Don't Come Knocking

A version of this review appeared in The Age, July 6, 2006.

The director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard first collaborated on Paris Texas (1984), and their latest film Don't Come Knocking (2006) is yet another version of one of the oldest stories in the book: the return of a wandering father. Shepard plays Howard Spence, the last of the cowboys – or at least, an ageing film star with a Westerner image and a long record of well-publicised bad behaviour.

At the outset, Don't Come Knocking looks and sounds like a Western in its own right: guitar strings twang as Howard makes a break from the desert location where he's shooting his current movie and rides his horse into the wild blue yonder, clad in full cowboy regalia. While the film crew he's left behind desperately try to discover his whereabouts, Howard acquires a car and heads for Nevada; here he makes contact with his level-headed mother (Eve Marie Saint) who joyfully takes him in and treats him as the child he essentially remains.

Shepard's lanky Gary Cooper silhouette and abashed grin give the keynote of his character, a man who's always been content to evade responsibility and reside within his myth. Despite his legendary aura, when it comes to personal relationships he's regularly on the back foot – particularly with his ex-lover Doreen (Jessica Lange) whom he met decades earlier while shooting a film in Butte, Montana.

Like King Arthur returning from his cave, Howard makes his way to Butte, where he finds Doreen still working in the same diner – but while she regards him with goodwill, she has no plans for a reconciliation. His real challenge is to win over their son Earl (Gabriel Mann), a petulant crooner in a local bar who reacts to his father's arrival by throwing infantile tantrums. It's unclear whether either Mann or Wenders fully recognise the absurdity of this character, though Earl's endearingly trashy girlfriend Amber (Fairuza Balk) is a more fully-fledged comic figure with a similar lack of impulse control.

Meanwhile, another of Howard's unacknowledged children has shown up in town, a young woman (Sarah Polley) who clutches her mother's ashes in a light-blue urn and haunts her father like a damaged angel. Also on his way to Butte is Sutter, a buttoned-down insurance company representative (Tim Roth, very funny for once) who's determined that the abandoned film be completed.

These varyingly eccentric types barely seem to belong in the same universe, and the film makes no pretence at realism. In this day and age, how probable is it that Howard could maintain his fame by specialising in Westerns? But Shepard's quizzically romantic attitudes and Wenders' ability to tell an intimate story on a grand scale combine to make this a wayward but extremely lovable film, filled with whimsical jokes, psychological surprises, and boldly composed images that give a sense of mastery over wide stretches of earth and sky.

After Howard arrives in Butte, time passes slowly and the viewer starts to feel like a local – familiar with the worn nineteenth-century shopfronts, able to imagine how the streets might fit together and where people would be found at different hours of the day. Having begun at one camp site, the movie centres its final act around another: after Earl tosses his furniture from a first-floor window in a typical burst of rage, Howard positions himself overnight on a tacky couch out the front of the hotel, where Wenders films their climactic encounter like a gunfight at high noon.

Though the title tells us that Howard belongs nowhere except for the sealed world of the film set, the optimistic ending suggests that his children have gained by accepting their real, flawed father in place of his silver-screen double. Still, a darker side to the story prefigures the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men (2007), which shares Don't Come Knocking's Western setting and mythic concerns. In the Coens' film, a parodic returning king (Javier Bardem) brings only death in his wake – and even a pregnant young woman (Kelly McDonald) has no chance of renewing the barren land.

Here, while Howard ambivalently longs for home and family, his opposite number Sutter remains shut off from personal ties and what he views as the continuing hell of the modern world. "Nothing's changed," he tells Howard, just before he pulls into a petrol station adorned with a dozen pumps sporting the Exxon logo. It's a grimly poetic image that belies his words, returning us to a corporatised America that has little place for solitary, roaming men.

Video Game Movies

A version of this article appeared in The Age, May 29, 2010.

Watching the new action adventure Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I felt the mild shock of rediscovering buried memories. As a teenager, I spent hours playing the similarly titled 1989 game on a Macintosh SE – leaping between rooftops, scaling dungeon walls and fending off enemies with my blade. Now I could see Jake Gyllenhaal, or his stunt double, performing all the same feats, with a multi-million-dollar recreation of ancient Arabia as a backdrop.

