Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) by Elan K — 22 Sep 2016

"A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master" is directed by Renny Harlin continues the story of Kristen as the film picks up not too far from where the last film left off, the remaining "dream warriors" are out of the hospital and among kids their age attending school.

So one thing you'll notice straight away is that Patricia Arquette did not come back to reprise her role as Kristen, and though all her screaming got on my nerves in the last film, I found her dearly missed as her replacement, Tuesday Knight, well.

.. Just wasn't all that good, and that goes for most of the actors/actresses in the film, they just weren't as strong as the kids we have seen in previous films apart from the guy who played Alice's brother, I felt he had a lot of charisma.

Now this is the point in the series where the films really started to take a dip, like I was saying "The Dream Master" picks up where the last film left off and Freddy has returned to take revenge on the rest of the "dream warriors" and once all that is said and done with, when the character of Alice comes into the mix the movie really starts to lose traction with a god awful reason why/how Freddy is able to pick off these teenagers without any of them being affiliated with elm street, there was more bloodshed in this movie than any of the others.

Now not to get into the logistic of things as you'll give yourself a headache trying to figure out exactly how any of this make sense, this movie was really just meant to turn your brain off and have fun, sadly I don't feel there is any fun to be had in this film.

It does a poor job trying to balance the goofy nature of the film while trying to tell a darker story that in the end it just doesn't know what it wants to be and left me as the audience pretty bored, this really did feel like a lot slower of a movie than it actually is.

Some positives about this film is that Robert England is fantastic as usual and you get more Freddy in this movie, I feel, so it makes up for the blandness of everything else going on. I also felt that some of the camera work done in this film was impressive, with a visually impressive opening scene and a nauseating tracking shot as a character is being drugged, there was also a really cool time loop scene that really did feel like you were in a never-ending dream that I loved.

But these few positive things cannot save this film. From a dog pissing fire, to Freddy on a beach, I had a hard time taking the movie seriously when I was supposed to feel bad about Alice losing so many people around her.

As well the climax to the film is once again visually pretty cool with the souls escaping Freddy but as for a reason to the happening, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and the fight scene was totally cheesy.

This was a script that few thrown together and overall I can't necessarily recommend this film unless you're marathoning through the series, "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master" gets a 4/10.