Music video director Samuel Bayer's blandly efficient remake of Wes Craven's seminal horror retains the core concept (if you die in your dreams, you die in real life), but where the 1984 film was joltingly inventive and disturbing, this is just second-hand fright. The identical nightmares the Elm Street teens share in this tedious reboot retain many of the original's iconic moments, such as the razor-fingered glove in the bathtub. But heroine Rooney Mara isn't the initial focus of the slightly tweaked terror, and that dilutes any empathy we might have with her past trauma and the accompanying exploration of the scary power of the subconscious. It's glossy and visually artful, but ultimately pointless without Craven's wickedly humorous touch. Robert Englund shouldn't lose any sleep, either. Taking over from him as scorched slasher Freddy Krueger is Jackie Earle Haley, who completely lacks his predecessor's evil charisma - even the character's signature one-liners fall totally flat.

Teenagers Nancy, Quentin, Kris, Jesse and Dean are all neighborhood friends who begin having the same dream of a horribly disfigured man who wears a tattered sweater and a glove made of knives. The man terrorizes them in their dreams, and the only escape is to wake up. But when, one by one, they start dying violently, the friends realize that what happens in the dream world is real, and the only way to stay alive is to stay awake.