| Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child Released: 1989 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Slasher Nuts and Bolts: Freddy’s back and this time he wants more than just the souls of the Elm Street children. He wants the power of the Dream Child. Alice Johnson must try and save her friends as well as protect the soul of the unborn baby growing inside of her. And there’s only one person that can help her; the ghost of Amanda Krueger. Summary: Dream Master Alice Johnson is dreaming again. This time she finds herself taking a shower when all of a sudden she (or at least her body double) gets slurped through the walls into a dank dingy chamber. She is actually in the old asylum wing of the Westin Psychiatric Hospital of the 1940s. There she sees Amanda Krueger being wheeled into a delivery room on a gurney. Amanda gives birth to a nightmarish version of her son Freddy Krueger. The infant terrible spins around the room several times before growing into the full sized adult Freddy Krueger. Before Freddy can confront Alice, the ghost of Amanda Krueger interrupts him. Amanda pleads with Alice to find her in the old tower. Before Alice can respond, she awakens from her dream. Note: During this sequence we also see the grisly details behind Freddy’s conception as mentioned in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors. The next day we see Alice at her High School graduation ceremony. We are introduced to a new group of piggies as well as a few familiar faces. We now have: Mark Gray (The comic geek), Greta (The fashion model) and Yvonne (The smart-ass). And back in the game we have Alice’s boyfriend and father, Dan Jordan and Dennis Johnson. The kids make plans to break into the High School gym that night for a graduation party. Dan tells Alice that he has purchased plane tickets for them to spend the summer in Paris. (What a guy will do for a piece of tail, eh?) After the party, Alice leaves to go to work when all of a sudden she experiences a WAKING nightmare. In the vision, Dan is on his way to pick her up from work when he falls asleep at the wheel. In Dan’s dream (which Alice is privy to) his truck becomes possessed by Freddy Krueger. Dan ditches the heap and steals a motorcycle. But this doesn’t work either as Freddy makes a bunch of wires and coils project from the engine spearing Dan’s body. Alice later learns of Dan’s death at the hospital. It is written off as an accident, but Alice knows better. To make matters worse, Alice discovers that she is pregnant with Dan’s baby! The whore. She later tells Yvonne, Mark and Greta about Freddy Krueger. No one really seems to believe her though and they humor Alice because of her tragic loss. The following evening, Greta attends a big social dinner hosted by her mother. Mom prides herself on Greta’s soon-to-be fashion career. Despite the copious amounts of food on the dining room table, mum won’t let Greta eat anything that might damage her figure. For some inexplicable reason, Greta falls asleep. In her dream, Freddy appears and begins force-feeding her every morsel of food on the table. Greta eats herself into an early grave. In the physical world, it appears as if she dies choking on a piece of food. Alice and Yvonne soon learn of their friend’s death and they meet Mark at his father’s workplace so they can console him. Apparently Mark had a boner for Greta and he’s taking her death really hard. Mark wishes he could be like his personal comic book hero the Phantom Prowler. Maybe then he would not feel so powerless. Mark later draws a picture of the old Thompson house (I have no idea why he does this). Falling asleep at the pencil, he is soon pulled into the picture and Alice has to use her Dream Master abilities to follow him. They arrive in the shit-stained ruins of Nancy Thompson’s old homestead and Alice meets a young boy named Jacob. Jacob makes mention of his ‘friend with the funny fingers’. Alice begins to realize that Jacob is a future incarnation of her unborn son. She decides to go to the hospital to get an ultra-sound. Alice learns that unborn babies spend 70% of their pre-natal cycle in a dream state. She now realizes why she has been suffering through waking nightmares. Freddy is influencing the dream realm from within the dreams of Jacob. Freddy is feeding the fetus the souls of those lives he has already claimed. With this the child will be able to harness the power to become his heir. The following day, Alice decides that she needs to locate the ghost of Amanda Krueger. She learns that Amanda may not have committed suicide, as records would have her believe. She is convinced that Freddy murdered Amanda. Alice returns to Mark’s place and has him watch over her while she enters the dream realm to search for Amanda. Mark of course fails in this just like Johnny Depp did in the first Nightmare. Falling asleep, Mark is attacked by a skateboarding Freddy Krueger. Mark can apparently harness his dream warrior abilities as well, and he transforms into the Phantom Prowler. Freddy turns Mark into a two-dimensional piece of paper and slices him to ribbons. While all this is going on, Yvonne decides to hunt for Amanda as well. But she is doing this in the physical world while Alice is exploring the dream world. As Alice searches the asylum, Freddy appears. She baits him into following her to the place of his own conception. There the ghosts of the maniacs who raped and impregnated his mother attack him en masse. Freddy is literally torn limb from limb but he recollects himself soon after. The ghost of Amanda Krueger arrives and convinces the corrupted essence of Jacob to rebel against Freddy. Jacob agrees and vomits forth the collected soul stuff that had been corrupting his body. The column of soul-shit impales Freddy and many of the souls he had collected are freed. Freddy reverts to the form of an infant and Amanda absorbs him back into her womb. Finding peace at last, Amanda’s spirit disappears forever. Nine months later, all is well and Alice takes her newborn infant Jacob Daniel Johnson to the park with her father. (Awww…I just LOVE me a happy ending. Where are my Kleenex?) Acting/Dialogue: The acting in this installment is only quasi-shitty. It’s not gag-me-with a spoon awful, but considering the budget, I expected a little bit better. Surprisingly, Lisa Wilcox actually did a better job in Nightmare 4 than