Full Review: Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master (1988)

People in the Movie:  Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox

Director:  Renny Harlin

Pigeonhole:  Horror / Teen Slasher / Comedy

The Basics:  Freddy Krueger is quickly resurrected after his “burial” in the prior film, and begins terrorizing a new group of teenagers.  Alice Johnson (Wilcox), the new protagonist, must find a way to defeat the “Dream Master”.

Recommendation:  If you are fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, you should see it.  Otherwise, it’s pretty much a waste of time.  As a standalone (meaning you have never seen any of the previous films) you would likely be completely lost throughout.  “R” rating is for violence, nudity, and language – and possibly poor story writing.

My Take: **spoiler alert** Kristen (now being played by Tuesday Knight), Joey and Kincaid from ‘Dream Warriors’ are quickly dispatched early in this film.  I thought this was a bit of a cop-out considering the effort put into creating, developing, and having these kids who fought and survived the prior movie, get taken out so quickly.  In a slightly bigger “movie leap”, Kristen transmits her ability bring people into her dreams to Alice right before Kristen dies at Freddy’s hand, and hence why Alice becomes the new lynchpin.

The movie unfolds with the now-typical formula; Freddy needs souls to given him his power, and he has to replace the souls he lost with his defeat in Nightmare 3.  The bodies pile up, Freddy cracks a handful of one-liners as he is killing each new teen victim, and then there is the proverbial final standoff.  The reveal, this time, is that Freddy is the Dream Master, the gate keeper of bad dreams, while Alice is the gate keeper of good dreams.  Alice shows Freddy his own reflection, “evil revealing itself, to itself” (huh?) and he is beaten again.  Until next year.

This film, much like Freddy’s Revenge, felt like a producer/studio trying to make a quick buck on the Nightmare name, without giving any thought to story, casting, or direction.  It’s to the point that Freddy’s attacks seem cliché, and what is even worse they try to rescue them with one-liners and comedy.  Freddy’s glove swimming around to the Jaws theme, then putting on sunglasses at the beach to kill Kristen, come on, seriously?      

Final Thought/Extras/For Fun:  This is the highest grossing film of the Nightmare series, which is rather sad considering the on-screen product… Patricia Arquette did not want to reprise her role as Kristen Parker, as she was pregnant at the time of filming… Wes Craven wanted to write a screenplay that somehow would involve time travel in dreams, but that got canned, so other than character credit he had little else to do with this movie…