1987
Directed by Chuck Russell
Written by Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, Frank Darabont, and Chuck Russell
I'd like to begin with a few observations about the Nightmare On Elm Street series as it stood in 1987. For one, it was here that you could say a tradition had been firmly established, never to be let down in the main phase of the series except by New Line Cinema itself: as a result of artist Matthew Joseph Peak, the Nightmares boast perhaps the finest set of posters in franchise history, sustained across six films and all the more remarkable because it kind of doesn't feel like Peak had a precise idea of what Freddy Krueger even looked like until this one, and possibly never learned what Nancy Thompson looked like at all. But they are extraordinary works of horror fantasy art (Peak's last, for Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, was not used, and, fair's fair, it's still good but also the worst), all of them incorporating and sometimes even surpassing the pop surrealism of the films themselves.
That brings us to A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, which potentially has the best movie poster, period; criticisms are possible, sure, but the concept of it, emphasizing the omnipotence of our villain by way of one superlatively literal rendition of the phrase "blade runner," if that's where the inspiration came from, and just looking so. fucking. metal and rad. This is also where New Line established, less firmly, the paired traditions of evocative sequel subtitles for the Nightmares—I only wish it were The Dream Warriors, but nevertheless, more enticing than "Freddy's Revenge"—along with some magnificently good taglines. If that fell off somewhat after Dream Warriors, that still makes three-for-three. The original Nightmare: "If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming, she won't wake up at all," which is so incredibly perfect. The tagline for Freddy's Revenge is even better, the series' cleverest, even before considering how subtly well-integrated it is into that movie's themes: "The man of your dreams is back." (Given that its script was written by a New Line marketing department executive, maybe he even crafted its tagline himself.) Now: "If you think you'll get out alive, you must be dreaming," still so cool. Though there's the matter of the alternate tagline, "If you think you're ready for Freddy, think again," which I suggest we ignore.
Dream Warriors is also the beginning of one more Nightmare tradition, though I'll only know how it plays out in the days ahead: the Nightmare series is the only classic slasher franchise (though, of course, my demurrer: they're not slashers, and somehow, despite managing a full order of slasher meat this time around, even less of one here) where basically all of them were directed by important directors. Now, none of them were important when they directed their Nightmare—and Jack Sholder, the outlier, never was*—but as for the rest, every single one has at least one other movie you've definitely seen, even if that movie's Tank Girl.
The director of future importance this time was Chuck Russell, with the relevant, even overdetermined entry on his resume being his credits as both a co-writer and production assistant on 1984's Dreamscape, not exactly A Nightmare On Elm Street's "competition," as that would badly overstate the matter, but which had been partially responsible for 20th Century Fox passing on it. (Dreamscape, as I recall, is bad, but let's blame neither Russell nor what was, I'm sure, some top-flight production assistance.) Russell brought in a co-writer, on the not-determined-at-all basis that he was Russell's buddy, someone who'd turn out to be a director of objectively even greater future importance, no matter how much I love Russell's Blob remake, Frank Darabont. They were, however, always working from a foundation already established by series creator Wes Craven, who'd been enticed by producer Robert Shaye to come back, the only time he would for the Nightmares' main line. The thing here is that Freddy's Revenge, despite turning a sizeable profit (and, by my lights, being slightly great), had not been ecstatically well-received, and that made Shaye nervous, because New Line was poised to become a big deal on the back of Nightmare sequels but only if those sequels made big money. Accordingly, Dream Warriors was given an inordinately long development cycle, to get things right, as well as an inordinately big budget. (I don't believe it was the most expensive slasher flick made till then, but it was almost certainly the most expensive where the budget wasn't obviously being mismanaged.) So Shaye returned to the source, and while Craven was too busy temporarily wrecking his career to direct another Nightmare, he had had an idea. Co-writing with Bruce Wagner, he delivered the skeleton (so to speak) of what Dream Warriors would become.
This would be a proper sequel escalation, an expansion of the dreamtime campaign that Freddy had waged in the first movie—though whether it was Craven & Wagner or Russell & Darabont, eventually somebody identifies the heroes of Dream Warriors as fellow "Elm Street kids" paying for their parents' sins, meaning that the secret conspiracy to lynch child murderer Fred Krueger involved twenty-two people who never moved, which arguably isn't the worst addition to Krueger history here—and while it was always their desire to expand the universe laterally, taking on concerns of teen mental health and sort-of poking at the idea of whether the kids were really crazy or if the world was just making them that way, it was also, this time, a direct sequel. So the very first thing Craven did, because to him it was the most important, was to make sure Heather Langenkamp would come back too. She said yes, and when I said last time I didn't remember how they explained Nancy surviving the end of Nightmare, it's because they don't.
