...what? You were expecting something else? Nightmare on Elm Street was a series that was running out of steam by it's third (and far superior to this) entry. There was no new ground to cover that wouldn't be utterly ridiculous. The only way this could work is if Wes Craven came back to the franchise with a unique story about Freddy coming into the real world and Heather Langenkamp having to take him on one last time to put the series behind her.
Alas, such things only exist in the world of dreams. I imagine it would underperform at the box office anyway the universe is a cruel place to new and innovative ideas. Oh, well...
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child concerns itself with the survivor of the last film, Alice (Lisa Wilcox), and her boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel) dating and with clearly no sign of Freddy anywhere except that there totally is because a movie has to happen. They're also about to graduate from high school, along with a bunch of teenagers who weren't in the last movie but are in this one because a body count has to happen.
So I know what you're thinking - what's the title got to do with anything? So, eventually, Alice discovers that she's pregnant and that Freddy has been using it's unborn dreams to attack the real world again.
Yeah.
Yeah, never mind how that makes many varieties of no sense, but then this series hasn't made sense since it started ignoring Part 2. It was clear that Nightmare on Elm Street really had nowhere new to go by this point. A bunch of admittedly somewhat creative (if completely over the top cheesy in the case of "Super Freddy") kills don't save this feature. The premise is ludicrous even by slasher film standards, trying to tether in bits of the Nightmare franchise that really just don't belong together and making just an overall confusing time for everyone involved.
Director Stephen Hopkins was disappointed in the final product, washing his hands of it completely after New Line and the MPAA cut it down from whatever it was originally. I shudder to think. He would later go on to direct Predator 2 and later have a lengthy career in television, such as being a director and producer on 24 and House of Lies, so it's nice to know he went on from this to do other things and didn't just fade into obscurity like so many directors.
Also, he was a second unit director on Highlander before this movie. Just to know he was involved in something truly great at some point.
Even with a good performance from Lisa Wilcox as fan favorite Alice (barring a few odd line reads - "Do unborn babies dream?"), this film really can't be saved. Robert Englund is once more criminally underutilized as a laughing, joking numbnuts who is only marginally scary (and that's being generous) instead of being the terror that he was in the first three films (and would be again in New Nightmare).
The series basically should have ended here. Amanda Krueger absorbing the infant version of her son into her body (just go with it) and Alice getting to live happily ever after following the birth of her incredibly creepy son Jacob.
Unfortunately for us, The Dream Child did turn in a profit - making $22 million on a budget of only $8 million. So New Line Cinema decided - "hey, let's prop up Freddy's corpse just one more time!" in lieu of decency or good taste.
Next year, we'll be getting into Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare and if you think I thought I was harsh on this film, you'll be happy to know that I was at least able to find something I liked about The Dream Child if only in a verrrrrrrrrrry minor fashion. Not so with Freddy's Dead. It's not the worst film I've ever seen - that remains The Last Jedi with Deathstalker following it very closely - but it's certainly up there as one of the worst excesses of the slasher film genre and is such a far cry from it's original source that it makes this film look like it belongs in the Criterion Collection.
Next time, we get into Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, when the Friday the 13th franchise was going through a similar tumultuous time four years before this movie. What's the difference? Friday the 13th still had a few good films after it's third entry.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is the property of New Line Cinema.
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