#A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

[pierppasolini]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) // dir. Stephen Hopkins

[fanofspooky]

Freddy’s coming for you…

[likeafantasy]

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN 1980's edition — (28/31) ↳ A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

[brokehorrorfan]

Fright-Rags celebrates 35 years of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child with two new shirts designed by Kyle Crawford and a reprint of artwork by Jeff Zornow. Pre-orders are up for $33 through Sunday, July 21, and will ship the week of August 9.

[horrororman]

Notable films that were released on August 11th...

#BlackSunday (1960)(Italy).

#KingKongvsGodzilla (1962)(Japan).

#scifi

#MardiGrasMassacre (1978).

#horror

#CityoftheLivingDead (1980)(Italy).

#ANightmareonElmStreet5TheDreamChild (1989).

#BlesstheChild (2000).

[closetofcuriosities]

A Nightmare on Elm Street

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) directed by Stephen Hopkins 

[pink-evilette]

[a08021993]

[ivansitojaja]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, 1989

[pierppasolini]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) // dir. Stephen Hopkins

[fanofspooky]

“Bon Appétit, Bitch.”

A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)

Scattered observations:

While the teenagers in the last movie weren’t defined with a lot of depth, they were at least likable and liked each other. Within the first few minutes I already found the ones here a lot worse, mostly for their loud, broad characterizations, although I’ll note that Kelly Jo Minter is easily the most charismatic of the new additions. I just wish she had more of a character than “friend of heroine”.

The Dream Child gimmick seems both like the result of New Line executives throwing darts on a board of ideas for justifying another entry, a way to appeal to the kids who were no doubt watching these movies, and a solution for further foregrounding the set pieces. You don’t even need the characters to dream this time around, just queue the next Freddy attack. But it also feels like a totally unrelated screenplay about parental anxieties that got repurposed into a Freddy movie, and is as clumsy as that sounds. It never reconciles the body horror implicit in the premise with the nightmares (only one lite Cronenbergian scene where the monstrous fetus is glimpsed through a monitor even comes close). The movie also becomes a great pro-choice argument, although given how muddled the handling of this theme is, it’s hard to believe it was remotely intentional.

Like the previous film, this is a long way from being scary, but while the set pieces in that one were at least credibly grounded in horror aesthetics, there are a few here, like the “Super-Freddy” scene, that drop any pretense of horror. (That and a few seconds from the climax are the only parts of this I’d seen before.) Stephen Hopkins directs in the same vein as Renny Harlin, going loud and piling on the special effects, but I don’t think he matches Harlin’s virtuosity. There’s nothing like a spiraling overhead shot here.

In the third movie, it was revealed that Freddy was “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs”. One of the nightmares here decides to depict that through the gang rape of a nun. While it cuts before you see anything, I was still put off. I don’t think sexual assault should be out of bounds for a horror movie, but I think you either need to treat it soberly or go full sleaze. Putting it in a movie full of crazy set pieces with a wisecracking villain seems like a miscalculation.  

There is an end credits rap, but sadly it does not summarize the movie nor does it feature an appearance by Freddy. I see no reason you couldn’t do that two movies in a row. What other horror movie has a rapping villain? Jason and Michael Myers don’t even talk. Seems like a missed opportunity.

[brokehorrorfan]

Gutter Garbs has a Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child design by Sam Coyne up for pre-order T-shirts ($30) and 12x18 prints ($36) through Sunday, August 6. They’ll ship the week of August 30.

[horrororman]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was released on August 11, 1989.

#RobertEnglund

#horror #fantasy #thriller

[80smovies]