1989
Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Written by Leslie Boehm, John Skipp, and Craig Spector
A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child almost has an idea. It continues to keep almost having an idea right up until almost literally the end, never so much grasping at that idea, but continually eyeing it, nervously. It's going to come as close as it ever will to actually catching it almost as soon as it begins, when, as with Dream Warriors and The Dream Master before it, we kick off with a credits montage of what amounts to insert shots, of an activity that is at first heavily abstracted. The difference, this time, is that activity is sex, and it's very easily the most abstract of the three. It is, quite possibly, too abstract, insofar as while we can be reasonably sure that what we're seeing is humans having 1980s blue-tinted sex, it takes till the end of the sequence before we can reliably discern which gender each of the participants are, and for most of it I'd defy you to immediately identify whose or what body part we're looking at. There's a close-up of a scapula, and my first instinct was that it was somebody's buttcrack.
That's a reasonable enough choice (it is, after all, "sexuality as a concept," not "pornography"), and for the last shot of it, if we guessed that the faces we finally see pop up into the blue haze belonged to Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel), The Dream Master's survivor couple, we'd be right. Finished, Alice goes to take a shower, and you'd probably start getting a sense of how I feel about this movie earlier than I intend if I were to describe the nightmare that ensues as "some birth imagery that isn't entirely pulled off," but the pipes break and fill up the enclosed shower, almost drowning Alice inside until Wilcox's body double bursts out of the glass, while in the meantime something resembling sewage was spewing up through the drain. The hell of it is, symbolically, this makes sense, but, for one thing, this isn't a series that benefits very much from having symbolism that baffles you until you unpack it for yourself hours later—if you want to read an ejaculatory dimension into Glen's blood geyser demise in A Nightmare On Elm Street, knock yourself out, but the horror of a blood geyser is immediate; it occurred to me only later that Debbie transforming into a cockroach in The Dream Master was a much smarter invocation of Kafka than I initially thought, in the way it could interface with her body image, but I certainly didn't need to know that then, for she was, quite simply, getting smashed like an insect—and, for a second thing, I'm not sure I'm even right, because while the interpretation kind of tracks with later events, there's a lot of stuff here that isn't going to track at all. It doesn't feel that "conceptiony" or "birthy," anyway.
But birthed Alice is, into an entirely new dream space, and presently The Dream Child takes its biggest swing. Alice finds herself dressed in a white nun's habit and locked in a madhouse with the proverbial hundred maniacs, and as they pile upon her the camera pulls out just far enough for us to get a good look at just one, whom we might find sort of uncannily familiar, because it's Robert Englund without the makeup. So this is the Nightmare whose opening move is having Freddy recast his archenemy as his own mother Amanda (now Beatrice Boepple) and feed her into the very rape dungeon that conceived him. And I am impressed: that is uncommonly bold in its sheer nastiness, yet somehow it's entirely fitting—it's something of a return of the focused sexual horror of Freddy's Revenge, while nevertheless incorporating that into the Dream Warriors/Dream Master horror fantasy formula, and we'll get, soon enough, to the Rosemary's Baby of it all. So it's priming us, before we've quite gotten there, for precisely what kind of eldritch mysticism and biological horror the film's undoubtedly going to be playing with. As will only surprise you if you don't trust everyone who said The Dream Master was no good—so it did, in fact, surprise me—The Dream Child starts crumbling almost immediately, on this point and on others, and it's definitely going to get pretty annoying if your least favorite thing in the whole franchise so far was Amanda Krueger's Goddamn ghost.
For that minute, it kind of looks like it's going to be using Amanda's history more effectively than Dream Warriors did, not as a plot device this time, but something to give meaningful flesh and form to Alice's violating nightmare in illustration of a dreamlord's cosmic-scaled perversity. It'll be awfully deflating once we learn that, actually, The Dream Child is also going to be fundamentally about Freddy doing proxy battle with his mom, while our heroine Alice's job mainly becomes just finding Amanda again after Amanda forestalls Freddy's first attack.
