FRIDAY NIGHT FRIGHTS: A Nightmare on Elm St. 5: The Dream Child (1989) “Told You Comic Books Was Bad For Ya!!”
A Nightmare on Elm St. 5: The Dream Child is a tough one to write about because it is easily my least favorite and thus, least frequently viewed entry in the series. I’ve never been in the mood to watch one of these movies and been like, “Y’know what? I could really go for Part 5 right now.” But I did give it another shot recently and am going to do my best to be nice.
Please Freddy, can I reason with you and ask you to not kill me for this review?
Look who I’m talking to.
Picking up about a year after where Part 4: The Dream Master left off, the survivors of that film Alice and Dan are again our main characters here. Now a couple, Alice begins having strange visions of one Amanda Krueger roaming around in an insane asylum where she is eventually attacked by a whole bunch of the patients (y’know that whole “Bastard son of a hundred maniacs” thing). Alice is also having visions of a young boy named Jacob and eventually discovers that she is pregnant with Dan’s kid and Freddy sees this as his opportunity to resurrect himself in infant form. It’s all a bit on the convoluted side and really just set dressing for the by now standard formula of introducing another group of teens(?) who will be offed by way of their own personality quirks: standard issue Nightmare on Elm St. stuff.
The main difference here though is that the (dare I say) fun of the previous installments is nowhere to be found. The Dream Child carries an overall tone that is particularly nasty and much more mean spirited then what we’ve come to expect. I mean, even for Freddy this one is dark! Director Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2, Lost in Space) has some solid visual chops, but he’s taking the whole thing way too seriously delivering a movie that refuses to wink and laugh at it’s own absurdity.
Of course, the main highlights of any Elm St. are the gruesome death sequences and it’s here where Part 5 has the goods.. Two in particular really stand out as possibly some of the most memorable in the entire series. The first being when aspiring supermodel Greta is forced to stuff herself to death in front of a laughing dinner party. For even the most desensitized horror fan, this shit is rough and a perfect example of how flat out angry this movies comes off for some reason.
The other one couldn’t be more opposite and is (for obvious reasons) quite possibly my favorite Freddy murder of all time (it’s also the one scene that manages to capture the flavor of the previous films). There’s this kid named Mark who’s a massive comic book nerd enthusiast and you know what that means. Our old buddy the Fredster is gonna have to pull him into a comic to wack him as none other than a superhero of his own design: Super Freddy!
Rest of the movie, why can’t you be more like this part of the movie?
Overall, I have to admit that there are several aspects about The Dream Child that I genuinely appreciate. There’s inventive set pieces and plenty of pretty nifty special effects; but the whole things is a bit sloppy with poor editing and a script that is flat out all over the place. And the introduction of the main title character Jacob (who Freddy plans on inhabiting) honestly leaves our antagonist feeling more like a special guest star in his own movie. It isn’t a horrible movie by any means, it just in my opinion happens to not be as much of a good time as the others. And it says a lot that the next installment Freddy’s Dead ignores the events here entirely. Like every chain in a franchise, there has to be a weak link and I’d say this is the one you can do without.
I know, I know Dream Child, you didn’t ask to be born.
