New Nightmare on Elm Street Is a Snoozer

Freddy Krueger may be haunting teen dreams once again in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but this "re-imagining" of the horror franchise is seriously short on imagination, say critics.

• The remake of Wes Craven's 1984 horror flick "cops virtually every memorable image from the original, but loses the depth that gave them power and the sense of place that grounded them," complains Keith Phipps for the AV Club.

• Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy doesn't measure up to the job previously done by Robert Englund, writes Elizabeth Weitzman at the New York Daily News, but the real problem here is that the "screenplay goes in the wrong direction entirely, dropping Freddy's sick sense of humor while turning him into a generic bogeyman."
• The movie isn't terrible, writes Bill Goodykoontz at the Arizona Republic, praising director Samuel Bayer's visual touches, "it's just superfluous."
• Peter Sobczynski at eFilmcritic had trouble staying awake during this "slickly made and ceaselessly stupid retread" of the much scarier original. "Who knows, maybe if I had fallen asleep during it, I might have found myself being killed off by a much better movie."

(More A Nightmare on Elm Street stories.)