"When deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake."
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master opens with this title card, and it's a sign of things to come. The previous one had a similar intro quote which was a neat and interesting choice, and so of course they had to recycle the idea. A lot of things start to become repeated from here onwards, from the opening credits showing an extreme close up of something related to arts and crafts, to the main idea of taking on Freddy in his own world rather than dragging him out of the nightmare to destroy him. Nancy's house is now firmly established as being his, and he's also now a soul eating demon one hundred percent - the vengeful spirit thing has been ditched entirely.
Sanctifying his remains at least seemed like a good ending to part three, but of course they had to go one more round so he's back straight away without any good reason. The special effects are still neat particularly with his body regenerating, but the way it happens makes as much sense as some of the things in part two. In an early dream sequence a dog urinates on his grave. Except it's not urine, it's fire... this is a scene in the movie. Why this makes his body come back together is not clear. It would have been easier and more logical for someone to disturb his resting place in the real world. Maybe dig up his bones or break a holy seal. But someone really wanted to include this I guess.
The makers must have known what people wanted by this stage, and they the the box office receipts to show it. It's not a bad idea to have more of this fantastical lucid dreaming stuff going on, but the execution doesn't really work at all. The characters that survived in part three (though Kristen has been recast) are quickly dropped which is kind of a shame, and feels really cheap. I mean they were meant to be the victorious dream warriors right? Why bother including them at all? As a result the new cast are Kristen's other friends, a fresh batch of victims unrelated to Freddy's death. With all ties to the lore severed he's now apparently just doing everything for the hell of it.
The heroes this time are led by newcomer Alice. Instead of having Kristen's power to dream in a group with other people, she can absorb the 'dream skills' of her friends when they're inevitably killed off. So she slowly becomes the titular 'Dream Master' which an idea thrown in from nowhere. Apparently the characters all know this idea from a children's rhyme like the jump rope song, it just never came up before. How many weird sleep related songs do kids sing in this town? She can soon do karate among other things, both in the dreams and real life. Yeah it's come to this. It all goes off the rails with a final showdown that is... kind of fun in the most cheesy way possible, but they have an absurd climax where Freddy is finished off by being shown his own reflection, which makes no sense at all. But at this stage it becomes par for the course, the internal logic is gone.
If the revival of Freddy in part four was ridiculous, in The Dream Child they barely attempt to give it a reason at all. In yet another rehash of the Dream Warriors, the whole asylum subplot is revisited so his birth can be shown in a flash back. But this is also part nightmare world scene where he regenerates as a monster baby. His body quickly grows into the empty striped sweater left from the previous finale. Guess that mirror trick didn't do much after all. They not only go back to having his mother the nun as an aide to the heroes, but they also try that rebirth plot from Freddy's Revenge again. Not really a source of ideas I'd suggest looking back to. Like all those stories about pure evil being reborn it poses the question of why any of these people would want to live through their whole childhood again, but here we are.
This is a film where someone becomes horribly merged with a motorcycle so it's probably not best to think too much about it. Freddy's aim here is pretty vague, but as an undead entity he now wants to pass his spirit into Alice's child, hence the title. But he can still go about business as usual killing off the latest band of teenagers in their dreams. Even though it's stated he's using the child's dreams, not theirs. It's quality writing. They also decided that each death needs a theme of some kind, so an aspiring model is force fed to death and the comic artist is turned to paper and ripped apart. It's all pretty stupid despite some fun effects, though a hospital sequence manages to be creepy as Alice's boyfriend is put on the operating table and enters a nightmare because of the anaesthetic.
The problem with these later entries is that the dream moments seem so unnecessary. At times it's as though the characters are going through this stuff in reality, or that they're sleeping at times that make no sense. The stakes and the tension levels are all over the place. The production values still provide some visually interesting sequences, particularly the asylum sets and a third act scene with the kind of M.C. Escher world also seen in Labyrinth. But the script just isn't good enough to hold this all together. There's a laughable moment where custody of Alice's child is demanded by it's future grandparents, something I doubt they have any legal right to do even if she may be suffering a mental disorder. Bringing back Freddy's mother as a way to defeat him just isn't established properly in a way that provides either closure or any meaningful additions to his backstory, resulting in an ending that seems rushed and lacking. However this is certainly not the worst they have to offer...
