A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Most of the time—well, 99.9% of the time—I approach each film with the basic thought: Okay, what do I like, and what do I dislike? I think a great deal of us just use this basic approach. Going into A Nightmare on Elm Street V: The Dream Child, I have watched it several times. I’ve never liked it. But it has been a few years. I went into it, believe it or not, with a clean slate. I pushed back thoughts and feelings that have always considered this sequel as the worst (..although, the next film might just claim this spot; a previous viewing wasn’t good…), all that negativity, and hoped I could find something, anything, that would be of some sort of quality. I do think there are flashes of brilliance surrounded by this all-encompassing dreck.
**

When the little Freddy baby runs around, I must admit that I groaned more than a little, but I continued to look for nuggets possibly buried deep in the shit. Even if I had to put on those boots and goggles and wade through the excrement for a while, I held out hope of finding just a few nuggets. I was certain if I looked hard enough I would find something of value.

Robert Englund was constantly fun even when his Freddy character had been robbed of his menace and turned into a comedian with a burned face. The make-up even lost its effectiveness. Credit to Englund for the sheer energy and verve he produced even under the most ludicrous plot developments involving his character. The Freddy of The Dream Child was a faint cry from how creepy he once was. People can talk shit about Freddy’s Revenge all they want, but at least Englund’s character still had his mojo.

Dan and Alice have a passionate encounter during the film’s opening credits which leads to her pregnancy. Freddy wants to use her son to get at Alice. He is “birthed” (it is the only way to describe it) thanks to a dream concerning Amanda Krueger’s childbirth of the bastard son of a 100 maniacs. Freddy is now once again active and after Alice’s high school graduate buddies. About that dream: Alice was awake, and it is soon learned that her unborn child was the one actually dreaming about Krueger; this child is Freddy’s ticket to killing some more people using dreams.

I had some trepidation about returning to the Nightmare series which is kind of evident in the absence of time between Parts 4 and 5 reviews. I went into December watching Nightmare on Elm Street movies every Friday night, but by four, the dread of diminishing quality kind of wedged a fissure that led to the length of time that has existed. Typically, a horror series reaches its peak by maybe the second, third film and it is all downhill. I consider Part 4 the bridge of the series, the high quality of Part 3 and the ever so low quality of The Dream Child. Part 4, to me, is that bridge that has a bit of structural damage but is still passable. It has good, great, mediocre, and bad. Part 5 doesn’t have great, but has moments that are decent. But when Part 5 is bad, it’s bad. Even Krueger has few great moments and a lot of lousy ones. I don’t fault Englund; the material just isn’t there. Super Freddy?!?! Are you kidding me?!?! At least, Englund wasn’t in that get-up. Some Nightmare fans love the parody on anorexia with the model friend of Alice’s getting “stuffed” by Freddy, but I found it a forced, desperate attempt at comedy that fails miserably. “Bon Appetite, Bitch” isn’t quite as cool a moment as “Welcome to Primetime, Bitch”. Of course, Freddy as a waiter might deliver some giggles, but his plate has a doll on it. Umm, okay. Supposedly part of the joke is that he feeds her to herself. Alrighty then. You also get Freddy skateboarding in a white nightmare sequence playing on the character of Mark’s comic book obsession, with his victim in graffiti colors trying to flee before momentarily getting some licks in with his cringe-worthy Robocop imitation. There’s a nifty moment though where Freddy slices through a comic book page outline of Mark as a drawing. I also dug how Mark turns into a comic book drawing while being sucked into a comic book called Nightmare in Hell. Dan’s flesh and metal motorcycle merge was rather badass, though, and provided (for me) echoes of Cronenberg and Tetsuo.

What I thought Part 5 did well at was returning to the Amanda and Freddy backstory. Amanda is the weakness of Freddy. Through Amanda, he will fall. While I like reintroducing franchise fans to where Freddy derived from and the idea that Part 3 (with Amanda much older, a spectre) provided Craig Wasson pointers on how to defeat her evil son by finding his bones, I’m not that particularly mindblown by how it develops overall. Rarely does the franchise (even Part 1) ever quite close with a truly satisfying method for putting Fred down. Part III, I guess, was probably the closest to a rather ideal way (although Catholicism is the device; as if Fred were a vampire…) with holy water and Fred’s own knife-fingered glove, the killer attacked outside and inside the nightmare realm. Part 5 also brings the asylum, now a skeletal relic, abandoned, leaves and moss, reminiscent of a forgotten Gothic castle. We see the asylum as it is realistically, the visual epitome of madness, sorrow, and misery. But in the nightmare realm, director Hopkins turns it on its head, specifically when Freddy decides to try and kill Jacob, Alice’s child at about five years old, with stairs at all angles, heading in all sorts of directions, literally a maddening “funhouse” where Freddy is on the loose, wanting to hit Alice where it hurts. She finds out, through her boy, that Freddy “hides within her” and she must free him from  her. There’s this bizarre separation as Alice tries to “sever” Freddy while Yvonne (the tough black chic who is a nurse and is an actual survivor; her character loves to dive in the local swimming pool) is attempting to locate the burial chamber of Amanda’s skeletal remains. Then it just continues to get more and more surreal (if it hadn’t been already) as Jacob “turns Freddy” in a manipulative move to save Alice while asking Fred to teach him his evil ways (Jacob actually “wears” facial burn make-up and speaks in a sandpaper voice). Jacob “projectile vomits” the “souls” of Freddy’s newly acquired victims (Dan, Mark, and Greta, Alice’s peeps) into Krueger. The heads of the victims pulling “umbilical cords” attached to Freddy’s back draw towards Amanda, now resurrected thanks to the discovery of her body by Yvonne. Freddy and Jacob return to infant forms and into the wombs of their respective mothers. Freddy fights to free himself this time from Amanda as she tries to keep him at bay while Alice affectionately embraces her baby’s return to his rightful place to later be born the right way.

