A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

If there's anything special about this movie, it's that it's the strangest argument against abortion I've ever seen.

I'm not joking. The alleged plot revolves around the fact that Alice, "last girl" and so-called Dream Master of the last movie, gets knocked up by her beefcake boyfriend Daniel and becomes pregnant with a kid with similar Dream Master powers, thus enabling Freddy to continue to kill through the unborn fetus' dreams.

Now I haven't taken a biology course in over three years now, and in the last one I did take, I got a C, but doesn't this seem a bit...I don't know...badly researched? In the course of the movie, Alice's fetus can't be more than two or three months old at most (although he does seem to jump forward a couple months between scenes at one point). And none of this is helped by the fact that the filmakers don't really go out of their way to make Alice look pregnant. Of course, someone who knows about such things can prove me wrong, but it seems to be giving a young fetus a bit too much credit to say that it can dream, much less project a psychic vision of itself from five years in the future into its mother's dreams. (Yes, Alice does dream about a weird little boy often, and yes, it does take about halfway into the movie for her to figure out he's really her offspring.)

You probably guessed it, A Nightmare On Elm Street 5 finishes the work of its two prequels by making the Freddy Kreuger backstory/Dream Master thing more convoluted and incomprehensible than you dared dream possible! The loyal viewer actually seems to unlearn how the whole Dream Master thing works, and don't ask about that weird little subplot with Freddy Kreuger giving Alice's kid souls of the people he's murdered in a weird attempt to possess him or something. As if this wasn't convoluted enough, Mama Kreuger, the Creepy Exposition Nun of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 fame, gets the spotlight in this movie. Even though it's never been implied before, her restless spirit is what's holding Freddy back from killing. But in order to stop Freddy again, her spirit has to be freed from its earthly prison and all that rot. Because her body is sealed up in the same insane asylum where she was raped by the one hundred or so maniacs. Even though we're told she hung herself after Freddy's trial (a tiny snipet of dialogue implies that Freddy actually murdered her and somehow covered it up, but nothing more is done or said about it.)

Of course, a new group of friends has sprung up around Alice to be killed off, so things like "bad plotting" shouldn't worry us. The one advantage A Nightmare on Elm Street has had over its sister franchise Friday the 13th and a great number of other slashers (including the Scream trilogy) is that, as shallow and two-dimensional as the victims are, the script mostly tries to make them likeable. That continues here, with even the anticipated Rich Bitch character not only acting decidedly unbitchy, but also even willing to hang out with nerds! Like a recent Steven Spielburg or George Lucas movie, though, the death scenes of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 are more concerned with being loaded with special effects than being actually fun or creative. The worst example is the death of the movie's comic nerd, which takes off on that famous AH-HA video which any spawn of the 80's will surely remember. I write from experience that the words "Taaaaaaake oooooon meeeee" will be tattooed on your brain for hours! (I have to admit, though, that this particular death had my favorite Kreuger one-liners in the movie, which I put below.)

The most jarring thing about the direction, besides the overdone death scenes, is the fact that the film is peppered with inappropriately artsy moments. Sure, a couple of scenes are effectve-the eerie love-making scene between Alice and Daniel that plays during the credits (which has its effect worse than spoiled by inappropriate music that seems to have been taken from a carnival) and a scene where Alice dreams herself inside her own womb. However, these can just provide a second's distraction from a lackluster script and a generally dull movie. After seeing this, anyone will understand why The Powers That Be decided to make the drastic move to make this the last "traditional" sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street and kill off Freddy once and for all.


Choice Quotes:

"Faster than a bastard maniac, more powerful than a local madman, it's Super Freddy!"
-Freddy Kreuger