Though it takes a couple of minutes before you realise it, A
Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: Dream Master picks up the story of the children
of Elm Street after the events in the third instalment of the series. Now home
from the psychiatric hospital where they were being treated for various sleep
disorders they are living back in the old neighbourhood and are living more or
less normal lives. Kristen still has the power to draw people into her dreams
which she tends to do on a semi-regular basis, especially if she’s having a
nightmare. Kristen isn’t so sure that they’ve seen the last of Freddy Kruger
and when she draws the others into her nightmares she tries to convince them
that they’re still in danger.
At school, the Elm Streets have made new friends and settled
into the social structures reasonably well. Among their new friends are a
brother and sister, Rick and Alice, a geeky kid who’s asthmatic and good at
the old book learnin’, and the usual collection of jocks and the like.
Sure enough, good old Freddy does manage to return, his
bones joining back together and the flesh growing back (though still terribly
disfigured) during one young lads nightmare. He then proceeds to murder all
round him, focusing his efforts on the two kids who with Kristen, had defeated
him last time out. With these two dispatched, Freddy then attacks Kristen,
using her power to draw others into the dream world for him to kill and, in
some way that’s not made all that clear, use their souls to grow more powerful.
Kirsten draws her friend Alice into the dream realm and
before she’s killed she passes her power to Alice. Now, as Freddy ups the body
count, Alice is imbued with the strengths of the person he has killed, which
Alice uses to prepare herself to face Freddy...
Hey Freddy, did you go bald when those parents set your ass on fire?
No, Bitch....
I got a Kru-cut!
Part three of the hugely successful Nightmare on Elm Street
franchise set things up nicely for the next movie and I was looking forward to
seeing how the story would develop and whether the ghost of Fred’s mum would
show up again and curse at people. Part 4 didn’t continue the story as much as
it simply carried on the story, by which I mean, unfortunately, that it’s
really just more of the same.
The idea behind the Nightmare series is a good one and the
previous film had added in a couple of new angles, with the idea that lucid
dreamers could do some good in the dream world, that the dream world itself is
more than just something in our heads, and that Freddy is a deeper and more
complex character then you’d think due to his background and the fact that his
mum is a ghost. Most of this was ignored for the fourth film so that Freddy
could have some lines that were meant to be funny (but weren’t) and so that the
film makers could show off a wide variety of special effects that they had
available to them.
The effects in Nightmare 4 are, for the most part,
excellent. I really liked the waterbed and the landshark scene sticks in my head
too, but nearly all of the effects were well executed (except the bit where
Freddy got a hole blown in his chest, the animation for that sucked!) The story
is so weak, however, that it’s hardly worth talking about which then leads to good
effects being used in places where you just don’t care. A bunch of teens get
killed off in this film and none of their deaths really resonate. None of them
seem as painful or horrific as those in the earlier films did, and as so many
characters are new there’s a strong sense of lambs to the slaughter, so when
one of them does bite it you’ve nothing invested. And while the effects are
technically well done, they’re not shocking enough to make you sit up and take
notice.
There are some things that you can't help but notice in Nightmare 4. The most obvious one is that Patricia Arquette was replaced as Kristen by, and I swear I'm not making this up, Tuesday Knight (that's her name, not sure if she's any relation to Michael or not). One other thing is the way the character of Freddy moves more and more towards comedy as opposed to horror which is a crying shame for a little humour in these films went a long way; in Nightmare 4 the comedy gets in the way of the whole point of the movie.
Two Thumbs Down for A Nightmare on Elm St. Pt4
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