Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, A - 1/5

Upon watching "A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child", I have come to the conclusion that there is one word that aptly describes this film: clusterfuck. Despite some very convincing attempts at trying...oh hell, this film doesn't even feel like it tries at all. It never makes any sense, the acting and writing is insanely poor, and even the special effects seem to have been downgraded. How one can even compare this to its originator film is beyond me.

Alice has beaten Freddy in "4" by...I don't know, shoving a mirror or something in his face, who the fuck cares at this point...so now she is able to move on with her life and ignore the fact that she lost all her friends cause now she is with Dan, the hunky football star. Of course, being the young teens they are, as the opening scene shows us, they make love because they are in love. And with her new set of friends/Freddy victims, they all are graduating and going to move on with their lives. UNTIL FREDDY RETURNS! Freddy comes back by using the dreams of Alice's unborn child to drawn in his new victims (aka Alice's friends) and now Alice must find ANOTHER way to kill him once and for all. This time with the help of Freddy's mother Amanda Kruger...or something.

As you can see, this movie makes about as much sense as pissing on an electric fence. Hey it can be a jolt, but in the end you just get burned too. That's how "The Dream Child" is. I wish I could go through and show you the flaws of the story, but the story is, essentially, a flaw in its entirety. None of it ever makes sense from showing you how Freddy is 'reborn' (literally its a fucking Freddy looking baby that crawls back into his clothes and ba bam! He's back) to how he is killed again. Nothing in this movie makes sense. In fact, it makes LESS sense that "4", which in itself is quite the feat. The deaths are all ridiculous and not scary at all as much as 'punch yourself in the face bat shit crazy' and the characters are still worthless to invest your energy and emotion in. The acting is awful and Fred Kruger has become a parody of himself. The attempts at creating a nightmare world for Kruger are so over the top that it never feels more than just a kids movie with gore, nudity, and swearing and trying to follow the dialogue will likely put one in a coma with its run of the mill attempts at originality. It's hard for me to say this, but the series actually got worse with this sequel. There is low and then there is "The Dream Child".

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this one as it really doesn't even deserve the time and effort to write this review. Of course, its not ALL bad. The gothic tones at times are nice and some of the special effects work to the film's advantage (when their not undermined by the story's stupidity), but from beginning to end "The Dream Child" is just a clusterfuck.

BONUS RANT: This whole film is essentially a bonus rant, so I'll keep this one simple. If you are going to advertise a film with a number in the title, please oh please, put it in the title sequence for the movie. Just calling it "A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Child" as the credits do, makes it seem like its not so much a sequel as it is an off shoot. Not that its good at being either, but for consistency's sake, just put the fucking 5 in there. Don't treat us like we haven't seen the first four, especially when its such a direct sequel to "4". 

Written By Matt Reifschneider