Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) by Grisel M — 22 May 2010

Damn you, Renny Harlin. Damn you to hell. This is the point at which the Nightmare on Elm Street films stopped being dark, clever, and macabrely funny horror films and turned into garish, campy cheese. I don't know what it is about the fourth movie in a franchise being the one in which internal story logic and fundamental filmmaking integrity simply breaks down (IF a franchise ever gets to four- I think this is some natural storytelling defense mechanism against breaking a trilogy), but while the last Nightmare film was a logical continuation from the established Elm Street lore (such that it was), this film just seems to... happen. There's not even a pretense of explanation: Freddy was solidly and decisively killed at the end of part 3, but they had to bring him back, so of course, the only way he could return this time is for a dog to piss fire on his grave. Honestly, were they even trying when they wrote that? I know that it's hard to come up with good ways to bring back the monsters in sequels to slasher films, but the resurrection in this movie just feels like a big middle finger to the audience's intelligence. Then, of course, they have to pull a typical horror movie move by killing all the characters that survived the last film (something I like to call the Alien 3 maneuver), thus rendering the last film meaningless. Worse still, the rest of the story feels episodic, as if the only reason this movie exists is to provide a slew of ostentatious nightmare sequences threaded together by a flimsy narrative- and what little there is of THAT seems so chaotic and nonsensical that it feels cobbled together out of several different scripts (which is weird, 'cause there was only one screenwriter); yet despite all that chaos, the film never achieves anything approaching the surreal, dream-like atmosphere of the first film, opting instead for excessive art design, cartoonish dream scenarios, and neon-splashed cinematography (it's really sad when the poster art for your movie shows more depth of imagination than the movie itself). And was it REALLY necessary to bastardize another children's rhyme? At least the original jump-rope song sounded good, and it wasn't used as a deus ex machina by the first film's end! But I digress. The movie starts, strangely enough, in the middle of a nightmare, as Kristen, our hero from the last film (now conspicuously NOT played by Patricia Arquette), wanders through Krueger's abandoned house while it apparently tries to scare the bejeezus out of her, despite Freddy being gone. She's irrationally fearful that Freddy is "coming back for us", and it turns out that she is absolutely right, because out of nowhere, for no f%$#ing reason, Freddy comes back. Let me repeat this: FOR NO GOD DAMN REASON AT ALL.

(sigh) Let me get into this now, because I know it'll come up sooner or later. This movie sports the laziest excuse for a script I've ever come across. Characters are telegraphed in short, poorly-done dialogue exchanges, plot devices are thrown in at a whim and quickly forgotten, thematic material is fabricated to suit the concept of the movie, and basically the only reason Freddy comes back is because the filmmakers need him to. Couldn't make a sequel without him, so BOOM! Freddy's back. That kind of "just-go-with-it" mentality might fly in a Friday the 13th sequel, but I expected more from a Nightmare movie. And wtf is the "Dream Master", anyway? The name is in the damn title, but the movie never tells us what it is! There's some idiotic classroom scene where they make allusions to it, but none of what's mentioned in that scene ever comes into play in the movie, except for Freddy's one line, "I've been guarding my gate for a long time, bitch." So, what, Freddy's the Dream Master? But the movie kind of insinuates that Alice is the Dream Master. But that makes no sense! Maybe we never see the Dream Master, and it's some outside force that... no, no, just forget it, it's bullshit, it has nothing to do with the movie. ANYway, so Freddy comes back and kills the last of the Elm Street kids (now we know why Arquette didn't come back- her character gets killed off in the first half-hour), but not before Kristen can transfer her power (the ability to pull people into her dreams) to her new best friend, Alice. Unfortunately, this does more harm than good, as Freddy uses Alice as a means to get to the other high schoolers in Springwood (whom he apparently couldn't touch before because their parents weren't the ones that killed him, which is actually a kind of cool plot point). But something about the whole process turns Alice from a mousy daydreamer into an eighties punk wannabe (again, a plot development which is pointed out, but never really explained), and the film ends in a decent showdown that climaxes with the most ridiculous, contrived, idiotic, unbelievably STUPID deathblow in cinema history: Alice gets Freddy to look into a mirror, and SHA-BLAM! He dies. Game over, end of story. What the f%$#. Taking his place as the undeniable star of the film this time 'round is Robert Englund as everyone's favorite child-killing psychopath Freddy Krueger, who by this point in time was a merchandising phenomenon known and loved by children across the country (God, the eighties were a strange decade). This is the movie that would cement the iconic Freddy into the mind of pop culture: the cackling jokester who makes a pun just before he kills you. Thing of it is, Englund is just as good as the corny jokester as he was when the character was dark and creepy- arguably even more so- and as a result Freddy is easily the best thing that this movie has going for it, and they try to get as much out of his presence as possible. Unfortunately, he's not the only person in this movie (which would be interesting in a different way, I guess- a Freddy one-man show), and he's not actually the hero; that dubious honor would go to Lisa Wilcox as Alice Johnson, the titular Dream Master... I think (you know, if you have to read the screenplay to know what's going on with the characters, someone's not doing their job right...). When Alice starts out, she's a mousy, plaid-skirt-wearing loser, who I'm fairly certain is psychotic (she's constantly spacing out and having hallucinatory daydreams, which include ranting at her douchebag father and seeing her dead brother jump cheerfully out of his coffin); as the movie progresses, though, she starts taking on the attributes of the teens Freddy kills (something Kristen couldn't do, but it kinda looks like Alice can because Kirsten's power was filtered through Freddy when she got it, or something- don't question it too much), so that by film's end it's strongly insinuated that she's the positive opposite of Krueger- a concept I would have been much more into if the rest of the film didn't suck so badly. Lisa Wilcox is... okay, I guess. If she can act, you certainly can't tell from this movie, but then again, she doesn't have a lot to work with- the character's shift from an introvert to a hardcore dream bruiser is implied primarily through her wardrobe, not her actions. She says her lines, she screams, she tries to act tough and badass, but she's really got no personality (one assumes because she's supposed to be a relatable "everyperson", but even everypeople have to be likeable and unique). If Alice comes off as bland, though, one could look at it as a welcome form of relief; the other characters in this film are such vividly colorful teenage stereotypes that it sometimes feels like you're watching a bizarre after-school special when they're on screen. Taking over for Patricia Arquette is Tuesday Knight as Kristen, our hero from the last film, who shows up this time so convinced that Freddy's coming back that it's probably safe to say that she WILLS him back to life. Then she gets killed- surprise, surprise- but not before passing her gift to Alice, at which point we completely forget about her. Knight plays the formerly haunted, introverted character as a wide-eyed deer in headlights before getting the Tina treatment. Andras Jones plays Alice's brother and Kristen's boyfriend Rick, an annoyingly positive guy who practices martial arts while listening to lame eighties pop-rock (and receives the lamest death scene in the film- he gets mimed to death). Brooke Theiss is Debbie, a bug-hating, iron-pumping tough girl whose weakness is telegraphed far too clearly ("C'mon! Give a bug a break!"), but who does end up with one of the most disgustingly clever deaths in the franchise's history (roaches check in...). The bizarrely-named Toy Newkirk plays Sheila, the brainy girl (who's kind of a snot about it, I think) with asthma whom Freddy teaches a thing or two, har har. Finally, Rodney Eastman and Ken Sagoes reprise their roles from the Dream Warriors, but only long enough to get horribly, brutally killed in the first fifteen minutes (with accompanying iconic one-liners: "How's this for a wet dream?").

