Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

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 We know these kids, we like these kids, even if Kristen has been replaced by an actress who only looks like Patricia Arquette if Patricia Arquette had acquired a nasty case of downs syndrome, and we couldn’t give a fuck about the ‘new’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.