I come not to bury Freddy, but to resurrect him.
Now, I’m not going to wholly defend the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street; it is far and away not a good film. But I am going to praise the impulse behind it.
Unlike many, I find 1984’s original Elm Street a flawed film, cursed with a weak lead and low re-watch value. It has a strong core, however, with fascinating thematic underpinnings and a great monster in Fred Krueger, that demon of the dreamscape. Yet as the series progressed (some entries more entertaining than the first, most much less so), Freddy devolved from nightmare creature to stand-up comedian (and we’re talking sub-Joe Piscopo stand-up here, not Patton Oswalt, although granted, a Piscopo dream-monster would be a terrifying thing).
Therefore, an attempt to actually make Freddy scary again is a welcome thing. And anchored by a strong performance by the always-great Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen), the remake had definite potential. Horror movies always have been able to transcend poor performances and weak scripts as long as they were actually scary. But any potential here was wasted in one crucial misstep: getting a first-time newbie to direct it.
Why anyone would trust a reboot of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated horror icons to an untested music video director is beyond me. While Spike Jonze and David Fincher may be exemplary filmmakers who started in video production, they are outliers. Samuel Bayer does not look to join their ranks, with a style that places him firmly in the Platinum Dunes pantheon of low-rent directors who mistake blood for scares, gore for tension, and blue filters for… actually, I don’t know what those replace. I just know I’m sick of them. (Marks also are subtracted for criminal misuse of its luminous and undeniably talented leading lady, Rooney Mara, that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who should take this movie off her CV.)
Didn’t Freddy deserve better? I put it to you, members of the jury, that his reputation can still be rehabilitated. Let’s look to some proven talents who know how to combine frights with pulp monsters. Let’s get Stuart Gordon involved or maybe Frank Darabont, Eli Roth or Ti West. James Wan seems to have possibilities lately. In my dreams, I can see a Krueger/Cronenberg marriage striking gold, and a David Lynch reimagining would likely become the most terrifying movie in the history of everything. —Corey Redekop
The setup: The government blackmails a criminal into launching a rescue mission within a heavily fortified prison. The movie? The John Carpenter classic pulp thriller 
Pearce is a great, charismatic actor, and it is one of the movie’s few pleasures that we finally get to watch him cut loose. He takes to the role with abandon, milking every corny one-liner and proving himself fully capable of acting the hero. If there’s a reason to watch, it’s to see him eclipse everyone and everything else onscreen. You keep wondering what it would be like to watch him in a good film, or at least a competent one.
On the scale of action heroes, a huge leeway is given for personal charisma. Talent hopefully plays a part, but personality carries the day. So, in the top tier, we find such charismatic ass-kickers as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood and Dwayne Johnson: men with widely varying degrees of acting skill, but there’s no denying they have the goods.
If nothing else, I would love Krull just for its part in one of my favorite geek jokes of all time, a quick visual gag on TV’s 
Not to date myself, but I remember a time when Joe Piscopo told punch lines instead of being one. He was great on 