I get that the film uses the Freddy series template to cover adult themes like pregnancy, protection of one’s child, eating disorders, difficult parental demands on their children, forces opposing a mother’s mental/emotional state and ability to raise a child, and dealing with the loss of the father of your child, but all of these are buried under practically incomprehensible plot developments and a cavalcade of oddball effects sequences (although impressive). The asylum and lighting didn’t bother me; assets, I found them. I liked that visual of the dangling lights swaying back and forth, as well as, the ominous halls of the asylum, empty but sending off an air of gloom and doom. I’m just not sure this kind of series was ripe for mature themes on a battle for a child’s life. Seeing a baby’s carriage on the cover, its title of The Dream Child, a poster where Freddy eyes a different strategy (which I’m never quite sure is fully explained satisfactorily) at getting even with Alice, doesn’t seem to appeal to that target audience. That said, this does seem like a daring option: to take a Nightmare film in new territory, a new direction. Maybe if director Hopkins wasn’t rushed under such hastily production conditions, with a script all over the place, a piecemeal of ideas from a variety of people/sources, and allowed more than mere months to fashion his film, The Dream Child could have been sharper, more focused, less muddled, with a more coherent narrative, and delineated a clearer chronicle of Alice’s struggle with Fred Krueger.

I have no problem with Lisa Wilcox in this movie. She’s gives her all. It is all there. Insistence that her friends entrust in her their confidence and belief that she’s not crazy no matter how preposterous this idea of a nightmare killer sounds. Integrity in how she doesn’t shirk the responsibilities of what having unprotected sex at such a young age can yield in regards to the consequences of pregnancy. A strength that emboldens her to face Krueger without reservation or hesitation because a child’s life is at stake. That will to not allow others to dictate her abilities as a mother. Bravery to willfully reenter time and again the nightmare realm although in doing so she will have to face off with pure evil. Perseverance because of the obstacles that stockpile both in the real world and in the nightmare against her, losing the man she loves and suffering because of the friends taken from her. In not giving up no matter what comes her way—including her unwavering support of her father who is sober and prepared to assist his daughter with the child—this is one hell of a character deserved of a better film.

If Hopkins had a better, more concise and controlled script, his ability as a visual filmmaker (set pieces are his specialty indeed; I thought the asylum of crazies and the camerawork conveying them was a bit of manic genius, particularly when they engulf in a sea of men both Amanda (in the form of Alice) and Fred (pulling away his gloved hand and its arm from the shoulder)) could have crafted quite a unique sequel amongst the franchise. As is, I was glad to have finished it, ready to put this experience in the rear view mirror. Not exactly a pleasure as much as it was an endurance test.

I was glad that Alice lived because it broke that stigma regarding heroines from previous films dying at the hands of Krueger. Like Tommy Jarvis in the Friday the 13^th series, she was a survivor never to face Fred again. She gets a happy ending. Others after her would not be so fortunate.

In preparation for this blog review, I had read that the architectural design of the asylum--at the end when Fred was trying to catch Jacob while Mama was hoping to steer him in her direction--was akin to famed art graphic designer MC Escher. Seeing the ways the stairs are constructed and designed to go in every kind of direction, with characters split up and separated from wildly opposing viewpoints, and a drawing from Escher it is easy to recognize his influence on Hopkins. This is a visual dynamo of a labyrinth in chaos. Freddy's playground. It's all a game; you have to somehow play by his rules and still outwit him. The problem is that even when you do, he just keeps coming back. Can't keep a nightmare madman down, can ya?

It must have been cool for Englund to work sans Freddy make-up and the character as just a demented inmate in the asylum of the damned. He still had that menace. It gave him the chance to deliver the goods without the disguise. I don't know about others, but the make-up in this Freddy incarnation was lacking. And, for me, this film just doesn't have the same kind of ooh la la death sequences and build ups to them that were often of such importance in previous entries. A bust. A bummer. A lackluster example of a series past its expiration date.