A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master Reviews

The original 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is still to me one of the scariest and best horror films there is, as well as a truly great film in its own right and introduced us to one of the genre's most iconic villains in Freddy Krueger. It is always difficult to do a sequel that lives up to a film as good as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' let alone one to be on the same level.

While the best of the sequels from personal opinion is the third, the fourth one is another one of the series' better sequels. Like the third film it is not on the same level as the original, a very difficult feat, but it does have enough of what is a large appeal of the original and why it works so well. Not perfect, but a lot of very good things.

'The Dream Master' is not without its flaws. With a couple of exceptions, the acting is largely wooden (while not the worst offender as such, Tuesday Knight is no Patricia Arquette) and the beginning rock song is really cheesy and feels out of place. The story at times gets a little silly.

However, Lisa Wilcox is a winning lead and Robert Englund continues to terrify as the iconic character that epitomises "what nightmares are made of". 'The Dream Master' is to me the second best directed sequel, courtesy of Renny Harlin, giving a potentially clichéd premise freshness and imagination.

Special effects are neatly executed. The humour is darkly comic and very funny and there are some wickedly cracking one-liners. The scares are aplenty and they are legitimately creepy with some cool deaths (the water bed one is a strong example) and amazing dream sequences thrown into the mix. Alice being flung into the on-screen action from the cinema balcony is one of the series' most marvellous highlights.

It's a beautifully photographed film, particularly the dream sequences, and is the most unique-looking 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' sequel with its European art-horror visual style. The production design is both dream-like and nightmare while the music is suitably haunting.

Overall, good sequel and one of the series' better ones. 7/10 Bethany Cox

The original 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is still to me one of the scariest and best horror films there is, as well as a truly great film in its own right and introduced us to one of the genre's most iconic villains in Freddy Krueger. It is always difficult to do a sequel that lives up to a film as good as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' let alone one to be on the same level.

While the best of the sequels from personal opinion is the third, the fourth one is another one of the series' better sequels. Like the third film it is not on the same level as the original, a very difficult feat, but it does have enough of what is a large appeal of the original and why it works so well. Not perfect, but a lot of very good things.

'The Dream Master' is not without its flaws. With a couple of exceptions, the acting is largely wooden (while not the worst offender as such, Tuesday Knight is no Patricia Arquette) and the beginning rock song is really cheesy and feels out of place. The story at times gets a little silly.

However, Lisa Wilcox is a winning lead and Robert Englund continues to terrify as the iconic character that epitomises "what nightmares are made of". 'The Dream Master' is to me the second best directed sequel, courtesy of Renny Harlin, giving a potentially clichéd premise freshness and imagination.

Special effects are neatly executed. The humour is darkly comic and very funny and there are some wickedly cracking one-liners. The scares are aplenty and they are legitimately creepy with some cool deaths (the water bed one is a strong example) and amazing dream sequences thrown into the mix. Alice being flung into the on-screen action from the cinema balcony is one of the series' most marvellous highlights.

It's a beautifully photographed film, particularly the dream sequences, and is the most unique-looking 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' sequel with its European art-horror visual style. The production design is both dream-like and nightmare while the music is suitably haunting.

Overall, good sequel and one of the series' better ones. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Once again I have returned to Elm Street to tackle everyone's favorite dream demon...this time we are going to be talking about Nightmare On Elm Street 4: Dream Master, some of our beloved dream warrior friends are back but we've got some faces including Alice, Rick, Dan, and Debbie. Each of them has some definitive traits that will come in useful for tellnig them apart and also we know what's going to happen to each-of them. While it is not as good as Dream Warriors, the creative kills are still there including the infamous kills that come to my mind...specifically Freddy appearing as a sexy woman in the waterbed, taking out Rick as an invisible ninja, and the most iconic of all...the infamous transformation of Debbie into her own worst fear, a cockroach. Ah, she and Misty would get along so well with their overall hatred/fear of bugs. Unfortunately she doesn't evolve into an Ultra Beast (i.e Phermosa, the cool/oddly sexy roach Pokemon), she basically now can be qualified as a Fighting/Bug hybrid type. That cockroach sequence, you know between this and David Cronenberg's remake of the Fly, I don't think insects will ever be the same for me again. And most infamously...the infamous diner scene where we found out Alice's worst nightmare is to be stuck working at the same place forever and also where the souls go...in a pizza. Yep, the pizza has the souls of Freddy's victims in it, and also most notably...the heads of those victims are meatballs.


Remind me never to order pizza from that place again, especially since the last time I ate there I got a severed limb with my order when I specifically said not to, oh well...that's what you get when you hire Freddy Krueger to work there. I personally think hiring Krueger was a mistake, especially since when it comes to delivery. I complained about the service twice and the employees said it wasn't their fault, people are too afraid to ask for delivery because of several Krueger related incidents. Although I question why would they hire a guy who is known for killing people in their sleep. If you want to make sure your customers don't end up dead, why hire Freddy to be your delivery boy especially considering you know what happened to the other employees?


Check out this fourth installment of the Elm Street franchise, if you dare, but remember to sleep with the lights on when you go to bed, or better yet don't fall asleep at all. If you do, Freddy might come for you...unless you want that of course.

