In updating 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street , the producers – including horror revival specialist Michael Bay – up the icky factor by expanding the original film’s brief references to child murder into a full-blown exploration of child abuse and pedophilia. Original director Wes Craven employed insidious imagery to depict the blurring of the real and dream worlds, but this film mostly expands the biography of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), revisiting the preschool where he found his first victims and detailing his crimes there. (There hasn’t been this unnecessary of a back story since Ron Howard felt the need to dramatize the childhood of one Mr. Grinch.) This Nightmare is nauseous stuff, included only for its shock value and completely irrelevant to the series’ ingenious conceit that sleeping is the enemy.
