A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Having made it to the fourth installment, the “Nightmare” franchise is showing signs of coming apart at the seams. Narrative raw material has dried up, leaving screenwriters scrambling for ways to supply fresh meat to an immortal being who’s already wiped out practically every teenager on Elm Street. Solution? Initiate a recruiting drive, with victims unwittingly drawing other teens into their personal nightmares, and thus into the monster’s fiendish grip (“Alice, I’m so sorry. It was a mistake. I pulled you in“; “I brought Sheila in like Kristen did with me“).

Additionally, with a hammy Englund who doesn’t miss an opportunity to turn his Freddy into a macabre comedian, “A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master” loses any pretension of horror or tension, devolving into a jumble of stand-alone oneiric scenes interspersed by a series of insipid references to the trials and tribulations of MTV-generation teenagers.

Despite exuding conceptual mediocrity and superficiality from every frame (references to Aristotle’s dream theories are maddeningly superficial), the film manages to redeem itself on the figurative level (Harlin is hardly an incompetent director after all), depicting the dream realm with flair and creativity: atmospheric art direction, elegant chromatic renderings, impressive makeup and special effects. Among memorable scenes we would cite the protagonist getting sucked into the screen to become part of the movie, as well as the scene in which the tough-girl weightlifter gets turned into a disgusting cockroach (after all, “Kafka and Goethe have never been irreconcilable“).

The box office continues to validate the product: $49 million in gross receipts versus an estimated budget of about 13 million, but a comparison to the prior film‘s results (45 to 5) should at least raise some red flags that the franchise is pretty much squeezed dry and it might be a good time to stick a fork in the “Nightmare” movies.

And yet… “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child” (1989) shows up in theaters less than a year later.