A Nightmare on Elm Street

I used to be totally against remakes. I hated everything about them. I thought that the originals were as good as they possibly could be so there was no point in updating them to make them "better". But over the years my opinion has slowly changed. I'm not saying that I agree with every single remake every done because there are definitely some useless and pointless remakes (Quarantine anyone?), but there are some movies that would just be so cool if they were updated slightly and given a face-lift.
Before I came around to the idea of remakes being not so bad, I would worry myself with the question "what if they remake Freddy?" And then my worry became a reality. Luckily after I had become okay with the idea of remakes.
And I'm glad they redid it. Freddy needed a little bit of an update. I am slightly disappointed at the fact that they found a new actor to play Freddy Kruger, but I was looking around a comic book store a few weeks ago in Toronto and found a magazine with an interview with Englund (I wish I could remember what magazine it was in. Rue Morgue maybe?). They had asked Englund of he was upset that someone else was playing Freddy in the new movie and he responded by saying that he was getting too old to play these high-energy parts in movies now. I can definitely see where he's coming from, and I don't really think of anyone who could have done a better job of Freddy than Jackie Earle Haley.
I didn't really care for the majority of the actors in the movie as they were all young and mildly-gifted actors. But that's just one of the charms that the original movie passed on to the remake.
Haley did a great job of bringing out Freddy's menacing side without losing any of his dry, sarcastic humour. It was definitely weird to be seeing close-ups of Freddy's face and instead of his looking like Englung wearing a mask, Freddy looked like a real burn victim. His face looked as if it had been smoothed out by it being melted in a fire. It was a really cool new face to give Freddy.
I also appreciated the way they had many of the memorable scenes from the original in the new one, yet they were minorly tweaked. Like instead of Nancy's boyfriend being eaten by a blood-gushing bed (original), they had Nancy fall from a blood-gushing ceiling onto her bed. Just these minor details were really cool.

Overall, I loved the new A Nightmare on Elm Street. It will definitely be added to my collection as soon as it's released on DVD!