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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good movie that should have been a great movie, 22 Feb 2004
I consider A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child a fairly impressive and certainly an important entry in the series, although I admit that it does have a few problems. Somewhat ironically, the success of the Elm Street franchise and Freddy in particular becomes a negative rather than a positive this time around. This was the second film in a row to be made without Wes Craven's guidance, and I think the filmmakers misinterpreted to some degree the secret of Freddy's success; they overplayed their hand by putting too much emphasis on new special effects tricks and Freddy witticisms instead of just letting Freddy be Freddy. In effect, our beloved anti-hero becomes a caricature of himself, and I as a viewer detect a barrier of some sort between myself and Freddy that stands in the way of my complete enjoyment of what I am watching. Had this fifth Elm Street film been forced to make do with a lower budget, it could have been something really impressive. The basic premise of the film is very sound and effective, and a couple of the killing motifs also bear traces of semi-brilliance, but the over-emphasis on special effects works against the filmmakers here.Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), the Dream Master of the fourth film, has picked up the pieces of her life and moved beyond her experiences with Freddy. She and Dan (Danny Hassel) are now a couple, and she and her new friends are all graduating from high school. Life is just great until she starts having disturbing dreams once again. In these dreams she and the audience actually witness a recreation of the stories (chronicled in the third film) of Freddy's conception and birth. We see Amanda trapped inside the tower with a hundred dangerous lunatics, then witness the birth of Amanda's child - it's an unusual delivery, to say the least. Things don't stop there, of course. Little Freddy is soon replaced by big Freddy, and thus begins another assault on Alice and her friends. There is a big difference this time around, though, as Alice soon discovers. She begins to have Freddy encounters while she is still awake. This confuses her a great deal, and the explanation for how Freddy manages to thrive and kill off her friends even when she herself is not asleep is, to my mind, quite brilliant. The introduction of a new spooky little dream child named Jacob complicates matters to some degree, as does the more active role played by Amanda in the unfolding drama, but these new plot twists actually work quite well in the context of the overall Freddy storyline. Things get a little frayed at the end, but the basic premise holds up from start to finish. The kills are actually the worst parts of this film, oddly enough. What should be Freddy's most evil shining moments end up looking rather comical, relying purely on fancy special effects and campiness to impress the audience. The Freddy we came to love in the first few films was not about drama and elaborate settings; he was just about killing people. In this film, Freddy has to make a great big production out of everything he does, and this just doesn't ring true in the hearts of those of us who know Freddy best. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child ends up being by far the least scary film of the entire series. It's a shame because the basic story was promising enough to take the series to great new heights. Having said all that, though, the film still manages to earn a strong four stars from me. I really liked what it tried to do; the special effects guys just needed to have been handled with a shorter leash.
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