A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) October 2nd, 2023

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master picks up where A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors left off, by quickly killing off the survivors and nullifying the events of the previous film. Why care about franchise continuity when you have a new money to make! Can’t get Patricia Arquette to return as Kristen Parker? Who gives a fuck, recast her and kill her off. Robert Englund is ready to shoot so let’s write in a new dream warrior to fight Freddy, but this time we’ll call her the Dream Master.

This lack of commitment to the lore and previously established characters reduces the strength of the brand and cheapens the experience. Look, I’m not dumb enough to expect every slasher film to be an astounding examination of the human experience, but to demolish all the progress made by the previous installment is disrespectful to that film and the audience who enjoyed it. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is such a dramatic shift away from the brave new direction initiated by A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors that it forced me to reexamine the quality of the franchise as a whole.

A Nightmare on Elm Street – an inventive new addition to horror film history that’s both disgusting and fun… but sometimes dumb (I’m looking at you pool-noodle-arms-Freddy).
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge – I remember very little about this one except for the thinly veiled homosexual undertones.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors – The peak of the franchise fleshed out more lore than any other to date, finished Nancy’s story from the previous films and established a new hero in Kristen Parker.
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master – Completely disregard everything you loved about the previous movies, except the wacky kills, that’s all we are now.

That’s the biggest takeaway, the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise has no more draw than the later Saw or Final Destination films. The story is secondary to gorier and more imaginative kills. If that’s what audiences want to see then none of these complaints matter except it doesn’t appeal to me. Call me old fashioned but I believe every film is a work of art until proven terrible.

That being said, the kills in Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master were pretty cool. One guy is trapped and drowned in his own waterbed, and in the end Freddy is torn apart by the souls he’s stolen like Shang Tsung at the end of Mortal Kombat. Then again, for some reason they made a dog help resurrect Freddy but didn’t explain how or why the dog could dream travel or why it used that power to propagate evil. The dog IS the highlight of the film, the hellhound named Jason (I wonder why?) holds the distinction of being the only dog I’ve seen piss fire on screen. That’s dream magic for ya.

Novelty dog piss does not a masterpiece make, but Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master does give dog shit a run for its money. Skip this movie, only the most devoted Krugerphiles should submit themselves to this level of masochism. On the bright side, it did give me an idea for a take on the Freddy Kruger character. What if in the next movie, Freddy possesses a New Line Cinema executive who deliberately produces terrible disinteresting franchises that are so bad they put audiences to sleep, giving Freddy a chance to murder everyone in the theater at the same time! This idea may, or may not, have come to me after nodding off in the last 20 minutes of Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.