FRIDAY NIGHT FRIGHTS: A Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master (1988) “You Can Check In, But You Can't Check Out!”
If one were to rank all of these movies, I’d bet A Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master would sit comfortably somewhere in the top 3 on most lists. Maybe even top 2. It’s arguably the most fun of them all, embracing a much more kinetic cinematic style, really cranking up the visuals and overflowing with an overall vision. It’s also just so 80’s, watching it now makes this one feel like the Freddy that comes to mind when you think about Freddy.
It’s kinda iconic.
This is all thanks to a young Finnish director named Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight) clearly hungry to show off his chops. It’s completely embracing the world of Freddy and feels like watching a living, breathing horror comic book come to life. At one point young Harlin ran into James Cameron who asked him “So how are you going to bring back Freddy this time?” To which he replied, “Gonna have a dog piss on his grave!” That response gives you a real solid heads up as to the kind of ride this kid was constructing.
The basic plot this time out sees Renny delivering on his word by having Freddy resurrect from a junkyard grave thanks to a dog clearly suffering from some from kinda burning sensation. It’s about a year after the events of Part 2 and the surviving Dream Warriors are in for the old Alien 3 treatment. Yep, after all that shit in the last movie, they are systematically wiped out fairly early on to instead focus on a young girl named Alice and a new group of teenagers (?). The “last of the Elm St. children” are no more but it sure is a good thing one of them had a little sister huh?
Ok yeah yeah, so how are the kills?
Well, when I think of A Nightmare on Elm St. in general there are 3 moments in particular that instantly come to mind (It’s kinda crazy they’re all from the same movie). The first involves a young girl named Debbie who while working out in her dream slowly begins to transform into a cockroach. Like something inexplicably torn from the pages of Kafka, Freddy eventually crushes her inside of a roach motel.
It’s pretty brutal stuff and every second is just classic Krueger.
The second sees Freddy sitting at the counter of a restaurant with Alice where he’s served a meatball pizza. Only the meatballs just happen to be the screaming heads of his previous victims. It’s genuinely disturbing (not to mention gross) but you gotta hand it to Freddy when he declares “I love soul food!”
The dude loves his zingers.
But for my money, the most memorable scene involves a kid falling asleep on a waterbed. These things were trending hard back in the 80’s and like many materialistic possessions during that decade were considered to be a kind of status symbol. My Aunt and Uncle had one that I thought was awesome. And after seeing this scene at the impressionable age of 9 years old, it was clear that there was only one way they could possibly be more awesome.
For *cough* reasons *cough*.
If you put money down that Freddy makes a wet dream joke here, you win that bet.
A Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master sees Krueger at his critical and commercial peak. Earning across the board critical praise and cashing out some of the highest grossing box office numbers in the franchise. This is MTV Freddy, Will Smith Freddy, The Fat Boys Freddy. The Freddy who would go on to launch a merchandising franchise. Video games, trading cards, record albums, T-shirts, children’s pajamas, adorned diapers, you name it. The dude had his murderous glove placed firmly on the pulse of pop culture. In the end, I love this movie and seemingly so did the entire world.
There was no way it’d be the last we’d see of that tattered red and green sweater.
