Directed by Samuel Bayer. Starring Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Clancy Brown, Kyle Gallner, Thomas Dekker, Kellan Lutz, Katie Cassidy 16 cert, gen release, 95 min

TO THIS point, the horror remakes emanating from Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes studio have been annoyingly bearable. You wouldn't cross town to see the new versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacreor The Amityville Horror, but you wouldn't cross the road to get away from them either.

This remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic from (no, really) the director of the video for Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, finally delivers the unadulterated garbage we had feared and expected. Crudely shoe-horning in all the greatest hits – the hand rising from the bath; the body bag in the school corridor – without offering any new ideas, the film plays like the work of somebody whose only previous experience of the series was a glance at A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. It's that perfunctory. It's that clumsy. It's that tedious.

You know you’re in trouble when the director, Samuel Bayer, chooses to include a throwaway shot of Freddie Kruger (a ho-hum Jackie Earle Haley) in the opening five minutes. This is his Kanesian sledge. This is his Norman Bates. Bayer has been entrusted with an icon of cinema, but, rather than constructing some subtle, tantalising entrance, he dumps the pullover-clad psychotic before us as a coalman might unload a sack of his cheaper fuel.

The film progresses in the same careless fashion. Adopting the beats of a sequel as opposed to those of a remake, Bayer’s film assumes we already know the rules and catapults us straight into the familiar dilemma. What can the kids do to stay awake and avoid unconscious annihilation by the dream stalker?

I’m not sure, but, if avoiding sleep really is your aim, I wouldn’t recommend watching this film.