It’s a boy!!!
Winding down on the Nightmare series, The Dream Child is the last of the actual A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Freddy’s Dead and New Nightmare do not follow the timeline at all. So this, is the last of the Elm Street movies.
Being nine years old and seeing this movie at the drive inn was fantastic. I really enjoyed the first showing and pretty as much as the rest. But over the years the movie has grown stale and it seems to be the worst of the original five movies. Not that it is Sterrible, but it just doesn’t have the same feel as the previous movies. It does have a couple of people returning for the Dream Master, but it just doesn’t feel like an Elm Street movie. Maybe this is why it was time to kill off Freddy for good, in the follow up cartoon of a movie, Freddy’s Dead.
Synopsis:
The fifth installment of the popular franchise focuses on Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a survivor of the fourth, who believes Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has been eliminated for good. She optimistically hopes to start a life with fellow survivor Dan (Danny Hassel). The nightmares begin soon enough, though, and Alice learns she is pregnant. When her friends start dying, Alice suspects that Freddy is using the fetus within her as a weapon. Can she fight the demon while protecting her unborn child?
I am a big fan of Lisa Wilcox, or I always had a crush on her. So, this one is always a must, the story really isn’t terrible and really an inventive way to bring Freddy back. Alice defeated Freddy in Dream Master and how would return, why not through Alice and Dan’s unborn child’s nightmares. Think about that for a second, Freddy is reborn and kills off Alice’s friends…through a baby. Not just a baby, a tiny little pupus of a baby. So, yeah the idea was very good and maybe one of the more inventive ways of ever bringing Freddy back. Although, I love Dream Master’s resurrection, it is silly as fuck, but I love it, the dog Jason pissing fire.
There are some really cool visual sequences in the Dream Child. Dan’s death on the motor cycle is super cool. The effects look great and he kind of looks like something out of a comic book, which is some what of a little theme. The director Stephan Hopkins has a background in comics. There is even a comic book death in the movie, where Super Freddy cuts down Mark and tells him comic books are bad for him. But before that, we see Mark’s comic character, which I would love to see more of and a follow up comic would have been great.
The rest of the movie is kind of ok, we meet a five or six year old version of Alice’s son, Jacob in her dreams.. The ending is out of control and Freddy’s death in the movie is so bad. It was nice to see Amanda Krueger back, but this was the worst…until Freddy’s Dead.
Eh, overall, it is just another entry into the slippery slope towards the end of the series, but I do believe if Sara Rischer would have kept her mouth shut and they would have went with one of the many other script ideas, we would have seen Freddy well into the 1990s and not seen Rachel Talalay’s terrible “ending” to the franchise. But, it is what it is, we have seven Freddy movies and a remake.
Where does Dream Child fall on your list?
IMDB.com has a score of 5.1
I give this one a 5.6