Once again I have returned to Elm Street to tackle everyone's favorite dream demon...this time we are going to be talking about Nightmare On Elm Street 4: Dream Master, some of our beloved dream warrior friends are back but we've got some faces including Alice, Rick, Dan, and Debbie. While it is not as good as Dream Warriors, the creative kills are still there including the infamous kills that come to my mind...specifically Freddy appearing as a sexy woman in the waterbed, taking out Rick as an invisible ninja, and the most iconic of all...the infamous transformation of Debbie into her own worst fear, a cockroach. That cockroach sequence, you know between this and David Cronenberg's remake of the Fly, I don't think insects will ever be the same for me again. And most infamously...the infamous diner scene where we found out Alice's worst nightmare is to be stuck working at the same place forever and also where the souls go...in a pizza. Yep, the pizza has the souls of Freddy's victims in it, and also most notably...the heads of those victims are meatballs.

Check out this fourth installment of the Elm Street franchise, if you dare, but remember to sleep with the lights on when you go to bed, or better yet don't fall asleep at all.

Here’s a thing I like about most of the Elm Street films, there’s a symmetry in that the majority of them have similar openings of an unseen figure crafting something. In the original we have the glove, in The Dream Warriors we have Kristen’s papier-mâché house, in The Dream Master we get creepy child drawing a chalk picture and in this we get a creepy child drawing on a sidewalk. It’s a tenuous theory but it’s a theory I’ll defend to the death.

So we have Kristen, Kincaid and Joey showing up in this film as the survivors from the last movie. It’s a nice way of establishing a timeline for the films, although you have to wonder how they all got released from the mental asylum considering they would have been found with the corpses of two of their friends and their psychiatrist following the events of the last film. Maybe some paperwork got misfiled and a judge got famous whilst some lawyers got fat. Anyways here’s the problem with Kristen, Kincaid and Joey being in the film. We know these kids, we like these kids, even if Kristen has been replaced by an actress who only looks like Patricia Arquette if Patricia Arquette had acquired a nasty case of downs syndrome, and we couldn’t give a fuck about the ‘new’ survivor kids.

That’s not entirely fair, Alice is probably my favourite reoccurring Elm Street character, but it’s interesting that this is the Elm Street film with the biggest body count (outside of Freddy vs. Jason which is like a fucking teen holocaust) and yet the actual details of these murders are almost ephemeral. Joey gets drowned, Kincaid summons Freddy by way of demon dog and then gets stabbed on a planet made of cars, one nerdy girl gets sucked dry, one guy gets murdered in a dojo and some girl, in an admittedly bravura continuation of the body horror theme, gets turned into a cockroach and dies, somehow. Conceptually they all work, but there’s no edge to them, nothing tied into the deeper narrative of the characters (unless Kincaid was REALLY scared of cars and scrap heaps) and despite sounding interesting they’re all kind of anonymous.

Written by Brian Helgeland, who has the bizarre career of any screenwriter anywhere, you can tell there’s been some thought put into the overall narrative in terms of continuing the arcs from the last film but it just seems like the director Renny Harlin doesn’t care. It’s not that he’s apathetic it’s just that he seems determined to do what he’s told. Harlin brings a certain flair to the film and it actually looks genuinely handsome at times, but it feels fluffy and disorganised and no amount of moody lighting can shake the feeling that you’re watching something that was compromised at some point. Harlin is able to achieve some genuinely iconic shots, the shot inside Freddy of all of the children he killed is genuinely unnerving, but the best thing he does in the film is use Freddy’s finger knives. By having Freddy actually cut up apples, and pick things up with the finger knives, it gives them a sense of physical presence and allows you to wile away the hours wondering how they convinced the cast to let them actually putting knives onto the end of Englund, or his stunt doubles, fingers. Now the chances are this is all special effects jiggery-pokery, but I prefer to live the lie and imagine that at some point they actually built a functional set of finger knives.

One of the funner things about watching the films in a row is watching the filmmakers desperately trying to work out how to kill a guy who is literally mythical. From Nancy denouncing his existence in Part 1 the producers tend to favour esoteric ‘power of love’ type endings with only Dream Warriors dispatching Freddy in a way that was set up earlier. Alice forcing the children’s souls to rip themselves from Freddy works on an esoteric level, but feels flimsy and it feels like the filmmakers just rushed to finish.

Also how odd is it that they replaced Kristen but didn’t change her mother at all. Kristen’s mother, in a series full of AWFUL parents, probably takes the cake for being utterly abusive and horrible. When you consider that the first film has the mother being a drunken, previously homicidal, shell of a woman and Freddy’s Dead is full of parents who are physically abusive that’s quite some feat.

After a 2nd watch, I have to admit that this movie was not as bad as I remembered but it was still pretty weak nonetheless. Eventually, the thing that probably bothered me the most was how lazy the whole thing was. Indeed, compared to the previous installments, there were many more killings which was not necessarily a bad thing but, as a result, there was no time left to develop the plot which was very thin, even more than usual. At least, it remained faithful to the concept, not like the 2nd installment which remains the worst of this franchise so far, but it was exactly what they did, they just sticked to the formula without adding anything really new. There were still a few good ideas in this movie but it was not enough to make it really interesting or entertaining. For example, it was a nice touch that they brought back some of the kids from the previous installment but, for some reason, they didn’t manage to convince Patricia Arquette to come back which was too bad. To make things worse, her replacement was just really weak, easily the worst actress of the whole bunch (fortunately, she was killed off half way through). Concerning Renny Harlin, it would be the real start of his Hollywood career which will be filled with some other B features like this one, with a few exceptions like ‘Die Hard 2’ and ‘Cliffhanger’. Anyway, to conclude, the whole thing was pretty weak and I don’t think it is really worth a look, except maybe if you are a die-hard fan of this franchise.