Ultimately, however, the execution was down to Russell, and it goes like this: roughly seven years after the Elm Street horror, Freddy (Robert Englund) is still extant, and still after the souls of the children, broadly-construed, which is how his movies are about him hunting teens but make it very clear that, at least in life, he veered even younger. Under the credits, a montage plays out, bouncing between images of a model of a house that looks pretty familiar and images of stay-awake products. All these items belong to Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette, for Dream Warriors has a semi-stacked cast, though not always in the places you'd expect or that would be best for it), and if we don't already suspect that she's undergoing the same torments as our heroes in the first Nightmare, when her mother (Brooke Bundy) arrives home with a date and puts her to bed for the presumptive good of all three of them, we'll certainly find out, as a coterie of creepy dead molested children—"that's where he takes us"—usher her into her nightmare vision of the old Elm Street home. Attempting to save one of the kids, only to be stuck in place as the man in the dirty brown hat and the red-and-green sweater approaches... she awakes. She tries to shake it off, when her own bathroom turns against her in the first bloom of the film's effects budget. Now she actually awakes, discovering that she's slashed her own wrist and is presently bleeding out all over the bathroom floor.
That's intense (all the Kristen-centric dreams are great), and it sends us to the Westin Hills Psychiatric Institute, where Kristen fights off every attempt to sedate her, much to the confusion of her doctors, the sensitive and caring Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) and the moralizing harpy Elizabeth Simms (Priscilla Pointer), though they have on hand a new grad student intern who understands implicitly, Nancy Thompson—she even finishes the Freddy nursery rhyme for Kristen. What Neil does realize, though presently he can only think in purely materialistic terms, is that something connects Kristen with his other patients—sarcastic sleepwalker Phillip (Bradley Gregg), aspiring actress and self-harmer Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow), depressed addict Taryn (Jennifer Rubin, probably not that one), wheelchair-bound D&D enthusiast Will (Ira Heiden), rage-prone braggart Roland (Ken Sagoes), and psychosomatic mute Joey (Rodney Eastman)—all of whom also eschew sleep as much as possible out of fear of the same thing. Simms posits a mass hallucination born from social decay, but Neil is increasingly receptive to what Nancy is going to tell him: it's Freddy, and he's real. That is not, by itself, very helpful (it also, frankly, completely obviates Craven's preferred Nightmare mythology, where the entire point was that Freddy's only as real as you believe he is, even if nobody involved, including Craven, noticed this), but Kristen has another secret, a psychic power that gives her the ability to share her dreams. Nancy is the first to enter, striking a blow against Freddy, giving her the idea that if all of them worked together, in a lucid dream, their combined strength could defeat the dream lord.
There is, furthermore, a whole subplot involving Freddy's bones, but I'll delay that till after we've talked about the other bad thing about Dream Warriors, and I don't want to talk about that till I've said several nice things first. Nevertheless, it was a surprise to discover that I liked it less than I remembered—it was a surprise while I was watching it, in fact, because the first stretch of Dream Warriors is awesome. Whatever the flaws of the previous film, Dream Warriors absolutely picks up where Freddy's Revenge left off as far as franchise style goes, not a repudiation of Craven, exactly, but a confirmation of an awareness that what Craven had done with dreams and dream logic was masterful, but not really fertile. Russell's approach, therefore, is to use dreams as an excuse more for psychohorror vignettes than nightmares qua nightmares, achieving varying degrees of success, but uniformly good to start. (Though it's noticeable that the ones that are more like nightmares qua nightmares are still, generally, the better ones.)
Anyway, the first batch of nightmares, some but not all of which end in death, are some terrifically creative stuff. Kristen's dream-within-a-dream prologue nets a lot of horror out of its ghastly children and post-apocalyptic suburban imagery, while also priming us for how much brawnier the effects and creature work are going to be this time; likewise, composer Angelo Badalamenti has, for this sequence at least, cracked the problem that had sometimes confounded Nightmare's Charles Bernstein, of how to make music that squared Freddy's joy with our horror, so it's only a pity I have essentially no recollection of the more original score elements that come later. (On the plus side: a Dokken theme song.) The first kill—now it's a pity it's Phillip, since even with his inevitably-limited screentime Gregg affords Phillip the strongest impression of (at least) all the non-Arquette teens—is even better than Kristen's prologue, and more daring, kicking off with stop-motion animation Freddy-faced goblins, on the basis that Phillip makes marionettes, which is how we get to that "Freddy Krueger at his most searingly iconic?" climax, of Freddy as a cosmic giant puppeteering Phillip's "sleepwalking" body to his doom. Jennifer's end is equally "psychohorror symbolic," but still properly nightmarish (the lead-up involving Dick Cavett becoming Freddy and killing Zsa Zsa Gabor places them high on the "cameoing celebrity" leaderboards) when the screen hopeful gets violently eaten by Freddy as a television.
