After the whole Freddy-wears-sunglasses" shark-jumping moment, I'd rate this "super Freddy" sequence as horror's second largest shark jump of the 80s! great photo, by the way.
I remember hearing that they were trying to make Freddy a more shadowy figure in this one, get him back to his roots. While they do manage that in a scene or two, nothing really changed.
Alice is back with blonde hair (and I think maybe a nosejob), her old jock boyfriend and a couple of new sacrificial lambs. Soon she spots some slow-motion children dressed in white and the trouble starts. The trick is that she's pregnant and Freddy's using her unborn child's dreamtime to attack her friends. I'll admit it's kind of a clever idea, but right away they screw up: Freddy can attack when Alice is awake, but he attacks the jock boyfriend when he's awake. Wrong!
The nightmare killings in this one are goofy and tired. Freddy's still rolling out quip after lame quip and doing lame things like merging someone with a motorcycle, riding a skateboard or turning into a supervillain version of himself. Very little worth seeing here.
I accept that horror flicks tend to fall back on a Christian framework while handling the frequent themes of supernatural evil, but in this one I found it grating. Personally, I don't go automatically rosy at the prospect of someone just out of high school having a baby, and this definitely has pro-life overtones. I wouldn't mind as much if the movie had the guts to say the word "abortion" while discussing it, but in 1989 I guess it was still too hot.
Politics aside, this one ends flaccidly with the unborn Jacob tricking Freddy so that Freddy's nun mom can grapple with him for all eternity. Yawn.
"A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child"
1 Comment -
After the whole Freddy-wears-sunglasses" shark-jumping moment, I'd rate this "super Freddy" sequence as horror's second largest shark jump of the 80s! great photo, by the way.
October 30, 2005 7:57 AM