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A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)

DVD Cover (New Line Studios)
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Overall Rating 51%
Overall Rating
Ranked #2,391
...out of 20,319 movies
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Alice, having survived the previous installment of the Nightmare series, finds the deadly dreams of Freddy Krueger starting once again. This time, the taunting murderer is striking through the sleeping mind of Alice's unborn child. His intention is to be "born again" into the real world. The only one who can stop Freddy is his dead mother, but can Alice free her spirit in time to save her own son? --IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: January 16, 2007
"It's a boy!" exclaims Freddy during his rebirth for entry number five in the series, but personally, I think this is one pregnancy that should have been aborted. It's still not the worst in the series - I don't think anything will "top" Part 2 in that regard (then again, I haven't seen the next two entries in years) - but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.

The storyline finds Alice (Lisa Wilcox), the survivor of Part 4, going through the motions of battling Freddy once again. The movie kicks off with her dreaming about the asylum rape of Freddy's mom, Amanda Krueger, and this dream somehow allows Freddy to be reborn thanks to his mother getting pregnant in the dream. Are you following this? Now, it's time for some more of the usual carnage, but this time, there's a new detail to give everyone involved some headaches: Alice is pregnant, and Freddy (Robert Englund) can kill people through the dreams of this unborn child. Again, are you following this?

This movie was made for two reasons, and neither of these reasons benefit the fans of the series or horror in general. Reason number one isn't unique to this series as nearly every long-running franchise has those one or two bastard-child films which are conveniently forgotten when reminiscing over the series history, and said reason is quite simple: money. Freddy was still raking in the big bucks at the box office, and New Line Cinema could have created a film with him doing nothing more than laughing and calling the audience suckers (and even promoted it as such), and it still would have topped the charts for a couple of weeks. There was no love for the series or characters shown in this film, but it was blatantly obvious that those in charge had dollar-signs in their eyes.

The second reason sort of ties in with the first, but it's separate enough to warrant its own paragraph. Special effects were getting better and better by the month around the time this was made, and those responsible really wanted to show off what Freddy could do with the assistance of this newfound technology. As a result, we get to see a man merge with a motorcycle (yes, literally), another man transformed into a paper comic book character, and a life-size recreation of M.C. Escher's "Relativity" painting. All of these were fine examples of what could be done with the new technology, but each of them was downright stupid to use in a horror movie. I realize that there's only so many ways that Freddy can kill someone with his trademark gloves, but transforming someone into a piece of paper and cutting them into confetti is really pushing it.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed this more had it been tied together with a coherent storyline, but as mentioned in the synopsis, it was nothing more than a bunch of garbage thrown together in order to allow the characters to go through the same formula. Introduce the characters, show Freddy getting resurrected somehow, let him accumulate a couple of kills while firing off horrible one-liners, show the main character finishing him off, hint at yet another sequel, roll credits: there's not much else that could be done, admittedly, but shouldn't it be about time to permanently lay the characters to rest when there's nothing left to be done with them?

Again, it's not the worst in the series - there's some neat visuals to be found, especially the church sequences - but there's really not a whole lot going for it otherwise. 4/10.
Edd #1: Edd - added January 16, 2007 at 9:35am
"Faster than a bastard maniac. More powerful than a loco-madman. It's... Super Freddy."
That quote alone should get this movie an 8/10.
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