This is, of course, where "WELCOME TO PRIME TIME, BITCH" comes from, so the other move Dream Warriors is making is towards the "funnier" Freddy, or at least a more pronouncedly verbal Englund performance, and we'll see how it goes, because it's still a mixed bag here ("[pun or threat], bitch" appears to be the standard formula, though I like that, including the written taunt, it satisfies the rule of threes), but I do hold this to have always been a significant part of Freddy's shtick, even back in the first Nightmare. Meanwhile, Freddy's Revenge already had its "brains" pun. Tentatively, I dig it.
So far, so very good; and for the first half, our only problem, unfortunately, is Langenkamp. Craven's narrative instincts were impeccable; bringing her back, no matter what, gives Dream Warriors a solidity that I just don't know if it could've had otherwise. But she is kind of really bad, starting immediately after Russell's flawless reintroduction to our heroine, and that's incredibly disappointing given how impressive she was in Nightmare as a "Final Girl" who had to carry an entire horror-adventure story on her back, rather than the usual, a bit of characterization and a single climactic chase. On the other hand, maybe it makes sense: in the first film, Langenkamp was playing a teen girl, something she knew about. In this film, Langenkamp is playing a hugely successful academic, something she knew about to the extent that Craven pulled her out of undergrad—thereby taking this young actor and asking her to play a solid half-decade older, a dicey proposition even under more forgiving circumstances—and anytime she has to do "mental health services professional" it has the profoundly unwelcome effect of a girl wearing mama's business clothes, with half her lines ending with question marks, regardless of how they were written, and her Oklahoma accent constantly slopping up onto the shores of her reads. Yet! As soon as she's fighting Freddy Krueger, something else she knew about, she's suddenly, jarringly good: when Nancy first enters Kristen's dream, and she has to stab Freddy as a Penis Worm, she's fierce, she's determined, she's Nancy Thompson again, rather than just Langenkamp visibly worried that Russell is letting her look foolish and wishing Craven were directing her instead. (She obviously hadn't seen Deadly Friend yet.) It's not even the worst performance in the movie (Arquette is quite acceptable, with a much easier part, mostly screeching or just being exhausted, but besides Arquette and Gregg, the "teens" are no better than any slasher cast), but it's the most important performance, and that sucks.
Maybe it's better that the movie's two big problems don't overlap much, and that the Langenkamp Career Day Pageant problem recedes as the more fundamental problem moves forward, but it means the whole thing gets sandbagged one way or another. Regardless, we've got Wasson, and we were able to get Nancy's dad John Saxon back too, so they need something to do; more importantly, we also need a way to destroy/"destroy" Freddy, so we—I mean Russell & Darabont, I would never have stood for this—are going to choose what might be literally the most inapt thing they could've that would satisfy both of these requirements. Entering the film abruptly by way of a nun (Nan Martin), whose pair of secrets you'll guess long before they're revealed, Dream Warriors' B-plot is a faith-and-science deal that could work just fine (is Freddy dreamt of in your philosophy?)—indeed, is pretty much already working fine, given that Neil surpasses his limitations by trusting Nancy in the first place—if it weren't so specifically Christian and attached to specifically Christian horror tropes that are appropriate in their place but don't ever seem like they could exist in the same moral universe as Freddy. "This is God"—remember? (We get more Freddy backstory in the bargain, and that's also undesirable, even if "bastard son of a hundred maniacs" is some memorably ripe stuff.) It leads to a fun sequence in a neat haunted junkyard where Neil must do cross-cut battle with a sub-Ray Harryhausen skeleton composite while our dream warriors navigate Freddy's various hells, but it's distracting that Neil's B-plot is the important plot, insofar as nothing Nancy and the teens do even matters beyond surviving long enough to run Freddy's clock, which is a slightly bitter pill, considering, well, how things end; but also that the whole point was the power of friendship and sharing your dreams, not the power of therapist-priests to relocate human remains eight feet.
