Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) by Brendan A — 19 May 2010

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4- Freddy goes Hollywood, would be the appropriate title here. Big budget, big soundtrack (with the re-introduction of the original score as well), big 80's hair, good-looking stereotypical 80's cast, Freddy with shades, a dog that pees fire, one-liners galore, some scares, many laughs, all-in-all, lots of entertainment. This is the biggest Freddy movie of all in terms of appealing to pop-culture (perhaps rivaling Freddy vs Jason), and offers us some scares along the way. By this point in the series, Freddy has stopped being completely scary and morphed into a pop-icon, but still had the scare factor just enough to make the movie work as a horror flick, and make it successful. It's not as scary as its predecessors granted, but all around, it is entertaining, and offers some of the series' best special effects. We also finally go to a whole new ball-game story wise, as Freddy finally finishes off the elm-street children, and takes his game in an entirely different direction. This movie is entertaining, and one of the better sequels. With Renny Harlin on board for a director, where could it go wrong?

Well, it won't be for everyone, that's for sure. This movie feels like two different movies rolled into one, and serves as a crossover film into the next few. How? Well, the elm street idea is now dying, and the movie doesn't waste any time to kill it, and move onto the next idea: Freddy is done with the elm street children, and now everyone else. Could the series have been a trilogy? Perhaps. Did the original director, Wes Craven even want it to go that far? No. Has it? Yes. What was the purpose of 4, and most of the rest? Money. However, let's not get cynical, this one was still a solid movie; though the same unfortunately cannot be said for the ones afterwards.

The movie begins similarly enough to the 3rd, with the main heroine Kristen (Tuesday Knight), having another nightmare about Nancy/Freddy's house and seeing the white-clothed children jumping rope, singing the infamous nursery rhyme. Kristen senses that something is wrong, but there is no Freddy just yet. She tries to convince Joey (Rodney Eastman) and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) that Freddy is coming back for them, to no avail. Eventually, Freddy gets brought back to life again, apparently because of kids' fears, and claims that he was never dead after all; he was also revived by dog urine out of all things. Kincaid and Joey die very quickly afterwards, and Kristen introduces the rest of the new kids to the Freddy legacy. She dies shortly afterwards, after being drugged by her mother (Brooke Bundy), and passes on her power to the new kid, who would be pivotal to introducing Freddy to everyone else, Alice (Lisa Wilcox).

The first 1/3rd of the movie felt reminiscent and played as a worthy sequel, more or less to the previous installment. A different actress came on board to play Kristen, which some loved and others hated, but truth be told, Tuesday Knight brings a certain flare that was appropriate for this MTV-esque flick. I just can't imagine Patricia Arquette's Kristen, chain smoking cigarettes, and delivering lines like "leave her alone you son of a bitch!" Or, "no mother, you just murdered me, take that to your god damned therapy!" That was definitely Tuesday Knight's forte. Joey has longer hair, Kincaid is pretty much exactly the same, and it showed us how the kids lived their normal lives after the psychiatric institution of the 3rd movie. Even the character of Nancy Thompson is given a very brief homage here, by her name appearing on a tombstone. But that is pretty much the end of the elm-street storyline, and Alice takes us into the future.

Alice starts feeling that perhaps something is going on, and starts noticing that she feels different. Every time she seems to fall asleep, one of her friends gets pulled into the same dream, and becomes Freddy's play toy. She also seems to carry on a part of that victim's personality. First up is Sheila (Toy Newkirk), the smart chick, who stood no chance as she was trapped in her seat, and Freddy sucked the life out of her. Shortly afterwards, Alice's brother Rick (Andras Jones), was offed by freddy's glove. Alice begins to realize what is happening, sets off on how to try to stop Freddy, to no avail at first, teaming up with Dan (Danny Hassel). Yet another one of their friends, Debbie gets killed, at which point, Dan gets injured shortly afterwards, and Alice eventually gathers her powers, and faces off Freddy one last time. She is victorious, and manages to defeat him, seemigly for good, being that she is, the dream master.

That is the story in a nutshell, pretty effective enough and serves as a continuation to offer opportunities for more sequels being that the "elm street" story is pretty much done and over with at this point, so they needed something new to go with. Combined with a catchy 80's soundtrack, if you like that sort of thing, the big hair, the stereotypically made clothes of that era, an appealing cast with good chemistry, a Hollywood-ized Freddy, this movie stands out, as to say "we made it," and at this point in time for this franchise, Elm Street and Freddy were red hot. This movie feels like it, and won't disappoint.