back to article Michael Bay to relive A Nightmare on Elm Street

Transformers director Michael Bay and his partners at the Platinum Dunes production company have been tasked by New Line Cinema to "relaunch" the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher classic gave the world the iconic Freddy Krueger, who haunted a total of nine films and two TV series. According to …

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  1. Mr Chris

    Michael Bay? Gah.

    Michael Bay's patented shaky-cam approach to cinematography will ensure we don't actually get a clear look at Freddie for the entire film.

  2. Mike
    Flame

    FFS

    So this is how Hollywood is getting around the writers' strike is it?

    How soon til we get remakes of Chaplin films with a good bit of Laurel n Hardy thrown in for good measure?

    Still, putting Michael Bay on the project will soon ensure that they stop. I saw Transformers in the summer and cannot for the life of me figure out how he could make a film about transforming robots which has been a cult for over 2 decades so monumentally bad.

    They should study the old adage: "If it isn't broke, don't fix it". That way the world will be spared of another "Italian Job" (how I wish someone would have explained WHY it was called the ITALIAN Job)

  3. Mark Rendle
    Thumb Up

    Up with this kind of thing!

    I wish they would remake American Pie. I watched it on ITV2 the other night, and seeing Tara Reid all innocent and virginal made me strangely sad.

    Ahem. JJ Abrams to direct, obviously.

  4. Lickass McClippers
    Boffin

    Oh fer'farks'sake..!!

    A bit of originality please folks, stop 'rehashing' shite and come up something of your own back..!!

    Oh, and Lester, if you still haven't seen Transformers, go watch it, it's a chuckle.

  5. Law
    Paris Hilton

    Transformers

    It wasn't a terrible film.... but thats basically because of the graphics, the fact it was in HD, and that I had been expecting something much worst from this a** hole.

    As for Pearl Harbour.... it sickens me to think you had subjected yourself to a second stretch of torture.... but maybe for some its like watching the 2girls1cup video for your friends/families reactions.... which is normally spontaneous vomiting.... for both.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Why does Michael Bay...

    ...get to keep on making movies?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Yet more remakes?

    Once, just once, I'd like to go and see a film that isn't a remake of something else...

    *books tickets for Cloverfield*

  8. Kyle
    Thumb Down

    Oh, for the love of...

    South Park got it exactly right recently regarding Michael Bay - he doesn't know the difference between a storyline and a special effect.

    That being said, does the world really need more Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees & Michael Myers films? If they'd given the franchise over to someone who could do something interesting with it, then maybe, but after the hatchet job that was Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, it's not looking good.

    Never mind all this rubbish, I want to know what happened with Don Coscarelli's proposed higher-budget remake of the Phantasm series as a trilogy bankrolled by New Line (possibly the only '80s horror series to actually have a consistent storyline across all the episodes). Not sure who they'll get to replace Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man though...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Michael Bay and Chums...

    ... appear to be trawling IMDB for anything that they can get the rights to.

    I recon that most of the other studios do the same - with a writers strike in progress, it is probably a lot easier to pick up a script.

  10. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    You should go see Transformers

    It was surprisingly good. I shed I tear when I heard Cullen's voice.

    Paris, because she's more than meets the eye(tm).

  11. Danny
    Dead Vulture

    Piracy is on the rise

    Because people don't want to keep paying for the same re-hashed shite they watched 20 years ago

  12. Craig Foster

    re: Why does Michael Bay...

    Because Uwe Boll is persona non-gratia now and *someone* had to take his place

  13. Alan Gregson
    Stop

    Near Dark

    "plus a remake of Near Dark to be directed by music vid vet Samuel Bayer."

    The original Near Dark was directed by "music vid vet" Kathryn Bigelow, so they can't even come up with an original choice of director.

  14. eddiewrenn
    Thumb Down

    I don't trust Michael Bay.

    I've seen his films. Great, another cherished franchise that, while perhaps overdue a revamp, is probably just going to get a rehash, Bay-style.

  15. Michael Sheils
    Thumb Down

    Damn

    Why didn't they give this to Rob Zombie, that would have been worth watching.

  16. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    Hey!

    There's nothing wrong with Pearl Harbour - you just need to start watching when the Japanese planes appear over the island and stop when they disappear.

