A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

"Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them." - Edgar Allan Poe

     So Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was a financial success.  However, that was the only way in which it was a success.  The critics didn't really like it, and neither did the fans.  It broke the Freddy rules by having him kill people in the awake world.  It had this weird gay vibe to it.  Freddy did poltergeisty things.  Knowing that they didn't do a great job with the second film, Robert Shaye and the rest of New Line wanted to get the third one right.  Instead of putting out a sequel less than a year later, this one would take a year and three months to get out to the public.   To help make a better movie, Wes Craven, writer and director of the original film, agreed to help pen a script.  However, with him doing prep work on his next film, Deadly Friend, most people think he did little of the actual script writing of that first draft.  Bruce Wagner was credited as a co-writer and most think he actually did most of the script with just little additions and a story idea by Wes Craven.  Mainly Wes Craven did the "writing" here to kill the series.  He wanted it to end here.  New Line liked the plot of the script, which had Freddy killing off teenagers in a mental health hospital and the teens having dream powers that they band together and use to defeat him, and that was kept, along with some of the character attributes to the teens.  However, New Line was kind of aghast at the script.  Freddy was very vulgar using disgusting language the few times he talked.  (Even the dreaded 'C' word.)  The deaths were also much more gruesome.  (If you'd like more info on the very different original script, go to this link, which has the whole plot synopsis and what Craven wanted the film to be.  Wes Craven's Dream Warriors

     New Line was approached by two budding screenwriter/directors named Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont who really wanted to work on the new Freddy movie. They came in with a youthful excitement and wanted to focus on the dreams more than Freddy as a character himself.  (Oddly enough, Chuck Russell co-wrote Dreamscape a few years earlier, which was also about going into dreams.)  New Line, not knowing where to go with the series after thinking Craven's script went too far liked the idea of optical and special effects driving the film towards the fantastic.  So Darabont and Russell rented a secluded cabin and wrote a new draft in eleven days.  New Line approved the script, but wondered how it could be done on a small budget.  However, somehow this movie was done on the surprising budget of $4.5 million.

     This film is set six years after the first film.  This teenage girl Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) has been having really bad nightmares and one night she gets her wrists slashed in her nightmare.  She wakes up one night having just slit her wrists with a razor blade.  (In her dream, the sink faucet handles grow blades and slash her.) 

So her horrible mother has her committed to the town's mental hospital where other teenagers are suffering from sleep deprivation due to bad dreams.  About the time she arrives there, a new doctor arrives.  Yes, Nancy Thompson, the heroine from the first movie has apparently gone to college and become an expert on nightmares and psychology and she now works for the mental hospital under Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) and Dr. Elizabeth Simms (Priscilla Pointer).  She quickly becomes close to her new patients because she knows exactly who they are dealing with and why they will not go to sleep.  The first night after she arrives, the deaths start and she and Dr. Gordon must help the teens discover their secret dream powers to defeat Freddy before all of them die horrible but inventive deaths!

     This movie was (along with the second film) the first of the Elm Street films I ever saw.  The local UPN station, channel 65, would air movies on Sunday afternoons and I being about 14 (I still wasn't allowed to watch rated R films at the time) taped both the second and the third film from the station.  Of course, they were slightly edited for language, nudity, and gore, but not to any extreme extent.  (In fact, this film isn't really all that graphic.)  I had been fascinated by slasher movies since I was young, especially with not being able to watch them.  I would frequently go into the video rental store while my parents were grocery shopping and just go through the horror section and look at the cool cover art and read the plot synopsis on the back of the VHS boxes.  And when we got the internet, the first screenplay I read online was to this movie.  So I was very excited to see it even in a very static, edited, full-screen form.  And I was very pleased.  This wasn't a regular old fashioned slasher film.  It was kind of funny, it was special effects driven, it had inventive kills, and it wasn't simply focused on a body count.  (In fact, none of the Elm Street films really worry about how many deaths there are.)  The movie is just... fun.  The film-makers knew that they could not top the horror of the first film.  They had tried that with the second one and failed.  So how do you make the story interesting?  By making it something no one has seen before.  And by making Freddy into a pop culture icon.