she did in this one. In part 4, she was moderately tolerable, but in this flick her acting is downright abysmal. Joe Seely, the clown who plays Mark is really rancid as well. Which is a shame, because he had the potential to be the coolest character. And of course there’s the disgraceful performance by Robert Englund. I don’t blame Englund so much as I do the screenwriter. After all, even Adam West can’t always pull off an academy award winning performance if he’s dealing with a dung-drop script now can he? And since we are discussing Mister Englund, he belts out some of the worst dialogue I’ve seen in a horror film yet. Once again, Freddy ceases to be a spooky monster and prefers to portray a guest on Def Comedy Jam. Sadly, the dialogue actually gets WORSE once you reach the next film. Gore: Practically non-existent. The Freddy franchise has grown into a kid-friendly genre by this point, so I guess the twits at New Line decided to lighten up on the gore factor. Mostly all we get are some flesh crafting sequences, which are pretty fake looking anyway. Guilty Pleasures: Well, there’s a scene where we see Alice standing behind the glass shower door. Everything is pretty obscured and the shot just SCREAMS body double. We also get a smidgen of a butt crack a few moments later. In truth, I’ve seen more T&A on an episode of South Park. The Good: There are not really many good things that I can say about this flick. There is a string of amusing shots but that’s about it. But I should at least give credit where credit is due. I actually think Freddy’s resurrection in this film is a bit more creative than the pyro pissing pooch from part 4. Freddy always struck me as a wily sort of a gent, so I figure he’s probably got enough smarts to find a loophole out of dream world banishment. Freddy returning to plague peoples’ nightmares via fetus dreams is pretty fucking creative in my book. One of the first not-quite-guilty pleasures that I found was that Robert Englund was also cast as one of the patients in the asylum. This is supposed to tell us that this one particular whack-a-loon was in fact Freddy’s biological father. After all, that whole ‘son of a hundred maniacs’ thing really isn’t all that feasible now is it? It was kind of cool to see the whole Amanda Krueger origin thing. It was detailed in Dream Warriors, but now we actually get to see what really happened. All in all, a pretty cool scene. There’s another interesting shot following the death of Dan Jordan. In the physical world, Dan falls asleep in his vehicle and gets smeared by an oncoming truck. The driver (killer) gets out to see if Dan is all right. He is seen wearing a red sweater and a brown fedora. Sound like anyone we know? I thought it was an interesting way to show the reflection of the dream world in contrast to the physical one. The only other scenes I liked were the ones that focused on the asylum. There’s a really beautiful shot of Yvonne finding the ghost of Amanda Krueger kneeling inside of the remains of the old watchtower. Everything is washed over in gray and a flock of white doves take to the air as soon as Yvonne enters the room. It’s a shame that this visually stunning moment lent no weight to the rest of the film. The scenery becomes REALLY trippy when Alice goes in to the dream asylum to rescue Jacob. Everything is in a fourth dimensional perspective and the entire chamber looks like something out of an M. C. Escher drawing. One of the few characters that I like was (of all people) Pappa Dennis Johnson. In Dream Master, he was an alcoholic dick who couldn’t even inspire love or respect from his own children. But losing a wife and son can be a pretty humbling experience. In Part 5, his character has evolved immensely. He is now on a twelve-step program and is totally supportive of his daughter and her needs. He doesn’t even get mad when he learns that the village idiot knocks up his seventeen-year-old little girl. How cool is that? And top of that, he survives BOTH films! Not many horror movie pops can say that. That’s pretty much it folks. A couple of interesting shots, but nothing more. The Bad: This movie is just fucking dumb. There is nothing even remotely scary about it. A rabid ass-raping ladybug would be creepier than this cheese dick serenade. Freddy is a joke. And a pretty bad one at that. His puns sound like something that a ten-year-old would come up with and the means by which he tortures his victims is just stupid. Christ on a Harley, he even rides a fucking skateboard! What’s next? Michael Myers on a moped? Or maybe a bungee jumping Jason Voorhees, eh? The deaths are trite and nauseatingly sanitized. If you notice, the death count becomes lower and lower as each film progresses. Only three deaths in this one. Freddy rises from the grave and all he accomplishes are a measly pissant three deaths? No wonder he wears that big-ass hat! It’s to hide the look of shame that he’s likely wearing on his face. (Speaking of which, his hat seems to get knocked off his nugget quite a bit in this flick.) Director Stephen Hopkins really seems to lose control of this film towards the end. (Not that I think he had much control to begin with) Once again, we are treated to a horror film with a head-scratching ambiguous ending. Why did Freddy turn into a baby? How was that stunt accomplished? And what exactly did Amanda do when she slurped the little Freddler into her gut? We know by now that THAT ain’t gonna keep him put for a second. All you need is a dog or something to piss in the spot where Freddy last ejaculated and he’ll be back for more. This film is an on-coming train wreck from start to finish. And on the final note, this movie represents the last in sequential numbering series. From here on out the working titles cease to be called A Nightmare on Elm Street in favor of stand alone titles like Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Great Lines: “…Nine, ten, he’s back again.” --A little boy putting a slight rephrasing to the end of the trademark nursery rhyme. “It’s a boy!” --Freddy’s first words after being re-born. Actually this is the only pun in the movie that I actually thought was kind of funny. Overall Rating: 3 out of 10 severed heads. And I think I'm being pretty fucking generous. Actually it's probably only worth maybe 2 heads and a shattered femur. |
| Back to Movie List Back to Contents Back to Home Page |