Review #110: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #27- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

I definitely remembered this one as being my favorite in the series, but in the days leading up to it I was afraid it wasn't going to live up to that memory for whatever reason. But I can confidently say that this might be the best movie I've seen all month- there were some other surprises, of course, but this one is just a home run from beginning to end.

I don't know if I quite got across the feeling in the last two movies, but I think the dream sequences in this series are the best part, and every single one of them in this film are top-notch. They're creepy, they're tense, they twist your mind in ways you didn't expect, and the practical effects in every one are fantastic. This is the movie that has the marionette dream, the "Prime Time, Bitch" dream, Freddy's fingers turning into heroin needles, the kids using their dream powers to fight back- I can't get over how good they all are. The gore and creature effects aren't just good, they're so freaking clever and terrifying at the same time.

And it's not just the dream sequences or special effects, either. I can't quite put my finger on why, but the scene where Joey is running to alert everyone while Philip is about to kill himself just feels so viscerally tense, and it really feels like the writers understood the difficulty that comes from a character being unable to speak- in a lazier film he would have just like clanged a couple things together and that would be that, but he bolts down to the nurse's station, pounds on the counter, and when he doesn't get the response he wanted he grabs a dinner tray and starts banging it on every door as he runs back. It's just such a simple scene, yet it feels so real and tense too. And then the following scene where the teens are in group therapy and they're all freaking out- again, a lazy scene would just have them angry or aggressive or scared, and while this scene has that, you can tell each of the characters (through the actors' performances) care about their dead friend, they care about each other, and they care about their survival. Kincaid gets put in solitary not for throwing a chair or anything, he gets put in solitary for calling out the therapist for refusing to believe him.

The introduction of dream powers feels like such a natural evolution to the series (the first movie sort of had it, I kind of wish Nancy had used something like that in this one but it's not a huge problem), though it's a bit disappointing that for several of the characters it ultimately leads to nothing as they get killed almost instantly anyway. I also liked the evolution of how they dealt with Freddy at the end- it felt like a natural move as well (finding his burnt remains and burying them) but at the same time it kind of hamstrings later films because you know they're going to have him come back somehow anyway. (But that's a problem for another film.)

As I said, this movie is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone, even someone with no intention of watching the rest of the series. Nancy's return has a bit less impact in that case but it's well-enough handled that I think it's still good.

Also, the song at the end is an absolute banger.

Overall Rating: 10/10 Tongue Cuffs

Cutting Room Floor Trivia: Apparently in an early version of the script there was going to be a transformers-style robot that one of the kids battled Freddy with. It even made it to the storyboard stage before being cut for budget reasons!