Films: 1980s
(1989) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5
Saturday, July 21, 2007
A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child
Director: Stephen Hopkins
Release: 1989
An eight-week shoot-to-final-cut rush-job, complete with a script cobbled together by multiple writers in a last-minute run-up to cameras, it is a wonder that director Stephen Hopkins made anything sensible at all out of "A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child."
What he does wrestle from the muck is a poorly acted, ham-fisted script of a film with some honest-to-goodness interesting maternal/abortion themes buried in its sloppy delivery.
Picking up the story of Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) from the fourth Freddy installment, "The Dream Child" drops audiences into a survivors' tale. Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel, also returning from part four) graduate from high school, plan to visit Europe and " unwittingly " are about to be parents. This opens the door to the demon.
Freddy Krueger has lain dormant for years since Alice closed the door on his legacy, but her unborn child's dreams prove a gateway back from the brink. With the fetus' nocturnal activity, Kruger is able to prey upon her new crop of friends and perhaps breed a successor in the waking world. Only the missing corpse of Amanda Krueger (Beatrice Boepple) " if laid to rest " can stop the resurgence of evil in Alice's womb.
This is the twisted world of Hopkins' film. The ingredients are on the counter for a dark tale, but the execution of the written scenes is bound by spin cycle of idiocy. The dream sequences in "The Dream Child," are mostly pointless comic routines " Dan is turned into a skeletal mechanized cyclist, and her comic-book drawing friend Mark (Joe Seely) both becomes a super hero and is carved apart by nothing less embarrassing than Super Freddy (Mike Smith). Only Erika Anderson, as forced-to-diet teen model Greta Gibson, serves the classic Elm Street death dish. Freddy force-feeds her to death in front of vampiric fashonista dinner guests.
Where Hopkins' installment fails is in its use of teen subconscious and adolescent sexuality as the fuel for Krueger's Freudian monster story. The film should stand out as a rarity in 1980s " or any " horror cinema. The girl is not only not a virgin, but also she gets pregnant from pre-marital sex. As a blunt-force trauma, the subtext of "The Dream Child" is obvious: having a child too early will open the very door to hell. As such, final credited writer Leslie Bohem's script says it plainly. She also packs in some curious abortion/adoption dialogue that raises a sensitive listener's eyebrow: "A Nightmare on Elm Street" as a pro-life vehicle? Nothing concrete is developed however, and even the creepy and effective performance of young Whitby Hertford as Alice's dream-baby incarnate can't solidify the runny egg of these written words. 
Where "The Dream Child" succeeds is in its set design and art direction.
Much like the later Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, even though the scripts sagged, someone at production company New Line was putting their all into the look of the film. C.J. Strawn (yet another carryover from the previous film), Timothy Gray and John P. Jockinson create a stellar visual landscape for "The Dream Child." Limited by late 1980s special effects, the movie can look clunky when the monsters move, but the walls, doors, windows and mazes of Freddy's dream world are beautiful. Shadows form crucifix forms of all sizes and orientation. Pipes, tanks, chains, plates of stain glass and Escher-like staircases fill a void of logic and narrative that go far towards making "The Dream Child" endurable for sophisticated viewers.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child, 1989
Nothing concrete is developed however, and even the creepy and effective performance of young Whitby Hertford as Alice's dream-baby incarnate can't solidify the runny egg of these written words.
