A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
aka 'Freddy Goes Mainstream' aka 'The One That Killed the Series...'
I make no apologies, I love this film, which is the first Elm Street I ever watched. It's the brasher, late 80s commercial sister film to Part Three. Part Three is an authentic dark fantasy masterpiece, rather than a horror. The fourth film transplants that dark fantasy aesthetic to a mainstream Hollywood adventure. From the outset, the film feels bigger. Those deep bass synth notes kick in over a quote from the Book of Job - a text which questions how and why the righteous suffer - and Tuesday Knight's vocals begin for her song Nightmare. It's very commercial. Commercial music is something you can't help but notice in this film. Seemingly every time someone gets in a car, every time someone walks into a diner, you get commercial music. The budget for this film was one and a half times that of the previous film and there's a gloss here that we didn't see before.
Renny Harlin does a great job, given he was roped in late in the day, the script was a mess and he had a very tight, fixed delivery date. Worse, the writers' strike began and any discussions with his scriptwriters had to be seriously off the record. Once again, this film proves that if there's talent and enthusiasm, a good film can come out of rotten circumstances. So the first sequel, Freddy's Revenge, has no excuses for being so dire.
The fourth film has the advantage of being a sequel to a surreal dark fantasy, rather than a supernatural slasher film. The dream world is just that now: a parallel universe, a vast surreal universe next to ours inhabited by Freddy, rather than a dream being something in someone's head. There are some clever elements such as a time loop Alice and Dan are trapped in to prevent them getting to save one of their friends. They realise they are asleep, but are clearly moving in the real world, so there's a real nightmarish distortion of time and reality at play.
I'm not sure I'd classify the third and fourth films as horror at all really. Harlin felt that, by now, Freddy was so familiar that he should be more 'James Bond', the cool guy in control of the dreams. It's a fun approach and I like it here, but I think it was bad for the series in the long run. The third film managed to balance the dark humour and scares, keeping Freddy as something malevolent. Harlin goes so far as to call his Freddy the 'hero'. And he's a tricksy, naughty, wisecracking, loveable bad boy now. We get even see Robert Englund in drag as a nurse. It gets really silly, but it's fun.
Fortunately, even if Freddy is the 'hero', that doesn't stop the rest of the cast doing a great job and giving us a few teen movie archetypes that you can still root for. The film opens akin to 1942's The Mummy's Tomb,
with a resurrected villain massacring the survivors of the previous film, before turning his attention to 'fresh meat.' I'm not sure what a 1942 movie audience would have made of Kharis being resurrected by flaming dog's urine, quite frankly!
Regardless, Freddy is returned from the grave, his power still deriving itself from the souls of the Springwood children he's killed and collected. We get to see Joey, Kincaid and Kristen from the third film again. Kristen is played by actress and singer Tuesday Knight this time. She might as well be playing someone else, as she in no way resembles Patricia Arquette's Kristen physically or in terms of performance. It's the biggest weakness in the film, because Arquette's haunting performance was the heart of the previous movie. I care about Joey and Kincaid, but I only know this is Kristen because Joey, Kincaid and Kristen's obnoxious mother tell me she is.
After 'the decks are cleared'
(Joey still having a weakness for skinny, large-breasted blondes!) Lisa Wilcox, playing Alice Johnson, takes the lead. And she's brilliant. Alice is my favourite character in the series. She starts out dowdy and wallflowerish, but due to events in the film - if we're going to go all meta here - she becomes a blend of the many different teen archetypes to become more than just a Dream Warrior,
becoming the Dream Master. But Alice stays feminine throughout. She doesn't do the modern 'empowerment' schtick of behaving like a man, and the men in the film aren't diminished to make her look strong. Alice is a good person who gets dealt a lot of bad hands in life and turns things around to become truly strong. In many ways, Alice is Jesse (from the second film) done right. Alice is used as a conduit by Freddy to kill more people, so Alice develops the skills she inherits and learns to assimilate them to fight back.
