1988
Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by William Kotzwinkle, Brian Helgeland, Ken Wheat, and Jim Wheat
A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master should not be good as it is, and, as consensus would have it, it isn't. That consensus, it seems, has gotten only more negative over time, for it debuted back in 1988 to at least a few raves and a dazzling box office take; but today, few hold it as a series highlight, and the majority think it sucks at least a little, if not a lot, and this is the kind of thing that drives me insane. I'm not going to spend this whole time insulting everyone (probably including you), as I have some faint self-awareness that my impulse to defend a churned-out third sequel to a slasher film is undignified. Yet integrity demands that I at least insult you a little, because while it's certainly nobody's obligation to have enjoyed Dream Master's immediate predecessor, Dream Warriors, that one is considered a series highlight by many aficionados, so if that's you, then I truly cannot imagine by what possible right you could disapprove of this one, which is the same movie but gloriously moreso. Nevertheless, I'll offer something more conciliatory (or passive-aggressive, I can never tell), even if I doubt it could be immediately persuasive either way: if you somehow had the opportunity to watch this for the very first time, as I was lucky enough to have done, without too much prejudice and with the same appetite for the thrumming lifeforce that's lacking in so much modern horror, then I think you could be swept right off your feet by the sheer maximalist joy of it all.
The year before, Dream Warriors' success had allayed Robert Shaye's worries that New Line Cinema hadn't actually bought a money-printing machine, and, better yet, it had, in the process, built a sturdy-seeming template that subsequent entries could follow to their own success. Now, undoubtedly, it can be overemphasized how different the first three (or four) films really are from one another—Dream Warriors is a direct sequel to the first one, after all—and the only one that really flew off chasing its own interpretation was Freddy's Revenge, which pinned Freddy Krueger down as a one-time use psychosexual metaphor. But they are, still, pretty different, and I think I could be at peace with anyone who thought the whole franchise went to hell after the original, whereupon Wes Craven's overpowering dread and serious treatment of the dream state gave way to carnivalesque sequels more interested in entertaining you with special effects than actually terrifying you, and nightmare sequences that veered away from Craven's pure unconscious terror towards more strictly-symbolic psychohorror. In this one, it veers away again, from symbolic psychohorror to something more like full-on reality-warping fantasy; but those are close enough in effect and in the general style of their execution that the distinction here is more like valence than objective difference, so while I want to investigate this valence, for now it's best to just say, "in Dream Warriors, Shaye saw the opportunity for any number of iterations on a winning formula, and accordingly Dream Master got pumped out of the New Line factory in eighteen months."
Shaye did have the decency to go to Craven first*, who sent him something about dreams and time travel, which Shaye found not merely unusable but completely out of accord with Craven's own series rules, something that, after Freddy's Revenge, Shaye had adopted as holy writ, even if it rarely comes off that way. But Shaye didn't have time to fiddle with Craven's idiosyncrasies, so eager was he for another Nightmare bounty for his studio, and, boy, was he: New Line started filming effects sequences for The Dream Master before it had a finished script, or even a director. There's an unpleasant efficiency to that, though I prefer to think of it as an indication of the fundamental purpose here (that is, "deliver incredibly cool fantasy horror vignettes," dovetailing only incidentally with "make New Line money"), but even so, I suppose it damns it, if what you want and all you want is soup-to-nuts auteurism, rather than collaborative imagination.
Soon enough, however, pressed by what continues to sound entirely like a self-imposed deadline, Shaye hired a young Finnish director, Renny Harlin, against his better judgment: he thought Harlin was too inexperienced—he didn't even like him—so despite New Line obviously having a legal department, not one attorney objected to a DVD featurette where Shaye stated aloud that he hired him in the largest part because Harlin was "a big guy," which signaled to Shaye the "stamina" he believed the production required. It's customary to despise Harlin, though having seen only three of his movies, two of which are A+ great, I'm unsure why; I know why Geena Davis despises him, but he didn't impregnate my assistant, nor, presumably, yours, nor did he imperil any of your finances with Cutthroat Island. Whatever else, I guess he was the guy Dream Master needed, for as it entered production it immediately got hit with the '88 WGA strike without any thought of slowing down. There was some shadiness here, regarding how writerless the movie actually was as it was made, and I'm not entirely clear what the difference is between "writing" and "coming up with ideas for what will be in a movie," but the upshot is that Harlin mostly had to make do, leaning increasingly upon the visual concepts he and his crew members (effects artists but also, like, art directors) were coming up with, and for this Nightmare, that apparently redounded in its favor.
