Mike_Bracken's Full Review: Nightmare on Elm Street 4 - The Dream Master
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master: New Line Cinema Rating: USA: R/ UK: 18/ Australia: M
By 1988, The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (and yes, by this point it had become a franchise) was at a bit of a crossroads. Wes Craven’s first film stood as a slasher classic. Even the hardcore NOES fans regarded Jack Sholder’s second film as an abomination better off forgotten. Chuck Russell’s NOES 3: The Dream Warriors was a decent film that tied up all the loose ends. So, by the time New Line realized that they could still milk a few more bucks out of the franchise, they had some choices to make—and trust me when I tell you they made the wrong ones, because A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is a marginal film at best.
Picking up where the third film left off, the surviving Elm Street kids (Kincaid: Ken Sagoes, Joey: Rodney Eastman, and Kristen; Tuesday Knight, taking over for Patricia Arquette) are trying to get back to living normal lives—attending high school, dating, the whole nine. Ah, but things can never stay quiet for long in this town, and soon, Kristen is having some pretty dark dreams—but minus Freddy. Eventually, Kincaid starts having his own nightmare, one where he and his dog wind up in the old junkyard where John Saxon and Craig Wasson buried Krueger’s bones. Kincaid watches helplessly as his dog digs up Krueger’s bones, and then, get this, pees a stream of fire onto them in order to resurrect the undead child killer.
Yeah, you read that right—the dog pees fire. I’m not sure what exactly went on the script meeting where this idea came into existence, but it must have been an interesting one. Say what you will about how cliché it is for someone to resurrect a guy by digging him up, or using some kind of spell, or whatever—but at least it’s not as stupid and outlandish as a dog shooting flaming urine onto a pile of bones. When you see this scene, all hope you might have for this film will immediately vanish.
But, I digress. Krueger’s back in business, and one by one, he knocks off the surviving Elm Street kids—which should make him happy and bring about the end of the film, right? No way…Kristen, who has the power to pull others into her dreams (which was one of the more inspired ideas from Part 3) passes her gift onto the incredibly meek Alice (Lisa Wilcox: Watcher’s Reborn). Alice is always lost in some daydream, and continually spouts off some nonsense about the "dream master" (which is basically a cheesily modified version of the "now I lay me down to sleep" prayer). Needless to say, Alice has no idea how to control this newfound power, and as such, she finds herself unwittingly drawing everyone close to her into her dreams—where Freddy then kills them (why is it that she only draws her friends in? I’d draw in the National Guard or something).
As you can probably imagine, the rest of the film plays out in your standard teen exploitation fashion. Characters are followed long enough for them to die in a particularly fancy and gruesome way (Freddy rarely uses the glove anymore at this point), then our focus shifts to the next victim. Repeat until you reach the 85-minute mark, add in a rousing five-minute climax, and voila, you’ve got a slasher flick.
By the time this fourth installment of the series rolled around, Wes Craven was once again nowhere to be found. So, in the hopes of replacing Craven (who was the brains behind the original script), New Line brought in a veritable team of screenwriters (including Brian Helgeland, who would go on to write LA Confidential). All this was for naught, though, as rumors abounded that they began shooting this film without a completed script—and it shows. NOES 4 has no real narrative throughline, and as such, tends to look like a series of lavish setpieces connected by the most tenuous of filler scenes. Even more amusing (or insulting, depending on your perspective) are the lame homages scattered throughout the film—one victim turns into a giant cockroach ala Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Alice’s character is little more than a thinly veiled allusion to the title character in Alice in Wonderland, and there’s a scene where she’s sucked into a movie theater screen which comes across as a riff on The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Deep Blue Sea) directed the film, and it’s not an awful job, but it’s not all that inspiring either. Harlin had made a horror film prior to this one (the low-budget haunted jail film, Prison) so you can’t give him a break by saying that he’d never directed a genre film before. Harlin captures some decent visuals (although none of them are really worth mentioning in detail) but the whole production seems almost rushed. Harlin moves the camera about quite a bit, never content to stick with an image and allow it to sink into our subconscious, and this frenetic, but ultimately meaningless, style leaves the viewer feeling tired and restless.
Of course, perhaps Harlin was moving the camera about so much in order to keep the audience from noticing how hokey everything looks. A lot of people who don’t like this movie complain that it features too much color for a horror film—and while they’re on the right track, they’re ultimately wrong. The problem isn’t the color (and if you don’t think a horror film can still be effective with bright colors, then I’d advise you to check out Argento’s Suspiria—a film filled with red and green and various other garish hues), no the problem is that the film is too bright. Harlin and crew have made a fatal mistake by choosing to shoot almost all of the Freddy scenes in bright light or broad daylight. Anyone who’s seen Hellraiser 3 can tell you that showing a latex clad monster in bright light makes the monster look like a guy in latex—and this film does it repeatedly. Krueger should be kept in the shadows, with a soft lighting source used to keep him looking real and menacing—not thrust out into the open where we can gawk at his every detail—and see just how fake he looks in the process.
The cast itself is nothing to write home about either. NOES 4 is filled with every single 80s high school character cliché you can find—the jock (Danny Hassel), the slutty, but goodhearted party girl (Brooke Theiss), the cool ‘Cory Haim" type guy (Andras Jones), and the bookish girl in glasses (Toy Newkirk). See, this way, the writers don’t have to expend any screen time developing the characters—we already know what they’re all like—which leaves more time for killing.
In an interesting casting note for all you trivia buffs, Brooke Theiss was one of the actresses’ on the Growing Pains spin-off, Just the Ten of Us—a TV series that also starred Heather Langenkamp aka Nancy Thompson, star of NOES 1 and 3.
Robert Englund turns in a valiant effort, as is generally the case, even though by this point the metamorphosis of Freddy from supernatural child murderer to wise-cracking, anti-hero, pop icon is now complete. Englund is required to spout off a frightening number of incredibly lame one-liners here, and it’s painful to watch what was once a terrifying creation neutered to the point where people actually hoot and holler at his exploits.
As I mentioned earlier, the gore setpieces are very elaborate (the most elaborate in the series' history to this point, but each subsequent installment will up the stakes) but they’re not all that satisfying. Freddy goes to great lengths to kill these kids, and it’s a far cry from the minimal effort he employed in the first film (where he basically did little more than stalk the kids through his boiler room in their dreams). Here, Freddy ends up on a beach before tossing the girl into a magma-filled boiler, he drowns one character inside their waterbed mattress, he kills another in a roach motel, and fights one ‘kung-fu style’, while invisible. Truthfully, it’s all overkill—give me Freddy running down a dark alleyway, with arms that stretch all the way across, before he hacks his victim to pieces with his glove—no one needs all these elaborate setpieces.
I didn’t have fond memories of this film going into my recent re-viewing of it, but it turns out that it’s actually worse than I thought. Freddy from the first film might as well be considered dead by this point—because the monster from the first film bears very little resemblance to the jokemeister on the screen from here on out—and that’s a travesty, because Freddy was probably the most impressive of the ‘big 3’ slasher figures. New Line makes it clear that they don’t care about the character, or the audience’s intelligence, as they churn out another poorly conceived sequel designed solely to cash in on the success of the earlier films. If you’re one of those kids who grew up on the Freddy sequels, then you might enjoy this—it’s essentially the birth of Freddy the anti-hero. However, if you’re like me, and grew up with the original, feel free to skip this and all subsequent entries and jump right ahead to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare—which, while a flawed film, still has more going for it than any of these turgid sequels.
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