7. A Nightmare On Elm Street (Samuel Bayer)
The original A Nightmare On Elm Street is one of my favourite horror films, and so I wasn't thrilled about it being remade, all the more so when I actually saw the damn thing. Robert Englund made the Freddy Krueger role what it is, combining a campy sensibility with a genuinely creepy demeanour beneath all of that scarred make-up. Mistake number one is not inviting Englund back, but instead casting Watchmen's Rorschach himself, Jackie Earle Hayley, as Freddy; while Hayley is a fine actor and well-cast for the role, there just wasn't a need to re-cast Freddy in the first place. It felt like the filmmakers were deliberately making an effort to distance themselves from the original, specifically the best thing about it! The real problem is that the film is just achingly self-serious, when even the first Elm Street flick had some deliciously amusing sequences - Johnny Depp being sucked into a bed and spat out into an awesome fountain of gore, for instance - before the franchise went into full-on camp mode. This film is just miserable and misguidedly takes the "gritty" route, while at once stripping Krueger's charismatic personality down to a generic slasher monster.