Spoilers below.
Dream Warriors is to A Nightmare on Elm Street as Aliens is to Alien, except both are better because Ridley Scott is a fart-huffing turbofedora and James Cameron is a meathead douchebag who whacks it to blue catgirls and mechs in about equal measure. But while Alien was carried by ELP album artist H.R. Geiger, Aliens had superior bantz and much better effects, and didn't have that awful hard cut between the puppet robot head and Bilbo which pisses me off every time I've watched Alien (twice).
So what I really mean is that, while Freddy's Revenge veered off into the insane, Dream Warriors is a proper sequel that expands on the impressive foundations laid by the original, going bigger and more action-packed while bringing back and further developing characters from the original. This one set the template the next three would try to match, usually with far diminished returns, but it was also a perfect time capsule of 1986, and, if nothing else, the subsequent sequels kept up that tradition beautifully.
The kino opens (and closes) to the strains of Dokken, who are the Beethoven of hair metal bands. Our /mu/ patrician Kristen (Patricia Arquette) is trying to stay awake by blasting "Into the Fire" and making a house out of Popsicle sticks, but she's thwarted by her mom, drifts off to sleep and is soon in the land of dreams. Freddy shows up and chases her, and cuts her wrist, so when she wakes up screaming it looks like she tried to kill herself.
This is interesting because in the first film Freddy arranged the murders so that Rod looked like he killed Tina, and then hanged himself in his cell, and now it looks like he's back to sort of covering his tracks by making his murders look like suicides. Coincidentally or otherwise, Kristen is committed to the same mental institution where other Freddy victims are holed up. Doctor Neil Gordon is baffled by their condition, until Nancy Thompson, Final Girl of part 1, shows up with her brand of expertise.
Nancy's on the hypnocil, an experimental drug that suppresses dreams, which suggests that Freddy continued to pursue her after the end of the original, but Kristen manages to pull her into her own dream, tipping Nancy off that these kids can develop their will into "powers" to fight back in the dream world. This makes some sense and is consistent with the idea of "taking back control" of the dream introduced in the original. It also ties into two of the great mid-80s motifs of the film: the Breakfast Club misfits banding together in the face of adversity and the Dungeons and Dragons-style party of adventurers approaching the unknown. On the other hand, some of the powers and costumes are pretty gay such as this Harry Potter looking NERD:
Never mind that though. For every idea that sputters and dies on the vine, there's something great to make up for it, whether it's Kincaid's top tier trash talk, Freddy's Harryhausen-style stop-motion animated skeleton, the return of based John Saxon as Donald Thompson (Nancy's father), or best girl, fellow Dokken fan and junkiefu Taryn White (Jennifer Rubin), who, as she explains, is "beautiful...and bad":
This one also introduces the idea of creative, personalised kills, such as puppet-making loner Philip who is killed in the best way maybe ever conceived in a horror movie: Freddy rips his veins or tendons out of his feet and wrists and uses them to walk him off a ledge like a marionette. Like everything else in Dream Warriors, they get the fine balance between creativity, darkness and goofiness just about right - a feat never again to be successfully completed. It's like Tim Burton's Batman kinos before Joel Schumacher took the wheel and plowed the franchise straight off a cliff.
Yet another way Dream Warriors creeps right up to the precipice is in its handling of backstory, something everyone thinks they want but no one ever likes when they get it. Dream Warriors reveals just the right amount by introducing Freddy's childhood nickname: The Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs, earned when he was conceived by the gang rape of a nun in an old wing of the mental hospital when she was locked in with the lunatics. This was exactly enough backstory (and, most importantly, creepy enough) to last Freddy forever. We didn't need any more, and no more of it was good past this point.
So everything about Dream Warriors works while exhausting the possibilities for further sequels by pushing it to its absolute limit. The one-liners and gag deaths are great, but just a tiny nudge would make them terrible and excessive. It even blows its wad by killing off Nancy herself, arguably the best Final Girl in slasher history, an audacious decision which lends the ending a significance and weight that, once again, can never be repeated. So this is what it looks like when a series reaches its natural and logical endpoint, pulling out all the stops and giving us a little bit of everything, and just about getting away with it.
And then they made three more.