The script was literally being finished while they were shooting the movie, and boy does it show. Plot threads come in and out of focus wildly, and as I mentioned earlier at length, whole concepts are left unexplained. What's up with that new nursery rhyme? Who would have come up with such a clunky and nonsensical prayer to teach to children? No one, that's who- it's a convenient plot device used to "kill" Krueger decisively, an arbitrary way to end the movie. Of course, it's not the scripts or the story that anyone cared about by this time in the franchise's history, but the kills- and Nightmare 4 does raise the bar for unique, clever, and expansive nightmare sequences (well, except for that whole mime fiasco. Andras Jones is no Edward Norton). People turn into bugs, fly into movie screens, have the life sucked out of them, and their souls end up as toppings on a pizza. The sets are pretty amazing (that church in the climax is certainly impressive), but the cinematography is all over the place, loaded with pinks, greens, and reds (at least in the dream world- it's pretty subdued in the real world, which I guess makes a decent contrast). The direction is a little... extreme; Harlin has a tendency to overdo his angles, overuse his wide-angle lens, and even employ the dreaded Dutch tilt (which, in a film about dreams, is a perfectly valid stylistic choice, but I just don't like that style, personally), and like many rookie directors, he seems more interested in getting an interesting-looking visual than he is in getting any sort of believable reactions from his actors. It's not the worst direction I've ever seen in a horror movie, and as a Sam Raimi fan, I certainly can't bring him to task for calling attention to the filmmaking itself, but what bothers me is that this film, for lack of a better analogy, looks like a music video. A classic eighties music video, sure, but a music video nonetheless. Harlin's definition of "atmospheric" consists of tilted angles, color gel lighting, and slo-mo; the plot is absurdly thin and incoherent, serving only as the thread that connects a litany of showpiece nightmares; and the soundtrack is filled with pop music, which drows out the minimal scoring that was done (which sampled quite liberally from the first Nightmare score by Charles Bernstein, I couldn't help but notice). No wonder it did so well when it was released- to teens in the eighties, a music-video horror film must have been like catnip.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 was the highest grossing Elm Street film for a long time after its release, beaten only recently by Freddy vs. Jason and the new Nightmare remake (both of which could easily be accounted for by inflation). While its financial success is unquestionable, though, its status among fans has taken a sharp decline as the years have gone by. That's because, unlike the first three films (and yes, I'm even counting Nightmare 2), Nightmare 4 is a shallow, substanceless piece of pop fluff, an artifact of its time that has not aged well. It's the sort of thoughtless popcorn entertainment that could turn a sick, evil character like Freddy Krueger into a dark but cartoonishly funny anti-hero- a change, for better or worse, that defined the character from that moment on. Is it abysmal, wretched, a film to run screaming from? Nah, it's not really all that bad- cheesy, maybe, but dumb and fun. But is it a good Nightmare film? Depends who you ask, really... but I say HELL no.