To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Up next; A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master…
After the success of the previous movie, the Nightmare on Elm Street series was back on track and the demand for Freddy was at its peak. While the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises were floundering with poorly put together cash-ins, New Line Cinemas had a chance to carry on their successful line of movies with a film that could stand amongst the first and third entries.
Sadly what they produced was nothing more than a cash in on the franchise.
Which really comes as no surprise when you figure that producer Robert Shaye gave Brian Helgeland (who had worked with Robert Englund on his directorial debut 967-EVIL) just four weeks over the Christmas period to turn in a full script. If he missed his deadline, he’d lose the job. But succeed he did and Helgeland FedEx’d his script to New Line and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master was fast tracked into production under then new-comer Renny Harlin.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is not a bad movie, it’s just a terribly mundane one. It doesn’t try anything new or original and is all a bit formulaic. The survivors of the last movie are enjoying their Freddy-free lives by trying to move on, that is apart from Kristen (now played by Tuesday Knight) who is worried that Krueger might not be truly dead. When Freddy’s body is brought back from the dead by a dog pissing fire, Krueger begins a new reign of terror by first killing off the Dream Warriors and then focusing his attention on sweet and innocent Alice, who Kristen has passed her dream powers on to.
The movie’s basic script is one of its biggest problems with its first act essentially killing off all the characters we loved from the last movie and then replacing them with bland teenagers who only serve as cannon-fodder to now fan-favourite Freddy. It essentially undoes all of the good that Craven, Darabont and Russell did with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors and all excitement is sucked from the movie as we’re presented with a boring paint-by-numbers slasher. It becomes less about the characters and motivations and instead is a showcase of “cool” death scenes for Freddy to spout puns over.
By this point in the franchise’s history, Freddy had become a pop culture phenomenon and was now a bigger entity than the movies themselves. Much like Jason, the crowd’s lining up to see these movies were only there because they wanted to see how Krueger would kill this set of teenagers, so New Line Cinemas didn’t really have to try. It’s hard to criticise Robert Shaye for cashing in on Krueger’s popularity as it was a smart business move, but had he taken time to craft out a decent script that would thrill audiences rather than just give them 90 minutes of Freddy puns, the success could have been longer lived. Having now played him in three movies (as well as various appearances), Robert Englund was starting to get tired of Freddy to the point where he nearly didn’t return for the fourth movie, stating that he would only reprise the role if they could think of a good way to bring the character back. As stated in his autobiography Hollywood Monster, as soon as he heard it was from a dog pissing fire he was back in the make-up chair.
The special effects work by Screaming Mad George and John Carl Buechler (who directed Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood in the same year) is really the true star of this movie. With the exception of Rick’s death, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master has some of the most inventive, disgusting and wicked effects of the entire series with the cockroach scene being one of the more memorable kills from the series. However, the rushed schedule does lead to one of the lamer moments of the franchise. With a limited amount of time and budget, the crew quickly put together a “karate themed room” in which Andras Jones has a fight with an invisible Freddy, who wasn’t even on set. As ideas go it’s pretty lame, but the execution is much worse than the concept.
As before stated, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is not a bad movie, it’s just forgettable. Not only does it not match up to the greatness of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, but it often blends with its follow up A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child in terms of characters, deaths and set pieces. The two are so similar that it’s easy to get them mixed up.
But while the movie was a rushed and bland experience, it was a box office smash. Bringing in a gigantic $49 million in the US alone off a $7 million budget, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master was the biggest money maker of the series to date and would become the highest grossing slasher movie of the 1980s. With that kind of success, who wouldn’t fast track another movie into production?
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Flickering Myth will be presenting a one-night only screening of zombie-comedy Stalled at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London on Novemeber 14th 2013. For more information on where to buy tickets, click here.