Nightmare Retrospective: Dream Warriors

Nightmare Retrospective | #3 | A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 is often considered to be the best of the Nightmare On Elm Street sequels (the direct ones at least), and it's really not hard to see why - at least, that's from the perspective of someone who's yet to see films 4-6. I do think that Freddy's Revenge is a somewhat underappreciated work, but it's far from a good one, and Dream Warriors, while not quite as bold and in some ways the beginning of the end for the franchise, is a much more engaging and entertaining film.

Ignoring the events of Freddy's Revenge and picking up where the original left off, Dream Warriors is a far more direct sequel that is already superior to it's immediate predecessor due to the fact that Nancy, the wonderful protagonist of the original film (played again by Heather Langenkamp), returns to help a new generation of Freddy's victims. The final children of the parents of Elm Street (just how many were there anyway?) are facing an epidemic of nightmares and suicides, and after a hallucinatory episode ends with her cutting her wrists, young Kristen Parker, played by Patricia Arquette, is taken to a mental hospital with the other teenagers.

This is an excellent expansion on the ideas of the original film, in which the parents and older generations routinely ignored the desperate pleas of the children in favor of what they thought was "right" for them. In reality, what is right is actually just what is perceived as "normal" and "correct." The staff of the mental hospital, led by a tyrannical Dr. Elizabeth Simms, refuses to listen to the kid's insistence that something is deeply wrong, that these dreams pose a real physical danger to their health, and instead insist that the dreams are a sign of personal weakness, guilt and failling, and must be confronted despite the danger they pose.

The doctors most likely believe that they want what's best for the children, but their idea of what's best is tainted by the conformity of the age; by this idea that abberations in behavior and personality must be crushed, and that ultimately these children are incapable of deciding what they want and need for themselves. There's even a part where one girl's mother insists that she's only doing all of this for attention. This makes them all prime targets for Freddy, and even as they begin dying one by one in ways that are labeled suicide, nobody listens to them.

Nobody, that is, except for Nancy. Nancy is an intern at this facility, yet even she is too young for anyone to take her seriously, even though she has direct experience with this exact phenomenon. Despite this, she is soon able to figure out what might be the key to all of their survival; Kristen has the strange (and unexplained) ability to pull people into her dreams. If they are all together in their dreams, they may be able to defeat Freddy once and for all.

Dream Warriors starts out with a more subdued atmosphere similar to the original, and indeed it definitely understands the value of restraint a lot more than Freddy's Revenge does, but it gradually becomes fairly silly. In this way, it really does sort of spell out the doom of the franchise; it introduces larger mythology and supernatural context to the franchise, promises a ritual with which to defeat Freddy for good, starts putting some particularly cringey one-liners in the mouth of Robert Englund (who is otherwise fantastic as usual), and in general just brings it to a more tongue and cheek place that all sets the stage for lots of poor sequels. Here, it kind of works though. Dream Warriors never hides from its silliness, but it also more or less keeps the characters and plot moving forward even through the film's rougher patches.

Dream Warriors is really the blockbuster companion to the more independent and restrained original. It's bigger and not really better, but still good enough. The budget is clearly higher, but it has a more B-movie feel - something that would be obnoxious if it didn't play it's hands it in just the right ways, with some of the best setpieces and grosses practical effects to date. Freddy Krueger jumps out of several mirrors, turns into a marionette, becomes a giant serpent portrayed by a giant slimy puppet with a hideous contortion of his face at the tip, animates a TV and drags a girl inside head first, and in one particularly disgusting scene, rips a teenager's blood vessels out of his wrists and ankles and uses them as marionette strings.

This might sound like it's a bit too much compared to the more subtle, restrained nature of the original film, and it does sometimes go overboard, but the difference between Dream Warriors and Freddy's Revenge is that Dream Warriors knows when to build up suspense, when to go all out, and when to pause the scares completely to let the story and characters develop. The cast of characters is really nice in this one; almost all of the kids in it are at least somewhat likeable, if not super well developed, and it's legitimately distressing to see them being picked off. Nancy leads the show, and her dynamic with the patients, along with Dr. Neil Gorden (played by Craig Watson) and the guard Max (played by a young Laurence Fishburne) is legitimately fun to watch play out and develop. It could perhaps have benefitted from even more time to let everything bake, but there is still a lot to like as is.

Not everywhere Dream Warriors goes is actually good. It sometimes gets a little too silly, such as a scene in which a boy transforms into a wizard and fights Freddy Krueger with badly composited magic effects before being stabbed to death anyway. There's a whole subplot involving Dr. Gordon being visited by the ghost of an elderly nun who comes to exposit about Freddy's past and how to kill him for good, while also ramming down a hamfisted message about the importance of faith that is never really explored beyond a couple of lines. Freddy gets more backstory that ruins some of his mystique and has some thoroughly icky implications; his mother was raped by 100 patients of a mental hospital for the criminally insane, thus leading to his conception.

Despite these hiccups, though, A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is the first truly worthy successor to the original's name - even if it is a little lesser in a few ways. It's silly and a bit too spiritually-oriented for its own good, but it also features a lovable cast and some excellent set pieces and practical effects. It's not as good of a film as Wes Craven's original, but it's the most pure fun I've had with the franchise yet.