A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)

Directed by Stephen Hopkins [Other horror films: Dangerous Game (1988), Predator 2 (1990), The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), The Reaping (2007)]

I’ve said before that The Dream Master is where A Nightmare on Elm Street, as a series, started going downhill. Certainly The Dream Master has some flaws, but compared to The Dream Child, it’s a fucking masterpiece.

Ever since I first saw The Dream Child, I’ve been of the opinion that it’s easily the worst in the series. And yes, for those of you keeping track, that includes Freddy’s Dead. Freddy’s Dead is a poor movie in many aspects, but at least it’s fun, whereas The Dream Child is drab and disappointing throughout.

There’s a lot that I could say, but I guess I should start with the fact I have no idea what’s going on. I get that Freddy is using the dreams of Alice’s fetus to reach out and impact the real world, but how did Freddy come back? Well, he says early on that he brought his mother (Amanda) back, so he could be born again. Now, I don’t know how you can bring something back if you’re no longer existing, which is only one of my problems.

Another is that, once he’s back (he was back before, apparently, but not back enough, or whatever), he uses Jacob’s dreams, which is whatever, but what’s his plan? Once he kills off all of Alice’s friends, he pretty much would have to leave Alice alone until she gives birth, so what’s he plan on doing in the meantime? Or, related, was he planning on possessing Alice – explaining why and how he was ‘hiding’ in her, as Jacob tells Alice toward the end of the film?

I have absolutely no idea. I also rather disliked the end – even aside from that utterly stupid baby Freddy look that Jacob briefly rocked, apparently Jacob was given a power by Freddy to destroy Freddy – it didn’t; it just took the souls of Alice’s friends and turned Freddy into a child, which Amanda (again, Freddy’s mother) then took into herself, and held him for all of three seconds.

Beyond whatever else could be said about The Dream Child, this movie is an utter mess. It’s a shame, because it might have had something to it, what with exploring Amanda a bit more (I’m sure most remember that she mysteriously popped up in Dream Warriors, mocked science, and left). In fact, we even saw a portrayal of Amanda being accidentally locked in the asylum with the 100 maniacs, which I thought was pretty nice (though having Robert Englund play one of the maniacs didn’t do much for me).

Actually, it’s that subplot, what with Yvonne and Alice needing to find the body of Amanda, that I thought the film showed the most potential. However, that brings up another question – Mark said that they thought Amanda killed herself (via hanging), but there was no body.

So let me get this straight – they find an empty room, an absence of Sister Amanda, and just assume she killed herself?

Again, this movie is a mess. The point was, though, that the deserted asylum looked rather cool both when Alice first encounters it in her dream and when Yvonne goes there in reality. It was dark, gritty, and a rather menacing building, and it was one of the stronger elements of the film.

One of the weakest elements, though, are the kills. I’d say this movie has some of the worst kills in the series. The ‘bon appétit, bitch’ kill was dreadful, but easily worse was the ‘need for speed’ kill, in which a character gets into his truck, gets attacked, wakes up (???????), looks at his truck, then steals (???) a motorcycle, becomes a motorcycle, gets injected with fuel, becomes a mutant, and rams his truck (???????) into an on-coming 18-wheeler.

My problem with that kill, believe it or not, is that I don’t know what’s going on. Dan gets the call from Alice and leaves immediately, meaning that first time he got into his truck would be the ‘reality.’ He’s then attacked in his truck by Freddy, gets his shirt shredded, and gets thrown out the window of his truck back toward the pool. He then runs out and almost gets in his truck again – but wait. Are we supposed to think that he fell asleep before getting into his truck? It looks like he dozed off before hitting the 18-wheeler, but it seems to me that there’d be no reason for Freddy to corral him to the motorcycle.

Again, this movie is a mess.

Now, admittedly, the Super Freddy death always sort of amused me. It starts out strong – a colorful guy (literally) is walking through a black-and-white factory. Of course, then Freddy starts riding a skateboard, and everything goes downhill, but even toward the end, when Super Freddy is shredding the paper guy, I can dig it. It’s horrible, but at least it’s sort of entertaining, in a way that neither the ‘need for speed’ nor the ‘bon appétit, bitch’ deaths were.

Lisa Wilcox (The Church, Dark Ritual, Savage, and Watchers Reborn) was okay here. I didn’t particularly care about her character one way or the other, really. Same with Danny Hassel’s Dan – I don’t get much in the way of emotion about him. Her friend group, though, was decently solid, what with Erika Anderson, Joe Seely, and Kelly Jo Minter. Now, it did take Minter a bit to really grow on me, but she eventually did, and Anderson didn’t really have that much to do during her appearances, but I still thought she did decent in her brief screen-time with Joe Seely.

Naturally, Robert Englund is always fun, but he’s rather goofy in this film, which isn’t itself necessarily damning, but given that this film feels like it was supposed to be a bit darker and grittier, I definitely could have done without. Nick Mele, who played Alice’s father, got a few decent scenes in there, and Beatrice Beopple, playing Amanda, was almost fine. I don’t have much to say about Whitby Hertford other than that he has a familiar face, and I’m sorry that he had to be in such a shitty movie at such a young age.

It might come as no surprise that I don’t care for The Dream Child, and I never have. It’s probably the movie I’ve spent the least amount of time with, as far as this series goes, and it just doesn’t have much I care for. Certainly, I feel it had potential – a really dark story could have been made about Alice, with the help of ghostly Amanda, trying to protect her fetus – but the execution here was abysmally weak. To quote Shuffle T during his bad bars battle with Marlo, “It’s like I’m the opposite of an industrial cooling system – not a big fan.”

5/10