A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Trailer—A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Another classic in the series. Once again a solid storyline and excellent visual effects.

The Dream Master is the fourth sequel in the Elm Street series. A few of the kids from the previous film show up in this one, although Patricia Arquette is replaced with actress Tuesday Knight. The Dream Warriors are beginning to have nightmares of Freddy all over again. Freddy is then resurrected, in an extremely wacky way, and returns to Elm Street to kill a new set of teens, after he finishes the last of the Dream Warriors off of course. Whenever a character in this film dies, their powers are passed on to Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a shy girl who must stop Freddy Krueger once and for all, or at least until a new sequel comes along. The Dream Master is one of the best films of the series and, although this is the movie when Freddy starts to become more comical and less dark, this is still a really good movie.

"Nightmare on Elm Street 4" is one of the best entries in the series. Okay, the first is considered a classic, maybe because it had a feeling of poetic surrealism that is indeed lost here. But, come on, it is the FOURTH Freddy film, did you REALLY expect it to be scary? Freddy delivers indeed too many puns, however some of them actually hit the mark. After all, the quality of a slasher film doesn't depend exclusively on how "serious" and "vicious" the killer is - he was more serious in "Part 2", which was an embarrassment, he was less serious in "Part 3", which was an imaginative, entertaining film. As for "Part 4", it has way-above-average acting, a polished look (just compare it to some early "Friday The 13th" cheapies) and some gruesome, stunning visual effects. Above all, the movie exploits more possibilities about the links between reality and dreams than the "classic" original did. It is worth seeing.

Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) directs Dream Master, the fourth entry in the franchise about a maniacal dreamstalker named Freddy Kruger. The entry is extremely passable and enjoyable. The survivors of Dream Warriors are still haunted by memories of Freddy Kruger. But Freddy isn't quite dead as he picks up his glove and takes up where he left off...with vengeance. The only flaw in his plan: a shy outcast named Alice who harbors powers that will enable her to do battle with Kruger as she assumes qualities of past Freddy victims. Although some of the more interesting characters are sacrificed first, the Nightmare franchise proves to be deeper and more original than any other slasher series around. Some inventive deaths and imagery on display as Robert Englund devours the scenery as Freddy.

This doesn't have the well-known cast of the previous Nightmare 3 movie but the special effects are still good.....each very different and some of them very funny. They make this perhaps the most entertaining entry in the series. Memorable scenes include a junkyard, a water bed, a classroom, faces in a pizza, a girl bench pressing and faces coming out of Freddy's flesh. The storyline, however, features its usual dumb and ridiculous theology and has its usual share of unlikable obnoxious teens. Their parents weren't pictured as any better, perhaps worse. In fact, the kids and parents are so bad you wind up rooting for Freddy to do them in. Perhaps that's the idea!