Prince of Persia looks set to reach a broad audience unaware of its lowly origins – but if so, it's the exception that proves the rule. Aside from so-called “torture porn,” the video game adaptation may be the most despised genre in modern cinema. The likes of Super Mario Brothers (1993) and Street Fighter (1994) have a camp appeal at best, while Germany's Uwe Boll has won the dubious reputation of “world's worst director” with such efforts as Bloodrayne (2005) and Alone In The Dark (2005).

These days films and games resemble squabbling siblings, locked in unequal rivalry. Game designers routinely use film scenarios as a basis for invention, but cinema is unable to recreate the direct experience of “becoming” an action hero. Indeed, traditional theories of cinematic identification are still catching up to a medium where the average player has no problem aligning himself (or herself) with a hoodlum, a hedgehog, or a hungry yellow circle.

All the same, video games have been a major influence on popular cinema for decades, particularly in science fiction and horror. One early adopter was John Carpenter, whose Big Trouble In Little China (1986) and They Live (1988) owed much to the shoot-'em-up format, with roughneck protagonists battling aliens and warriors on a series of discrete “levels”.



The late 1990s saw a rush of “virtual reality” films, culminating in The Matrix (1999), which asked whether life as we know it might be just another simulation. A few years later, the “puzzle” aspect of gaming served as inspiration for the horrific Saw franchise and its confined spaces fitted with deadly booby traps; more recently, science-fiction blockbusters such as Avatar have picked up on the notion of manipulating a second self from outside. Even the current boom in 3D can be seen as a response to the popularity of interactive entertainment, with the audience in both cases plunged directly into the fray.

Perhaps the most notable gamer director is Britain's Edgar Wright, who has paid homage to the medium ever since his cult sitcom Spaced. Wright's upcoming comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World stars Michael Cera as a slacker who must face off against his girlfriend's “seven evil exes,” who turn into coins when defeated.


Shadowing the debate over video games is a concern about the representation of violence. Nobody grieves for the Space Invaders, any more than they do for pawns removed from the board in chess. In modern games, deaths can be gruesomely realistic yet weightless, with the reboot button always within reach. From a humanist perspective, this has disquieting implications which filmmakers have been quick to take up. The satirical B-movie Gamer imagines a near-future version of gladiatorial combat, where convicted criminals can be manipulated like game characters by remote control.

The veteran Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku used a comparable premise in his sombre Battle Royale (2000): the government forces teenagers to slaughter each other, while a death toll periodically flashes onto the screen like a high score. From here it's only a step to the art cinema convention of treating games as the ultimate in nihilistic pop culture - as in the Austrian director Michael Glawogger's recent Kill Daddy Goodnight, where the near-psychotic protagonist (Helmut Kopping) designs a game that allows him to murder his hated father over and over.

Games may take place “outside” the real world, but they're also a part of the reality we all share, in an age when millions have the chance to invent identities for themselves online, and when wars are increasingly fought (on one side at least) from a distance by computer. There's no doubt that filmmakers will continue to raid the video game toolbox for marketing opportunities and ironic metaphors, as well as new ways to tell a story. But if anything has been learned from the long battle to win cinema the status of an art-form, surely this powerful emerging medium deserves to be approached with curiosity rather than contempt.

Fish Tank

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 27, 2010.

An angry girl in a grey hoodie, marching past a patch of waste ground with a determination that tells you she has nowhere to go. From the outset, Fish Tank locates itself in the familiar terrain of British social realism: even the square aspect ratio suggests a nostalgia for the heyday of televised kitchen-sink drama. Yet the emphasis has shifted; the director Andrea Arnold shows more interest in sexual power struggles than any other sort.

The girl is Mia (Katie Jarvis), an stroppy teenager with a enthusiasm for hip-hop, an unsympathetic mother (Kierston Wareing), and a dream of becoming a tabletop dancer at a local club. Like the heroine of An Education, she's curious about what the world can teach her – but she's destined to learn her early life lessons in a much rougher school.

Far from lamenting the plight of the underclass, the film is unusually candid about the allure of a setting where “civilised” standards hardly apply, where adults behave like children and vice versa. Mum dances round in her underwear in the kitchen of the council flat, and Mia's younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffith) shares a cigarette with a friend while critiquing the starlets on reality TV.

Mia, at fifteen, is well on the way to adulthood, alternately wearing her hair in a ponytail and letting it down to reveal a surprisingly fashionable cut. It's little wonder she attracts the attention of her mother's new boyfriend Connor (the impressively versatile Michael Fassbender), a well-groomed security guard with a relaxed smile that seems half kindly, half predatory.