Dream Warriors is to A Nightmare on Elm Street as Aliens is to Alien, except both are better because Ridley Scott is a fart-huffing turbofedora and James Cameron is a meathead douchebag who whacks it to blue catgirls and mechs in about equal measure. But while Alien was carried by ELP album artist H.R. Geiger, Aliens had superior bantz and much better effects, and didn't have that awful hard cut between the puppet robot head and Bilbo which pisses me off every time I've watched Alien (twice).
 |
| They dropped "Part" from the title, probably because "Part 2" wasn't part 2 of anything. |
So what I really mean is that, while Freddy's Revenge veered off into the insane, Dream Warriors is a proper sequel that expands on the impressive foundations laid by the original, going bigger and more action-packed while bringing back and further developing characters from the original. This one set the template the next three would try to match, usually with far diminished returns, but it was also a perfect time capsule of 1986, and, if nothing else, the subsequent sequels kept up that tradition beautifully.
 |
| Freddy: The Hair Years. |
The kino opens (and closes) to the strains of Dokken, who are the Beethoven of hair metal bands. Our /mu/ patrician Kristen (Patricia Arquette) is trying to stay awake by blasting "Into the Fire" and making a house out of Popsicle sticks, but she's thwarted by her mom, drifts off to sleep and is soon in the land of dreams. Freddy shows up and chases her, and cuts her wrist, so when she wakes up screaming it looks like she tried to kill herself.
 |
| Me after watching five minutes of Freddy's Dead. |
This is interesting because in the first film Freddy arranged the murders so that Rod looked like he killed Tina, and then hanged himself in his cell, and now it looks like he's back to sort of covering his tracks by making his murders look like suicides. Coincidentally or otherwise, Kristen is committed to the same mental institution where other Freddy victims are holed up. Doctor Neil Gordon is baffled by their condition, until Nancy Thompson, Final Girl of part 1, shows up with her brand of expertise.
 |
| Incidentally, Nancy >>> Laurie Strode. |
Nancy's on the hypnocil, an experimental drug that suppresses dreams, which suggests that Freddy continued to pursue her after the end of the original, but Kristen manages to pull her into her own dream, tipping Nancy off that these kids can develop their will into "powers" to fight back in the dream world. This makes some sense and is consistent with the idea of "taking back control" of the dream introduced in the original. It also ties into two of the great mid-80s motifs of the film: the Breakfast Club misfits banding together in the face of adversity and the Dungeons and Dragons-style party of adventurers approaching the unknown. On the other hand, some of the powers and costumes are pretty gay such as this Harry Potter looking NERD:
 |
| "I am the wizard master!" - Urkel "Screech" Poindexter, before getting killed. |
Never mind that though. For every idea that sputters and dies on the vine, there's something great to make up for it, whether it's Kincaid's top tier trash talk, Freddy's Harryhausen-style stop-motion animated skeleton, the return of based John Saxon as Donald Thompson (Nancy's father), or best girl, fellow Dokken fan and junkiefu Taryn White (Jennifer Rubin), who, as she explains, is "beautiful...and bad":
 |
| >tfw no 11/10 punk rock gf with two feet tall mohawk and glitter on her chest |
This one also introduces the idea of creative, personalised kills, such as puppet-making loner Philip who is killed in the best way maybe ever conceived in a horror movie: Freddy rips his veins or tendons out of his feet and wrists and uses them to walk him off a ledge like a marionette. Like everything else in Dream Warriors, they get the fine balance between creativity, darkness and goofiness just about right - a feat never again to be successfully completed. It's like Tim Burton's Batman kinos before Joel Schumacher took the wheel and plowed the franchise straight off a cliff.
 |
| He'll feel that in the morning. |
Yet another way Dream Warriors creeps right up to the precipice is in its handling of backstory, something everyone thinks they want but no one ever likes when they get it. Dream Warriors reveals just the right amount by introducing Freddy's childhood nickname: The Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs, earned when he was conceived by the gang rape of a nun in an old wing of the mental hospital when she was locked in with the lunatics. This was exactly enough backstory (and, most importantly, creepy enough) to last Freddy forever. We didn't need any more, and no more of it was good past this point.
 |
| This sounds like something they'd say on Memri TV. |
So everything about Dream Warriors works while exhausting the possibilities for further sequels by pushing it to its absolute limit. The one-liners and gag deaths are great, but just a tiny nudge would make them terrible and excessive. It even blows its wad by killing off Nancy herself, arguably the best Final Girl in slasher history, an audacious decision which lends the ending a significance and weight that, once again, can never be repeated. So this is what it looks like when a series reaches its natural and logical endpoint, pulling out all the stops and giving us a little bit of everything, and just about getting away with it.
And then they made three more.
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