A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Director Stephen Hopkins decides to make an attempt in the fifth movie to bring Freddy back, “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child,” released in 1989. The script was written by Leslie Bohen, from a story by Bohem and novelists John Kipp and Craig Spector, using the survivors of “The Dream Child,” with concepts taken from “The Dream Warriors.”

Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel) have survived to complete high school and accomplish their love. Their plan to spend the summer in Europe is interrupted by Freddy Krueger’s resurrection to Alice’s dreams. However, this time she finds herself playing Freddy’s mother, Amanda – a nun left alone in an asylum and assaulted by so many insane patients in one of the film’s more disturbing moments. She soon finds out that Amanda’s spirit, played by Beatrice Boepple, is trying to make contact with her so she can try and finally stop Freddy (like that’s ever going to happen).

She also finds herself dreaming of a kid named Jacob, played by Whitby Herford, who is actually Alice and Dan’s unborn son. Freddy is using the dreams of Jacob’s to attack her and her friends even while she’s awake. He wants to be inside Alice’s womb instead of Jacob so he can be reborn and live to terrorize again.

The typical teenage friends are on board to give Freddy another body count, including supermodel Greta (Erika Anderson), comic book lover Mark (Joe Seely), and champion swimmer Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter). How Alice and Dan manage to have any friends at all after six of them were brutally killed in the last film is a question you’ll be asking.

Once again, Freddy haunts his victims in a series of vignettes, laughing out loud at his own puns, killing the friends through their own weaknesses: Greta is forced feed until her face is obese, Mark becomes a human comic strip, and Yvonne is dragged down to a boiler room with the diving board coming to life and jumping off, almost drowning.

Paul V. Wargelin said in his review, “Special effects crew Adam Jones (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY) and Alan Munro (ADDAMS FAMILY, ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES) handle the gore chores admirably.” The most creative kill is when a truck and motorcycle attack Dan with their car parts such as seat belts and gas hoses.

Wargelin mentioned, “Other effective moments include a shower scene (which owes homage to both Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and Wes Craven’s bathtub sequence in the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET), and the asylum lunatics behaving like the zombies of George A. Romero's Dead trilogy (not really surprising considering Skipp and Spector's love for Romero's films). But THE DREAM CHILD contains Freddy's most embarrassing moment in the series when he uses a skateboard in pursuit of a victim - echoing the 1960s Batman TV show when the Caped Crusader surfed against the Joker.”

Overall, “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5” has better material and potential than the last movie, but suffers from continuing the pattern of having humor over horror which wasn’t a good idea. This just makes the film average. It’s definitely weak compared the last ones, and that is a shame that they made this convoluted and somewhat forgettable. However, you can’t deny how entertaining this movie is, which makes you want to watch it. If you want to, give it a watch, but this is up to you.

Alright everyone, hold on tight tomorrow when we look at the next installment in “Elm Street-a-thon” in this year’s “Halloween Month.”