The title may hint that Arnold views her characters as exotic specimens, but gains additional meaning through a narrative that teems with environmental metaphors. “What kind of animal would you like to be?” Connor asks the girls (he sees himself as an eagle, swooping down from above). In a symbolically loaded scene, he entices Mia into a mucky pond to grope for an unappetising fish. “I'll eat it,” she declares boldly, while her mother looks on in scorn.

One of the best British films of recent years, Fish Tank marks a major leap forward from Arnold's first feature, the glum and overly contrived Red Road (2006). Though the plot holds few surprises, the command of detail is sure – and though Mia's path to maturity is a dangerous one, she's anything but a miserable prisoner of her fate.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 27, 2010.

Based on a well-known computer game, this sword-and-sandals romp aims at repeating the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean series – but even with newly developed muscles and a fey British accent, Jake Gyllenhaal as the heroic Prince Dastan is no substitute for Johnny Depp. His co-stars are better value: Alfred Molina has the funniest lines as a rogue ostrich racer, Gemma Arterton makes a suitably feisty love interest, Ben Kingsley is almost too well cast as Dastan's wicked uncle, and Richard Coyle as the Crown Prince Tus suggests a Top Gear presenter unaccountably strayed into the world of the Arabian Nights.

Despite Gyllenhaal's reassuring blue eyes, it's unclear if the American public is ready for an action franchise that takes place entirely in the Middle East. Director Mike Newell and his writers have risen to the challenge by shaping the film into an allegory of recent global events: the plot is launched when Persia invades a neighbouring city in search of weapons that prove not to exist.

Happily Dastan, who led the charge, is able to make amends with the aid of the magical object everyone is seeking, a dagger with the power to turn back time. Would that our modern rulers were so lucky.

The Losers

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 27, 2010.

Based on a DC comic book, Sylvain White's action fantasy about a renegade CIA black ops team maintains a consistent level of cheerful brutality from the moment a helicopter full of Bolivian children explodes with a teddy bear left smouldering in the ruins.

It's an image straight from a Ben Stiller burlesque, and there's no pretence of serious purpose in a film where a sinister corporation trades under the name Goliath Enterprises, the plot turns on a high-tech disintegrator device (“for the 21st century green terrorist”), a key set-piece involves a Dunkin' Donuts sign and a giant magnet, and a fight in a seedy hotel room serves as an excuse to show off Zoe Saldana's curves in bright red pants.

White has a gift for choreographing large-scale mayhem, especially in aerial shots, but the screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strives for wit without rising above the level of, say, an episode of CSI: Miami. Overall, the film would be more of a guilty pleasure if it wasn't trying so hard. Still, if you can't wait for the A-Team remake you might have some fun here.

City Island

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 27, 2010.

As the title suggests, the setting of Raymond De Felitta's quaint little comedy is urban yet exotic – a square mile of the Bronx tucked away from the mainland, populated by “clam diggers” (born-and-bred locals) and “mussel suckers” (everyone else). In the first category is prison guard Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia), a solid citizen who secretly spends his evenings at acting classes, leading his hot-tempered wife (Julianna Margulies) to suspect an affair.

Garcia gets to indulge his hammiest tendencies as Vince, who idolises Marlon Brando, while Emily Mortimer as his sympathetic classmate seems to be channelling a wilted Audrey Hepburn. But then everyone's an actor, to the degree that everyone has something to hide. Vince's daughter (Domenik Garcia-Lorido) works as a stripper; his teenage son (Ezra Miller) is into “feeding” obese women, a kink portrayed with more sympathy than one would expect to find outside the films of John Waters. Deceptions multiply when Vince makes contact with his adult son (Steven Strait) from a previous relationship, and brings him home for a visit without telling anybody the full story.

City Island is fluff, but fluff of an eccentric, personal kind, at a distance from the commercial calculations of a Little Miss Sunshine (2006). The plot is contrived even by the standards of farce, and De Felitta too often falls back on broad “ethnic” humour, which mainly means scenes of family members screeching at each other. But the film shows enough goodwill to give weight to its message: when masquerades fail, sincerity just might do the trick.

Savages Crossing

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 27, 2010.

As star, co-writer and producer of Savages Crossing, John Jarrett has been warning his fans not to expect another Wolf Creek (2005). That's putting it mildly. The film turns out to be a stagey, hokey thriller, unfolding in and around a single location: a Queensland roadhouse where a gun-wielding maniac named Phil (Jarrett) shows up to get revenge on his ex-wife (Angela Punch-McGregor) and terrorise locals and tourists over the course of one dark and stormy night.