But it would probably behoove us to drop the frame-by-frame pace: so while Alice's rape dream concludes without any definitive evidence that Freddy's back, it shakes her, because it's the first time since The Dream Master that she hasn't felt in control of her own dreams. But, for now, today's her and Dan's graduation day, which mildly aggravates me because (this may have been my mistake) there's such a pronounced "graduating seniors" vibe to the previous film, which we're made to understand was a year earlier even though its emotional throughline feels entirely bound up with the prospect of friendships lost to the end of high school. Oh well, maybe the dead ones were still graduating. But Alice goes to the ceremony, meeting her and Dan's replacement buds: Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter), a swimmer and candystriper; Greta (Erika Anderson), an "aspiring" model being vicariously and oppressively lived through by her mother (an immoderately camp Pat Struges); and Mark (Joe Seely), a comic book fan and hopeful artist; also on hand is Alice's dad (Nicholas Mele), who's mellowed out since the last film, and has been afforded a somewhat expanded role in this one. Dan, on the other hand, has not: soon enough, Freddy makes it crystal clear he's back, striking at Alice with a full-on waking hallucination, which ought to be impossible, and he hijacks the dream sharing power Alice acquired from poor Kristen last time to draw first blood with Alice's boyfriend, causing a fatal car crash. Alice passes out from the shock of witnessing it, and when she wakes up, again—though the freakish Freddy muppet baby has foreshadowed it unmistakably, as does Freddy when he reassumes his form and declares, "it's a boy!"—a doctor with astoundingly few qualms about patient privacy, even for 1989, shouts the news to everybody in her wing of the hospital, that she's pregnant with her dead boyfriend's child (this will be Whit Hertford, in the dream visions of the six or seven year old "Jacob" that begin now and only now). What precisely Freddy's game is takes Alice a while to discern, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it involves that baby.
The fact is, to the extent it does involve that baby, it's in unintuitive ways, though it eventually begins to explain (sort of) where Alice's newfound susceptibility to waking dreams is coming from, albeit at the cost of requiring you to relax your objections—all the way into a coma—regarding what you know about fetal brain development and what the writers of The Dream Child obviously don't. Maybe it seems like a minor quibble, but it's a telling one, conveying just how astonishingly disinterested this horror movie is, amounting to a legitimate anti-interest, in dealing with "a pregnancy" as any sort of physical process, not even morning sickness or, as far as I could tell, padding under Wilcox's shirts. Hell, we wind up with a perplexing timeline on account of it, so while the ultrasound scene is more of a matter of sinister imagery impinging on wholesome imagery (also exposition), and therefore that imagery of a ~16 week old fetus doesn't absolutely need to be precisely representationalist, it still makes you notice that they're not trying hard.
That's small stuff, though. For all of its 90 minutes, you keep expecting something to kick in regarding this pregnancy, but it barely pretends to be interested in pregnancy as a social process, either, and it's essentially never interested in it as a psychological one. And just... what the fuck is the movie, then? It is, potentially, an outstanding chassis for any particular aspect of pregnancy you wished to explore: an unwanted pregnancy; an unwanted pregnancy that's unwanted, specifically, because it was instigated by rape (which, despite the symbolic portent, it doesn't seem to have been, even mystically); in the same vein, a pregnancy of uncertain paternity; a pregnancy that's wanted even if doesn't make sense, because the man who gave it to you is gone forever (we get the closest to this, via one solitary line); and, of course, a bad pregnancy that isn't going to work out no matter how much you want it, and even if you'd die for it, all you could ever accomplish by trying is hurting the ones who already love you.
The plot converges best with the latter (unborn Jacob is the means by which Freddy is inflicting those waking nightmares on Alice), hence the one line raising the possibility of an abortion that is immediately dismissed by all involved, something that might've had some manner of theme or character pinned onto it—hell, even a plot complication, if that's really all you've got—if it weren't so blatantly just the only move the movie can make and still keep itself going. By the finale, it's sort of switched tacks anyway, so maybe the pregnancy was mystical rape—Freddy has established a rapport with Jacob that's sort of like evil fatherhood, and there's an entire body horror sequence involving Alice's need to remove the Freddy that's been growing like a cancer inside her—but it's very confused. Yet even at this late point, the movie has a chance; its refusal to make any previous squirmy choices means it's stuck itself in a corner, but if it did still want to be about something, then the dangerous pregnancy—the kid—had to sacrifice himself, which for a very (ahem) pregnant moment, Jacob even looks like he might do. I don't know why I thought this would suddenly have that bravery. Instead, Amanda does ghost magic; the closest we get to anything meaningful is that sometimes kids are good, sometimes they're Freddy Krueger.
