Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.
You need only note that Robert Englund had top cast
billing for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4:
The Dream Master to see the direction the series was heading. Freddy had
become the driving force behind the series’ success. Without a mask to hide
behind, he was given personality along with dialogue riddled with jokes and
quips that grew hokier in this fourth installment. Directed by Renny Harlin,
one of only a handful of horror film directors to actually go on to a sizable
Hollywood career, Nightmare 4 begins
the real downward trend of the series, though it is still reasonably fun if
hardly ever frightening.
Before dispatching the three survivors – Kristen, Kincaid,
and Joey – from the previous film, he pressures Kristin into bringing her new
friend Alice (Lisa Wilcox) into the dream so he can feed on some “sweet, fresh
meat.” Remember they were the last of the Elm Street children. Freddy obviously
craves more and finds it in the next group of kids from the neighborhood.
Alice is a quiet daydreamer prone to zoning out during
school or her shift at the local diner. Because Kristen imbues Alice with her
power to bring people into her dreams, Alice develops a habit of accidentally
bringing her friends – the asthmatic Sheila; the entomophobic Debbie; Dan the
jock; and Alice’s brother, the martial arts and Zen-centered Rick – into her
dreams to become Freddy’s next victims. You would think any teenagers in this
town would be familiar with the Freddy legend, but the screenplay by Scott
Pierce (a pseudonym for Jim and Ken Wheat) Brian Helgeland (yes, that one)
based on a story by Helgeland and William Kotzwinkle condescends to idiots by
having Kristen explain the whole thing to her new friends. Did they think
anyone in the audience would be unfamiliar with the history? Can you imagine if
each successive Friday the 13th
film explained that Jason killed a bunch of people in the woods?
The general silliness of the movie is found in Alice’s
ability to acquire her friends’ traits and powers when they die. This is represented
with a bit of clumsy symbolism of Alice shaking off her shyness: as each friend
dies, she removes their photos one-by-one from her bedroom mirror until she’s
able to fully see herself. Then she’s ready to face Freddy. Too bad for her
friends, I guess, that they had to die for her to achieve self-actualization.
But still, there is something about the basic premise of a killer taunting his
victims in their dreams that remains more interesting than the standard slasher
films of the 80s. At least Freddy and his methods are inventive.
Harlin’s direction of the dream sequences, many of which
border on the action genre, keeps things moving at a breakneck pace (at least
for a horror film). And the special effects are quite good. Considering they
seem to be the star of the show, it would be a real downer if they weren’t.
Some of the highlights include a girl having all the air sucked out of her body
and another who mutates into a bug so she can get stuck and squished inside a
roach motel. These particular instances set up the popular stylings of Freddy’s
wit with remarks such as, “Wanna suck face?” and “You can check in, but you can’t
check out.”
Finally, it’s almost some kind of rite of passage that
horror films have to pass through to have a glut of poor acting talent on
screen, and Nightmare 4 is certainly
no exception. Unlike the presence of Johnny Depp, Patricia Arquette and Kevin
Bacon in A Nightmare on Elm Streets 1 and
3 and Friday the 13th, respectively, there is no future star
you can point to and say, “This is where it started for him and you can see the
talent even at that early stage.” There is an early dialogue scene between
Alice and Kristen that is so poorly delivered I was tempted to just stop the
film. I suppose it was a morbid interest in Freddy’s cult of personality that
kept me going.
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