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Director: Renny Harlin
Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ken
Wheat and Jim Wheat
Cast: Robert Englund as Freddy
Krueger; Lisa Wilcox as Alice Johnson; Danny Hassel as Dan Jordan; Tuesday
Knight as Kristen Parker; Brooke Theiss as Debbie Stevens; Andras Jones as Rick
Johnson; Toy Newkirk as Sheila Kopecky
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #130
The Dream Master is a mess. Made during a writer's strike, with
only a year after Dream Warriors (1987) to capitalise on that prequel's
success, this film makes little sense. Freddy
Krueger being resurrected by flaming dog urine is just one of the odder
moments to expect but it's one of the more memorable moments in a film littered
in a lot of convoluted or underwritten material. It's neither a sense of the
intentionally surreal as the biggest
issues with the sequel is that, whilst the dream sequences for the most part
are memorable, the film altogether feels as rushed and improvised as its
production history suggests. Krueger returns to pick off the survivors of Dream
Warriors, using a friend of one of theirs Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a shy and introverted teenager, as a conduit for him
to acquire new souls once he's run out of the ones he originally targeted. The
problem after this in terms of logic is not the structure of the film but
trying to make sense of what "the Dream Master" is, never properly
developed and a term thrown around in dialogue as word salad which is the cause
of the problems of little making sense, especially the ending.
There's also the issue, that
comes to the front here in this sequel onwards, that Robert Englund is not only squandered but everything directly
involving Krueger, even in great weird sequences, is embarrassing and shows the
character as being a dead weight in his own film. Every dumb aspect is entirely
surrounding Kruger himself. The one liners, Kruger wearing sunglasses on the
beach. Everything that's a problem with the film is directly with Krueger's prescience.
Even in a good sequence as the classroom sequence, the unnerving tone to it to
the gruesome sight of someone being turned as flat as a football, you still
have to put up with the lame puns in the midst of it from Kruger. The character
no longer is scary as the dream themselves and their special effects are an
entirely separate entity, a side character who feels pointless and defanged at
this point in the series. As in The
Dream Child (1989), the next sequel, its Krueger himself alongside the
scripts where these films deserve criticism. It would take Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) for this character to come a
virtue again.
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The positives of the film are the dream sequences by themselves. The special effects throughout the series never dipped in quality, and whilst you have sillier moments in this film like a pizza made with meatballs that have faces of previous victims, you also have Screaming Mad George's cockroach hotel sequence, the legendary special effects artist turning a person into a cockroach in a repulsive and surreal way1. Then you even get utterly inspired moments, that redeem so much of the film's flaws, like the déjà vu repeating sequence or Alice entering a cinema only to be sucked into the screen. By this point, when even Dream Warriors had an engaging plot, the films afterwards are saved because of these inspired dream sequences. Whilst they're no longer close to real dreams at points, and there are some terrible ideas (the Jaws pastiche on the beach for example) you have a lot to admire. Whatever one might say of director Renny Harlin's work in terms of context, here at least he has a style and clearly wanted to embrace the music video surrealism he had carte blanch to use even under a strict production time. The simplest of moments, a Playboy Playmate disappearing off a poster on a boy's wall to swimming in the water bed under mine, to elaborate sequences such as the bathroom from hell full of cheerleaders and an elevator growing out of the cubicle going downwards, all have lot to admire. It's only when it gets overtly silly, the invisible martial arts scene immediately after the elevator, where the film suffers in this area.
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It's also a film which does attempt greater emotional drama in the midst of what's a spectacle. It tries at times, with some success, to give this new heroine Alice some personality when she could've come off as a contrived inclusion. Depicting how she imagines how she should act in a scenario only to be daydreaming it is actually a series of good moments, standing out considerably as it does hit close to home my own shyness as a person. As does a scene at a funeral, a random moment of actual emotion in a film full of dumb moments. The problems with this are really the end when this gets reduced to her having to overcome her fears to become a heroine, something which feels at odds with a film which never lets her become said heroine, even with the symbolism of her mirror being uncovered of photos to show her own face, with its vague and nonsensical "Dream Master" concept. That ending, alongside making little sense, is what cuts this one interesting dramatic aspect down.
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Out of the sequels it's also the one that manages to be the gaudiest of them all, a comment which is not necessarily an insult but is definitely a distinction between this sequel against the others, certainly so far removed from the original only four years before. This means there's some awful production decisions. That there's Kruger in the end credits contributing a god-awful rap song and the film's drenched in awful eighties pop. But there's other aspects, whilst dated, which give it a personality. There's even a cameo by MTV which puts this film in the time period, fixing a time date on this film that's more extreme than even the other sequels. Cheesy with its big hair and bright colours. A sense of playful camp in the midst of its various problems. Something I have to admire in spite of so much bad taste. This is as much part of the film as a mess, something which has a lot to admire but also a lot that fails. Out of the films in the series its definitely a "guilty pleasure" if one realises I have no concept of guilt for liking these films.
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1) Anyone whose managed to see
even clips of ParanoiaScape (1998),
a PlayStation One pinball-horror game
which he devised the look and tone of, human cockroaches amongst other gruesome
sights became an obsession for him over the years. A Japanese release only, you
can find clips of it online and you see how his previous monstrous creations,
including some from Society (1989),
became artistic motifs like one would see in other creative mediums.
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