Truly grotesque stuff is all around us — car wrecks, aviation disasters, LiLo’s Twitter feed — but the reboot of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” won’t cost you any sleep.
As always, Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley, who has made a specialty out of playing pervs and masked men — this time he does both) claws his way into the hearts (and lungs and intestines) of dreaming high-schoolers.
While they fight to stay awake instead of fighting back, first-time director Samuel Bayer fights to be as obvious as possible, and from this battle he emerges in triumph.
There are the usual loud sound-blasts to go with false alarms, the usual fantasy-reality switcheroos (as when, for instance, a character lies awake in bed but, it turns out, is really dreaming about being awake). Even when things are wrapped up tidily, the audience happily stays put for the One Final Shock everyone knows is coming (regardless of whether it makes sense).
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This time, the kids drift off for brief “micronaps,” which are an excuse to have Freddy pop in for a second or two, and there’s a reference to the real-life trumped-up child-abuse cases which were a far scarier aspect of the 1980s than Mr. Krueger ever was.
To the audience suckered into paying to see this, here’s why your generation sucks. A book for first-graders by Carl Reiner was called “Tell Me a Scary Story, But Not Too Scary.” Young adults going to this movie are, mentally, first-graders with a higher tolerance for gore.
Going in, you know the story and pretty much what’s going to happen in every scene (Freddy is going to pop up in varying settings). A girl gets in the bathtub and everyone waits for the finger-knives to appear so they can issue a properly prepared-for shriek. That’s pretend scared.
Now that there have been eight Freddy movies, 12 Jasons and 10 Halloweens, it might be time to declare that kids like to see the same stuff over and over. (When Generation X sat through all this, at least it was new, or new-ish.) But just as you can’t tickle yourself, you can’t really be scared unless you honestly don’t know what’s next. Teens are so uncertain all the time that they crave movies where everything is as pre-arranged as soccer practice. When you start to notice that full-on predictability has become unpleasant to watch, you might just have arrived at the moment of your moviegoing maturity.
Though Freddy is basically the same guy as in the 1984 original, his back story is different. For a few minutes the movie threatens to become interesting — then retreats. (Mild spoilers follow.)
Much like his fan Groundskeeper Willie from “The Simpsons,” Freddy actually worked at a school and was beloved by the 5-year-olds. But those kids may have been coached by hysterical parents to give false child-abuse testimony against Freddy that resulted in his lynching. The plot point echoes several 1980s witch hunts such as the Amirault case in which three preschool staffers were jailed based solely on testimony given by children. Later, it emerged the kids had been coached to lie about the abuse.
In the movie, the teens come to believe Freddy is punishing them to get back at the parents who may have cajoled them into giving false testimony as pre-schoolers. By the end, though, any feel for gray areas in guilt and punishment (does a molester really deserve to be burned alive?) is dropped. And even the big plot question that ought to be the heart of the movie — how do you go about tricking and killing a boogeyman? — rushes by in an instant instead of being a mystery the students solve step by step.
That Freddy appeared only for a few minutes in the original was an asset in suspense terms (see also: the shark in “Jaws”), but this time he’s everywhere — and he won’t shut up. “Your mouth says no but your body says yes,” he says, and “Now it’s time to play” and “Now let me take a stab!” If I’d been feeling deprived of lame one-liners, I would have stayed home and watched Bill Maher.
kyle.smith@nypost.com