While TV veteran Kevin James Dobson is the credited director, the blame for this mess has to go to Jarrett, an actor out of control who does everything but froth at the mouth. The cast of notables includes Jessica Napier, Chris Haywood and Craig McLachlan (who also contributes to the soundtrack), but even the usually reliable Sacha Horler stands no chance against a script so crude it obliges her character to announce herself as a lesbian in her very first line of dialogue.

It's possible that Savages Crossing will acquire a small following of cultists nostalgic for the golden days of lurid soapies such as E Street. But it's unlikely to show up on anyone's list of recent high points of Australian cinema.

Shock Docs

A version of this article appeared in The Age, May 26, 2010.

“In a word, stupidity,” says Philippe Mora, when asked why his 1973 documentary Swastika caused such a stir at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Made without narration, the film tells the story of the rise and fall of the Third Reich through newsreels and propaganda films of the era, as well as home movies shot by Hitler's mistress Eva Braun and architect Albert Speer.

Based in Los Angeles since the 1990s, Mora is known as the director of a string of outrageous cult films including Mad Dog Morgan (1976) and Howling III: The Marsupials (1987) – but nothing in his career has generated the same kind of heat. Especially potent was the seemingly innocent footage of the Fuhrer relaxing with his cronies, or playing with children and dogs. “People weren't used to seeing Hitler as a human being,” he says.

From Mora's point of view, the horror of the era was so obvious it didn't need to be underlined. His parents Georges and Mirka Mora were refugees from Nazism whose flight brought them to Melbourne, where they became pillars of the local art scene while their son grew up wondering about the source of the family's accent. But despite good reviews internationally, up till recently Swastika has remained unknown in Germany. “It wasn't a government ban – it was blacklisted,” Mora says. “We couldn't get it shown anywhere.”

Swastika will screen in July as part of "Shock Docs," a season of “controversial” Australian documentaries running from June through August at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Also part of the season is Kerry Negara's A Loving Friend, an attack on cultural double standards which delves into the private life of artist Donald Friend during the years he spent in Bali.

If Mora's film shows the human face of a monster, Negara breached a comparable taboo by insisting on the “dark side” of a much-revered figure. Using extracts from published diaries and interviews with former “houseboys”, the film argues that Friend was a serial paedophile – a view not shared by Australian specialists in his work, who look more than uncomfortable when the subject is raised on camera.

“It would seem that they are all very upset with me,” Negara says. “I would have hoped that it would make them think twice about their attitudes, because their attitudes are appalling.”

Negara, whose own children are half-Balinese, says she had to fight to complete the film using private funding, in the face of opposition from powerful vested interests in both the art world and tourism. She suggests that Friend's behaviour has been excused for two main reasons: the special privileges granted to artists, and the racist myth of the “sexually compliant island child”.

No film in the season has sparked more public criticism than Jeff Daniels' The 10 Conditions Of Love, a portrait of the activist Rebiyah Kadeer – a leading campaigner for the rights of the Uyghur people in China, where she's viewed as an enemy of the state. The film screened at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival despite strong objections from the Chinese consolate, which led to many Chinese filmmakers withdrawing from the event.

In retrospect, Daniels sees the furore as a blessing in disguise. “I'd been trying for years to raise money for this film,” he says, “and people just felt that the subject wasn't relevant, wasn't important. But the second China piped up, everyone was interested.”

Subsequent international screenings have passed without a murmur, and as a result, Daniels says, interest is now starting to decline. So far he's had no luck with efforts to start a reasoned debate on the Uyghur issue with voices from the other side, for example by screening the film to groups of Chinese students in Australia.

Of the four films in the Shock Docs season, Swastika is nearly forty years old, The 10 Conditions Of Love has been positively received outside China, and Richard Lowenstein's We're Livin' On Dog Food, a study of Melbourne's “post-punk” subculture, has raised few hackles anywhere. For Negara, this shows the current reluctance of local documentary makers to explore difficult subjects. “The Australian documentary industry is now geared to commercial interests,” she says, “and the investigative documentary doesn't get a look in.”

For his part, Mora still hopes to shoot another project inspired by memories from his childhood: When We Were Modern, a dramatised account of the lives of famed art patrons John and Sunday Reed and their circle. Asked why the film has taken so long to get off the ground, he drops into the flat tones of a funding bureaucrat: "Who's heard of Sidney Nolan outside Australia?" Suppression takes many forms.

