A Nightmare on Elm Street reviews…
Ouch. First Spill:
Then the NYPost, Kyle Smith:
…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.)…
Moderate in the Middle 