Review #112: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #29- A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

This movie started out with a really good horror sequence, with Alice taking a shower and the shower starts filling up with water and it threatens to drown her. It was very well-shot, it felt very believable as a dream, and genuinely felt creepy. However, it went downhill very soon after and never really recovered.

This movie seems to have completely lost sight of what this series was about or what made it good. The connection to previous entries is not even tenuous (I'll get to that in a moment), it forgets any rules it previously established (I'll get to that too) and it shoehorns in a bunch of canon that serves only to cheapen the series as a whole (you guessed it).

Remember when this story was about a guy who was haunting the children of the people that killed him? Yeah, I remember that- it ended at a distinct point in the previous film. The only reason Alice began dealing with Freddy is because Kristen accidentally pulled her into a dream with her dream-pulling powers, and then when Kristen died she passed those powers on to Alice. So Freddy started tricking Alice into inadvertently pulling her friends into dreams, so that he could kill them and eat their souls (?) or whatever. So to an extent, she was to blame for most of her friends getting killed in that one, but I think we can forgive her since she killed Freddy (I guess).

But then in this film, Freddy comes back somehow and then... he starts killing Alice's new friends. But my question is, why? I mean, why THEM, and not, you know, literally anyone else? He's not killing them because they're Elm Street children (he already killed all of those), and he's not killing Alice, nor is he killing people Alice pulled into her dreams. Now apparently he's able to just kill anyone he wants to, so why go after people close to Alice? Why not kill people she doesn't know, on the other side of the country, so as not to draw any attention? Or is Alice endangering her friends by telling them about Freddy, thus somehow making them viable targets? (And if that's the case, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS GIRL? She already knows she got all of her old friends killed, so why is she not concerned that she might be the reason the new ones are getting killed this time?) It just feels like the writers forgot- or more likely, willfully ignored- the rules of who Freddy can kill, without any reason for it. That's a problem.

Remember when Freddy could only kill people when they fell asleep? Yeah, that was a thing. It's not any more, apparently. In all the previous films, the protagonists had to fight to stay awake, had to take medicine to stay awake or stop themselves from dreaming, all because everyone knows Freddy kills you when you inevitably fall asleep. While that... may technically still be true in this one, you have to explain why every single character seems to have a SEVERE case of narcolepsy, because all of them seem to fall asleep while doing ordinary tasks at normal times of the day. Dan falls asleep while driving his car (without any sign that he was tired), a girl falls asleep while swimming, a comic book nerd falls asleep reading a comic book, another girl falls asleep while at a dinner party with a bunch of socialites... and I say "falls asleep" but I'm only assuming- with one exception, none of them actually visibly fall asleep- they are just suddenly revealed to be in a dream, despite the strenuous or attention-keeping activity they were already engaged in.

This is also a problem because once again, the writers are just omitting the rules whenever they feel like it. If the killer can kill anyone he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants, then after a point the story stops being scary because you realize the killer is so powerful there's no reason they shouldn't win, but because it's lazy writing they just... don't, for some reason. When there are rules, there's tension, because you can see when someone starts to fall asleep. You know who's going to be targeted because they're one of the Elm Street kids or whatever. If Freddy can do whatever, eventually you'll just throw your hands up and say, "Okay, do whatever then".

But on that same note, Freddy doesn't really seem to care about killing people, does he? The dream sequences used to be fairly short, maybe with a bit of Freddy playing with his food before he eats them. In this one, each sequence is a five-minute scene, first with a part where you don't realize they're in a dream, then Freddy gets revealed, then there's a chase, then there's some back-and-forth, then either Freddy finally ends up killing them, or they escape. Once again, it feels like the writers decided, "People liked the dream sequences, so let's just have those be like 50% of the movie" but they didn't bother to actually make them compelling, or have a point beyond filling up a roll of film so people get to see dream sequences.

One last nitpick is that we get an origin story for Freddy (that was hinted at in Dream Warriors), but I don't know whether what we're seeing on screen is supposed to be true events, or an exaggeratedly absurd dream vision, because none of the origin story makes any sense except as a cartoon or a dream. But, unless I'm mistaken, this is the closest we get to a canon origin story, so it feels like they actually want us to believe that what we're seeing really happened. And if that's the case, I just have to say: That's not how getting pregnant works. Freddy's not the son of a hundred maniacs- even if a hundred maniacs raped his mother, only one of them is his father. (It was probably the one played by Robert Englund. I just solved it, guys.) But when the closest-to-canon origin story has Freddy born as a demon baby to a religious cult operating entirely inside an asylum, I can't help but feel like it cheapens the story- how angry can we be at Freddy when he was (I guess) literally born a demon? Isn't a normal man who chooses to become a murderer far scarier of a villain?

This movie wasn't all bad, just mostly. I really liked the comic book sequence, with greyscale Freddy. It's strange that this is the only other instance of someone choosing to give themselves superpowers in a dream, outside of Dream Warriors- can everybody do this? If so, why does nobody do it? What was the point of the Dream Master if Alice could have gotten all those powers by just dreaming them? But I digress. I also thought the scene at the end that's reminiscent of an M.C. Escher painting was cool, and although the effect itself looked kind of cheap, the part where Alice is pulling Freddy out of herself was pretty well-done and was a great concept for a practical effect.

I just think it's obvious this series should have ended after Dream Warriors.

One more last thing- WTF was that song during the credits?

Overall Rating: 3/10 Angry Tarantulas

Surprise Casting: The eponymous "Dream Child" was played by the Prehistoric Turkey kid from Jurassic Park!