A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: The Dream Child - 1989
New Line Cinema
Rated: Australia, USA: R / Finland: K-18 / France: -12 / Germany, Norway, UK: 18 / Sweden: 15 |
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Director
Stephen Hopkins (PREDATOR 2,
THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS) takes the reins in this fifth effort
to resurrect Freddy, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: The Dream Child. The script written
by Leslie Bohem (THE HORROR SHOW), from a
story by Bohem and novelists John Skipp and Craig Spector (credited with starting the splatterpunk movement of the 1980s), utilizes the survivors
of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM
MASTER, with concepts taken from A NIGHTMARE
ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS.
Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel) have
lived to complete high school and consummate their love. Their plan to
spend the summer in Europe is interrupted by Freddy Kruger’s (Robert
Englund: DEAD & BURIED)
timely return to Alice’s dreams. But this time she finds herself
in the role of Freddy’s mother, Amanda - a nun left alone in an asylum
and raped by dozens of deranged lunatics in one of the film’s more
disturbing scenes. She soon discovers that Amanda's spirit (Beatrice
Boepple) is trying to establish contact with her in an effort to
stop Freddy once and for all (uh-huh, sure).
She also finds herself dreaming of a little boy named Jacob (a creepy performance by Whitby Hertford: ADDAMS FAMILY, JURASSIC PARK),
who turns out to be Alice and Dan’s unborn baby. Freddy is using
the dreams of Alice’s fetus to attack her and her friends even while
she’s awake. He plans to replace the boy’s soul with his own
so he can live again.
The usual
teenage friends are on hand to provide yet another body count, including
super model Greta (Erika Anderson), comic
book geek Mark (Joe Seely), and champion
swimmer Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter). How Alice
and Dan manage to have any friends at all after losing six to brutal murders
in the last film remains a mystery.
Once again, Krueger torments his prey in a series of vignettes, cackling to the wit
of his own puns, striking our would-be heroes through their identifying
traits: Greta is stuffed with food until she is obese; Mark becomes a
living comic strip; and Yvonne suffers drowning.
Special effects
crew Adam Jones (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT
DAY) and Alan Munro (ADDAMS FAMILY, ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES) handle the
gore chores admirably. The most inventive scenes involve a truck and motorcycle
attacking Dan with such automotive parts as seat belts and gas hoses.
Other effective moments include a shower scene (which owes homage
to both Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and Wes Craven’s bathtub sequence
in the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET),
and the asylum lunatics behaving like the zombies of George A. Romero's
Dead trilogy (not really surprising considering
Skipp and Spector's love for Romero's films). But THE DREAM CHILD contains Freddy's most embarrassing moment
in the series when he uses a skateboard in pursuit of a victim - echoing
the 1960s Batman TV show when the Caped Crusader surfed against the Joker.
All in all, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5 has better material and potential than its predecessor, but
continues the trend of emphasizing humor over horror resulting in a rating
of two Shriek Girls.
This review
copyright 2000 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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