Product Placement at ACMI

A version of this article appeared in The Age, March 4, 2010.

Like any self-respecting Melbournian, I love the Australian Centre For the Moving Image. I love their state-of-the-art theatres, their fascinating exhibitions, and most of all I love their commitment to showcasing the best in world cinema, past and present.

Now, ACMI have taken yet another brave step forward with the launch of Timeless Glamour: Bulgari On Film, a retrospective which pays tribute to the jewel company Bulgari – or BVLGARI, as the vowel-challenged like to call it – and the many screen legends who have adorned themselves with its wares. As programmer Roberta Ciabarra says in the press release: “Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida were models of elegance, beauty and style and never more so than when they appeared in lavish, big screen productions in which they sported luxury jewels by Bulgari; the ultimate product placement fantasy!"

Cynics might claim that synergy can go too far, but I prefer to think that the team at ACMI have stumbled upon an whole new approach to film programming. Here are some suggestions for the future they might like to think about...

Striking It Lucky: Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen were models of tough, nonchalant cool, and never more so than when they appeared in gritty big screen productions in which they puffed on Lucky Strike cigarettes. More recently, the brand has enjoyed a resurgence as an emblem of retro hipness on TV's Mad Men. Arrive early to receive your complementary novelty pack (not to be smoked within 50 metres of the ACMI lounge).

Coke Is Cinema: This amazing season kicks off with Masculin féminin, Jean-Luc Godard's classic 1960s study of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. Also featured is the Billy Wilder farce One, Two Three, with Jimmy Cagney as a flag-waving Coke executive pushing his product on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. And don't forget the wacky South African comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which a Coke bottle falling from the sky represents nothing less than Western civilisation itself.

The iMac Collection: Step back in time to the turn of the millennium, when no Hollywood blockbuster was complete without a sleekly designed personal computer. Remember the classic scene in Zoolander, where Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson regress to primitive savagery while struggling to find the “On” button? How far we've come.

Focus On Hasbro: The beloved toy company has recently been moving into cinema in a big way, with two smash hit Transformers movies and the not quite as successful G.I Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. Less well-known is the fact that Hasbro also own the rights to Monopoly, soon to be adapted for the big screen by Ridley Scott (no kidding). After that, look out for Sofia Coppola's live action reboot of the My Little Pony franchise, due in 2012.

A Salute To The Akubra: From Chips Rafferty to Molly Meldrum, no Aussie bloke can feel authentic without one of the nation's favorite hats. Alongside screenings of iconic titles such as Crocodile Dundee and The Man From Snowy River, a special exhibition will showcase dozens of the custom-trimmed Akubras created by costume designer Catherine Martin to ensure that Baz Luhmann's Australia would be the most dinki-di movie ever made.

McDonald's On Screen: There are so many unforgettable McDonald's screen moments – from John Travolta ranting about a Royale with cheese in Pulp Fiction, to Morgan Spurlock stuffing himself sick in Super-Size Me. But the highlight of this family-friendly season has to be the greatest product-placement movie of all time: Stewart Raffill's 1980s classic Mac And Me, in which a boy in a wheelchair is befriended by a Mysterious Alien Creature with a taste for thickshakes. Don't miss the musical number with Ronald McDonald and his breakdancing friends!

Moving Forward With Nike: As this exciting season demonstrates, the world's largest sneaker company have been at the head of the promotional pack ever since Space Jam, a vehicle for Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny based on a 1992 Super Bowl commercial. More recently, the company lent a hand with the comedy Run Fatboy Run, starring Simon Pegg as a slacker who has to get into shape to compete in the fictitious Nike River Marathon. For the final fifteen or twenty minutes, there are product logos in almost every shot – but as director David Schwimmer acknowledged, “If it wasn't for Nike, there would have been no movie.” Who says art and commerce shouldn't mix?

Freddy Krueger

A version of this article appeared in The Age, May 21, 2010.

There was Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Chucky and Pinhead – but for children of the 1980s, like this writer, only one horror icon really counted. Even if you weren't allowed to see the movies, you had to know and fear Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), the shape-shifting psycho with the melted face and the leather glove custom-made for slicing up teenagers. True, Freddy's powers were restricted to the world of sleep – but as characters never tired of explaining, if he kills you in your dreams you die for real.

