A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors [M]

All over town teenagers are committing suicide. Survivors of attempts are grouped together in a clinic where they have nothing in common, except for a recurring figure in their nightmares. A burned man with knifed fingers terrorises them in their sleep and it’s not until the hospital receives a new staff member, Nancy Thompson that any hope of survival comes through. Knowing the foe that these kids face, Nancy teaches them to use the powers of their dreams to fight back against Krueger. But Freddy’s been gaining strength from the souls of his victims, is Nancy and a bunch of kids really strong enough to fight him? 

Whilst it’s not a cinematic masterwork by any means, Dream Warriors is still a hell of a lot better than Freddy’s Revenge. This is where the films become somewhat camp, like Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies, but that element of campiness actually has a lot to be said for it. Dream Warriors introduces this fun element as well as the horror and stomach-churning gruesomeness that is the fun of Nightmare, making it a relatively entertaining movie. 

Firstly, the writing is much better than its predecessor! What we’ve now got is a fairly stable and balanced script that blends information dumps and payoffs with comedy, and plausible pop-psychoanalysis. Freddy’s methods of attack in these kids’ dreams become all the more inventive and scary as he takes on the form of past or repressed horrors of each character. For example, we’ve got an ex-drug addict whom Freddy kills with ten fingers of needles while another girl is forced to listen to her mother’s decapitated head complain about her attempts to ruin her relationships with other men. On a shallow level, this movie delivers the thrills by preying on the plausible psychoanalytic edges of distressed teens that are suffering from real-life problems like drug addiction, divorce, etc. This exploration into that sort of territory already makes it infinitely better than the piss-weak attempt of possession through Nancy’s old house that was at the centre of the second flick. 

Secondly, we’ve got some much stronger performances at work here and it was actually nice to see cast members from the first movie reprise their roles. I’ll concede it was a bit of a wild card bringing Nancy back into the nightmare, seeing as we never really worked out whether she died in the first film or not, but the appearance of her familiar face did bring a new layer of enjoyment to the movie: it’s always nice to see familiar faces in movies. The performances are all bounds ahead of those in the second film, with connection and chemistry actually being able to be seen between the central characters. 

What I love also too are our heroes’ interactions with Freddy and his newfound one-liners that bring that extra level of fun to the film. 

The special effects are much better and there is even a solid stab at explaining Freddy’s history, which is interesting. 

Starring Heather Langenkamp, Craig Wasson, Patricia Arquette, Ken Sagoes, Rodney Eastman, Jennifer Rubin, Bradley Gregg, Ira Heiden, Penelope Sudrow, Priscilla Pointer, Laurence Fishburne, and Robert Englund, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a camp, but fun supernatural slasher flick filled with action, horror, violence, drama, and comedy. While it’s still not a horror masterpiece, it’s fun.