A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

"When deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake." - Job IV, 13-14

     Around the time between A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the fourth film, Freddy Kreuger was at the peak of his popularity.  Freddy was hosting Headbanger's Ball on MTV to promote the next film, the soundtracks which were mostly metal with some rap songs thrown in sold well, there were even Freddy toys!  And of course, the Freddy costume was popular with Halloween trick or treaters in 1987 and 1988.  The third film had been successful by making Freddy less of a scary guy.  He quipped with puns and didn't just kill people with his knife glove anymore.  Instead that film took on more of a surrealistic fun tone with some dark subject matter with apparent teen suicide.   It was quite apparent that the new feel of the series was going to be one of kick-ass visuals instead of blood and gore, with an emphasis on surreal dreams.  The question was who were they going to get to make the film.  New Line wasn't all that worried about having big names direct the films.  Chuck Russell had never directed a theatrical release before Dream Warriors, and Jack Sholder had only done a prior slasher film for New Line before the second one.  Newly arrived in America from Finland, a big hulking guy that kinda looked like Thor went to New Line to beg to do the new film.  He got a meeting with head honcho producer Bob Shaye, but with Renny's bad grasp of English, Bob Shaye kicked him out of his office.  Not willing to give up, Renny Harlin would just stay in the New Line office lounge and try to get more meetings with Bob Shaye.  Now Renny Harlin was living in this trashy apartment at the time, wore the same (unwashed) clothes every day, and was living on canned beans.  Finally, just to get him out of his hair, Bob Shaye agreed to let him direct.  Now, I'm sure there was more to the story than that.  Probably Bob Shaye saw Harlin's first film Prison, which was full of cheap but effective special effects.  That film was about a wrongfully convicted man executed in the electric chair in 1964 coming back as a ghost in the prison to avenge his own death by killing the man who executed him, killing inmates along the way.  So it was pretty close to the Nightmare films anyway.

     Apparently the filming of this was not a great experience for those involved.  Patricia Arquette did not come back to get killed off by Freddy.  Instead another girl, Tuesday Knight, was to play the Kristen role.  This didn't sit too well with the other two surviving Elm Street kids from Dream Warriors.  The actors, who knew they were coming back just to get killed off, didn't feel the sense of family they did on the third film.  And they're gone before even 20 minutes is up.  Renny Harlin, the director, was looked down upon by producer Bob Shaye.  They didn't even speak to each other during production.   The film was being filmed without a complete script.  They had a release date and a poster, but didn't have much of a story or script by time they needed to start filming.  And anyone in the film business can tell you that that's a dangerous situation to be in.  So with filming happening fast with no real direction, of course tensions were high.  Add to that a mostly untried director unliked by the producer and you get an even worse situation.

    So in this film, Kristen, one of three survivors of the last movie, has dreams pointing to Freddy's return.  She has started pulling Joey and Kincaid, the other two survivors, into her dreams to warn them and protect her, much to their chagrin.  So Kristen starts to stay awake again.  However, Kincaid and Joey don't show up to school one morning and she learns that they've died the night before.  (In fact, since Kristen hadn't been sleeping, Freddy used Kincaid to bring him back to life in a dream.  Kincaid has a dream where he's walking his dog in the junk yard where Freddy's bones are buried.  His dog then, I shit you not, pisses fire on Freddy's gravesite and this causes Freddy to return.  He kills Kincaid in his dream, and the goes to Joey's dream to kill him.)  Soon, Kristen's friends start to die in their sleep too.  That's about the crux of it.   There's not a huge plot to speak of here.  Even the Dream Master idea is kind of stupid.  Alice, the main character in this one, (Kristen gets killed off halfway through, and Alice is her best friend.) gets Kristen's dream warrior powers and gains her friends' skills as they are killed by Freddy.  Why?  Who cares.  Apparently it wasn't important enough to explain.

    I will admit, this is one of my least favorite of the Elm Street films.  For a lot of people, it's their favorite, and I've never understood why.  The acting goes back to the level of the original film, the deaths aren't that great on the whole, there's not any blood or gore really, the plot is stupid, and the film is so damned bright and colorful!  Most of it even takes place in the friggin' daytime!  Freddy and nightmares just aren't scary when it's bright and sunny!  But worst of all, Freddy is the one we're supposed to root for!  He's a wisecracking, full of confidence, cool guy here!  He's not threatening in the least bit and this is the one film in the series I dread a scene that he's in, because it's those scenes that tend to bring the movie down.  Here's one scene that shows some of what's wrong in this one.  The bad acting, Freddy's wisecracks, and the overall bright color scheme.

