A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors (1987)

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Director: Chuck Russell

Screenplay: Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell

Cast: Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson; Craig Wasson as Neil Gordon; Patricia Arquette as Kristen Parker; Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger; Ken Sagoes as Kincaid; Rodney Eastman as Joey; Jennifer Rubin as Taryn; Bradley Gregg as Phillip; Ira Heiden as Will; Laurence Fishburne as Max; John Saxon as Donald Thompson; Priscilla Pointer as Dr. Elizabeth Simms

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #128

Dreams Warriors was the first film of the Nightmare on Elm Street series I saw. The first 18 certificate film I saw too, watched when I was ten or so. My parents wanted to watch it and, rather than what one would presume, it was myself as the child worrying about watching the film in case it would give me nightmares, to which my mother told me to grow up and I watched the film. For some that might come off as bad parenting in the modern day, but said mother was also responsible for a lot of the horror films that came in the house when the family had an obsession with buying or renting them on DVD. It's something I look back as a humorous moment of my childhood that led directly to this blog post even existing. If an entirely different attitude to the scenario took place, unless the Goosebumps books she used to read me at bedtime were as much an effect, I'd probably be a lot more boring a person.

Dream Warriors however, upon revisiting it for the first time as an adult a few years ago, was one I had the least excited reaction to. It's when this series began proper in terms of what a Nightmare on Elm Street film was presumed to be, a mainstream franchise which undoubtedly became more of a glossy crowd pleasure than the weirdness of Part II. It doesn't feel like the original film in tone in the slightest either, something very different when one watches the series in order not far between days of each other. Returning to the film I've softened on Dream Warriors considerably only with some reservations. The premise is less of an issue now. With Freddy Krueger targeting teenagers in a sanatorium plagued with by mental disorders, said youths discover how to access their dream-selves to fight him. It's a premise out of place in horror as the genre, as they gain power to not fear the bogeyman, one even becoming an actual wizard, thus defeating the point of even a slasher film where one has to use wits and cunning against a juggernaut. But really the bigger issue with the premise which gives the film its subtitle is that its ultimately an afterthought, characters late on discovering these talents in their dreams only for it all to be useless. Thankfully this premise is more useful for emphasising the characters as likable figures. From Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), a cocky and sarcastic heavyweight with a chip on his shoulder, to Kristen Parker (a young Patricia Arquette) whose ability to drag others into her dreams is responsible for the premise, the young ensemble cast do add a great deal, a new dynamic from the first film where you care for their fates. (And no one should complain about a young Laurence Fishburne as hospital orderly Max).

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The only aspect added to the franchise which is a problem for me still is Krueger's back-story, first introduced here, where he's the "bastard son of a thousand maniacs". Krueger is still scary here, even if this was the beginning of Robert Englund throwing quips constantly like baseballs, but the back-story castrates a lot of fear of the character. Like many examples of newly added origins to cinematic monsters - from Michael Myers having living family to prequels for Leatherface's life story - it undermines the true fear of the unknown in these characters as well as feeling like a safer barrier, suggesting here a very convoluted origin is responsible for Krueger than a child murderer, who could be living on any American street, who managed to overcome death. These back stories show a hesitance to show terror as horror films should, the cause of how convoluted they become trying to exaggerate (and rationalise) the unknown horror for sequels.

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Aside from this thought, I have a lot to like about the film now. The return of Heather Langenkamp as Nancy is a huge virtue, alongside John Saxon, bringing more to their characters especially as subtle details were added to show a life outside the previous film. As someone who also views Body Double (1984) as Brian De Palma's best film, having Craig Wasson as a major character in the film is also a joy as playing the same everyman character as in the De Palma film, only significantly less perverse morally. Someone with the charisma of a person who will always be at a disadvantage, especially fighting a stop motion skeleton like in this film, but you can root for nonetheless. What's also significant is how, as a film made in the eighties, it can still get away with being fantastical and gruesome even if its smoothed over the rough edges from previous films. A film whose dreams include someone having their own tendons used as marionette strings and doesn't shy away from how horrifying that'd look. Even if the film's a glorious mass of elaborate production, which can throw in anything from stop motion to a Zsa Zsa Gabor cameo, there's still a gristly edge to this film which was sadly lost as bad humour took over the series. The dream sequences are more elaborate than previously but still retain a freakish gristliness that particularly helped on this viewing show a lot of the film's virtues. A sense that, even if its having to soften the premise to be more of a entertainment film than a creepy tale, Dream Warriors is arguably, until Wes Craven's New Nightmares (1994), the last film in the series you can argue as being good without a kitsch value of poor production decisions.

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And I can't leave this review without talking about Dokken. I hate most glam ("hair") metal. Unless you're talking about Van Halen, who effectively influenced it but did it better than everyone else, I've always adored I prefer the more underground subgenres of metal from this period. (Or bands like Judas Priest who, even if they had their own glam metal periods, had more personality and musical complexity involved). I can't argue however against Dream Warriors, the song titled after the film, being great even if cheesy. Sadly it would go downhill after this in terms of end credits, with Krueger rap music and terrible forgotten eighties pap. A shame as its worth talking about now, with the last effective piece of end credit music, how the first three films got a lot of final character from their credit tracks. Where even the ditty from the first film, Nightmare by 213, has an appropriately odd air to it and Part II has an underrated choice, likely inspired by the Halloween films, of taking an old easy listening track, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? by Bing Crosby, and emphasising how the lyrics can easily be as creepy as they are sweet in a different context. It's appropriate to end discussing Dokken as, even as silly hair metal, it does have the right hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck atmosphere appropriate for the last of the eighties Nightmare On Elm Street films to have a sense of being a real experience to see.

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