  17. Brian D. Switzer
    Stop

    Michael Bay must be stopped

    Stop this madness now!!! Michael Bay must be stopped from making any more movies!

  18. Rob Crawford
    Thumb Down

    If it ain't broke,

    Then let Bay direct it and it soon will be.

    Why do thay actually let him make films, my cat could do a better job

  19. Dan
    Alert

    Transformers

    Go and see it - while wearing headphones to provide you with a better script. Yes, I know it's an action movie, but it shouldn't make me cringe every time someone opens their mouth. Fighting/effects etc cool, but as another commenter implied, it must have taken effort to make such a bad film.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pearl Harbor

    When I traveled to Japan several years ago, United Airlines, in a magnificent display of political correctness, played Pearl Harbor about four times to a 747 filled with about a 50/50 mix of Japanese and Americans. I'm really not sure who was more uncomfortable.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Cherished franchise?

    Come on, people. Freddy Kreuger? It's a slasher flick. And then you're whining that the guy doing the remake doesn't care about plot? For christ's sake, people; he's not redoing Citizen Kane.

    Oh, and as far as transformers goes - it was a movie about giant, fighting robots. And you bitch because it had a lot of special effects.

    What's next? I hated transformers! Too many robots! The guy doesn't know the difference between plot and a robot!

    Sigh.

  22. Andy S

    re: Oh fer'farks'sake..!!

    You have to remember all the writers are on strike. What else are all they going to make.

    Ok that doesn't explain all the hundreds of re-hashes before the strike but it, sort of, escuses this one

  23. Will Leamon

    The Rock...

    Is a damn-fine Michael Bay flick. Though Pearl Harbor was indeed pure bollocks, as was Armageddon.

    But I must admit I'm the only guy in the world who actually liked The Island so maybe I'm just crazy.

  24. Rick Brasche
    Stop

    @ David

    if the movie *had* been about giant robots, and fighting, then it would have been cool.

    Instead it was a sh*tty "coming of age" flick with some lame @ss topical political commentary, with squishy whiny humans taking too much screen time,

    Or to be nice, it was one long commercial for GM and Mt. Dew. Bay's problem isn't just story and stuff, it's constant blatant product placement!

  25. Alien8n
    Flame

    Transformers

    I had the great pleasure of watching that with my cousin who had just come back from living in Qatar for the last year. The running commentary was:

    "That's bollocks, that's bollocks and that's bollocks!"

    Like the bit where the kid tells them his village is on the other side of the mountain. For those that don't know Qatar is basically a flat desert plain, there's no mountains, hardly anything close to a hill even and certainly no green fields for them to walk through. Apparently the Army Base in Qatar looks nothing like the one in the film either...

  26. Chris iverson
    Heart

    Only if

    You see Transformers purely to watch cars turn into robots and watch them beat the crap out of each other. I went to be entertained and entertained I was.

    Looking at it from a different perspective and it is utter crap.

    But I did love my transformers

  27. Benedict

    Formers

    In regard to transformers. I wondered, if they can spend so much time making the effects perfect and dazzling, why can't they do the same with the plot/dialog? I'd hate to be some graphics monkey spending hours making the effects so worthy, just to have them shit on by the writers/actors.

  28. Craig Roberts

    @Will Leamon

    My God!!! There's another one! I thought I was alone!!!

    I too liked The Island... before the meds kicked in... Fortunately, I'm all better now...

  29. Kyle
    Unhappy

    @ David Wiernicki

    Yes, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday 13th & Halloween are by no means masterpieces, certainly not when regarded as franchises. But the 1st parts of all 3 franchises did interesting things within the constraints of the genre they defined:

    Nightmare On Elm Street introduced a surreal approach to horror that was mostly lacking from mainstream american films

    Friday 13th had a solid storyline in and of itself which was then butchered to allow the creation of a franchise

    Both followed the lead of Halloween in having killers who embody an essentially puritanical code of ethics regarding the behaviour of their victims, as well as appealing to the then-current fear of the middle classes that they were under threat from those scary scary lower-class people...

