A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Chuck Russell
"Welcome to prime time, bitch!"
Sequels to films are tough to pull off. The cemetery of shitty, rushed-out-the-door sequels that fell flat is like Flanders Field at this point. But occasionally you get something that is interesting or significant, tackling the original concept from the first film in a slightly different way. Terminator 2, Aliens, Gremlins 2, Evil Dead 2, Dawn of the Dead (and Day of the Dead, rounding out the rare "perfect trilogy"), each of the Planet of the Apes sequels (both original and remake): they all utilize the original story--and our knowledge of it--to twist things around and give us a new perspective. They may not always surpass the original story, but they add to its existence in a pleasing way.
And then you have the big three 1980's horror franchises: Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th. Each franchise is a complete jumbled grab-bag of quality, with a strong statistical lean toward "unbelievable shit," but a couple of notably strong (or strange) entries do exist. The most notable example is one of my favorite horror movies of all time, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. It was John Carpenter's attempt to break the franchise out of its doldrums before it got stale and turn it into a "spooky movie anthology" series that would try new stories under the banner of Halloween. But then it came out, didn't have Michael Meyers in it, was hated by morons, and so now we all get to see a new dumb Halloween movie every couple of years.
Two Spooktobers ago, we looked at A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, which was a surprising treat, mostly due to its wonderful queer subtext that was woven into the script unbeknownst to the director. The movie as a whole is a bit incomprehensible, but there's enough there to charm you into enjoying it, maybe even despite yourself. Like Halloween 3, it was also panned by fans (and audiences in general) for going too far off the rails, so the next film in the series would need to get back to its roots. That's where today's film comes in.
Dream Warriors isn't quite the masterpiece of horror that the original Elm Street is, but asking someone to replicate the skill and vision of Wes Craven is unfair, and Chuck Russell does an admirable job. The concept is downright brilliant: instead of just outright hacking and slashing teens, or turning them into a geyser of blood, Freddy injures them enough that the teens are suspected of self harm and are locked up in a mental hospital where they can be tortured and picked off at his leisure.
The execution is a little muddled for my tastes, because the filmmakers drag the character of Nancy Thompson (played abysmally by Heather Langenkamp again) back in so that she can train the teens in the art of dream combat, which I guess she mastered because she didn't die to Freddy that one time? But who cares about the story execution, because the most important facet that this film introduces to the franchise is creating the character of Freddy Krueger as we know him today. Freddy is unique among the 80's slasher monsters because he can talk and emote, and this is the film where they really turn Robert Englund loose and gave Freddy his best character moments of the series. When someone mentions Freddy Krueger, this is exactly the kind of thing you think of:
This is a bit of a double-edged sword, unfortunately, because as great as the TV scene is, it gave future hacks permission to do crimes against humanity like this:
So while Dream Warriors Freddy may be the ideal Freddy, it moved the...um...Kruegerton Window toward pure cartoonish goofiness and it never really looked back. It's a shame, because Dream Warriors is still scary and disgusting. Flesh is slashed, children are tortured, and a character has his veins ripped out and used to control him like a marionette doll.
I really enjoy the subtext about the teens tackling their own inner trauma. Throughout the film the teens are told by the hospital staff that their wounds and tortured dreams are their own fault, and faulty Freudian psychoanalytic thinking is thrown in their faces. As a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, I like the idea of being proactive with mental health challenges. The characters challenge their fear head on with strategies they work on in group therapy with their peers. Freddy may as well be a maladaptive thought or some negative self talk, and the only way to defeat these things is to confront them. It's a nice touch to give some depth to the film, even if its a little sloppy in its execution.
The stuff I really don't like is the exploration of Freddy's origin. There's a ghostly nun character that one of the therapists sees hanging out around the hospital who eventually explains that Freddy's mother was raped by 100 criminally insane mental patients and that she gave birth to a demon, or something. It's just so unnecessary, and only exists to tack on another 12 minutes to the runtime. However, the quest the nun gives to return Freddy's earthly remains to hallowed ground does give us the scene where his skeleton fights like he's in Jason and the Argonauts and then roars like an animal while pumping his fists in the air. So I guess it's not all bad.
Dream Warriors may not keep pace with the creme de la creme of 80's slashers, but it adds enough to the forumla to make it the second best of the series (at least until Wes Craven steps back in with New Nightmare), and features some strong performances by Patricia Arquette (in her first role!) and a young Larry Fishburne.
REVIEW: It's an easy recommend from me, bitch.
HOW I WATCHED IT: I own all these movies on Blu-Ray, bitch.
BEVERAGE: A Brewery Vivant Verdun, bitch.
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