Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child!!!

Note the absence of the number 5. Just like with people, when you need to start hiding your series' age, it's time to think about wrapping it up.

Fifth instalments generally suck, and The Dream Child largely falls under the curse. Maybe it's because horror franchises have a natural lifespan of four movies: Friday the 13th Part 4 was called "The Final Chapter" (it wasn't), Hellraiser 4 was the last one to get a theatrical release, and Final Destination 4 was dubbed, simply, "The Final Destination" (it also wasn't). Parts 5 always seem to be extending the premise a little too far, too gimmicky, and redundant. But as sad and tired as Dream Child sometimes feels, it still has moments and a ton of style that endear it to me, and probably to no one else.

The Jacob's Ladder/Silent Hill/Event Horizon tier aesthetics in the asylum scenes are consistently on point.

This time the movie starts off with Alice and Dan from Part 4 having secks. This is the origin of the pregnancy around which the drama revolves. Alice has a dream about being a nun gang-raped by 100 maniacs who then gives birth to BABY FREDDY. Although Freddy was burned by a mob as an adult, Baby Freddy in the dream world still appears to be burned, although maybe it's just ugly, I don't know.

Separated at birth: Fred Krueger and a Bitcoin investor (respectively).

Everything in this movie is great up until Freddy's resurrection. It has a nice, dark, kind of expressionistic quality to it. But when Freddy shows up the pacing gets all weird and the tone of the movie vacillates wildly between dark serious horror and unfunny comedy, making it irritating. It doesn't help that Freddy only has three kills in this movie, and one of them is the lamest yet.

Taaake oooon meeee

So Freddy bumps off Dan and proceeds to try and corrupt Alice's unborn child for...some reason, I guess. Maybe to be reborn through him, or use him as an agent in the real world? I don't know, and neither did the writer. Probably to be a dick, by this point.

2bf imagine the genes you'd get from her.

The retardation kicks into high gear at the end of the second act when Freddy kills a comic book geek by skateboarding toward him on a bladed skateboard, disappearing, calling him names, turning into Super Freddy, complete with cape (yes), and finally turning him into paper and then cutting him to bits. This scene encapsulates, albeit hilariously, everything that went wrong with the series: by this point Freddy could no longer be described as scary or even menacing, but annoying. If Part 5-era Freddy came up to you in a dream, you'd be like, "go away". That's why I think they should have stuck with the Freddy Baby the whole time, because it's creepy as shit, except when you see it moving from behind and it looks like a rubber chicken.

Every Frame An Edgy Metal Album Cover

There are, however, a few things I really liked about this movie. Alice's drunk dad from Part 4 is now going to meetings and trying to be a better person, which is a completely unexpected bit of character development that makes us care about him, making me wonder if he was supposed to be attacked at some point (he isn't). The opening and ending sequences have some wildly imaginative Gothic/Expressionistic uses of space, shadows, lenses and camera movements. We also learn that Freddy is such an asshole he calls his own mother "bitch" (although to be fair this is how he addresses everyone).

I get this shit from my mom too.

Moreover, Lisa Wilcox is again great as Alice, and it's nice to see her character move forward with some closure and new hope for the future. As much as the series was starting to get old, in a way it was also growing up. So forgive the worst parts of 5 because there's good stuff in there too, and it's a lot higher effort than, say, the same year's Jason Takes Manhattan. After this there would be one more regular sequel, and it would be the worst in the whole series, but don't worry, after Freddy's Dead everything got better! Until the remake.