Freddy’s back from the dead in the 4th Nightmare movie, rushed out just a year after the highly successful part 3. Unfortunately, things have started to get stale in dreamland.
Elm Street 4 opens up in the exact same matter as Elm Street 3: A blonde teenager talking to a little girl in an ominous dream. In fact, it soon becomes clear that the blonde is actually the same character, albeit played by a different actress. The part of Kristen Parker, formerly played by the excellent Patricia Arquette in her first screen role, has been recast with the far inferior Tuesday Knight. Unfortunately, that’s just the first in a string of disappointments on display in this sequel. In fact, it becomes immediately apparent that casting is the least of our problems as the dream becomes much less of the Impressionistic hell-scape of the prior film, and a little more “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video.
Renny Harlin has taken over the helm from Chuck Russell, and it proves to be a death knell for the boundless creativity of the outstanding Dream Warriors. All of his energy was clearly spent on a few creative kills, and they are admittedly memorable (particularly the horrific cockroach sequence). What made part 3 so great, however, was that every dream was eerie and terrifying from start to finish, providing a relentless tone of dread. Harlin fails to generate any scares from the atmosphere of this film, preferring to rely on Freddy alone to do the heavy lifting. In fact, he seems to have an aversion to darkness, which is pretty much the most basic building block for crafting a scary scene. Seriously, this must be the brightest horror movie in history. It doesn’t matter if we are in the middle of a nightmare or simply in one of the teen’s rooms at night, 50,000 watts are seemingly streaming through every window.
To be fair to Harlin, New Line had a notoriously difficult time with the script for Dream Master. Originally written in seven days, and unable to be touched up due to a writer’s strike, the screenplay doesn’t take any time to develop the characters. The only thing they bring to the table is that it’s fun to try and predict how their single distinguishable characteristic will be involved in their horrifying deaths. Oh, that girl has an inhaler, or that guy does karate, how will Freddy cater his kill based on that superficial detail? (In a pretty cool way and incredibly dumbly, respectively, in case you were wondering.) That being said, I actually think the plot is pretty cool. Freddy kills Kristen early in the film, eliminating the last of the Elm Street kids, and theoretically his pipeline of fresh victims. However, Kristen uses her special power to bring her friend Alice into her nightmare, unwittingly giving Freddy access to go after her. Before she dies, she then “gifts” her power to Alice in order to help her fight him off. Instead, Freddy uses Alice and her power to gain access to the dreams of all of her friends, keeping his killing spree going. Alice has her own dream power, though, which allows her to absorb all of her murdered friends’ gifts and become the Dream Master. This makes her a legitimate foil for Freddy and leads to an epic final showdown. The concept was there, the execution was just lacking.
So, if you want a showcase for Freddy to mechanically dispatch zero-dimensional teens one after another, this movie is fine. It turns out that a lot of people did want that in the late 80’s, as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 was a huge success. Renny Harlin was considered a hot new up-and-comer who got the opportunity to direct Die Hard 2 based on the box office success of his efforts with Elm Street. If any of the studio executives at the time had bothered to actually watch this uninspired mess, they would realize it was Robert England who deserved to be Hollywood’s darling, and that the film was successful in spite of Harlin’s flat direction. Personally, I was pretty bummed by this one. I knew that the series ended up in a really rough spot, but this entry is still relatively well regarded, so I had some hope that it would be a gradual decline from the delirious heights of part 3. I’m sure that morbid curiosity will lead me to check out the raging dumpster fires that are most likely parts 5 and 6, but at least I’ll go into those knowing what to expect.
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