A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

     So Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was a great success financially and popularly.  The critics were mixed to negative on it and if you read the last blog post, you saw that it was my least favorite movie in the series.  However, with the success of the fourth film, Bob Shaye started right away getting things ready for a fifth film.  New Line decided to send out feelers into a group of authors who specialized in writing a genre called 'splatterpunk', which were stories or novels that focused on non-stop gore.  Writers like Jack Ketchum and Clive Barker were a part of this trend for a while.  The genre was started with a book called "The Light at the End" by John Skipp and Craig Spector about a guy riding a New York subway and being turned into a vampire and going on a killing spree.  So those two were brought in to do a draft for the new movie.  The studio wanted birth to be a theme and so they wrote this story about Alice, the heroine from the first film being pregnant and Freddy getting into her dreams through her baby.  And of course, she could get into Freddy's mind the same way and learn why Freddy became the way he was.  The studio didn't really care for the script and the screenwriters were shown the door.  They ended up bringing in a guy named Leslie Bohem to do the screenplay, as he had had an idea of someone giving birth to Freddy back in the days of the third film and though it wasn't the idea they wanted back then, it seemed right now.

     Now it was time to find someone to make this idea a reality on screen.  Enter Stephen Hopkins, a Jamaican born guy who was raised in Australia and England.  He had done a small thriller two years before called Dangerous Game, which was not successful, but he did have a background in art direction and was able to show his ideas for the film by storyboarding them.   (Note that the bigwigs at the studios love when a director can do this, because they know what he/she's going for.)   He was a guy that was really into comic books and so not only were they storyboards, but they were done sort of like comic books.  He got the job on Valentine's Day of 1989...  The movie was to be released on the first week August, less than a year after the last film debuted.  That gave him 6 months to prep and film the movie, special effects and all.  The script was not up to par.  It was very muddled and the rules weren't quite clear.  So Stephen Hopkins and Mike De Luca did the best they could as the movie was being filmed.  Yes, New Line didn't learn from the last film that working with an unfinished script is not a good idea.   The plot is that Alice was impregnated by her boyfriend Dan (and yes, both actors are the same as they were in the last film), and her child is getting taken over by Freddy as her friends die.  (He needs the souls of all four of her friends to win, like some sort of demented role-playing game.)  Now, Dan dies early in the movie, so there's also a very good subplot dealing with abortion questions and maybe giving up the baby to Dan's parents.  It's sort of like Juno as a horror film.   And believe it or not, the acting is much better than the last film.  I mean, it gets kind of soap opera like in places, but I'm not taken out of the movie because of how forced the acting is either.

    Also, Freddy's toned down the jokes a bit here.  He's not back to being scary, but he's not really annoying like he was in the last film.  They originally wanted to make Freddy scary again, but for some reason that didn't come through.  It doesn't help that the make-up for Freddy in this one is the worst in the entire series.  They got the guy back who did the makeup on the first film, but the studio and Robert Englund wanted the makeup to be done faster and cheaper.  What we got was something not as detailed and that looked like a Halloween mask.

    Now the deaths in this one are pretty good.  Dan has a nightmare that his motorcycle starts to bond with him turning him into some sort of machine man out of HR Geiger.  It's very cool to watch as he has wires and steel pipes insert themselves into and under his skin.  And it's actually quite disturbing.  Another victim, who is bolemic gets fed her own intestines by Freddy until she dies.  Another one, which I like because it's so damned funny-looking and cool is when the comic book nerd gets pulled into a comic to go up against Super Freddy and turns into a 2D paper version of himself as he gets shredded by Freddy's glove.  The film-makers strive in this one to make sure that the characters actually fall asleep to have their nightmares where they die.  Now, the film was originally going to be a lot gorier than what was shown.  By 1989 the MPAA had really started to go after gory films.  This is the same year the virtually gore-less Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan came out and virtually killed that franchise.  When this movie came out on VHS, an unrated version was released that put back in the footage cut from the death scenes that made the movie more disturbing.  The skin of Dan's head is torn off when he's turning into the motorcycle man, it's made clear that Greta's being fed her own innards which is not clear in the theatrical cut, and apparently there was more to Mark's death too.  Here's the uncut version of Dan's death so you can see what they were going for.  (Note that current DVDs and blu-rays do not include the unrated version of the film.  Only the laserdisc and VHS ever did.)

     Also, the film has a gothic feel to it.  Stephen Hopkins wanted the ending of the film (which was done essentially script-less) to have an M. C. Escher sequence.  Escher did this...

So we have Freddy chasing the 'Dream Child' up and down stairs going all sorts of directions.  It's really cool.  Also, the beginning of the film is set in the gothic church that the fourth film ended in.  I love the look of this film.  It's dark, unlike the last film was while still doing the cool camera tricks that Renny Harlin brought in.  It was still very much like a high budget horror music video.  (If you could call the fourth film horror.)  Except maybe for Alice Cooper instead of Ratt like the fourth one.  

     Now, you may have noticed that the movie is called The Dream Child.  Yes, there is a kid in this movie that is the personification of Alice's unborn baby who could potentially become a vessel for Freddy.  That kid is played by Whit Hertford.  Or as I like to remember him, that fugly kid that says the Velociraptor skeleton in Jurassic Park isn't scary and looks like a six foot turkey.  Of course, he's 4 years younger here, and not nearly as annoying.  He's still odd-looking though.  His last line in the movie was supposed to be "Fuck you, Kreuger."  However, since he was not allowed to say that, the line became the nonsense "School's out, Kreuger."  Then he barfs on Freddy and his vomit grows heads and kills Freddy.  (Yeah, I don't get it either.)  Well, technically Amanda Kreuger's ghost kills Freddy and traps him in hell, but only because the kid barfed.  Or.. something.  (But we do get to see ugly demon Freddy born from his mother in the film too, which is kind of amusing because he reminds me of a chihuahua with mange.)

    The film was released on August 11, 1989, less than a year after the last film was released.  Budgeted at 8 million dollars, it only brought in just over 22 million.  That's less than half of the last film, breaking the cycle of each Nightmare film making more than the last.  The critics also wrote negative reviews of this one, which I just don't get.  Was it Freddy fatigue?  I mean, in no way was the fourth film better than this one.   Why did it make so much less?  I think that was, in fact due to Freddy fatigue.  That and maybe part 4 wasn't so good, so they didn't see the fifth one.  And the trailer didn't help.

    Showing every one-liner Freddy says in the film... and trying to sell it as a scary movie.  Yeah, that'll work.  Not.  Some say that it was the themes of abortion, drinking, bolemia, anorexia that did the movie in.  Sure, pretty heady stuff for a 1989 horror movie, but I think they make the movie better.  Maybe the teenagers didn't like it.  Maybe it was more of an adult Elm Street?  Who knows.  But one thing the movie did do?  It told New Line that maybe it was time to lay Freddy to rest, which they did in the next film.