Line up the meatbags. Don't bother to write lines for them.

My feelings upon viewing the A Nightmare on Elm Street re-make can be summed up as: an acceptable horror movie in most respects, doesn't hold a candle to the original, lots of missed potential, boring characters were not believable as teenagers.

Every time I see a horror movie I come away with more and more certainty about the biggest problem with modern horror cinema, whether it's a remake of a classic or an original property--the characters almost without exception suck balls.

Hollywood writers seem to have a fetish for filling their movies to the gills with 'everyman' and 'everywoman' characters. These characters are simply repositories for cliched writing, uninspired dialogue, clumsy stereotyping, and lowest-common-denominator personality traits.

I've thought about this a lot. I suppose there are several good reasons to do this.

One, assuming your intended audience really is incredibly stupid and unable to identify with a character without hamfisted personality cues to set them up, it's maybe possible everyman/woman characters are the only characters people are able to comprehend anymore. I don't necessarily believe this, but...I occasionally see people when I go outside. It isn't pretty...

Two, it's real easy to write these characters. Hell, they may even have an automatic method for writing them in bull sessions: assign each hackneyed and boring personality trait an integer number between 0 and 9 (such as occupation, motivation, mind-numbing platitude of choice, # of loved ones that need to be saved) and then use the random number generator on your calculator.

Let's see...ah! Married fireman with extreme protective disposition towards dogs believes all babies are special, has nine children to save from monster.

Third, these characters generate so little sympathy, empathy, emotional response, or even mild interest, that they are able to more efficiently carry out their role of walking, exposition-spouting meatbags whose only purpose is to die in incredibly contrived, yet largely uninspired ways. This is even easier if CGI is employed instead of a single bottle of karo syrup. Cuts down on the mess and/or creative exertion.

Eh. My dissappointment knows no bounds.