It arrives part-and-parcel to general diminishing returns on the psychohorror itself, the balance tipping towards too concrete and literal, and too connected to the remaining victims' one notes. Taryn gets the best of it, based on the squirmily gruesome image of track marks begging for drugs—it comes off very silly (even PSA-like), with Freddy's new needle-hands, but I admit it's "good"—and Will gets the worst, with a heap of wheelchair puns. (I also don't know if the movie actually meant to demonstrate that the kids' "dream powers," of which Will's wizard spells seemed to be the strongest, are all hugely useless and dumb, despite being heavily showcased.) But then there's Joey, sent into a coma and used as bait (the message written into his flesh is a bodacious effect that's one of the few times Dream Warriors plays by strict Nightmare rules as regards Freddy-mediated physical injury), and Joey's denouement is, no pun intended, actually resonant.
But by the end, Russell is obviously running on fumes, budget- and focus-wise; the dream boiler room is the first thing in the movie that feels compromised, like an idea was merely "good enough" (even the previous goofballery is clearly enthusiastic), and it's the first set that feels like it should not feel this much like a set, which is a shame, because it's a handsome and energetic motion picture all told, with some solid photography courtesy Roy Wagner (especially some expressionistic shadows in the hospital's "quiet room," but it's got nice late 80s horror vibe all over). The film deserves much of its reputation—it's the only one of the first sextet, I believe, that people stand next to Nightmare and say "this is worthy"—but it steadily develops more and worse weaknesses as it goes, which is the opposite of how you'd want it if it absolutely needs to have bad parts at all.
Score: 7/10
*Though I'm curious about The Hidden.
Reviews in this series:
A Nightmare On Elm Street (Craven, 1984)
A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)
A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)
A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)
A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
A Nightmare On Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)
Some 'Dream Warriors' musings:
ReplyDelete- The Elm Street posters indeed rock. They always reminded me of the contemporaneous Star Trek posters. I'm aware tons of 80s genre flicks had a similar style, but back in the day whenever I'd see the artwork for Part 4 'The Dream Master' I had to take a split-second to make sure it wasn't Star Trek The Motion Picture. Part 3's also looks like it could be for a kickass RPG on the NES.
- It occurs to me that the Elm Street movies were kind of the Fast and the Furious of the 80s in the way they escalated from straight horror to crazy over-the-top "horror themed" franchise flicks much the way Fast and the Furious escalated from straightforward car chase/heist movies to crazy over-the-top "car themed" franchise flicks (also a little bit in the "omg such and so from two movies ago is back" way their casts evolved over time). I dunno maybe I'm reaching with that one but hey.
- The most unrealistic part of this movie is that the girl with the history of drugs and who has a dealer on site itching to do business with her should ABSOLUTELY be wanting to score some coke and speed considering the whole situation with the dream demon wanting to kill her in her sleep and all.
Now that you mention it re: Taryn, that's insane--you're so right.
DeleteThe Star Trek posters were basically the only other one that occurred to me as possibly better, but they have a bad habit of being repeating themselves with the transporter faces thing, though as that shouldn't be disqualifying (Dream Child is riffs real hard on Dream Warriors), I'm gonna go with TWOK and TFF being more like "very good" instead of "extraordinary" and letting down the average. Thought about the Indies, but it's mainly just Raiders that has an all-timer poster; BTtF occurred to me, more as "being a franchise," but it's more of a cute concept than really evocative art; in honesty, I liked the better MCU character vomit posters a lot for a while till they got samey and I started to wonder if there was anything really there besides neat arrangements. The Fridays have some swell ones towards the back half (Final Chapter is amazing), but a lot of them obviously suck.
Re: the remainder of the franchise, I have no idea how you or anybody will respond to how I feel about The Dream Master, insofar as my first, second, and third instinct is to insult everybody we know for lying to me all these years and saying it sucked, and I am going to have to tamp those instincts down so hard.
As I recall, I may also have described Slumber Party Massacre II's poster as the best ever. Well, that's superlatives for you. No wait, "best *movie-poster interaction* ever"--reductively, a masculine/feminine thing, like the Driller Killer made the poster but Valerie made the movie--which is a little different.
DeleteHunter, you go RIGHT ahead and insult those lying liars who lied to you. 'The Dream Master' rocks, and time has weirdly forgotten that it was actually well-received overall when it was released.
DeleteOh, re: "how did Nancy survive the end of part 1," seems the implication is she just woke up! Freddy then probably decided she was more trouble than she was worth and figured taking her mom was consolation enough.
ReplyDeleteAny horror tale that shows our Designated Victims re-designate themselves Big Damn Heroes is alright with me: there’s a reason DRACULA is my favourite classic horror novel, after all.
ReplyDeleteIt is one of the big ways that the Nightmare movies take themselves out of "slasher movie."
Delete