Nightmare Retrospective: The Dream Master

Nightmare Retrospective | #4 | The Dream Master

Well, it took four films and four years to get to this point, but here we are; finally, a terrible Nightmare On Elm Street sequel. The franchise went a while before dipping to this point - Freddy's Revenge wasn't good, but at least it had some interesting and bold ideas - but we were bound to get here eventually, especially since by this point the franchise had been effectively annualized.

The Dream Master is a thorough mess of a film from start to finish. In some ways, it's actually two films in one. The first half follows the survivors of Dream Warriors as they try to adjust to a life post-Freddy, only they seem to have banished their personalities along with Krueger. Kristen is paranoid. Joey is moody. Kincaid is Black. That's about it. Kristen is convinced that Freddy is coming back - why or how isn't explained. Kincaid and Joey try to tell her she's crazy, effectively ignoring the lessons of Dream Warriors completely.

There's a potentially interesting storyline here; one in which Kristen descends further and further into paranoia as she is gaslit by Freddy and disbelieved by her friends, unable to escape the terror of her past trauma and subsequently cultivating its power once again. This isn't explored. Instead, Freddy comes back with almost no explanation at all and kills Kincaid and Joey - Kincaid dies first, per the "Black character dies first" trope. Everything that happened in part three is now completely worthless, and Nancy died at the end for nothing.

This first half of the film is painfully boring. The dialogue is cringey, the characters are flat and uninteresting, and the plot whizzes by at such a ridiculous pace that it's hard to get attached to anything. The camerawork is utterly abysmal, with strange movements that are nothing but distracting and no regard for the power of the images they're capturing. Even the kills are relatively uninteresting, and though Robert Englund is as good as ever, he isn't really given all that much to do.

The second half gets somewhat better, but it's so different that it serves for a very jarring experience. Halfway through, Kristen's mother spikes her drink with sleeping pills to get her to sleep. There's a confrontation where Kristen declares to her mother that she's killed her, which is one of the film's more legitimately engaging moments, and then she passes out and is burned to death by Freddy - but not before using her dream power to pull her best friend Alice into her dream and transferring her abilities over to the other girl for some unexplained reason by some unexplained method.

The second half follows Alice, who despite her seeming inability to do basically anything useful until the end, has a more interesting arc. Freddy is able to visit her in her dreams now, but instead of haunting her, he uses her to pull her friends into her dreams and kill them - starting with the other Black character, of course. Robert Englund has a grand old time in this section, playing a devilishly campy villain in some fairly creative set pieces and kills - some of the more memorable of which include a girl who turns into an insect and is squashed and a scene where Alice is drawn into a movie theaters screen into a black and white scene. It's all extremely silly, but it has a really fun B-movie charm to it that makes this half noticeably more enjoyable. Everything comes to a head in a ridiculously cartoony duel between Alice, who has absorbed the physical abilities of her friends, and Freddy, in which Alice somehow turns all of the souls Freddy has absorbed on him and tears him apart, effectively killing him for real this time, unlike the last time he was definitely permanently defeated in Dream Warriors. Of course, he will be returning soon in A Nightmare On Elm Street 5.

Despite the mild uptake in quality, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4 is a half-hearted disaster of a film, filled with bland characters, a nonsensical and ridiculous plot and an increasingly muddled mythology. The kills and plot don't seem to affect anything about the surrounding world at all. Most of all, the original appeal of the franchise has been completely lost. The iconography surrounding Freddy - Nancy's old house, Freddy's face, the rhyme sung by little girls accompanying his presence, etc - has become the focus of the horror, growing more cosmically evil at the expense of actually being scary. What was scary was the fact that he represented a horror the characters couldn't escape; it was only ever a matter of time before they fell asleep again and were at Freddy's mercy. He represented a darkness covered up by an uncaring generation of adults that their children were forced to deal with. All of that has been played out to death, and while The Dream Master attempts to add in new elements, it never really does anything with them, instead hitting the same beats that the series has hit over and over and over again by this point.

The Dream Master was directed by Renny Harlin, who would go on to direct Die Hard 2. There's an interesting story I heard about this film, though; by the time Harlin was brought onto the project, the film had already gone into production and was filming. Not only does this explain the difference in quality and focus halfway through the film, but it also explains why this is such a stale product. By this point, the Nightmare franchise had been truly annualized, and everything that came from it was effectively a sequence of studio products that lost all of the passion of the original. In that respect, I guess the real horror of The Dream Master is, in fact, capitalism.