Also essential to her character is her close relationship with her twin brother, Rick, who is Kristen's boyfriend. Their mother is dead and their father is an alcoholic and prescription drug addict. There's a lovely moment about three quarters of an hour in,
after their friend Sheila's death when Alice breaks down, realising it was the ability she'd inherited from Kristen
that dragged Sheila into the dream that killed her, so it was her fault. Dan, who is Rick's friend and the object of Alice's hidden, unrequited affections, questions Alice being so freaked out over Kristen's past remarks about Freddy Kreuger. Rick backs his sister, though, and, beginning to break down says 'Look at us; we're dropping like flies!' before running to his sister to embrace her. It's well acted and beautifully shot with a corridor in silhouette.
Alice is interesting because, unlike Nancy, who managed to escape Freddy for a time and hide from him, she becomes Freddy's archenemy. Freddy is powered by the children's souls, but Alice has all their powers. This sees an evolution of Freddy to being more than a mere ghost killing people in their dreams. He's the keeper of a negative gateway of dreams and claims to have been there a long time. So that potentially ties into Wes Craven's comments in New Nightmare about a malevolent force that likes being Freddy. When Freddy and Alice finally confront each other it's as the keepers of the positive gate and the negative gate of dreams duking it out.
The special effects are fantastic here. Most notable is probably Japanese effects artist Screaming Mad George (a regular collaborator of Society's Brian Yuzna) doing the bug transformation sequence where
Brooke Theiss's Debbie Stevens is torn to bits as she becomes a cockroach. It's pretty excruciating to watch and fantastically gory. Turning someone who has entomophobia (I admit it, I looked up that word!) into a bug is classic Freddy cruelty! There's also a great sequence involving a cinema and Alice being dragged into the screen to face her fear of spending her life in a dead end job. It's interesting at this point that we see a reasonable amount of characters killed off earlier in the film returning in the dream sequence after their deaths to taunt Alice. All too often actors in these sorts of films do their scenes up to the murder, then they're gone. There's a special effect pizza with human heads in it too! Eek! The effects guy in the interviews on the DVD was bursting with enthusiasm talking about it, as well as the finale, where a number of prosthetics, animatronics and a 20 foot tall model of Freddy were used, plus Linnea Quigley's boobs (I kid you not!) Once again, that passion for creating physical effects comes through in the final film. All of the effects could be done now by a dozen bored blokes in a giant server room on a computer, but the physical presence of these items on set and in front of an actual camera makes them seem real in a way no computer effect would. It wouldn't be as inventive.
Ultimately, this is the peak of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. It's also the rush, the drug high, before it starts the comedown. Freddy's Nightmares would debut within three months of this film's release, running for two seasons. A fifth film was fast-tracked that arrived 51 weeks later. Freddy became a camp horror icon you could imagine hanging out with Herman Munster and Grandpa at the White House. There's a Freddy Krueger hiphop track on the end credits, where Englund, as Freddy, raps with the Fat Boys. It's that exhilarating moment before things are going to spiral out of control. Freddy got too big, too flamboyant. He was no longer that terrifying, shadowy figure with surreally long arms taunting Tina before gorily slashing her to pieces. He had become a snarky, wrinkly uncle who would make witty remarks at the dinner table to make your adoring kids giggle. He was a Roald Dahl grotesque and he had just done the Nightmare equivalent of Die Another Day's invisible car. There was simply nowhere else to go with the series. And things would never be as good again for the main Nightmare series.
The Blu-ray is far better quality than the previous film. After the coarsely grainy opening titles (optically processed titles) the grain becomes nice and steady, colour is good, although the contrast is still a bit high and it's darker than I remember the film being when I saw it originally. I obviously can't say which is more 'right'. The old video and TV version might have been too bright. Either way, I'm happy. The sound has a nice bass punch. Nice to hear the late Sinéad O'Connor too!
The fifth film is next. Apparently it's the censored version on the Blu-rays. I don't remember loving it, but it's been a long time...
