A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
Roll over Beethoven - it’s Freddy’s 5th!
Well, it’s the last Thursday of October, so it’s the last real easy excuse I have to keep the trend going. I mean, in fairness I am my own dude and could just keep watching them straight through just for the sake of doing it here. I wouldn’t be opposed to finishing out the chain - I just loose a little bit of the sound logic of doing it as a seasonal thing instead of continuing along the backlog of movies that I still haven’t watched yet. I guess we’ll have to see what comes, much like tonight’s little dream child. Make your baby strollers as metal as you can, the sweater is back in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.
Picking right up after the last one as they all somewhat have since the third, we find ourselves following Alice’s story again. Whose that? That’s that final girl from the last one, empowered by the mantra of dream door master and causer of that sick effects scene of locking Freddy away. New friends are abound and we finally graduate from school - but something sinister lurks as the nightmares return. Freddy’s mom is back in some of these dreams, setting up more tie-backs to that plot that was kind of just not-important in the last one, but this time around somehow Freddy is getting to people while Alice isn’t asleep. What could possibly be going on with that? As if that’s not enough stress, guess who just so happens to be pregnant?
Characters here don’t really get to be all that great. They aren’t necessarily any worse then some of the others - they all have their shtick to them, like comic guy who can’t handle seeing blood or the gal whose mom is overbearing towards making her a model. That means mostly everyone has two things for them - the “character trait” and the “fear/problem” part. Our lead gets to go on an adventure, but I wouldn’t call it a real journey for her character, as it’s pretty much rehashing the lead for all of these - nobody believes in Freddy and thinks I’m cray cray, but he must be stopped! Of all the characters to feel like they get a moment, it’s actually the Dad who seems to have changed the most (albeit between the movies), but it is nice when you’ve been going through the movies one at a time like this. Unfortunately this time around, we also strongly get that one character that despite not really meaning ill you end up hating because they just have to be agitating with how absolutely zero percent belief they are in any of whats being told them up to the point when they literally end up face to face with Kreuger. In turn, they can feel overly blind and annoying even if they mean well.
Actors do a decent job portraying the characters. I still don’t exactly feel like most of them are out to chase an award, and I’m still not convinced I’d believe any of them telling me they were in high school, but it’s not bad. I can see an argument being made that perhaps it’s not great - but I think this is again one of those situations where there’s only so much a person can do with what they are given. People generally get across what’s going for regardless of it it’s being scared, frustrated, happy, or tired. I don’t necessarily think that some of the more emotionally intended parts play out as well as they could, but I’m also not sure how much of that is me being totally unattached from the movie and how much is just me being annoyed at a given character or two so it just doesn’t come off in the manner intended. Our villain once again has a ball in the movie, and also manages to fit himself in without all the prosthetics in a few of the dream segments. The dude has a level of charisma the he carries to most the movies he’s in - including some of the badder ones I’ve seen - so it’s really just a matter of how he’s going to use it. We get some puns and classic emotional turns between acting scared and creepy - so for a murderous dream demon born from a hundred maniacs set to murder any Elm-adjacent children he can, he manages to get some of the widest range to play with.
Graduation, from terror!
Effects are pretty well done for the most part. The stop motion scene didn’t feel quite as smooth as that one puppet-Freddy scene did way back in 3, but nothing here is really egregiously bad. The final showdown feels a little less intense then the previous movie, but it does harken back to it somewhat. Admittedly, although they usually come with some gag or another, some off the handful of kills in this one are somewhat lame. Thematic, yes, but “death from having your face stuffed with food and then choking isn’t really as crazy to watch as fusing with a motorcycle or the comic guy’s arc. There is also only three deaths here, so I think it might actually be the lowest death ratio yet. That might be a bit of a turn off for the slasher fans looking for a body count and interesting demise.
Audio is alright here, and the line deliveries fine with it. Music is rather similar to what we are used to, with a little Iron Maiden slipped in there in the background as well. Thanks to the music, you can pretty much immediately tell when we’ve transitioned over to a dream section even before any dream stuff starts happening. The dreams do get a bit more fancy this time around, while also not being too crazy. We get some more nightmare asylum, and classic Freddy house in here - but we also get to play with things like the A-ha style comic transition and the black and white set of the comic section itself. A lot of things stand in thematic ways for stuff, for folks that are interested in that kind of design - and we get one scene even that has some wild Escher stair sections to it. It might not be mind blowing, but it’s still enough variety that it doesn’t feel stale but unrelated either.
I feel like there is a bunch of stuff folks could play with in this one. It might be particularly potent or perhaps argument-inducing with the baby side of things. For the more generic to the franchise stuff, some of the dreams do play with characters thoughts and fears. Our “fastest dude around” getting fused to a motorcycle, the model kid being force-fed to death after we’ve already seen mom scold her so much as thinking about licking a candy, or the comic guy and his brief transition into the comic hero he’s always drawing when he tries to battle Freddy in his dream. Connecting some of that is a different take on parent-kid drama as well, somewhat replacing the “adults don’t believe me” and more emphasizing the parents dynamic of trying to control and shape their kid to be what they the parents want instead of letting the kid be a kid. It’s nicely contrasted by the lead’s father, whose pretty supportive of his daughter the entire time including when he finds out she’s pregnant fresh out of high school. I feel like it also plays a little with the whole good/evil two coin sides concept in there, as it feels a little too on the nose in some scenes to be accidental.
Ghost rider is so dreamy.
It’s not bad. I feel it might be a little goofy that my favorite part of the movie is just how good a guy the dad has become since the last movie and loosing a kid. That said, I wouldn’t put this one really above most the others either. It has some moments where it plays with what was set up in the other movies, although I don’t really think it necessarily advances anything. The kill count is rather low, which in turn also means you don’t have as many characters but they aren’t really throwing a whole ton of quality at those characters so you might not even care that much when some of them die. It pretty much just feels like someone came up with a nifty idea with the whole dream child title aspect, but then they played it relatively safe and didn’t want to go too nuts with trying to implement and improve. That might end up sounding harsh, but it’s also not really a bad movie either - it sets things up obvious enough you’ll know any twist coming before the 15 minute mark, but you won’t be sitting there bored and hoping for the movie to end either. Certainly not my favorite, but still feels at home.