A Nightmare on Elm Street Marathon: The Dream Master

Now this is the Freddy everyone warned you about.

That's not a good thing.

    When people who don't like A Nightmare on Elm Street talk to you about A Nightmare on Elm Street what do they typically say? The complaints are usually that Freddy's too funny and not scary, the kills come so often that they start to get boring, the plots are ridiculous and make no sense at all and the series feels like it's only here to make more money. But, for the first three movies in the series, that Nightmare was nowhere to be found. Even Freddy Vs Jason wasn't like that. And then Dream Master came along...

    The fourth entry follows Kristen (This time played by Tuesday Knight), Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) and Joey (Rodney Eastman), the only surviving members of the Dream Warriors, who discovers that Freddy (Robert Englund) is still alive because... because. When Kristen accidentally brings her friend Alice (Lisa Wilcox) into one of her Freddy dreams, Freddy starts to haunt Alice and her friends. Alice, along with her brother Rick (Andras Jones), her crush Dan (Danny Hassel) and her friend Debbie (Brooke Theiss), they try to stop Freddy once and for all.

This is getting silly.

    This is where the series starts to go downhill fast. Sure, this isn't the worst movie ever made, or even the worst of this series, but still. Freddy is in full on "Pun Kill" mode. The kills in this movie come literally one after another almost non-stop. And, unlike in the other films (Sans Freddy's Revenge) the kills are uninspired to a comical degree. Gone are the marionette tendons or the killer TV or Johnny Depp's Bed O' Blood. Instead we get teens falling into quicksand, getting stuck under waterbeds or getting lost in a junkyard. Or maybe I should mention what is currently the worst kill in the series. A girl gets turned into a cockroach. Not real reason why. I mean, the special effects are great, but why a cockroach? Was it the payoff to a scene I missed?

    By now the series has just gotten lazy. Alice makes for a good protagonist, but the story she's given is complete garbage. The film often gives major plot-points barely an explanation if any explanation is given at all. How Freddy is once again back to handslaughter the living is handwaved away in a single line. Nobody really seems to care all that much. Most of the acting is barely decent. Somehow Ken Sagoes has managed to get worse between Dream Warriors and this film. Even the normally strong Englund feels like he's phoning it in. The series has become just like it's main character. Soulless.

"... Anyway, that's why my face looks
exactly like this pizza."

    There's not much of a point to the series anymore, is there? I mean, other than the money (This was the highest grossing entry until Freddy Vs Jason). Nobody seems to care anymore. The kills aren't very good, the humor is lame, the acting is decent and the creativity has flown out the window. I am really not looking forward to 5 and 6 at this rate. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master gets 3 stars out of 6.