A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) October 7th, 2024

I didn’t watch any of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films growing up and only knew of Freddy Krueger through quiet whispers and hushed tones. It took me years to grow into loving horror and begin exploring the best and worst of the genre. Now every October my wife and I burn through the next installments of the classic horror Francises of the 80s and 90s, including A Nightmare on Elm Street. As much as I hate A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child I am grateful for the chance to experience its failures firsthand.

Where are we in the series? The first installment is strong, but weird. Freddy-with-the-long-arms haunts my dreams through embarrassment, not fear. Part 2 takes a dip in quality but I’m sure it has massive appeal to people of a certain disposition. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a five star 80s horror outlier standing alone at the top of the franchise. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is a sharp drop in quality equally matched by its successor.

Freddy’s been dead many times but if I know anything it’s that if we can dream, he can kill us. This time he seeks to be reborn and torments a mother-to-be by invading the dreams of her unborn child. The uncharacteristically pro life advocate attempts to infuse his essence into the fetus but is blocked by the spirit of his ironically pro choice mother, Sister Mary Helena aka Amanda Krueger. I guess being raped by 100 maniacs’ll do that to ya.

I know Freddy’s supposed to be ‘The Funny One’ in the horror villain boyband, but there’s only so many times I can laugh at his violent dad jokes. Though there is no such limit on him calling someone ‘bitch’. That shit kills me.

Speaking of kills, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child does contribute a few memorably bizarre slaughters to the series’ mythos. Freddy foreshadows another film we watched this month by fusing a man and motorcycle into a painfully petrol powered cyborg of death. He flirts with getting canceled by force-feeding a girl with an eating disorder to death in a scene reminiscent of a famous scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Each of those imaginative and gruesome deaths merely set the stage for probably the weirdest Krueger kill of all, the Take on Me music-video-kill. Oh, you’d like me to elaborate? Well I’m not gonna. If you know that video, and you understand how Freddy crafts imaginative nightmares for each victim based on their specific fears or an aspect of their personality, then you can figure out that Freddy murders the artistic character by turning him into a paper version of himself and then like, cuts it up or something. Ok, so I did explain it.

As we near the end of this franchise, I find myself excited for the finish line as the crushing disappointments of each film compounds into a dreadful obligation to watch the next. Luckily I’ve previously watched Wes Craven’s New Nightmare leaving only Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare left unseen (Not including Freddy vs. Jason, the 2010 remake or the A Nightmare on My Street Fresh Prince music video). I’m glad this nightmare will soon be over, but I’ll probably rewatch Wes Craven’s New Nightmare because it’s actually pretty good.