Countdown to Halloween – A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)

Based off an idea by New Line and Nightmare on Elm Street veteran Rachal Talalay (who was pregnant at the time) and directed by Brit Stephen Hopkins, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child had an 8- week production – from the first day of shooting to the last day of editing. Even for a slasher movie, that is an insanely quick turn around for a feature film. Sadly, the rushed production and quick release (less than a year since the previous movie) shows in this poorly thought out, half-baked cash-in on a popular franchise and character.

Having survived Freddy’s attacks from the previous movie, the now pregnant Alice is living a peaceful life with her boyfriend and trying to put her Krueger nightmares behind her. However, she is visited in her dreams by Freddy’s mother as it appears Krueger is trying to invade the dreams of her unborn child so that he may be reborn into the real world.

Or, something like that. Either way a new set of cannon-fodder teenagers die.

As mentioned at the tail end of yesterday’s Countdown to Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (no number this time round) is very similar to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master in that they both have a set of teens to be bumped off in weird and wacky ways, there’s plenty of Freddy puns and the whole plot and story are placed second behind inventive ways to kill people. Both films feel like the writers wrote some death scenes and then spent half an hour tying them together with a weak through-line. Perhaps the idea of Freddy invading the dreams of an unborn infant and Alice being helped out by anapparition of her unborn son would have been an interesting concept (if a little flawed), but its lazy execution just leads to a whole lot of nothing. Stuff just happens in between some cool death scenes.

And it feels weird to complain about a slasher movie being nothing but inventive death scenes with a lame plot, but A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child barely makes an effort to create sense out of its own story. With that said, the movie does contain two of the more memorable death scenes from the franchise – Greta’s food stuffing and Mark being killed by Super Freddy. Greta’s death in particular is full of amazing practical and make-up effects that really make your stomach turn as Freddy (in busboy tux) force feeds her while her creepy mother encourages her to eat more, staring wide-eyed into the camera (“only the best for Greta!”). The uncut version of the scene, seen in documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, goes the extra step by having Freddy cut open her stomach and then feed her the digested food she just had stuffed down her throat (“you are what you eat!”), which is gloriously disgusting and utterly brilliant. Which is a stark contrast to Mark’s wacky death (which took some huge inspiration from Aha’s Take on Me) which is a visual delight with some great imagery and clever effects work. It’s pretty stupid, but Super Freddy is kind of a funny touch.

But sadly it all feels empty when stacked up as a whole. The deaths are cool, but the characters are cardboard cut outs and the plot doesn’t make much sense. You can’t really blame Hopkins for the films short comings as he did the best he could in his extremely tight 8-week schedule (his quick work earned him the director’s chair for Predator 2), as the fault really lies with Robert Shaye, Rachel Talalay and screenwriter Leslie Bohem. The Freddy character deserved better than this, as did Robert Englund who was still showing up day after day to reprise the role. Like A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child is not a complete disaster, it’s just a really forgettable movie.