The downside is perhaps not entirely obvious, but only because it's a slasher movie, and I'm happy to agree it's not totally surprising to learn that, depending on the scene, the actors' teen yammering was basically improv. Even so, we do have a story, and I think that story works a lot better than it should, given the foregoing. So: a year after Dream Warriors and Freddy's (Robert Englund's) incomplete campaign of vengeance upon the Elm Street children, the three survivors—Roland (still Ken Sagoes), Joey (still Rodney Eastman), and Kristen (now Tuesday Knight)—have found that, with Freddy dead, they're scarcely more mentally ill than any given teenager, and have gotten their lives more-or-less back on track.
Nonetheless, Kristen remains worried than Freddy isn't dead, and when she sleeps and dreams, she continues to reflexively deploy the talent that was never as vital to the end of Dream Warriors as its (entirely-finished) screenplay kept insisting it was, hence pulling her former comrades-in-arms into her regular, non-Freddy nightmares, to their increasing annoyance. When she sucks them into Freddy's psychic boiler room, they sigh, and demonstrate that while it's still very spooky, it's now empty of his evil. Kristen can't believe it, but maybe she is just bothering her old friends because they're the only ones she can talk to about their mutual wounds, unlike her new friends, cool Gen X karate-wielding boyfriend Rick (Andras Jones), his distracted and fantasy-prone sister Alice (Lisa Wilcox), sharp-tongued asthmatic nerd Sheila (Toy Newkirk), pop-punk exercise enthusiast Debbie (Brooke Theiss), and nice jock Dan (Danny Hassell). But maybe Kristen wasn't wrong. That very night, Roland and Joey discover she was not, with Freddy essentially resurrecting himself—the implication, if there even is one to be inferred, is that Freddy has suborned the dreams of Roland's dog—and neither survivor survives their new encounter with the dream demon. But Freddy sees in Kristen's ability to share her dreams a way for her to snare new souls for him to consume, so now faced with the daunting prospect of even convincing her new friends that Freddy's real, she sets herself to saving them from Freddy's perversion of her power, and defeating him again.
It's worth stopping there, not quite halfway through this 93 minute movie, to note that finished screenplay or not, it's as solid as can be in its underpinnings, in essence a remake of Dream Warriors but stripped of all of Dream Warriors' tangential bullshit (the efforts at ever-more-elaborate Freddy backstory, the Christian proselytizing, and the adult sidequesting all being abandoned, not to be missed). But we do have the returning protagonist again: like Nancy Thompson before her, Kristen Parker serves as the new anchoring heroine here, and while it's a pity they couldn't get Patricia Arquette back and more of a pity Knight looks nothing like her, this matters way less than it should, because guess what?
Suddenly, it's much more of a remix of Dream Warriors: Kristen lasts only long enough for you to never expect that she dies at the perfectly chosen juncture for it to be a genuine shock, Psycho-style, rather than a case of a previous film's Final Girl eating it to clear the board for a new tray of meat, and, indeed, more structurally surprising than Nancy's endgame sacrifice last time, because this is actually discombobulating, leaving you wondering where the movie could still have left to go. It is, then, a remarkable death—and remarkably well-done, though somehow the wildest thing about it isn't in her dream itself but in the lead-up to it, after her well-meaning, still-a-jackass mom (weirdly, still Brooke Bundy) straight-up drugs her to get her to sleep, whereupon Harlin comes recklessly close to being outright obnoxious with how much he's already been overusing his sleek mobile overhead camera mount, and solves whatever problem I was about to have with him by just punching through and using the holy fucking hell out of it now, by way of a bravura tracking shot where Kristen's freakout is reflected in that shot getting increasingly addled itself, till ultimately it's in the same fuguelike spin she is. After that, it's all over but the crying for Kristen, except that in her panic, she pulls another friend in. Our dream master, if she can achieve it, shall be Alice, who, through some mystical process (seemingly the daydreamer's own imaginative capabilities), inherits the dream sharing power of her now-dead friend.
It also provides a parallel benefit, in that now all of the movie's worst actors are gone (Knight, though not "Heather Langenkamp as a grad student" bad, is decisively worse than Arquette), thereby leaving us with one very above-par slasher cast: Jones's 75%-capacity Christian Slater and Newkirk's Converse Urkel would be easy standouts anywhere else, and they're all exceeded by Wilcox, knocking on the door of great, and with vastly more to actually act with than Langenkamp had, even in her definitely-great Nightmare turn, which was still mostly just scene-by-scene freneticism. You see, the way the kills shake out here affords The Dream Master the closest thing to a classical slasher structure seen so far, but it still has that Nightmare difference, not just because this has gotten way too danged cosmic to be "a slasher" (though it has), but because Nightmare's premise collapses the space between its killer and the death metaphor that all slashers are dealing with in some way or another, as the kids mourn these openly-committed murders with such hopelessness about even convincing each other (let alone any adults) what's happening that it's pretty deep into the movie till they start trying to, by which time they're mostly dead. Where that becomes further entwined in the film's fantasy conceits is Alice herself, who, with every friend's demise, acquires a measure of their personality, and while that's bizarre and perhaps undercooked, maybe it's better for it, because nobody had the time to script any condescending speech stressing what it means. In physical terms, it means she learns martial arts (the worst thing in the movie is Wilcox's shot-from-behind stunt double learning the nunchaku on her behalf) and gets dream muscles and acquires nerd inventions, all of which she'll use to fight Freddy, which sounds idiotic, so it's a good thing that the movie knows it is, and all of these physical skills don't matter at all, just more pitiful desperation for Freddy to laugh at. In emotional terms, though, tethered to a hoary but-I-like-it-that-way use of a mirror in which she finally, get this, sees herself, it's quietly but successfully dealing with the dislocations of high school and young adulthood, and how, maybe, it's still possible to take the best of your lost friends (not typically lost to supernatural murder, but lost all the same) into the future with you.
