DVD Of The Week: A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

What's Halloween without a bit of horror? And this year's remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street (just out on DVD) certainly has that - although maybe not in the way you were expecting.

I think a lot of people were put off when this came out at the cinema because it wasn't a slavish retelling of the original movie.

This parallel universe version of the world-famous Freddy Kruegar story is all about the bait-and-switch, from its use of memorable beats from the original that play out totally differently to the central plot actually being less about the supernatural dream world and more about finding out who Freddy really was.

A group of teenage friends - including Supernatural's Katie Cassidy as Kris, The Sarah Connor Chronicle's Thomas Dekker as Jesse, Kyle Gallner as Quentin and Rooney Mara as Nancy - are being plagued with frighteningly realistic dreams about a burned man with a glove of knives. Then a couple of them die and the survivors realise that there is something more to the dreams.

But they are connected by more than just their dreams and the fact that they all live on Elm Street in Springwood. Nancy and Quentin discover that they were all pupils at a pre-school together where Freddy was the kind and attentive gardener - but their parents started to get the idea that Freddy was abusing the kids and decided to sort him out in their own way, rather than getting the authorities involved and having to put the children through the ordeal of testifying in a trial.

But was Freddy really a paedophile? Were the children's stories reliable? Is Freddy now haunting the children out a sense of injustice at his murder or just continuing the vile practices that his burning alive temporarily halted?

I'm a big fan of the unreliable narrator gimmick in movies - if not overused - and thought its use here was very intriguing; in the original, of course, there is never any doubt over Freddy's guilt, making the parents' vigilantism slightly more justified.

By tackling the sensitive area of child abuse, the filmmakers have immediately stripped this incarnation of Freddy of any potential for "anti-hero" cult status. The original Freddy films very quickly glossed over why Freddy had gone after the children and eventually it was forgotten about completely to make room for increasingly elaborate death scenes and cutting one-liners.

Although this Freddy does deliver a couple of zingers, they are all together more creepy because of the serious overtones that we are never allowed to forget (but more about forgetting things in a moment...).

It's the tackling of paedophilia that makes this story so unnerving and uncomfortable viewing, hitting head-on a topic that was skirted round in Wes Craven's original and totally ignored in the sequels. How is being a child-killer somehow more socially acceptable than being a suspected child molester?

Ultimately Robert Englund will always be Freddy to the masses, but Jackie Earle Haley (forever Rorschach) makes the character his own in this movie - because it is a very different movie. In a disturbing way, Haley's Freddy is more human while Englund's was always more demon.

Haley's Freddy, however, is the true monster rather than the playful anti-hero fit to be merchandised up the wazoo. Hypocritically, though, I do frequently wear the new Elm Street T-shirt I won a couple of months ago in an online competition.

If this version of the Krueger story had come first and then people had seen the 1984 version they would have probably wondered what all the silly stuff with sleep clinics and lightbulbs filled with gunpower was about.

The elephant in the room isn't "who is the better Freddy", but the unfortunately contrived, semi-amnesia all the children have about their days at pre-school. Not only can none of them remember Freddy (even once his name is brought up), but they can't even remember that they all knew each when they were five.

Sure, I could buy some kids maybe forgetting the other children who moved away, but you simply don't forget that you've known someone since you were five if you've remained constant, close friends (who all live on the same street) all your lives. You don't invent some imaginary meeting when you were all teens and then block out everything before.

I realise some abused children understandably repress memories of what has happened to them but for an obviously close circle of friends to all wipe the same large chunk of years (between pre-school and being teens) - and not wonder about the gaps that would possibly have been left - is stretching things a bit.

Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer's script doesn't even to begin to explain away this rather crucial hole in the plot, which is a shame because it undermines much of the gravitas of the situation.

Personally, despite its faults, I found the 2010 Nightmare On Elm Street a powerful horror film and a worthy addition to the Freddy canon. It certainly won't replace the original movie, but it doesn't detract from it either. The two movies are two very different beasts and need to be considered as such.