A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child aka Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (1989)

(On Blu-Ray, November 2021) By this point in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, five instalments deep, the films were almost operating on autopilot, and so will my review. Once again in The Dream Child, Freddy Krueger is slaughtering an entire finishing class of students brought forth as slasher fodder. Once more, a plucky heroine triumphs over near-impossible evil. Once more, the film’s strongest moments (and the series’ chief claim to distinction in a crowded 1980s slasher-horror field) come from the disturbing oneiric sequences where reality and dream logic crash into gory sequences. Once more, the film undermines its own potency by having antagonist Freddy Krueger spout a stream of nonsensical one-liners, simply stringing puns one after the other — it’s hard to make a credible horror film when the antagonist acts like a terrible stand-up comedian. It all combines to create something that is frustrating, but admittedly still more interesting than most of the slasher horror films of the time — a mixture of special effects, gothic weirdness, call-backs to the series’ mythology and some darker imagery to go with the provocative pregnancy motif of the film. Still, you have to be a fan (or at least tolerant) of the series to make it all the way to The Dream Child — it’s more of the same.