    Even the death scenes here aren't really that great.  The only one I really like is the one that everyone likes.  One of Alice's friends that is terrified of bugs turns into a cockroach and is tormented by Freddy.  It's really quite gross and also quite ironic.  Also great is the time loop that Alice and her friend are trapped in to make it so they can't save the friend. 

    Speaking of the time loop, the film does have some excellent setpieces when it comes to the dreams.  And those are the reasons I watch the film.  In fact, that and the camerawork are the only reasons to watch.  Renny Harlin and his cinematographer did great camera tricks here.  It's kinetic and shot more like a high budget music video from the late 1980s.  I suppose that's where the bright color scheme comes from too, but I find that unforgivable.  When Kincaid is facing Freddy and is stuck in a circle of junked cars, he yells to the sky asking for Kristen to help him, and as he does so the camera zooms out really fast until the whole world is shown to be a maze of junked cars with their lights flashing off and on.  Later on Freddy traps his victims in a sort of nightmare funhouse.  And best of all is the scene in the movie theater where Alice is dreaming.  She's watching a movie and slowly things get pulled towards the screen.  Popcorn, her popcorn box, her drink, and finally she herself get sucked into the black and white 2D world of the movie screen.  So the film has interesting ideas and is shot very well.  No one's ever said that Renny Harlin wasn't a flashy enough director.  Still there are ideas that don't work at all and are detrimental to the film such as Kristen dreaming she's on a sandy beach and Freddy's glove acting as a shark fin coming towards the beach and continuing as a shark fin in the sand finally blowing up a sand castle on the beach (seriously, the sand castle explodes with fire) and Freddy appearing... in sunglasses.  And it sucks.

    There's also a lack of blood and gore here.  When Kincaid gets killed by Freddy's glove?  No blood.  The asthma attack death later in the film of course is bloodless.  I'm trying to remember if there's any blood in the film at all.  I don't think there is besides some slashes appearing on Freddy's back when he's pretending to be a female nurse.  (Yes, you read that right.)   In fact, the film could have been PG-13 rated had the few F words been cut and there hadn't been tits in one shot.  Seriously, worse than this is seen on network tv now nightly!  I'd have no trouble showing this to a 13 year old.  (Honestly, I've never gotten why boobs are so horrible for kids to see.  They carry milk for babies and are just like fat deposits otherwise... and when it comes to the language, I guarantee you they hear it more in school and probably use worse too.)  This is not in any way a horror film.  It's not even remotely creepy as the last film was.  It's a dark comedy, and I use dark lightly.  Some like Freddy this way.  Now, I enjoy Freddy doing occasional wisecracks as he did in the third film.  But this much combined with the films other problems really destroys this film for me.

      It's obvious that they weren't going for horror here.  The film was clearly marketed at teens, and the movie came out on August 19, 1988, about a year and a half after Dream Warriors and before started back for most students.  The film, which was made for 13 million dollars, which was more than 3 times the amount of the last film, went on to premier at #1 and stay there for three weeks!  It made just over 49 million bucks, which was almost 5 million more than its predecessor.  So apparently people back then didn't agree with my view of the film.  Either that or the film was successful just riding on Freddy fever and the success of the third film.  It was popular enough for Freddy to get his own syndicated TV show called Freddy's Nightmares.  That show was basically Tales From The Crypt as presented by Freddy instead of the Crypt Keeper.  In fact, when this show was cancelled after two seasons (it was apparently not a good show outside of the pilot that told the story of Freddy's arrest and death) the crew moved on to the new Tales From The Crypt series.  Either way, Freddy wouldn't be so popular for much longer.  Why was that?  I'm going to blame the Fat Boys rap music video done for the Nightmare 4 soundtrack.  (Yes, this is just a reason for me to post this horrible music video featuring a rapping Freddy.)  Also, it launched the career of Renny Harlin, who would direct Die Hard 2: Die Harder the next year and later would direct Cliffhanger and Deep Blue Sea.  His work tends to get bad reviews, and his films are only hits sometimes.  (He also did Cutthroat Island and this year's The Legend of Hercules after all....  But hey, at least Nightmare 4 had a kick-ass poster, right?