A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

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

Runtime: 93 minutes

Directed by: Renny Harlin

Starring: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Danny Hassel, Brooke Theiss, Andras Jones

From: New Line Cinema

I figured it was about time I saw another Freddy Krueger film and while this is only average, it certainly is better than the next few films in the series. I talk about it in my Letterboxd review below: 

It had been awhile since I had watched an Elm Street movie and with this one in particular it was years since I last checked it out so this was the perfect time to kill two birds with one stone and see this entry; while it helped make Freddy Krueger a popular pop culture figure for awhile it also was a detriment to the series to have him become a wisecracking comedian and a goofball.

This film concludes the story told in the last entry and begins a new one with shy milquetoast Alice and her friends that are literally dragged into the proceedings. How Freddy is revived and brought back to life... it was certainly outside the box thinking, for sure. It's also utterly preposterous; a dog pissing fire? The general idea of the story seemed fine and how Alice is able to fight Freddy at the end I am okay with. It's just the execution that wasn't always there. I'll blame it on how this was rushed into production and started filming even before the script was finished, which is usually a pretty bad idea. No offense to Tuesday Knight but everyone would have preferred it if Patricia Arquette had returned as Kristen for this one. Most of the adult characters you see... bad and lame stereotypes. And some of the deaths were lacking.

That said, I can still rate this as average. Most film fans laugh or groan when you bring up the name Renny Harlin today. His career did go downhill after the 90's and I haven't watched a new film from him in ages. But I thought he did a nice job with this movie. The 80's-ness of it also tickled me pink; giant hair & references to Dynasty abound.

The soundtrack is a wacky mish-mash of 80's artists: Sinead O'Connor, Billy Idol and The Fat Boys all together? Yes. And there still are some good death sequences, with “the cockroach scene” being great in my eyes; at least personally it really is creepy and disturbing. That alone may have been the reason why I even have it rated as 2 ½ stars. The fact that the next two in the franchise are notably worse is definitely another explanation for my opinion.