Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master!!!

We're going all the way with this.

Just as Dream Warriors was the mid-80s time capsule that threw Dungeons and Dragons, hair metal, The Breakfast Club and most of its cast into a blender and just about got away with it, so part 4: The Dream Master moves with the times by giving us "the MTV Nightmare", complete with MTV title spots, water beds, The Karate Kid, and other 80s-core that hipster flicks of today cram in because DUDE THE 80S LMAO but which was, in its original context, actually endearing (80s nostalgia is actually misidentified nostalgia for a time when you could put Fu Man Chews in a movie without some 500-lb Umm Excuse Me umm-excuse-meing about it, but I digress).

Welcome to MY lightshow.

So if you're determined to see A Nightmare on Elm Street as a scary horror series and Freddy Krueger as a dark, menacing figure, immediately skip to Wes Craven's New Nightmare, because at this point, the scares are gone. This movie doesn't even attempt to be scary at any point, and brazenly ushers Freddy himself into the spotlight as a ham and cheese pop culture villain who does shit like pose with sunglasses on a beach and order pizza with the faces of his victims depicted as meatballs on it.

Yes, that really happens.

But if you want a pacy, nonsensical, 80s-hip trip into unabashed surrealistic effects-driven moviemaking, The Dream Master has a lot to recommend it. This is also the one where a dog pisses fire on Freddy Krueger's grave, bringing him back to life, which is both an apt metaphor for the state of the series for the next couple of flicks and a characteristically left-field, genuinely imaginative and dreamlike image that encapsulates everything Renny Harlin's flickkino (or kinoflick) gets right. I don't know if it's the dumbest smart movie or the smartest dumb joint I've seen, but it's one of them.

"Very observant. The sacred and the propane" - horror producer "Little" Carmine Lupertazzi

The thing is, for everything about part 4 that sucks (Freddy's glove cutting through the water like a shark's fin, the Karate Kid death) there's something boldly imaginative or downright artistic, like the body-horror-inspired cockroach death or Alice flying backwards into the cinema screen. It's like watching alternating scenes directed by Michael Bay and David Lynch. Since it's one of the longer entries, I wonder how much a judicious fan edit could actually improve it (I think this about part 5 too).

"This is really turning out to be a nightmare on Elm Street for: the Dream Master." I turned 360 degrees and walked right out of the kinoplex.

What we can all agree on is that Tuesday Knight's opening song is top tier pop and Lisa Wilcox is excellent as Alice, the new Final Girl who has the distinction of being the only two times undefeated champion of Nightmare on Elm Street films. She's the Dream Master of the title, a concept that's barely explained in some background dialogue delivered by Bob Shaye in a classroom scene. Basically there's a positive gate and a negative gate, and Freddy is the guardian of the negative gate, making Alice his equal and opposite, the guardian of the positive gate. I actually love how half-assedly this exposition is delivered because it shows that Harlin knows details like that don't matter, that film editing is basically free-associative in nature, and that gives the film, at times, a real dreamlike feeling.

Lost Burning Youth is not, so far as I can tell, a real film. However, not only does it sum up the condition of our unlucky protagonists, but it sounds like some arthouse film, which would make Reefer Madness the punchline to the double bill. No image therefore sums up The Dream Master quite like this one.

So while some of these movies are objectively pretty bad (2, 5 and 6), part 4 exists in a weird quantum state. It's no 1, 3 or 7, but it's a really intriguing oddity, and was the most successful release in the series at the time (though this probably has a lot to do with the positive reaction to 3). It also killed off the survivors from 3 in short order, and part 5, released less than a year after it, was a much diminished success, so this was clearly where the wave peaked in terms of popular interest. Nonetheless the studio capitalised on that moment in every way it could, with the two-season Freddy's Nightmares TV show spinoff following and all manner of merchandising like pinball machines appearing around this time. Not many pop culture phenomena reach such glorious heights and self-parodic lows at the very same time. And this, more than anything, shows us why the 80s are unrepeatable.