Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

Here’s a geeky question. Just how long after the original does this film take place? A Nightmare on Elm Street came out in 1984, it’s sequel the next year. However the sequel jumped forward five years, so is this movie set seven years after the original. As such are the Nightmare on Elm Street films actually set, by and large, in the 1990s?

Nancy’s hair says no, but my heart says yes.

Regardless of the time period something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and by Denmark I mean Patricia Arqutte’s psyche. Freddy Kruger has decided to give up his summer job as the personification of homosexual Id and get back to his first love, the brutal (and for some reason Ironic) butchery of teenagers. Whilst I wasn’t utterly scathing of Freddy’s Revenge, with the film’s reputation it’s akin to curb stomping a puppy to get all critical with it, it’s nice to see Freddy back as an actual threat to children. His comedic lunging in Part 2 whilst oddly vicious always felt like a party entertainer had gone a little method rather than a homicidal maniac had achieved corporeal form and was about to get his long awaited murder on.

Here is what is magical about Dream Warriors, it somehow manages to balance wisecracking, ironic, Freddy with scary, rapey, Freddy. This is perhaps the last film in the series in which Freddy has a sense of menace and power to him but it’s also one of the more whimsical entries in the series. Despite all of bloodletting, and tits, and tendon pup petering, the entire film is built on the kind of ‘believe in yourself and you can achieve anything’ and ‘the power of love and friendship will overcome all odds’ moralising you’d usually find in Captain Planet.

I like to think that part of the reason for this tonal tightrope actually working is Frank Darabront’s involvement at the script stage. Now I know Darabront’s no miracle worker, delude yourself all you want but his Indy 4 script wouldn’t have saved that film (then again the power of Christ couldn’t have said that film), but I think he is gifted with the kind of emotional intelligence that is really lacking in most of these films. Whilst the stuff with the dream group can get a little sappy and cheesy, it feels earned and the kids actually feel like they have three dimensions (I mean this figuratively, the kids don’t get literal three dimensions until Freddy’s Dead). As discussed earlier part of the appeal of these films, too me, is that they feel focused on actually creating likeable characters rather than just fodder. We’re given enough information and time so that we actually get to like Kristen, Kincaid, and Joey, and that kid in the wheelchair, and the junkie chick, and that smart ass who gets walked off a building. OK, so it looks bad that I don’t actually remember half of their names, but I’m pretty sure the kid in the wheelchair doesn’t even have a name. Names or not they’re still a likeable bunch, like the Breakfast Club with mental health issues, and it helps Freddy maintain a hint of a threat.

The next two films in the series will start to see the kids having their personalities scaled back (presumably for budgetary reasons) and their dream sequences becoming grand circus of ironic hilarity rather than something truly horrible. There’s elements of that mean-spiritedness here, the weird looking kid who gets smashed into a TV seems to be get way more abuse than anyone else, but in general you’re rooting for these kids and Nancy, whose now all PHD’d up and kind of looking like the Bride of Frankenstein.

Nancy’s an interesting part of the texture of the Elm Street films as she kick starts a precedent for the survivor girl appearing in the next movie, dying, and handing the reins over to the next survivor girl. As such as soon as Nancy sees Kristen you know she’s going to get all clawed up at some point.

This is the iconic Nightmare film in a lot of ways, simply because it introduces the elements people know and love about Freddy. You ask people what they think about Freddy Kruger and they’ll tell you he’s a burned dude who cracks wise whilst dragging people into crazy dream worlds. This is the film which introduces wise cracking Freddy, which introduces gauche personalised dream worlds and which subtly redesign the costume to what we know it today. Gone is the massive jumper, in is a svelte sweatshirt. Hell ,they even call him Freddy this time rather than the rather unassuming Fred of the first film.

“Fred Kruger mom! He came into my dream and advised me about my tax rebate”

In the original you dream and you go to Freddy’s weird little boiler room, it’s essentially the horror house from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on the Left transposed onto dream logic. With this film we start to see Freddy actively using dreams as something grand and almost operatic. Whilst the stuff with the kids gaining their dream powers is cheesy, it shows a level of ambition and a level of psychological savvy that the films never really see again. It also allows us a weird dream world where four of the kids ostensibly gain super powers (although the one black kid being able punch things REAL hard feels a little questionable) whilst the other gets a Mohawk and some flick knives. Now I’m not debating the merits of a Mohawk and flick knives, but compared to the kid whose scream can destroy matter, or the kid who can acrobatically defy physics or the kid WHO IS A FUCKING WIZARD just asking for flick knives and a hair-do seems a little reductive.

We’re also treated to some more inconsistencies with regards to Freddy’s powers. Now you see I think it’s kind of hilarious that Freddy has no hard and fast rules in regards to what he can do, but I do wonder if anyone gets seriously agitated by him flouting the rules. Anyways after killing the wizard kid and somehow overcoming the girl with the Mohawk and flick-knives Freddy is facing down our intrepid heroes when he realises something ain’t right in the material world and he fades out to possess his bones, don’t ask, and go Harryhausen all over John Saxon’s ass. Two things strike me as odd about this. One, Freddy can reanimate his bones seemingly at will but has chosen not to do despite the fact that surely an unkillable bag of bones would surely be just as an effective avatar as a whiny kid who’s so far in the closest he’s been proclaimed the king of Narnia. Two, why does Skele-Freddy have his blade glove when Nancy’s mother apparently stole it from said corpse years ago. Three, why the fuck did Nancy’s mother steal Freddy’s glove all those years ago? Did she feel that at some point down the line she’d need an appropriate visual aid to explain to her kid how she firebombed some dude for the greater good?

This film also starts the tradition of Freddy killing people fairly innocuously but going full on with the build up. He lobs one kid off of the roof of an asylum which doesn’t sound all that interesting, the main thing about this is the lead up to the actual death, with Freddy ripping out the kids veins and tendons and turning him into some squirming teen marionette. It’s painful and gooey and really effective and it sort of marks the transition from Elm Street being a slasher film (Tina and Glen in the original are, despite the theatricality, fairly standard murders) to being something halfway between body horror and slasher. Freddy lingers with his victims and often the level of violence inflicted on one person becomes almost monstrous, and that’s a part of the films odd charm. Jason and Michael have to have ever increasing body counts because they’re essentially blunt objects, Freddy can spend five minutes putting each victim through agony. Lamentably this is probably as much a progenitor of Torture Porn, and in particular the Saw films, as Last House on the Left.

One last thing to mention is the score. Now the first Nightmare film was scored by good old Charles Bernstein (who created the really fantastic main theme), the second film got Christopher (I’m a truly fantastic composer, but I don’t seem to get any credit) Young for the scoring and in the third film we get Angelo (David Lynch taught me to eschew soundtracks in favour of random buzzing sounds) Badalmenti. Badalmenti does some nice ambient stuff and seems to homage Bernstein a lot, which is nice. From this point on the Nightmare films get overtaken by tie-in heavy metal songs, a trend started by the Dokken track from this film, and that’s a shame because Bernstein, Young and Badalmenti all bring really interesting layers to the films that get lost in the later films.

7/10