So losing the numbered title system we reach Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. He's never been alive this whole time right? It's not really the final one either. The last instalment (in the main series at least) brings a whole new level of nonsense to the table. If the others were getting goofy, this time it's just obnoxious. That opening title card is back again, this time there's a quote from Freddy himself just in case you want to stop and watch part three again instead. Nice of them to warn us I suppose. Skipping over any kind of mythology this one is set ten years into the future, where somehow every teen in Freddy's home town is dead which means he's trapped there. Dreams have geographical boundaries and his victims can be anyone. It's a weird time to add new rules.
Any kind of internal logic is just scrambled completely and it's hard to know where to begin. Right away there's a lot of total nonsense including a Wizard of Oz gag, something about Freddy's long lost daughter who now exists, and a bunch of scenes where the original town is now full of people that have gone crazy from having all their kids taken. The last part is supposed to be real life for the residents, and not a nightmare. Does nobody pass through here and notice? People still move homes right? They even waste Yaphet Kotto, who could have been utilised as a child therapist studying dream techniques. It should have been brought around full circle, but instead it's a big waste of time.
Springwood, the location of Elm Street is now sat behind some sort of barrier where Freddy resides in dream land. The last teenager 'John Doe' tries to leave by plane (even though later they come back just by driving a few miles) and after some Looney Tunes moments he arrives outside in the real world. Suffering from amnesia he ends up meeting some new friends at a housing project for troubled kids. This is Freddy's plan I guess, using him to draw back fresh blood. One of the social workers takes him back to Springwood of course in an attempt to solve the memory problem, which kind of adds up. But some of the other teens just happen to stow away in a failed attempt to escape their supposed incarceration at the home.
This all results in the usual set of events involving Nancy's house and some nightmare deaths that seem even more lacklustre than ever. Eventually the 'death' of Freddy arrives with in yet another showdown. This time they decide he can be dragged into reality and destroyed again, but how this is truly final is anyone's guess after he revived five times in a row. The ending was done with 3D in mind for some reason, so there are a lot of silly effects and some bad '90s visual effects. Elsewhere there are embarrassing attempts at comedy, and the horror atmosphere is mostly non existent. The whole thing feels like a kids TV show complete with a Scooby Doo van and a bunch of videogame jokes and wacky mishaps. They go a bit further into Freddy's past in an attempt to give him more backstory (including reasons for his post mortem powers) but by this point it's all such a mess that nothing even matters. Rest in piece...
One more thing....
Wes Craven's New Nightmare caps off the series with a new twist, setting the story in real life where Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon are just actors. It's good to see them back again and a few familiar faces have small cameos (though strangely nobody noticed Lin Shaye who played Nancy's teacher in the original, not as herself but another character). There's a great opening where they're filming another sequel in which Freddy has been revamped for a new era. He cuts his whole hand off this time and replaces it with a fancy new set of claws. But things soon get weird as the first dream scene arrives. So this time around the films themselves are starting to cause the nightmare world to appear, which is a great concept. So it's a shame that this opening sequence is probably the best part of the whole film.
There are a lot of throwbacks and call outs including set pieces and dialogue lifted right from the original film. But nothing really stands out as being dramatic or spectacular enough. A lot of the story is concerned with Heather's son having sleep problems so much of the running time is devoted to hospital drama rather than horror. She's also living in an earthquake zone and the tremors get far too much attention. Broken crockery and mental health problems seem like the real threats here. It doesn't help that the same stock sound effect of a vase breaking gets so often it becomes laughable. The plot itself involves Wes Craven himself realising his monster is becoming real and having to write a new script to stop this, but its all pretty lacklustre. As a commentary on pop culture and horror fandom there's so much more that could have been done here.
The whole child in peril idea is pretty heavy handed in a film where nobody will ever expect the boy to come to any real harm. Freddy doesn't even feature that much, and Robert Englund himself only gets a brief appearance. I kind of expected them to have a meet your maker scene at least where the perils of being a movie star or a director take a new turn. When he does show up the makeup has gone back to looking like a mask, and the 'new' Freddy wears a big coat to make him scarier, which doesn't work when he's shown under bright lights so often. The knife glove is later replaced by a fleshy hand with real metal claws growing from it, but it just looks like a plastic toy.
Ultimately this is just a slow and unengaging film which had the potential to explore some really neat new ideas and celebrate the influence of the franchise. But instead it fails to do anything of note and it lacks the creativity or the atmosphere of films from many years earlier. It's nice to see everyone back one more time, but it's probably best they finished it all here.
Oh...
