Films: 1980s
(1988) A Nightmare on Elm Street 4
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Director: Renny Harlin
Release: 1988
Director Renny Harlin wrestles with Freddy Krueger in "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master."
Holding the number two financial returns spot, behind "Freddy vs. Jason" in the franchise, "Elm Street 4" awkwardly wobbles off the high-concept peak established by its predecessor "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors."
"Elm Street 4" is a studio project, start to finish, and the team assembled to create the script clearly had varying ideas about what to do with the remaining characters from part three.
As it opens, Roland Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) and Joey Crusel (Rodney Eastman) are alive and well and apparently back in high school in the haunted town of Springwood. Kristen Parker (now played by Tuesday Knight, who replaced "Elm Street 3's" Patricia Arquette) is living at home again, and her dreams are veering dangerously close to the boiler room in which she and the Dream Warriors last confronted Freddy. Kristen can still pull Kincaid and Joey into her dreams, and they warn her not "stir" Freddy from his grave.
It is too late, however. Emerging from the ground of the auto dump where he was interred, Freddy is resurrected by a baptism of flaming dog urine and uses Kristen's ability to catch other dreamers to not only slay the remaining Dream Warriors, but to bridge the gap between the children of Elm Street and the rest of Springwood's teens.
In the course of his new rampage, a new generation of fighter is born. Among them is Rick and Alice Johnson (Andras Jones and Lisa Wilcox). Brother and sister, Alice and Rick live with their single and drunken father Dennis (Nicholas Mele). They form a sort of moral core with "Elm Street 4," and around them turn jock Dan (Danny Hassel), bombshell Debbie (Brooke Theiss) and nerd Sheila (Toy Newkirk).
With this new cast, screenwriters Brian Helgeland and the team of Jim and Ken Wheat develop a logical extension of "Elm Street 3's" find-your-inner-strength concept. In "Elm Street 4," survival against Freddy rests in finding the strength in another and making that strength an asset.
Also an interesting fold in the usual "Elm Street" formula is part four's examination of the father-child character dynamic. Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" was about mother-daughter betrayal, its sequel a barely sublimated homoerotic romp and part three a resumption of the female-female/parent-child relationship.
Here, the conflict is largely centered around Rick and Dennis; and then Alice and Dennis. Like Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and her mother in the original film, alcohol is the signifier of parental detachment and ineptitude. As in "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Alice is the asexual replacement mother to Rick (and the surrogate wife to her widowed father). She makes meals, nurtures and requires little in the way of self-care.
Rick has replaced his father-son relationship with a combination of avoidance tactics and physical regimen. Rick cannot see manhood, or he chooses not to - lest it lead to the brazen stereotype of gristled alcoholic middle age.
His character is deliberately sexually underdeveloped, and the fresh-faced Jones proves a non-threatening boyfriend figure to doomed Kristen in the first quarter of the movie.
Following her death, Rick attempts to shed his disaffected denial of the male threat and presses the rest to believe in Freddy Krueger. Interestingly, however, Rick cannot actually see Krueger in his fatal dream. The physical abuse that precedes his evisceration is perpetrated by an invisible threat, a taunting male voice that -- disembodied -- seems to represent the father-abuser he sought to escape.
Unlike Nancy, Alice does not defeat Krueger by adopting the skill set of her absent father, but by traveling from invisible female to sexually realized womanhood. Whereas Nancy learned guerilla combat skills and built traps out of household hardware, Alice travels through the looking glass in her bedroom - systematically absorbing the gifts her slain friends possessed and physically transforming into an attractive and deadly opponent while looking into the mirror. It is absurd, but a broad and compelling description of the power lent by fantasy and hormone in the growing body.
The problem that shoots through this otherwise worthwhile structure is that Harlin and his writers grossly mismanage Krueger. Far from the dark and nasty demon of the first two films, Englund's performance veers into high camp in "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4." Harlin lets (or perhaps prompts) the character to pander to an audience awakened by the one-liners emphasized in "Elm Street 3."
The underlying problem is that Freddy has become the very teenager he sought to destroy. Instead of seething rage at the youthful bodies he once tormented, Krueger is now the class clown with a homicidal punch line. It makes for some interesting projection-fantasy on the part of a presumably youthful filmgoing audience, but it strips away the vengeance-of-old-upon-the-young he previously suggested.
Furthermore, Harlin's palette is severely off. The greens and reds of "Elm Street 4" are those of the carnival fun house, rather than the dingy nightscapes of Craven or the industrial Hades of part two. Gone are the Gothic hallways of "Elm Street 3" and in their place abstract sets like a spinning barrel ride through which stab limon-green shafts of light.
Writing by committee is seldom a successful enterprise, and "Elm Street 4" suffers here, as well. Attached somehow to an attempt at backstory are the stained glass and church walls of the scene of the film's final confrontation. Producer Bob Shaye appears in a classroom expository scene to briefly expound on a sort of gateway to heaven/gateway to hell geography. Presumably Krueger is a guardian of one of these gates - but the momentary mythology that surfaces, submerges and then rears its head again is never explicated very well. It serves to distract.
Also a symptom of too many cooks in the kitchen is a never-developed rhyme, supposed to hold a key to Krueger's Achilles' heel. As it turns out, he can't see his reflection or all the souls he's eaten escape. Why or how this is part of Krueger's character is left unsaid. Another opportunity lost in the curious but garbled bramble that is "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master."
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, 1988
The problem that shoots through this otherwise worthwhile structure is that Harlin and his writers grossly mismanage Krueger. Far from the dark and nasty demon of the first two films, Englund's performance veers into high camp in "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4." Harlin lets (or perhaps prompts) the character to pander to an audience awakened by the one-liners emphasized in "Elm Street 3."