It all feels so gallingly incomplete and slapped-together, which, indeed, it was, even when it shouldn't have been; this might've technically had the longest story development any Nightmare ever had, including Wes Craven's first film, given that it began with Leslie Boehm's idea for an abandoned iteration of its very first sequel. But by the time this fourth sequel rolled around, 51 weeks after the third, novel concepts were scarce, time was scarcer still, writing partners John Skipp and Craig Spector were brought in to give us what they gave us, and, as with The Dream Master, an inexperienced foreigner was given the director's chair, this time Australia's Stephen Hopkins.
I prefer to think that Boehm, when he did his work, did have an idea or at least was ready to look an idea in the eye, but none of those other guys seemed to have any particular attachment at all to a movie about Alice's diabolical pregnancy, or, for that matter, a movie about Alice Johnson, period. If they did, they still gave us an Alice who's lost forty I.Q. points between The Dream Master and now—at least forty, given the battle-tested heroine of The Dream Master was so smart and capable. Now, she's unbearably slow on every uptake, and written as unable to think beyond the middle words of any given sentence, notably when it takes Alice two, three, or possibly four tries of shrieking at adults about "KREUGER!" before it dawns on her this might be counter-productive. It's a bummer, because every so often Wilcox is able to grab ahold of a scene that actually does remember who Alice is, and we get to remember, too.
But, instead of any of the foregoing, Hopkins and company's energies seem to have been devoted entirely to pursuing Dream Warriors' nightmare kills formula, which isn't, by necessity, the worst place for a Nightmare to land. But maybe it even sums up The Dream Child's problems, especially vis-a-vis The Dream Master, to mention that Renny Harlin and Hopkins, shortly after completing their third and fourth Nightmare sequels, respectively, each took on a first sequel to a John McTiernan film, and while Harlin's McTiernan sequel was Die Harder, Hopkins's was Predator 2. We get the Predator 2 of Nightmares, though this may be unduly complimentary.
By and large, the horror fantasy is clumsy—does that make Harlin, by comparison, elegant?—and often opaque. I belabored (sorry) the shower/birth symbolism, now let's consider Freddy's dreamland resurrection, accomplished atop a giant hydraulically-lifted piece of thrusting earth, piercing upwards into the nave of a church. It's the sort of thing that, by definition, doesn't feel like it could be "opaque," but it doesn't come off like the violent phallic imagery I'm sure it's supposed to be. It comes off like they had a hydraulic lift. With Dan's death, Hopkins wants to riff on Dream Master's time loop. It comes off like somebody told him that the desired gore effects, involving an invasion of machine parts into Dan's body, weren't feasible inside Dan's truck, so even though he just died in that truck, he dies again, on a motorcycle, where they were feasible (the relevance of "becoming a cyborg" to Dan's character is a somewhat salient question, too.). Mark's demise is supposed to be one of the movie's true showpieces, and I'll tell you, the denouement of it, as the comic book artist is transformed into paper to be torn apart, is wonderfully unique. The sequence to which it belongs, however, is frankly embarrassing, partly because of the bad conceit of "Super-Freddy," partly because Mark's dream-form, the embodiment of his superhero creation, is a shitty Frank Miller riff, but mostly because it comes off—there's that phrase again—like they wanted to do a Nightmare version of "Take On Me," and then they couldn't figure it out, but still left the teases for it in anyway. (And not one tease but two: the first is even pointing at an incredibly clever sequence concept, regarding Alice drawing herself into Mark's comics as a lousy stick-figure, that just craps out immediately into live action.) Greta's death comes off how it's meant to, at least, but it's still noticeably poorly-edited. Yvonne doesn't die, so they never came up with a good idea for threatening her with death.