    So yes, by no means excellent films. However they're still a step above the effects-laden rubbish that Michael Bay seems to think cinema should be; we're talking about a man who thinks that without a core love story, films can't be interesting, after all...

  30. Kevin Campbell
    Flame

    remake?!? AARRRRGGGHHH!!!!!

    Dear Hollywood,

    Good God in Heaven PLEASE get a fargin' clue!!! No more remakes!!

    The ONLY outright remake I've seen in recent years which was even remotely decent was "I Am Legend", and even THAT was "not much new here except shiny effects." The overwhelming majority of the other remakes would cause even a skunk complain about the smell.

    You wanna know why people would rather "pirate" your garbage than shell out hard-earned cash for it? WE'VE ALREADY SEEN/HEARD IT! What would EVER possess anyone to think he could IMPROVE on such classics as "Psycho" or "The Birds"? "Halloween" was ALREADY one of the top five best horror films of all time. Why mess with such near perfection? "The Island" was, at least to me, a retelling of "Logan's Run" but it was sufficiently different to be quite enjoyable.

  31. Mectron

    @Chris iverson

    and i love Freddy, but as you say, you have to love for it is, a slasher flick, cheezy effect. It is good, because it is so bad, I miss freddy and glad he will be back,

  32. Bounty
    Paris Hilton

    I want to see

    Freddy v.s. the Preadator.....

    Haloween v.s. Aliens v.s. Google... or

    Space Marines v.s. Harry Potter and the Chamber of SAW MMVIII

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @ David Wiernicki

    a) A Nightmare on Elmstreet _is_ Citizen Cane material when you're talking slasher flicks, ergo

    b) THERE IS NO NEED FOR A REMAKE. Especially because

    c) Bay not giving a rat's ass about the plot means he tends to "miss" vital elements of his material. Have you actually seen the TCM remake? No? No loss, you would not understand it anyway, as the whole aspect of cannibalism has miraculously vanished from the script, so you have no clue about what is actually happening out there, which is not helped by the subterranean actors. This is what happens if MB (producer in this case) is allowed near remakes of classics. Along that line of thought, the Nightmare remake will likely feature a slasher who kills teens in their dreams, without any explanation on why the poor guy looks like a pizza. And this is why

    d) MB should not be allowed near remakes of ANY classic movie, ESPECIALLY of the horror variant. You leave that to people like Cronenberg (The Fly), Carpenter (The Thing), or Russell (The Blob), because these people have some idea about what they are doing and might actually come up with something that IMPROVES on the original.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Michael Bay might have a real problem with Elm Street

    Because I don't think anything blows up.

  35. TheHempKnight
    Alert

    End Of An Act...

    I have to agree that I share the sentiment of a song from Team America: World Police here... no not America, F**k Yeah, but End of an Act, with lines such as "Pearl Harbor sucked and I miss you" and "Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies..."

    On Transformers, I think it was like Alien VS Predator Requiem which I saw at the weekend, if you take out the bits with the lameass teen stereotype humans, it's a good film.

    I do hate how Hollywood is getting remake happy though, I mean the only really good example I've seen of a remake was Ocean's 11, the list of bad ones long, and including The Italian Job, Planet of the Apes, Rollerball, Flight Of The Phoenix, Ring (and by entension most japanese horror movies that have been remade), Thunderbirds (directed by a guy who knows Trek but nothing about T'birds), Battlestar Galactica (it might have been critically acclaimed but I still don't rate it), even Flash Gordon for deity's sake...

    All of this and the awful Freddy V Jason and Jason X lead me to the conclusion that we don't NEED another of these movies, especially when we have perfectly good modern gore movie franchises like SAW.

  36. Damian Gabriel Moran
    Unhappy

    NO!

    They cannot remake Near Dark, no one can say "Finger lickin' good!" as cool as Bill Paxton!

  37. CrackedButter
    Thumb Down

    Transformers

    It was a terrible film, the action was sparse considering its 2 and a half hour run time, the characters were crap, there were too many and not enough screen time for the Robots. While the CI was clever, it didn't do anything for me, the first Transformers film is better.

    The film is about Robots kicking the shit out of each other, that wasn't what I watched in the cinema that night, stupid masturbation jokes and bagging the car mechanic chick.

