Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Here’s something funny. Nothing happens of interest in The Dream Master, Freddy anonymously kills some kids and makes wise cracks. Tons of stuff happens in The Dream Child and yet it’s a completely joyless slog. In theory the different elements of this movie should stack up to something truly great, in actuality it just ends up being subjectively the worst of the Elm Street films.

The film opens with Alice and her boyfriend, aka the Random guy she nearly murdered by carelessness in the previous movie, fucking in that sultry, over lit, late 80s way. In a way this ties into the creation aspect of the other movies, with little baby Jacob being created in lieu of papier-mâché houses and razor gloves. This is perhaps the cleverest thing about the movie, which is a shame.

In this movie we get flashbacks to nun rape, we see Freddy being born and his little foetal self scurrying away in a direct homage to Alien, we get Freddy at his most outlandish and we get the creepiest child actor ever known to man. Unfortunately nothing comes of it and there’s an overriding sense of cheapness and listlessness to the entire thing. Stephen Hopkins as a director has this unusual talent for overseeing projects with interesting ideas and quirks and somehow making them look cheap and wretched. For all of the abuse Lost In Space got at release I’m sure a better director with that FX team and script could have created something special.

Whilst Renny Harlin could never be classed as a subtle or nuanced he actually managed to make his cast feel lively at times. The cast assembled for The Dream Child just never quite gels. There are five main victims in the film. One is taken out almost immediately, the other two dissapear until they’re needed and the other is literally in the film for three scenes, one of which is her BIG Nightmare moment. Like the original Alice feels utterly isolated, but unlike the original there’s no sense of menace or dread. Freddy just looks odd (check out his weirdo arms throughout the film) and has become the master of jokes. When you don’t give a shit about the victims Freddy transforms from being something horrific and becomes an almost vaudevillian figure, inflicting ironic punishment on people for our entertainment. As such there’s real spectacle to Freddy’s kills this time, people get Tetsuo: The Iron Man’d into a motorcycle, people are fed their own innards, at one point Freddy turns into a goddamn super-hero but because there’s nothing to hold it together they feel like skits more than anything else.

Even Englund, usually energised in his role as everyone’s favourite immortal paedophile, seems bored in the role delivering his lines like a washed up comic forced to do paid personal appearances and tell old jokes……there were supposed to be more paragraphics but aside from laying into the aesthetics of the piece (a brown filter? Really?) I honestly don’t think there’s much else to say.

Some people will say that this is a better film than Freddy’s Dead and I’d disagree for one key reason. This film tries to go out there and zany with it’s dream sequences but fails to be truly crazy, Freddy’s Dead for all of it’s failings feels like a legitimately crazy film and it becomes endearingly entertaining because of it. The Dream Child just feels like watching beige paint dry.


3/10