In 2001 the director Michael Bay was part of a group who established Platinum Dunes, a new production company with a heavy emphasis on remaking classic horror films. The company’s first release was Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and this was followed by Andrew Douglas’ The Amityville Horror (2005), Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), Dave Meyers’ The Hitcher (2007), and Nispel’s Friday the 13th (2009). When Platinum Dunes then progressed to a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street – directed by music video creator Samuel Bayer – it pretty much seemed par for the course.

The film was a commercial success, but despite its lead cast being signed onto two sequels at the outset no follow-up was ever produced. Now 15 years old at the time of writing, and with no further movement on additional sequels and remakes, Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street seems consigned to being the final gasp of the once iconic movie franchise. No doubt this will not always be the case, but for now this is it.

It seems rather fitting for Elm Street, a franchise that re-imagined itself based on the first generation of music video makers, to be personally remade by the second. There is a particularly stylised, over-saturated look to the film, as well as a visibly calculated wide-angle sense, that Michael Bay was largely responsible for shifting from the music industry to cinema. Bayer – an accomplished director who had worked with Nirvana, the Rolling Stones, Metallica, and David Bowie – replicates much of Bay’s signature style.

It gives the film a particularly rich, glossy look, but it also makes it remarkable uniform in appearance: the waking and dreaming world look identical, and by starting with a high-tension dream sequence the film is left with nowhere else emotionally to go. That leads the entire piece to drag terribly, with a slow weight pulling down any strong sense of suspense or horror. The cast, which includes Rooney Mara, Connie Britton, and Kyle Gallner, give well-intentioned and broadly effective performances, but they’re struggling against the material.

The film largely abandons comedy, and delivers a particularly humourless Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley). Krueger’s backstory shifts here from his being a murderer of children to a molester of them. On the one hand it hews closer to Wes Craven’s original intentions for the character; on the other it makes for a particularly distasteful character. There are moments during the film’s climax where Freddy becomes particularly difficult to watch. Haley is visibly committed to the role, and excellent at what he has been asked to do, but it is difficult to overcome Robert Englund’s more theatricalised and enjoyable persona.

Key moments from the original are repeated in this new ultra-bleak context, and in literally every case they emerge weaker than the original. Craven used all manner of inventive physical effects to render Freddy’s fantastical rampages. Bayer relies on CGI, and it is to the film’s great detriment.

When Platinum Dunes relaunched Friday the 13th, they did so with a smart, considered take that poached all of the elements of the franchise the audience would remember and expect while jettisoning everything else. The result was a snappy and knowing celebration of the original. It seems a pity they did not attempt that here. As the final word on Elm Street, this is strangely leaden stuff.