“How do you handle your nightmares?”
Generally speaking, if a movie has both a number and a colon in the title, you’re justified in assuming it’s going to be awful. In fact, there’s only one good movie that has both a 4 and a colon in the title, and it’s the first Star Wars. So right away, the deck is stacked against A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and that’s before you even realize that it’s directed by Renny Harlin, the patron saint of hacks. Harlin has never made a good movie; to go beyond that, his worst movie, Mindhunters, should land him on trial at The Hague. The performances are wooden, the characterizations paper-thin, the computer effects sketchy, and much of the dialogue trite and cheesy. In spite of all that, though, not only is The Dream Master not bad, but reader, it approaches good.
The Dream Master picks up where the previous installment, Dream Warriors, left off, with Kristen Parker (Tuesday Knight, taking over for Patricia Arquette) works to retain a hold on her sanity. She has her fellow survivors to help her, and this is where the film meets its first obstacle, because her fellow survivors are Joey and Kincaid, and it’s impossible to write for these two. Joey is an absolute nothing of a character, and Rodney Eastman does nothing to help bring him to life. Kincaid is by far the worst character in the film, and Ken Sagoes does The Dream Master no favors by playing Kincaid as though he’s on stage at the Winter Garden. Everything is played at top pitch, and there is absolutely no nuance to the character whatsoever. The only redeeming factor about Kincaid is that he has a very good dog, who is both handsome and a good boy. I mean this completely sincerely: the dog is probably the best actor in the movie. To be fair, Knight isn’t much better as Kristen. Perhaps part of that is due to the weird dubbing in this movie; it’s as though all the dialogue was done in ADR and never quite synced up to the characters’ mouths.
Each Nightmare sequel rises in body count, and that is definitely true of The Dream Master. The kills come quick and early, with Kincaid being the first victim. There are lots of nicely effective set pieces in this movie, and this is just one of them: a labyrinthine impound lot, which we see has taken over the entirety of the globe. There is some genuine creativity not only with the kills, but the locales as well. Of course, some are less creative than others (for instance, Joey dying by drowning in his water bed). Elsewhere, some are gruesome and cruel, which we’ll get to later.
As in the first film, the main character is not necessarily the protagonist. After Kristen’s death, Alice (Leslie Wilcox) takes over the story, and the film is neither better nor worse for it. Wilcox also fails to bring much humanity to the role, so for a lot of the movie’s run time, Alice is just…there. Which is true of many characters, none more so than Alice’s prospective boyfriend, Dan, who I just remembered is in this movie. I finished this movie thirty minutes ago. Probably the most memorable character is Alice’s brother (and boyfriend of the late Kristen), Rick – but certainly not for the reasons the film intended. Rick is just embarrassing. He talks about working out, and we see him doing some karate and messing around with num-chuks, something that has never looked cool or intimidating. So he’s kind of a jock bad-boy type, right? Well, not exactly, because sometimes he’s a brooding outcast weirdo. It’s like The Dream Master was trying to combine the Karate Kid with Robert Downey Jr’s character from Back to School.
So with all that negativity just above, what is there to like about A Nightmare on Elm Street 4? Easy: the shots. In many ways, this is the most visually ambitious Nightmare film since Wes Craven’s original. And here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: some parts of this film left me very impressed by Renny Harlin’s direction (this is probably the best movie Harlin has ever made, but keep in mind that he has directed precisely zero good movies). Of course it doesn’t hurt that he’s working off a script co-written by Brian Helgeland, who would go on to win an Oscar for writing L.A. Confidential. But I digress. There are some scenes in The Dream Master that are not just impressive, but downright audacious.
There’s one particularly gripping scene, where Alice seems to sleepwalk into a movie theater. Soon she’s sucked into the movie, where she sees in black and white the diner where she works, staffed by an elderly version of herself. In the audience, applauding loudly: all the characters who have died so far. Later, she and Dan are trying to save one of their friends, Debbie, only to be caught in a loop of driving to Debbie’s house over and over. This sequence plays out in full three times.
The most impressive part of the film, though, comes with Debbie’s death. We know two things about Debbie up to this point: she likes working out and she hates bugs (although her long, polished fingernails don’t seem conducive to weight lifting). When Freddie kills her, first by breaking her arms at the elbow, then by slowly turning her into a giant, hideous insect: that’s The Dream Master at its nastiest, it’s most ghoulish and nihilistic. I had some of the same praise for Dream Warriors, and maybe that’s why the kills in these movies hold up so much better than the jokes, or the plot, or the characters. It’s not as though the movie hates its characters. That you can tell. The Office, for instance, hates its characters, and that comes across in every scene. The Dream Master just doesn’t care about its characters. This is a double-edged sword. On the one side, that ethos leads to roles being underwritten; on the other, the film’s lack of sentimentality leads to some truly indelible images.
We all know by now that A Nightmare on Elm Street needed no sequel. But we also knew it was inevitable (after all, The Dream Master came out a scant four years after the first film). That being the case, The Dream Master is probably the best you could hope for. Sure, the acting is across-the-board unfortunate, the and none of these new characters are even half as memorably as the first film’s Nancy Thompson. But A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 has a mean streak a mile wide, and doesn’t care if you like it or not. It takes guts to fully embrace nihilism, and even if The Dream Master is not, strictly speaking, a good film, it is still a film that I respect.
Thursday, 10/1: Phantasm
Friday, 10/2: Frozen
Saturday, 10/3: Suspiria
Sunday, 10/4: Suspiria (2018)
Monday, 10/5: Emelie
Tuesday, 10/6: Castle Freak
Wednesday, 10/7: Session 9
Thursday, 10/8: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Friday, 10/9: We Are Still Here
Saturday, 10/10: The Changeling
Sunday, 10/11: The Bad Seed
Monday, 10/12: Verotika
Tuesday, 10/13: The Legend of Hell House
Wednesday, 10/14: Lake Mungo
Thursday, 10/15: Puppetmaster
Friday, 10/16: Marrowbone
Saturday, 10/17: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Sunday, 10/18: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Monday, 10/19: Sweetheart
Tuesday, 10/20: Girl On the Third Floor
Wednesday, 10/21: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Thursday, 10/22: Triangle
Friday, 10/23: Dog Soldiers
Saturday, 10/24: Noroi: The Curse
Sunday, 10/25: Train to Busan
Monday, 10/26: Tales From the Hood
Tuesday, 10/27: Mandy
Wednesday, 10/28: Sometimes They Come Back
Thursday, 10/29: Veronica
Friday, 10/30: The Wicker Man
Saturday, 10/31: Child’s Play
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