A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master [M]

Kristen, Joey, and Kincaid are the last of the Elm Street kids against whose parents Freddy swore revenge. Although his bones are buried and they’ve been sleeping sound, Kristen fears that they haven’t seen the last of him. Sure enough, Freddy comes back, but it’s not just to wipe out the original Elm Street kids. Hungry for the souls of more children, Freddy tricks Kristen into using her power to call new kids into her dreams and soon his sights are set on Alice, an identity-confused wallflower with a dream power all her own. As her friends start to get picked off one by one, Alice must dig deep and find the courage to face Freddy and become the dream master. 

After a slight resurrection in the quality of writing and performance and just everything in general in Dream Warriors, this next instalment in the Freddy Krueger saga is a sound flop. It just flops to the ground like a sack of crap. True, the sack of crap that it is. 

For a start, we’ve only got two members of the Dream Warriors cast and while I can understand that this is no-one’s fault really, it’s just very hard for people to see different faces on the characters they know and it’s not fair to expect us to automatically feel the same (if any) attachment to them as we had before. To be honest, even the two originals made it feel like they didn’t really want to be there. 

Having said this, the new characters made a solid go of it and fair play to them! More power to Lisa Wilcox who stars as Alice; it’s hard to play a convincing wallflower who actually does have friends, but not really a sense of belonging and she did the role really well, particularly when she takes on the character traits of each of her friends as they meet their end. I actually quite liked her as a character and thought that her eventual embodiment of all her deceased friends forming her identity was a nice touch (in sentiment at least). 

Freddy’s methods of killing and wisecracks become more creative and hilarious with him turning our heroes’ deep-seated fears and social anxieties against them: one girl gets gruesomely transformed into a cockroach and another has everything sucked out of her when Freddy asks “wanna suck face?” Need I say more? 

Moving on to things that bring this movie down, the major one is the way that the writers tried to be deep and smart in the ways of Lacanian mirror theory. If for nothing else, the overt and brutally ham-fisted way in which mirrors are used in this movie as a metaphor for identity really drags the film down to the lowest depths possible with a heavy coat of pretentiousness. 

The dialogue is shoddy, rumbling along fine and then suddenly popping forward or backward, and there’s at least two or three places where you forget that there’s some sort of shaping plot going on. Overall, it doesn’t make for very gripping entertainment on any level. 

Starring Rodney Eastman, Danny Hassel, Richard Garrison, Andras Jones, Tuesday Knight, Nicholas Mele, Toy Newkirk, Ken Sagoes, Brooke Theiss, and Robert Englund, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master falls back bounds behind its predecessor. Filled with gore, action, drama, murder, and comedy it’s another 20^th century B-grade horror flick that achieves a few throaty chuckles at its derpy hilarity, but ultimately just isn’t good.