Platinum Dunes, the Michael Bay-owned
production studio responsible for tarting up the Friday the 13th
franchise with their poorly-received 2009 outing of the same
name, have this time turned their attentions to infamous undead
kiddie-fiddler Freddy Krueger.
Boasting a more realistic makeup job and a
spooky digitally-altered voice this time around, the perpetually scruffy
killer is busily haunting the dreams of a whole new generation of
unsuspecting, good-looking young suburbanites. The vapid twits scream
and flounder just like they did in the eighties, trying desperately to
keep themselves awake when they realise the sweater-clad cad only
attacks them in their dreams, but by the time they realise there’s a
common link uniting them viewers will likely be numb with tedium.
Both a ‘reboot’ of the series and a loose
remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 original, A Nightmare On Elm Street
comes across as a curiously inert affair. Apparently director
Samuel Bayer had to be persuaded by old crony Michael Bay to even take
on the project, and it isn’t hard to see why: the budget might have
increased and the special effects improved, but even the presence of
computer-generated wizardry and a darker, more nuanced villain can’t
disguise the fact that this addition to the series offers little that
hasn’t already been seen in the eight films which preceded it. The
characters are mostly interchangeable cardboard cutouts – one exchange
between Kris Fowles (Katie Cassidy) and her mother finds both actresses
so disinterested as to appear in their throes of a narcoleptic episode,
and it is difficult not to follow suit. Only the excellent Rooney Mara,
soon to be portraying Lisbeth Salander in the US remake of The Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo, gives anything approaching a committed
performance, but ultimately she fails to inject more than a modicum of
watchability into this ugly, rotten carcass of a concept.
Audio & Video
No complaints here. The film is presented
in an impeccable 2:40:1, 1080p transfer, with a DTS-HD English 5.1
Master Audio track. Other languages featured are Castilian Spanish,
Italian, French, German and Thai, all in DD 5.1 surround. A 2.0 English
Audio Descriptive Service is provided, as are subs in English and no
less than 15 other languages.
Special Features
Warner Brothers certainly haven’t skimped
on providing value for money. The Blu-ray Combo Pack contains the
1080p, DVD and Digital Copy (for watching on iPods and the like)
versions of the film – three formats for around thirty bucks isn’t too
shabby, and it’s a nice incentive to those presently sticking with DVD
but thinking about upgrading to HD in the future.
Included as bonus features are a fairly
standard, self-congratulatory 14-minute ‘Freddy Krueger Reborn’
Featurette that includes behind the scenes footage and
interviews with cast and crew; something called ‘WB’ Maniacal Movie
Mode, which provided such useful titbits as ‘in certain scenes you
can literally see the flesh bubbling on Krueger’s face;’ ‘Focus
Points’, a series of short featurettes on makeup, costumes, special
effects and the like, two Deleted Scenes and an Alternate
Ending. The lack of a Director’s Commentary is a glaring omission,
but fans of the film (and its $130 million worldwide box office gross
suggests there are plenty of those) will presumably not be disappointed
by this bumper crop.