As for laughing Freddy, this is Englund's strongest performance so far, too, and while I am open to the possibility that this gets worse, so far, "Funny" Freddy rules. It is, at least for now (and now's all that counts), striking one incredibly good balance, with the self-amusing monster seldom being "actually funny," but horribly convincing as an omnipotent dreamlord for whom this is such a meaningless challenge that only constant novelty can entertain him. (I recommend not listening to Harlin talk about Freddy, but when he describes him as the franchise's "cool" "hero," as stupid and tasteless as that is, it's on behalf of a villain for whom stupid tastelessness is his thing.) I've said repeatedly that it's unreasonable to want four movies that, as Craven's did, do "actual nightmares." That's a way to be scary, but obviously limited, and it doesn't mean that the puns and the goofy kitsch of a bored god aren't another; even if the latter is more blatantly "fun," being funny has always been part of Freddy, and this time he fully achieves asshole divinity, the cartoon anarchist who, at the end of the comedy short, still destroys you. A jokey rap song should not play over the end credits of a Friday or Halloween, of course it shouldn't; but for Freddy (Englund provides a vocal track), what you think is acceptable or right isn't his concern. So, no, I don't care that he's resurrected by a dog pissing fire. It's ugly chaos, this whole movie is ugly chaos, that is, dizzyingly enough, at all times presented beautifully. (Freddy's liquid putrescence reconstituting itself as flesh would be the most accomplished gross-out effect in almost any movie; it's only the second-best gross-out effect in this one.) He's "funny," but his rejoinder, "I believe in you," sure as hell isn't not scary.
But I'm annoyed with myself that, for this movie all about formal wallops, I've mostly talked about the half a screenplay strung between those wallops. It's so much movie it's hard to encompass it, and rather gorgeous front-to-back, thanks to Harlin and especially cinematographer Steven Fierberg, unfortunately of no feature film career of note besides his diligent work here, which is a grand exercise in over-the-top horror lighting and difficult compositing challenges and pure-and-simple energy, especially music video energy (including much unmotivated-shaft-of-light energy), as applied to never-more-tactile-yet-always-surreal dream spaces courtesy production designers C.J. and Mick Strawn (siblings, I think, but this movie would need two production designers). But it's varied and smart, too; hell, the daylight exteriors have a strong sense of personality and tone, and there's stuff as modest but still-cool as the grim shadows of an afternoon classroom that don't immediately announce themselves as the stuff of nightmares.
So then, when it comes to murderous novelty, we get it, and how: just nightmare sequence after nightmare sequence, really, all of great imagination, and, to alloy the praise, not entirely winners. Rick's dream dojo death at the hands of an invisible Freddy is... dubious, and apparently replaced an unrealizable sequence, half of which remains as a more quotidian nightmare about the cheerleaders bursting in on you when you're taking a dump. And there is as much "actual dream" in this as anything since Craven's Nightmare, including Freddy tactically using looping repetition to stymie his dream master foe; call me a heretic if you must, but there's more "dead, blackened heart of suburbia" in Alice's dream vision of still working at the local diner at age 70 in a town even more decayed than she is than anything Nightmare ever managed with its lousy parents and dumb, politically-incoherent Krueger lynching. The creativity is off the charts; the average is harrowingly good, kicking off with Roland in a re-use of the Dream Warriors junkyard set that sets high expectations for effects-driven brawn that The Dream Master is still going to breeze right past (it is unbelievable that this movie cost $6.5 million in 1988), and heading straight in to possibly my favorite concept, where horny young Joey is tempted to his doom, again, this time by a mermaid, or siren, who appears within his waterbed, and if I wanted this to be even more elaborate, that's unfair because this isn't an Esther Williams movie. It's not usually so literally tethered to signposted individual weaknesses as Dream Warriors; but, if you'll allow it, it finds Freddy testing his victims till he finds one, which is more visually interesting, and maybe more narratively interesting, too.
