Review: A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

“You shouldn’t have buried me. I’m not dead.”
- Freddy Krueger

Another gem I present to you in my never ending Freddy Krueger collection! I am really trying to ration them all out over an acceptable period! So here is another installment in the collection of cheesy lines, blood, guts and gore - A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.

The movie begins with Kristen Parker (Tuesday Knight) again having dreadful nightmares about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). She knows it can’t be possible as she and her surviving posse defeated him in their last show down. She becomes convinced of the fact that Freddy may not actually be dead, and that he is coming back for them. Her surviving friends, Roland Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) and Joey Crusel (Rodney Eastman) are tired of Kristen pulling them into her dreams unnecessarily. They are ready to continue with their lives, uninterrupted, and over the terror.

Kristen’s new boyfriend, Rick Johnson (Andras Jones) and his sister, Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) want to stand with Kristen, but don’t really believe her. Kristen is hunted down by Freddy, and she and the remaining survivors are slaughtered unceremoniously, but not before she makes the mistake of bringing Alice into the dream. Kristen is the last Elm Street kid, but has now opened the doors for Freddy to hunt outside his designated perimiter, and Alice has now been given Kristen’s gift of pulling others into her dreams.

Comically rocking those shades!

Alice realizes very quickly that Kristen was not crazy, and is terrified that she is now in the position that her deceased friend was: she needs to kill Freddy, and she has to do it soon. With every death that occurs, not only Freddy inherits their souls… Alice receives a part of their personality, too. Her boyfriend, Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel) quickly realizes that Alice needs all the help she can get, and chooses to fight the war with her.

Can Alice bury Freddy ultimately and for good? She is his new source of children, but can she put a stop to that, and turn the past around, even with all her friends that have passed at the hands of a monster? Is this all possible while still fighting the demons of her own sordid domestic life with her alcoholic father, Dennis Johnson (Nicholas Mele)?

A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is worth a 5.5/10. There was no real adding to Freddy’s history in this one (and that I love to see more of, always) and I thought the Dream Warriors were disposed of exceptionally fast. The story was, for a slasher, again entertaining, and the way that they broke Freddy out of his Elm Street limitation was done rather well. The concept that she was absorbing traits of the murdered was also a new spin altogether, so instead of a final fight with a load of kids, there was a final fight with one kid with a load of energy from others.

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