[Yes, I know; there's been a two-week break in this series and I'm a terrible slacker. Unfortunately a combination of real-life mini-disasters and some health problems got on top of me and I had to take some time off several things to recover. This will teach me not to have review notes not far ahead enough to deal with this sort of thing... Regardless, I'm back now and continuing as scheduled.]
By the time A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 came along, ideas for the franchise were starting to run a bit thin on the ground. After all, how many different ways could they bring an undead child-killer who murders teens in their dreams back, and how many new ways could they come up with to kill him at the end? In the end, they went for a variation of an idea that had been originally pitched to a pregnant executive - imagine a Freddy baby's claws tearing out of your body. That particular pitch wasn't used, unsurprisingly. but they decided to keep at least an aspect of the "baby Freddy" at least.
Alice, the Dream Master of the last movie, is finally graduating from high school, and she has a whole new bunch of friends who all act like they've known each other all their lives, despite us having never seen them before. Oh, and there's also Dan from the last movie as well - now Alice's boyfriend and making the beast with two backs with her on a regular basis. The happy times don't last long, however, as Alice suddenly finds herself dreaming while awake, and Freddy Krueger is apparently using those dreams to kill off her friends, starting with Dan. Could this have anything to do with the fact that Alice has also discovered that she's pregnant? And what's with Sister Mary Helena/Amanda Krueger wandering around in the dream world and giving out a D&D-style quest to "seek her earthly remains in the tower"?
A couple of things struck me while watching this movie. Firstly, I think Alice is one of the few, if not the only, heroine/Final Girl in horror who is sexually active and still a survivor (other than Sidney Prescott in Scream), which is both a good evolution of her character and an interesting thing to note (albeit also slightly depressing to see that it's so rare to actually happen). Secondly, I noticed for the first time (after watching five of these movies, for shame) that there's an underlying theme of pretty terrible parents in all the movies. The only exception is Alice's father, who's gotten sober since The Dream Master and now proves to be a pretty awesome guy, supporting and helping Alice in her pregnancy and standing up for her when Dan's parents threaten to take her baby when it's born - but all the other parents we meet are unpleasant, controlling, snobbish and so on. and now that I look back on the previous films I realise this was actually a pretty common theme. So I feel pretty stupid for not noticing this earlier.
However, The Dream Child is, in my opinion at least, the weakest of all the movies in the series, including even the remake (and we'll get to that in a few days). It was certainly the lowest grossing of the whole franchise (although Robert Englund still considered it a success), and appears to have had the least effect on the canon as a whole, unless you count the comic books released in the last several years. It's biggest problem, I believe, is that its perhaps the most bloodless of the series - the primary reason for this is that all three death scenes were heavily edited and so ended up looking rather... insipid, for lack of a better term. Dan's death is still the best, as he dies to Freddy effectively playing Pimp My Ride with him and merging him with a motorbike, but even then a lot of it was cut out. While I'll never be an enthusiastic fan of gore for gore's sake in movies, I'll still never understand the reasoning of cutting scenes from a slasher movie to make the movie effectively bloodless just to avoid a higher rating. This also means that all of Freddy's killings are made to seem like accidents (shares of Dream Warriors, but kids dying in accidents doesn't strike the same level of dread into people as the mass suicide plan) rather than murders or even suicides.
(Speaking of Dream Warriors, I'm pretty sure that Mark would class as one, what with his ability to transform into his comic creation, the Phantom Prowler, in his dreams. Too bad it didn't do him much good.)
The film also can't keep its own internal continuity straight, however, which is another problem. We're told that Amanda Krueger hanged herself... but they never found her body (hence the D&D quest for her remains). It might be just my OCD talking, but it's particularly off-putting when a film messes up like that... then again, it could also be seen as a sign of things to come as future movies make even more of a mess of the continuity...
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