As "Super-Freddy" may suggest, it might be clumsier still with the other thing The Dream Master perfected, "Funny" Freddy. We could start with the departure of stalwart makeup artist Kevin Yagher and return of Freddy's originator, David Miller, though this can't explain why this looks worse than the original Nightmare's makeup, too. Some of it's just that Hopkins is lighting Freddy more fully, but a lot of the time Freddy doesn't even look like himself at all, and I can wonder if this was a lighter, more flexible series of appliques, and wonder further if Englund didn't fully realize this, since he's still making the broadest, most bug-eyed facial expressions in the apparent belief that, to move the latex, he'd need to. But I also wonder if Hopkins was deliberately courting the resulting hamminess, but, whatever it was, The Dream Child is the Nightmare where Freddy frequently looks like he's just shit his pants. It's still less annoying than what they're doing with Freddy's humor: it usually isn't even quips anymore, and never moreso than the ADRed-in monstrosities attending Dan's death where Freddy is just shouting random car-related phrases like "FUEL INJECTED!" and "POWER DRIVE!", while Englund sounds more like Randy Savage exhorting you to bite into a pig snack than any bored, malignant god. Englund winds up with a lot of flopsweat here, unavoidably; so it's both relieving and slightly sad when the real Freddy comes up for air, and he says something self-amusing but still scary. "I know exactly what you're up to" is a slightly-obvious feeder line, but Englund absolutely still sells "I think I'm up to... Yvonne." (Needless to say, I like "wanna make babies?") It does help me realize what people mean when they say "Funny" Freddy was a bad idea.
But I'll give it to The Dream Child, the climax cooks, visually-speaking. It appears to have been Hopkins's only serious engagement with the entire film, in that it allowed he and production designer C.J. Strawn (doing nothing throughout but bringing honor to herself, alone amongst all the principals here) to realize a psychedelic Escheresque dreamscape with as much money as New Line had ever spent on a movie; and while what this has to do with the biological or psychological dimensions of "a dream child" remains palpably unclear, it's cool. The movie isn't as bad as people say, and it at least has a certain junky propulsiveness. But the realization that finally arrives here—that it's not merely that it doesn't know what it's about, but that it does, and it's terrified of dealing with it, so that the very strongest evocation of fear that this horror movie ever achieves comes from realizing how afraid it is of itself—makes it impossible to even offer my customary charity of calling it "fine."
Score: 5/10
You can tell there really was this gung-ho effort in the production to outdo themselves as far as the elaborate effects sequences go and I can definitely appreciate that, but they concentrated it on these three huge, largely modular setpieces that just keep drilling down on a single idea (cyborg motorcycle, grotesque overfeeding, comic book) that end up just bogging down the movie more than anything.
ReplyDeleteIn comparison Part 4's cockroach scene actually starts at a weight bench, becomes an insectile limb replacement, then goes into getting trapped in a mysterious substance, then becomes full-on metamorphosis, and THEN we discover we're in a giant roach motel, all while the other characters are trapped in a timeloop, to boot. Like, it wasn't just "becomes a cockroach > becomes even more of a cockroach > becomes even more hideous as a cockroach."
These set pieces are so long and self-contained they remind me of music videos. Shit, you could say in a weird way the movie feels like a musical. (And speaking of music videos, they REALLY shouldn't be teasing a full-on "A-Ha" sequence if they weren't going to deliver!)
But yeah, even at this point it was still a fair movie in comparison to most of its contemporaries. The next one, you're probably aware, decides to get even MORE ambitious and most people think it flies completely off the rails.
It's a lot better than Jason Takes Manhattan, anyhow. But I can't say how disappointed I was when Alice scrawled that red stick-figure into Mark's drawing, all but promising a weird animated sequence, and then it's just, like, the 1428 Elm Street set or whatever.
DeleteI feel like I somehow hold these movies to a higher and lower standard simultaneously, perceiving genuine dramatic import that sort of just comes part and parcel to a bunch of people dying, but then let down when they gesture at something ambitious and don't, ahem, manage it.
Do love the poster tagline, wish it lived up to it. In fact, that reminds me of something I did mean to mention, it's suggestive that THIS is the one where Freddy does NOT do any kind of drag (either Englund or with another actor).
I once explained to my brothers that Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street have a kind of Walmart : Target relationship. One of them is pretty objectively nicer than the other, but how much that matters to you when it comes to 80s mainstream horror movies and discount supermarkets may vary!
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