It does not lack for jaw-dropping interest. There's a pizza of souls. There's a very involved nightmare that's a philistine parody of Kafka (namedropped by philistines, alongside Goethe, so maybe there's a philistine parody of him I didn't recognize, too). There's Robert Englund in Ernest P. Worrell's Auntie Nelda drag. I think there's a freaking reference to Busby Berkeley's Dames. There's an astoundingly-good, mythic-scaled, very-expensive, and superbly-disgusting climax, that could feel unfounded, but it's so damned intuitive it still feels correct. And, somewhere in here, Freddy Krueger hits the beach.
What SPF would possibly work here? I loved nearly every second of this, and, if 80s horror is even remotely your thing, you should too.
Score: 10/10
*That may explain the discrepancy between the reputations of the third and fourth Nightmares, by the way: Craven's name is on Dream Warriors, and it's just Goddamn fannishness. Deadly Friend has a higher average Letterboxd rating than this movie, I rest my fucking case.
*runs in* Come on, we have to hurry. I'M DRIVING. *starts engine, takes off*
ReplyDeleteI've always liked Part 4, but had always ranked it behind Part 3 mostly on the basis that dropping the "dream warriors" conceit felt like a step backwards. But on a recent re-watch I've reversed that judgment: I feel like it's more on Part 3 for squandering its own concept than it is on Part 4 for not picking it back up; also what I had mistaken in Part 4 for "trendy 80s ironic editing shit" was actually just the movie treating Alice's daydreams the same way as nightmares (I'm thinking of that "I'm sick of watching you waste your drunk-ass life away, dad" micro-interlude in particular).
I think the cockroach sequence (and adjacent scenes, since it's all one big crazy setpiece) is the Nightmare on Elm Street Series at its very peak. It's inventive, you're never 100% sure where it's going next, keeps getting crazier as it goes on, it has some *amazing* effects work, it's truly nightmarish, and somehow having it all end with a simple splat feels like a fitting punchline rather than just an anticlimax. It just rules!
Finally, I don't know if it's all down to HD or if there's been some further remastering work done in the meantime, but I'd never noticed how gorgeous the movie looked before. I can imagine a lot of shots that just looked sorta murky on standard def suddenly becoming rather striking with the added detail.
*stops engine* Here we are. *Runs off* Come on, we have to hurry. I'M DRIVING *starts engine, takes off*
In fairness to the haters, I can sort of understand looking back on this one with some bitterness, especially if you haven't seen it in a long time. The stuff it does well (cool nightmare sequences, Robert Englund, etc.) is easy to mentally assign to the series in general, while there's a lot of sequel bullshit that probably doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things (it does feel like it throws the prior film under the bus, at times it comes off like a stealth infomercial for MTV (a little surprised there was no cameo by INXS or somebody), etc.) that can leave a bitter taste in your mouth in hindsight. You can also make a legit case that the series jumps the shark here as the next two (the remainder of the main series) spend their runtimes trying HARD to recapture this one's energy with questionable success.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I think if this movie were made in Japan or Europe or India it'd be this oft-cited cult classic that film nerds everywhere would claim is "some crazy awesome multi-genre shit that Hollywood could never." But this is Freddy and he's all-American, baby! *pumps fist* U-S-A! U-S-A!!
(Yes, Renny Harlin is a Finnish import, but America is a melting pot etc., etc.)
The unfortunate thing is that the combination of coming out in a cultural context where horror was already going to be devalued, where kitsch (no matter how deliberate and interestingly applied) was going to be devalued, and above all being the third sequel in a franchise is probably going to keep consensus anchored down on it. It also doesn't help at all, as you suggest, that I think there's a lot of slippage in people's minds between this part of the second half of the main run and the subsequent parts of the second half of the main run, i.e., The Dream Child, which I am wrestling with currently. And I can kind of see it: the plots are a little different (less than you'd think they would be, annoyingly), and they're both relatively free-form iterations of the Dream Warriors formula in the special effects sequences and Freddy characterization, but one of them is WAY worse at it.
DeleteIt is, nonetheless, very hard to square with the seeming love for maximalism from a lot of present-day cinephiles, and, like I said, I think they just locked down their opinions of it a long time ago, while I didn't.
Re: the Dream Warriors conceit, one of the things I didn't really quite have space for, though I hope I implied it, is that I think it actually does manage "friends sharing their dreams and banding together against Freddy" a lot BETTER, which I suppose is counter-intuitive given the seeming handicap of most of the friends no longer being alive at the end, but Alice's silly suiting up moment worked really well for me, and of course it helps that the all-important plot fulcrum isn't handed over to somebody from outside of the peer group. So about The Dream Child...
Re: cockroach death, it's really incredibly good, I think more than I gave it credit for. It still doesn't quite have THE singular perfect image like Dream Warriors' puppeteer death, but it's real real close.