Written and directed by genre specialist Wes Craven in 1984, the original A Nightmare On Elm Street cleverly blended elements from previous horror hits, notably the suburban setting of Halloween (1978) and the slasher formula of Friday The 13th (1980). From today's vantage point, the strongest influence appears to be the hallucinatory work of Dario Argento, particularly when the synthesiser score starts pumping as Freddy chases the heroine Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) through his boiler-room lair.

The film remains more eerie than its successors partly due to its low-budget, half-realised quality: Freddy remains in the shadows, with the viewer left to fill in the blanks. For Craven, who came of age in the 1960s, he represents the revenge of the older generation on youth; Nancy's alcoholic mother is the first in a long line of irresponsible Elm Street parents. Yet he also embodies a repressed part of the virginal Nancy herself: “I take back every bit of energy I gave you,” she tells him just before he vanishes.

It's not hard to understand the success of a film that pushes so many adolescent buttons: fear of sex, resentment of adults, and reluctance to go to bed early. A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) soon followed, minus the participation of Craven and Langenkamp; this remains the odd film out of the cycle, a blatantly homoerotic allegory centred on Freddy's efforts to “get inside” a teenage boy prone to lounging on his bed with his shirt off.

Box office takings were respectable, but Freddy was clearly due for the revamp he was given in the far slicker Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), directed by newcomer Chuck Russell from a script co-written with Craven, the novelist Bruce Wagner, and an up-and-coming screenwriter named Frank Darabont, who would go onto greater success with his Stephen King adaptation The Shawshank Redemption (1994). By any conventional standard the best of the cycle, this was also the film that cemented its villain's status as a cackling, wisecracking cult figure – one of the great freaks of 1980s pop culture, along with Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Pee-Wee Herman.

Englund inhabits the role with the elan of a Broadway dancer, and what the succeeding films lack in subtlety they make up for in the obscene vitality of their central figure. This Freddy is quite aware of playing to a crowd, and determined to let nobody steal the limelight: in a defining scene he kills an aspiring actress by slamming her head through a TV set, quipping “Welcome to prime time, bitch!”

Freddy may be fearsome, but he's fully in touch with his feminine side: academic and former Age reviewer Barbara Creed describes him as a “womb monster,” most at home in the warm, dank depths of the unconscious. In part four, The Dream Master (1988) he literally absorbs his victims into his body, forcing them to fight their way out – a sequence which necessitated the construction of a giant model Freddy for the actors to writhe inside, and which stands as a high point of a cycle with much to offer fans of the lost art of pre-digital special effects.

Archetypal products of the MTV era, the later Elm Street sequels are so fragmentary that few will recall which set-piece death occurs in which film. At best the results come close to the fruitful ambiguity of actual dreams – but the descent into self-parody was complete by the time of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) which saw Freddy riding a broomstick like the Wicked Witch of the West and trading his old-school claw for a Nintendo Power Glove.

Like Dr Frankenstein trying to regain control of his monster, Freddy's original creator made a comeback with Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) – an ambitious spin-off that strove to examine the Elm St phenomenon from outside, with Langenkamp playing “herself” as a haunted actress reluctant to sign on for yet another sequel. Still, with the Nightmare On Elm Street remake now a box office hit in the US, Freddy's life after death looks set to endure for a long time to come.

A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 20, 2010.

Some films don't need remakes, others don't deserve them, but it seems worth having another go at A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). After all this time, there's still plenty of potential in the notion of a disfigured psycho who returns from the grave to slay teenagers in their dreams.

Compared to the flamboyance of Robert Englund in the 1980s, Jackie Earle Haley as the crazed Freddy Krueger is more lumbering man-child than demonic daddy. Likewise, the digital special effects can't match the impact of the old tricks with latex and puppets. Still, director Samuel Bayer retains the key ingredients of the formula: the surrealistic murders, the disbelieving authority figures, and the little girls in white whose sinister skipping rope rhyme heralds the horrors to come.

This time round, Freddy is explicitly identified as the paedophile we always knew he was. As if in compensation, Bayer and his writers steer away from depicting the sex lives of his teenage victims. Instead, they focus on the chaste bond between high school misfits Nancy (Rooney Mara) and Quentin (Kyle Gallner) who correspond to the characters played in the original by Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp; the twitchy, pale-faced Gallner comes close to stealing the show, particularly when Quentin tries to bluff a chemist into refilling his prescription for the pills he pops to stay awake.

As ever, the thrill lies in seeing the kids aligned against the adults as they grapple with the starkest mysteries of life and death. Maybe Gus van Sant should direct the sequel.