What a lovely way of saying
How much you love me
- Paul Anka
And so the nightmare continues...canon-style with the fifth (and probably least remembered) of the series: The Dream Child.
This is one of the movies that people kind of forget about. It didn't do too well in the theaters and fans of the series really don't claim it as one of the best or one of the worst. However, it's actually not a bad movie. What I'm going to say may be a little controversial and maybe even a bit heretical to you NOES fans, but I have to say it. I liked this better than Part 4. And I think I know why. But first, a synopsis.
Alice once again returns as our main heroine and everything is going super-duper awesome in her life. She is joined by "major league hunk" Dan, her now-boyfriend and a group of totally new friends...er....victims because life is too short to think of all those that died brutally in the last film! Whee! And she's graduating! Of course, all that changes when she predictably starts having dreams again. Oops. And...she finds out she's pregnant. And...Freddy wants her child. I guess to be reborn, or to live through his dreams or something. It's never fully stated. But let's just say bad things are happening to the new mama.
Let's start with what the film has going for it. This movie looks good. It looks like the set designer had a field day. The cinematography and the set designs are spectacular, especially the mental hospital where Freddy's Mother was raped and the M.C. Escher-inspired stairways during the climax. From viewing it, it's obvious that somebody actually gave a damn when it came to creating this world.
But....you can only see so much "pretty" before you begin to notice the flaws. Mainly, with the rest of the movie. There's not much of a story and you could drive a mack truck through the holes in what little plot there is. Also, these kids just exist to be slaughtered. Okay, fine, we already knew that. But none of Alice's friends suffer from the sheer exhaustion the others felt in earlier movies. No one believes Alice about Freddy so they can sleep at night just fine. So why do they keep on accidentally falling asleep? Dan falls asleep while driving, although he looked perfectly awake in the scene before. Greta falls asleep during a large dinner party, but....she didn't appear tired before. Yvonne falls asleep in a small pool, but she'd just finished diving so she would have been wide awake.
All that makes no sense but then again, neither do most of the scenes. This whole movie is just a patchwork of visual images. In fact, everyone associated with this movie admits that everything was made up on the fly and it shows. There wasn't much of a working script so they just threw everything in the kitchen sink and no one knew what was happening from day to day. It works in some ways and in others, it doesn't. I mean, there is definitely a lot of creativity in this one. And I certainly wasn't bored, but....I wasn't compelled either. Freddy wasn't so much a threat as an afterthought. And since I didn't know what the heck he was trying to do with Alice's baby, I wasn't on the edge of my seat. But at least I was more entertained than I was by The Dream Master, which made me yawn throughout.
I may like this one because of the extra cheese. I mean most of this movie is downright silly. Greta's "overeating" for example with the ultra-fake prosthetic. Freddy's birth where he apparently becomes the "It's Alive" baby, which doesn't make sense since Freddy wasn't deformed before he was burned. And of course, there's Super Freddy. With a...lightening bolt across his chest? I don't know. Let's just say it was creative enough to be fun to watch, but scary or suspenseful? Nah. You won't find it here. And I'll admit, the ending was just plain stupid. But it's still insanely watchable.
Suffice it to say, I really didn't like Part 4, but I found this one less boring and a little more fun, which suited me just fine since I didn't expect much anyways.
It's still not the worst of the bunch, but we all know which one that is....Part 6. I'm looking at you.
Favorite Moments (may contain spoilers):
- Alice's nightmare of being a nun trapped with a thousand maniacs...
- Dan's motorcycle scene, which was somewhat cheesy but looked damned cool.
- Mark's "Take On Me" moment when he's dragged into a comic book.
- The creepy little kid who shows up from time to time to remind Alice she's pregnant. With him.
- One of the writhing bodies in the opening sequence belonged to the buff actor who played "Super Freddy".
- Although it looked like Mark entered a black and white world, most of the scene was actually not filmed in black and white. Rather, the set was painted to look that way and wardrobe gave him colorful clothes to stand out.
- The laugh at the end of the movie before the final credits was actually Vincent Price's laugh from Michael Jackson's Thriller.
- Almost all of the death scenes had to be cut quite a bit to avoid an "X" rating.
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