    Many people say that this is where Freddy Kreuger stopped being scary and became a wise-cracking sort of anti-James Bond with his puns.  There is some truth to that, but I think he hasn't completely gone over to that here.  Look at this scene for example, which includes one of Freddy's most famous lines.

  It's... kind of creepy with the disembodied voices coming from the TV while it's all staticy.  It's entertaining and cool with Freddy's lines.  And it's kind of funny because the Freddy head coming out of the top the TV has antennas on it!  I think this film works best because it shows all the best out of the series.  The horror isn't completely gone.  I mean one of the deaths has a teen being forced to jump out of a window as he sees Freddy treating him like a marionette walking him through the hospital to a fourth story window by his tendons from his arms and legs.  It's disgusting, but it's very cool and something you don't really see anywhere else.  (And Freddy materializes from a claymation effect of a puppet himself!)  The movie is just a heck of a fun time to watch.  You even get to see Laurence Fishburne in one of his early roles as a male nurse!  (He goes by Larry Fishburne here.)  And of course there's actress Patricia Arquette known for this year's film Boyhood and of course the long running TV drama Medium.  The movie actually even gets downright creepy at times.  There's a nun that appears to Dr. Gordon sporadically throughout the movie and talks to him.  She also disappears quickly.  It is through her that we learn how Freddy came to be.  And it is in this film he's first referred to as "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs" which is just so darned memorable.  (His mother, a nurse at the mental institution in the 1940s was trapped with the inmates over the Christmas holiday and raped hundreds of times.  She got pregnant and gave birth to Freddy.)  But it's really the special effects that I dig here.  Claymation Freddy puppet, a stop motion skeleton battle, a hovering door in the middle of a room leading to hell, and of course the giant Freddy penis snake.  The final version of it looked like this.

But originally it looked like she was being eaten by a giant penis, so they added the slime and stuff to make it look less dickish.

   Yeah, looks like a giant veiny circumsized penis eating a happy Patricia Arquette.  I mean, the scene is still quite laughable, but the effects in the scene are surprisingly good.  It's just hard to take a giant snake-Freddy-penis trying to ingest a teenage girl seriously.  But at least the effect worked, right?

  It's pretty clear that this was supposed to be a possible end to the series too.  You have two characters return from the first film, Heather Langenkamp as Nancy and John Saxon as her father, who is now just an alcoholic security guard.  And you can guess what happens to them since as I said earlier, New Line wasn't sure this was going to be a hit.  But guess what?

   When the film opened on February 27, 1987 it opened at #1 in the box office.  By the end of its original run, it had made $44,793,333 at the domestic box office.  That's over 11 times its budget.  Heck, even the critics found it to be pretty good!  (Ebert not withstanding.  He and Siskel always hated 'teen death' films.)  In fact, the film was the 24th best grossing film of 1987.  I guess this was before February was the month all the studios put their horrible films out.  And with a trailer like this movie had, who can blame people for really wanting to see it?  It doesn't show any of the film.  It's like a teaser, but it's pretty darn brilliant giving the feel of the film without seeing a lick of it.

   The movie got Patricia Arquette more acting roles, it was the first independent film to be #1 in the box office, and it jump started the career of Chuck Russell, who went on to direct the 1988 remake of The Blob (which is excellent, by the way) and then later The Mask, Eraser, The Scorpion King, and episodes of Fringe.  And of course Frank Darabont would go on to write the Blob remake and The Fly II...  But what you probably know him for are writing and directing three great Stephen King films.  The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist.  Oh, and he's the reason that The Walking Dead was brought to TV.

     Oh yeah, and the film has an awesome theme song by 80s metal band Dokken.  In my opinion, it's one of, if not their best songs.  Don Dokken can't sing it these days, (he could hardly sing it then it was so high, according to him) but it has a great music video using the hell set from the film and starring Dokken, Patricia Arquette and Robert Englund.  It's a really catchy song to boot.  The beginning of the film used another Dokken song, Into The Fire, as Kristen is making the model of the Elm Street house.  (And that's another of their best songs, by the way.)  Here's the music video for Dream Warriors.

      Yes, Freddy was still getting more and more popular, even though the second one was a bit of a disappointment.  With the third film now bringing Freddy to new heights, the question was could it last?