A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child [M]

Alice thought she had gotten rid of Fred Krueger and those horrible nightmares. But now dreams are taking on an eerily familiar tinge of danger. After a terrible nightmare where she almost drowned in the shower, it seems to Alice that Freddy is back and when her boyfriend is brutally killed in a car crash her worst fears are confirmed. Freddy is back and in search of new souls, but what’s different this is that he’s attacking their dreams… when they’re awake. 

And we’re back on to the bad follow-up movies that attempt to tell the impenetrable back-story of Fred Krueger and… fail, absolutely epically. But we’ll get to that in a minute. After exploring and mutilating the themes of identity and Lacanian mirror theory in The Dream Master, this follow up movie explores pregnancy and motherhood. Maybe it’s some stab at the ultimate abject; kids and parents turning on each other, whatever the writers were trying to do with this movie caused it to be a class flop just like its predecessor. Admittedly, you can argue that these films have become a deliberate B-grade string of ‘good’ bad movies, but it really doesn’t make them any less bad. 

So, Freddy is somehow back again and really we have no idea how; we’re given all these clues, but no information dumps, which is kind of surprising seeing as films like these tend to favour them generically. The first thing that I want to tear apart in this film is the religious aspect of it. I can completely understand the appeal of creating a history for a notorious cinematic slasher like Freddy Krueger; he’s one of the best horror movie killers around with his fedora and his wise cracks. But what irritates me is the fact that whoever was in charge of coming up with Kruger’s back-story, didn’t really bother to explore the other, more frightening possibilities. Think about how much fun you could have writing about Krueger from a psychological point of view. But no, they go for the religious aspect and how he is some mutated spawn of the Satan. Now, this annoys me for two reasons. 1) Freddy Krueger was not born some mutated creepy devil spawn: he was a man who was a child murderer and was murdered by the townsfolk, thus sparking his revenge story of the first movie. 2) I cannot help but feel that it’s an example of incredibly lazy writing when you just slap on a ‘religious’ label and then don’t explore that further. In this film we get the slightest hints of explanations regarding Christian mythology, and Freddy’s one weakness, his mother (a bit of a reverse Bates or Vorhees thing going on there), is a nun. End of research. 

All of the film’s attention is on the ‘gross-out’ aspect, which is really just a lot of tapioca, claymation, and rubber daubed in shiny gluey liquid. One thing that can be praised in this movie is Freddy Krueger in black and white comic strip: that return to the grey tones of noir was pretty cool, especially for such a modern character as Freddy. I have to admit also too that there was a little hint of Mad Max about the first death scene, namely the victim literally becoming one with his bike. It was actually eerily prophetic of Fury Road. Whether this was deliberate or not, I still responded in a positive way to that bit. 

Most of the performances are pretty solid with a special shout-out going to Lisa Wilcox as Alice and Kelly Jo Minter who, in a slightly annoying and obvious but nevertheless effective way, provided the voice of reality, authority, and all of the characters who were not meant to believe what Alice was telling them about a guy killing people in their dreams. 

Starring Danny Hassel, Erika Anderson, Nicholas Mele, Joe Seely, Valerie Armstrong, Burr DeBenning, Beatrice Boepple, Clarence Felder, and Robert Englund, Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child provides a fairly predictable cinematic experience that results in disappointment because it is so obvious. Filled with gore, classic Freddy wise cracks, drama, horror, and a sneaky exhibition of Englund without scarred Freddy makeup, it’s just as bad as its predecessors and should be viewed with the expectation of being a tacky, B-grade horror movie. Not much less and certainly nothing more.