  38. Tim Brown
    Dead Vulture

    Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

    DO NOT TOUCH THE BIRDS!!!!!!!!!!!

    There is no possible way to improve on that film. Hollywood will just f*ck it up by trying to explain the birds behaviour. The original didn't try - it just went in and told the story.

    Hitchcock wisely didn't use any music - and it damn well worked. I'll bet the remake is full of someone eerily playing a saw, in order to "add dramatic tension". It doesn't need it.

    Gaaaaaaaaaah!!! Wibble.

  39. Andy Hards
    Paris Hilton

    My cat's

    vomit could make a better film. So could Paris!

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    @Transformers

    I agree that it's crap. I've seen the Bay flick at a video store (the local video stores here have a thing where the latest and greatest movies to be released on DVD and video are shown on a bank of LCD screens and with the sound blasting), and well, I find that the 80s movie was actually better, and had better humor to boot (lol at those robots who learnt to speak English from TV). The happy-sappy ending in Bay's film really destroyed the atmosphere. I'm glad I didn't pay the 40 Malaysian dollars to go watch that in the cineplexes.

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Bay Slasher

    IMDb lists Bay as producer on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Begining, The Horseman, Friday the 13th, The Hitcher, Amityville Horror and few borderliners, like 2012:War of the Souls and some untitled project that are definate horror-flicks.

    What is it with all these re-make slashers from 1980's? Does Michael Bay just make a few money titles like Pearl Harbor, Transformers, Transformers 2 (of course there is a 2) and such, so he can keep making bad copies of original teen-horror movies? This is a behevioral patern of serial copy-cat. Every one of them is a third rate copy that is all but tanks in the box-office and still he keeps coming back more times than Jason!

  42. Chris C

    re: Cherished franchise (David)

    If all you see when you watch the Nightmare series is a bunch of slasher flicks, you missed a lot. Nightmare does have a plot, a rather intricate and interesting plot, but perhaps you didn't pay enough attention to notice it. The plot twists its way through all of the movies, adding more back-story the further the series progressed. And that doesn't even get into Freddy's trademark humor. Saying Nightmare was "just a slasher flick" is like saying Pump Up The Volume was just about a foul-mouthed teen.

  43. Tom Austin
    Paris Hilton

    @Will Leamon

    ...actually I too enjoyed The Island. Still not sure why, but drugs might have had something to so with it. So there's about three of us in this posting, then.

    Paris, because it's a guilty pleasure of a weird (and possibly more shameful than we thought) sort...

  44. Paul Charters

    A nightmare...

    A nightmare will be when one of two things happens:

    1. It's all special effects - which is just pointless considering these films were about terror.

    2. Freddy Kreuger will be turned into a more 'modern man', ala Apollo from Battlestar Galactica - once a character who had character and actually was a type of person he'll become a whiny little twerp with daddy issues.

  45. Nick
    Happy

    Me Grimlock King!

    I thought the Transformers remake was excellent - it was exactly what it needed to be: Stupid. If they had tried to do the kind of shit they've been doing with other remakes, ie, tried to make it 'gritty' and 'real', then it would have fallen flat on its face.

    If you just relax, and refrain from saying poncy phrases like, "Oh, Kurosawa wouldn't have done it like that", then you might have actually enjoyed the slap-stick, dumb gags, criminal puns, and giant robot shit-kicking action.

    It's a pantomime, not an opera - deal with it.

    One more thing: Why are people shocked there is product placement in this movie? It's a film based on a cartoon which was essentially a vehicle to sell toys to kids - It's just the cartoon's live action big brother, and all the kids have grown up and are now aspiring to own Camaros instead.

    Bring on Unicron, Dinobots and Megatron resurrected as Galvatron for the sequel!

  46. Old Man of the Hills
    Thumb Down

    The Island?

    Couldn't stand it in the end. It started well enough, with a sort of Logan's Run feel about it all, and then went decidedly downhill from the moment they escaped. My ability to suspend disbelief was snapped, mangled, minced and flushed long before the Secure, Secret Facility Without Even One Gun With Bullets In It ending.

    Transformers, on the other hand...a bad movie, admittedly, but it seemed to embrace the idea of BEING a bad movie from the beginning, so I forgive it.

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