Sometime after Dream Warriors, Kristen begins to have
nightmares that suggest Freddy might be coming back. She tries to warn her
school friends, including day dreaming Alice, of Freddy’s return, but nobody
believes her. Unfortunately for them Freddy is indeed back, and he begins to
target the kids of Elm Street, starting with the survivors of the last film.
When he targets Kristen for her dream powers, Alice must become the dream
master and stop Freddy from killing off all her friends.
Kristen is now played by some other actress, with Patricia
Arquette nowhere to be seen. Maybe she didn’t want to reprise her role because
her character doesn’t last long. Nope, Kristen dies about a third of the way
through, passing her dream powers to our new heroine Alice. The rest of the
(surviving) teen cast returns, tough black kid Kincaid and mute Joey. They’re
not exactly nice to Kristen – at the beginning she accidentally brings them
into a nightmare, afraid that Freddy’s back, and the two of them just shut her
down. Well they don’t last long either, as Freddy comes for them pretty much
instantly.
So Alice is our new heroine, and she sucks. She comes across
as absent minded and a bit dim, as though she’s not quite sure where she is or
what she’s doing. In fact she spends a lot of the movie doing nothing and being
useless, standing around like a guppy while Freddy kills her friends, until the
finale where she gets a silly dress-up montage
where she basically puts on make-up, jeans and a jacket and is ready to
fight. In the end she punches and kicks Freddy with karate skills and does some
flips and shit, but Freddy just ignores her. She’s actually really annoying and
the more I think about her the more I realise I hate her. The girl playing her
is awful as well, not seeming to know where to look or what to do and doesn’t
seem to know what emotions are. She’s never got the right expression for the
moment.
The rest of the teens are a bit outlandish in a very
eighties way, known only for their outfits and quirks. Alice’s brother is a
karate enthusiast, though Freddy ignores his kung-fu skills to easily kill him.
There’s a work-out athletic chick who dies in a pretty weird way, an asthmatic
black nerd who gets the kiss of death from Freddy and then Alice’s love
interest Dan, who is just some dude. Continuing dickhead parents, Alice’s dad
is a jerk for no reason. And Kristen’s bitch mother is back and she’s still a
bitch. She’s actually even bitchier this time, essentially killing Kristen by
drugging her with sleeping pills.
Freddy’s resurrection is silly. Kincaid and his pet dog
enter a nightmare to the massive junkyard where Freddy was buried. The dog pees
fire onto Freddy’s grave, causing the earth to open up and Freddy’s skeleton to
reform. Freddy’s body reforming is brief but pretty cool. Kincaid tries to kill
him by dropping a car on him, but Freddy survives and stabs him to death. Joey
imagines a nude girl in his water bed, and then Freddy burst out and kills him,
yelling “How’s this for a wet dream!” which is just about the funniest thing
ever. I have to say I really hated Joey in both this and the last film – he was
just a horny idiot teen who instantly fell for any nude woman and it got him
kidnapped and killed. He sucked.
It hosts one of the series’ strangest, more memorable kills
– the gym junkie girl falls asleep (while lifting weights I guess?), and Freddy
attacks her. He pushes the heavy weights down on her, causing her elbows to
snap open, breaking her arms. As she stumbles away, the room get smaller and
horrific glue-like substance begins to trap her. Suddenly her skin sloughs off
and she becomes a horrific giant cockroach monster stuck in a roach motel,
which Freddy squishes. It’s so intricate, gross and strange. The other kills
are all over the place. Seeing Freddy suck the life out of that poor nerd is
funny, though immediately before that it gets weird when he possesses an exam
paper and a hand made out of stationary attacks her. Kristen gets offed in a
pretty anticlimactic and sudden way.
The film expands on the nightmare sequences of the last
film, by going bigger and stranger with them. Perhaps the most memorable would
be Kristen’s beach dream – she’s sunbathing on the beach when sudden Freddy
appears like a shark (with his claw sticking out of the water like a fin). He
chases her into quicksand, and she sinks through into Freddy’s house. He dispatches
her pretty quickly, by throwing her into his furnace. The effects look awful,
especially a burnt Kristen, who yells ‘take my powers Alice!’ before she’s
absorbed into Freddy. Freddy’s fleshy chest with the souls of his victims
embedded within returns, and this time it’s what defeats him.
The pace is weird; it’s pretty gung-ho actually, but there’s
no real sense of build or ramping tension. There really isn’t much of a plot,
with Freddy picking off teens in their nightmares until the very end where
Alice finally nuts up and takes the fight to him. Until then she largely just
watches him kill people – she drags people into dreams with her new powers, and
then stands around like a guppy while Freddy kills them. In fact that’s
basically Freddy’s plan – to finish off the rest of the Elm Street kids he just
uses Alice’s power to draw other teens into his nightmares. It works because
the idiot girl doesn’t take charge until almost everybody is dead but her. This
time around nobody has any dream powers (except Alice and her useless karate).
There’s not much suspense or tension, and no near misses – Freddy just shows up
and kills the teens in the order he appears to them.
This movie is a lot sillier than the last one. Seeing Robert
Englund dressed up like the school’s nurse is hilarious, and when Freddy turns
up on the beach and puts on some shades it’s almost too ridiculous. He’s
resurrected when a dog pees fire onto his grave, and at one point he eats a
pizza with screaming people’s faces as toppings. A lot of the film’s scenes are
like this. Freddy himself is still creepy, but honestly the quips have kind of
muted him at this point. Sure he’s fun, but he’s not as menacing as he’d been
before. Freddy is ultimately defeated at the end when he sees his reflection.
It’s the dumbest thing ever (especially since he’d appeared in mirrors plenty
of times before now), and comes out of nowhere, since it’s never actually
mentioned as a way to defeat him until a second before it happens. Throughout
the film Alice mentions the ‘Dream Master Rhyme’, but we only hear it right at
the very end as she fights Freddy in a nightmare cathedral. A chorus of little
girls sing the crappy rhyme, which ends with ‘Evil will see itself and it will
die!’, so she uses a piece of mirror to make Freddy see himself, and then the
fleshy spirits of the dead kids embedded within him pull themselves out of him
– it’s a gooey scene of nonsense, with some cheap effects, but it’s pretty
gross and creepy. All their awfully animated ghostly spirits are freed, Alice
wakes up and reunites with her boyfriend and that’s the end.
It’s really silly. Overall the movie is a fun ride, but it’s
not as strong as the tightly plotted Dream Warriors, and not as scary or
effective as the original. As an exercise in outlandish creativity its
nightmare scenes are creative fun, though they border the line to silly and the
characters aren’t particularly relatable. The Dream Master sort of feels like
an expansion to Dream Warriors, in that it took the nightmare scenes from that
film and expanded on them, delivering more outlandish kills at the expense of
an actual plot or structure. The entire end fight is dumb as hell though,
especially since Freddy just stands around not doing anything for the most part
while Alice flips around punching and kicking at him, eventually showing him
the mirror. It ends in a pretty definitive way actually – with Freddy dead and
Alice and her boyfriend living together happily. But we’re not done yet.
Instead we head to one of the darker ANOES movies.
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