology(in which Freddy was rarely a major player in most of the stories)called Freddy's Nightmares:





Despite the watering down of the Elm Street series,there is plenty of interest amongst moviegoers in Freddy and his nighttime antics. This is not the first attempt at reviving Freddymania-Wes Craven took on that challenge with his New Nightmare awhile ago,which had the original cast and crew of the earlier movies being stalked by the legend they helped to create. That film actually got some good reviews,the best since the first NOES movie came out.

The more recent Freddy flick had him team up with Friday the 13th's Jason,which later to the two of them turning on each other,once in the dream realm and then in the waking world. Ronny Yu directed this gruesomely nostalgic fright fest,with the same darkly humorous vibe that he gave to Bride of Chucky and it would be a good idea to involve him again. The man really has a flair for making the fearsome fun to watch:

ROUND ONE



ROUND TWO





Whatever they decide to do with Freddy,the best that both old and new fans can hope for is a return to the terror that the first film invoked. The element that separated the Elm Street series from the rest of the slasher movie pack was the fear of being attacked from within by the worst your imagination had to offer. It would be a welcome relief from the torture porn flicks we've been inundated with lately and a creepy creative way to embrace the dark side: