The first thing that comes to mind when I think of The Dream Child is "Swing and a Miss!" I admire that they decided to try something different - stylistically, this is obviously a lot different than the other films in the Nightmare franchise. But ultimately, I think I would have rather watched part 4 again. Or part 3. Or part 1. Just not 2. Geez.
Fair warning - I was pretty inebriated watching this. Three weeks into this "watching a horror movie every day" thing, I've realized that watching and writing about a movie is more work than I would have thought. Maybe I just don't write fast enough, I don't know. But at any rate, I like drinking too much to stay sober-ish for every movie (particularly in this case - we had just come back from a concert prior to my watching it). Even inebriated, I still feel like I have an okay gauge of what I like and what I don't, but this is just something to keep in mind. If I ever get paid to do this, I'll limit it to 2 beers tops. Maybe 3 if I'm going out with friends beforehand.
Anyways, The Dream Child is about our survivors from The Dream Master (Alice and Dan) and their new group of friends. Despite supposedly eradicating him in the last installment, Alice is having nightmares featuring the burnt molester Freddy. Much like The Dream Child, Alice is inadvertently inviting her friends into her dreams to get murdered. And as we've come to expect by this point, much of the movie is elaborate sequences where her friends are inventively killed, before Alice and Freddy have their final battle.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that they gave Freddy an origin story. We get some pseudo-flashbacks where we meet Amanda Krueger, a nun who works at an insane asylum. One day, due to (I don't remember, but I'm going to assume lack of communication between the staff) she locked up with the inmates and is gang-raped by a whole group of them. JESUS THAT'S HARSH! Granted, you don't see anything happen, but it's still pretty brutal... especially when you consider that we've reached the point in the series where Freddy is cracking jokes on the regular. This happens early on, and it's where the film kind of goes off the tracks for me. It takes things in a more serious direction, and while there are some themes that come up over the course of the film, it's not really consistent with the Elm Street series up to this point. Which wouldn't be a bad thing in and of itself, but even asa a standalone film I still feel like it would be a failure.
This over-seriousness is just a part of what brings the whole thing down. The acting, FX, and filmmaking in general just isn't up to snuff to make it work.
What I didn't like
The main issue I had was that this movie didn't really have a "real-world" to take place in. You never got the idea that there was anyone else that existed besides Alice and her few friends. Granted, we're pretty well used to generic teenage characters by this point, but this group rang even less true to life than usual. And there was nothing really on the outside world either - other than the phony graduation scene and a couple of party/death scenes, it hardly seems like there was a real world at all. Maybe this is a symptom of spending too much time in the dream-realm, but it just made it feel like there was very little at stake.
And in general there was just some stuff that was hard to stomach. Some of the choices from director Stephen Hopkins were just baffling. From my notes:
-Some "The Room"-esque bad editing (i.e. people just popping up out of nowhere)
-interesting choice - letting things block the shot
-30 minutes in, I wish it was over...
-bad green screen/bad FX
Now, granted - this was '89 so I'm not expecting a Gravity-like FX masterpiece. But Dream Child was a step back from Dream Master in that department. The set-pieces here just really weren't that good - or any fun. Again, the more serious-tone really hurt! It's hard to take a movie seriously that wants to talk about a young-woman getting an abortion one minute, and then having a guy get sucked into a comic-book (`a la Aha's "Take on Me") the next.
Again, we're totally supposed to be cheering for Freddy in this one. Robert Englund gets the top billing, but even he seems to be treading water. He doesn't get as much fun stuff to do (I think he only kills 2 people?), and it's hard to get behind someone who is trying to kill the kid from Jurassic Park. (The "sounds like a six-foot turkey" kid.) Freddy is even reduced to recycling quips from the last movie ("Soul food...") - no good.
It's admirable that they tried to change things up. I think they saw the writing on the wall by this point in the series (it's hard to get past part 4 of any franchise without things seeming stale), so I think it's cool they took a chance. But it just didn't work for me, at any level. The "real-world" scenes were not believable, and the "dream world" stuff, while ambitious, didn't deliver.
Ultimately
I would not recommend this film.
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