With Day 3 comes Part 3: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The film is notable not just for the return of Heather Langencamp as Nancy Thompson, thus returning to the canon of the original film considerably more than Freddy's Revenge did; but also for the return of Wes Craven to the franchise. It's also notable for being the first major writing credit for one Frank Darabont, who is of course now better known for things like the TV series The Walking Dead and the movies The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist (despite that ending).
Six years on from the first movie (which makes it one year after Freddy's Revenge) and Freddy Krueger - this movie also marks the first time he's actually referred to as "Freddy" and not just as "Fred" - has been hard at work perfecting his teen-killing techniques. He's still torturing and killing the teenage children of the parents who torched him in the boiler room all those years ago, but now he's making them look like suicides in the waking world. Those few who manage to survive their dream encounters with him end up in Westin Hills, the local psychiatric facility, and treated for all manner of sleep and mental problems. One of these survivors is a girl named Kristen, who has the ability to bring others into her dreams. Along with the help of the now-adult Nancy Thompson, who has returned as a psychology grad student specializing in nightmares, Kristen and the other survivors use their dream abilities to fight Freddy on his own turf and lay him to rest once and for all.
Dream Warriors was the first of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies I ever saw as a teen, and I suspect this was the same for a lot of my age group - or, if not the first of the series they saw, then it quite probably was the one that left the most influence on them and on the growing pop culture phenomenon surrounding the series. As mentioned above, Dream Warriors was the first on the series to properly refer to Krueger as "Freddy"; the first to let him really run free with the wisecracks and pitch black humour that were to become his trademark as much as his razor-glove ("Welcome to prime time, bitch!" being perhaps the most infamous - and ad-libbed - of those one-liners) and it was the first film to give Robert Englund the lead billing he so richly deserved. They had briefly tried a different actor as Krueger all the way back in Freddy's Revenge, but it worked so badly they wasted no time in bringing Englund back and keeping him there for all the movies after that. There's also all of the canon that was kept around for the later films - Hypnocil, Westin Hills, the "bastard son of a hundred maniacs".
Another of Dream Warriors' strengths is that they weren't afraid to be creative with it. In the first two movies they had dome some playing around with one or two of the nightmare sequences, but in the end they never really strayed too far from the boiler room. In Dream Warriors we have dreams happening in several different places, and with plenty of original imagery - while most people probably remember the curiously phallic snake that nearly eats Kristen (and they had to coat it with green goo to make sure it didn't look completely phallic at that) as the most iconic dream sequence, for me it was the hall of mirrors near the end that stayed with me afterwards. The deaths are more creative as well, as well as more personally tailored to Freddy's victims - the TV starlet gets her big break in TV literally; the puppeteer gets puppetted out of the building by way of Freddy using his tendons as marionette strings; and so on. The idea of some of the teens being able to survive Freddy's dream attacks on them because of their "dream powers" - effectively lucid dreaming with a twist, is a new and original idea as well, so we don't have to worry about dragging out the whole "get Krueger into the waking world and fight him there" plotline over and over again.
The one part I didn't like about Dream Warriors is part of the ending. While Nancy, Kristen and the others are fighting Krueger in the dream world (and as an aside, I'm pretty sure that Kincaid's "dream power" wasn't just "super-strength" but actually being either Mr. T or Luke Cage), Nancy's father and the hospital psychiatrist are trying to find, bless and bury Krueger's bones to lay him to rest in the waking world. This plot thread leads to a climax where a stop-motion skeleton fights the two of them in an abandoned junkyard, and not only does it look so ridiculous it's stupid, it makes no sense in the rest of the backstory. What exactly is animating Krueger's bones and, if he can do that, why didn't he walk his skeleton ass to a safer place years previously? I'm just going to pretend that bit didn't happen.
Finally, Dream Warriors is notable for the screen debut of Patricia Arquette, an early appearance of Laurence Fishburne (back when he was just Larry) and the first appearance of breasts in the series (thank you Joey).
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