| A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child | |
| Director: | Stephen Hopkins |
| Producer: |
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| Screenplay: | Leslie Bohem |
| Story: |
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| Music: | Jay Ferguson |
| Cinematography: | Peter Levy |
| Editing: |
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| Studio: |
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| Distributor: | New Line Cinema |
| Runtime: | 90 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $8 million |
| Gross: | $22.1 million (US) |
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (stylized on-screen as A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child) is a 1989 American slasher film[1] directed by Stephen Hopkins and written by Leslie Bohem. It is the fifth installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and stars Lisa Wilcox, and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. The film follows Krueger, using a now pregnant Alice Johnson's baby's dreams to claim new victims.
The general tone is much darker than that of the previous films. A blue filter lighting technique is used in most of the scenes. It is one of the final slasher films released in the 1980s.
The Dream Child was released on August 11, 1989, and grossed $22.1 million on a budget of $8 million, a steep decline in box office receipts from Dream Warriors and The Dream Master, though still a box office success and the highest-grossing slasher film of 1989. It received mixed to negative reviews from critics.
The film was followed by (1991).
In June 1989, a year after the previous film, Alice and Dan have started dating, and there are no signs of Freddy Krueger. One day, while taking a shower after having sex with Dan, she has a vision of herself dressed in a nun's habit with a name-tag saying Amanda Krueger at a strange asylum. She is attacked by patients at the hospital but wakes up. The next day, Alice is graduating from high school alongside her new friends: Greta, an aspiring but reluctant supermodel; Mark, a comic book fan; and Yvonne, a hospital volunteer and swimmer. Alice confides her nightmare to Dan, who tells her she is in control of her dreams.
On her way to work, Alice finds herself back at the asylum, where she sees Amanda giving birth to a gruesomely deformed baby. Amanda tries to collect the baby before it escapes, but it sneaks out of the operating room. Alice follows the baby into the church where she defeated Freddy in the previous film. The baby finds Freddy's remains and quickly grows into an adult, hinting to Alice that he has found the key to coming back. Alarmed, she contacts Dan, who falls asleep en route to see her. Freddy attacks and electrocutes Dan, turning him into a frightful man/machine hybrid before veering him into oncoming traffic. Alice sees Dan's body come to life and taunt her before she faints. Waking in a hospital, she hears the news of Dan's death and that she is pregnant with his child. During the night, she is visited by a young boy named Jacob, but the next day, Yvonne tells her there are no children on her floor, nor is there a children's ward.
Alice tells her friends about Freddy and his lineage; Yvonne refuses to listen, but Mark and Greta are more supportive. That afternoon, at a dinner party at her home, Greta falls asleep at the table. She dreams of herself snapping at her mother and ranting over her controlling nature before Freddy arrives and forces Greta to eat her own organs before choking her in front of a laughing audience. In the real world, Greta falls down dead in front of her mother and their guests. Yvonne and Alice visit Mark, who is grieving Greta's death, and a rift forms between them. Mark falls asleep and is nearly killed by Freddy, but Alice saves him before seeing Jacob again. Jacob hints that Alice is his mother. Alice requests that Yvonne gets her an early ultrasound and discovers Freddy is using Jacob as a conduit to attack her friends even when she's awake and has been feeding him his victims to make him like himself.
Yvonne and Dan's parents still believe Alice is crazy. Dan's parents insist that she give them the baby when it is born, which Alice refuses. Alice and Mark research Krueger and the Nun Amanda. Realizing Amanda was trying to stop Freddy, they investigate her whereabouts, and Alice goes to sleep, hoping to find Amanda at the asylum. While there, Freddy lures her away by threatening Yvonne, who has fallen asleep in a Jacuzzi. Alice rescues Yvonne, who finally believes her. Mark falls asleep and is pulled into a comic book world, where, after becoming a superhero to fight him, Freddy becomes a super villain, turns him into a paper cutout and slashes him to pieces.
Alice goes to bed to find Freddy and saves her son. Realizing Freddy has been hiding in her every time she fell asleep, she draws Freddy out from within herself. Yvonne finds Amanda's remains at the asylum and Amanda joins the fight in the dream world, encouraging Jacob to use the power Freddy had been giving him. Jacob destroys Freddy, and his infant form is absorbed by his mother, while Alice picks up a baby Jacob. Warning Alice away, Amanda seals Freddy away in time.
Several months later, Jacob Daniel Johnson is enjoying a picnic with his mother, grandfather, and Yvonne. Some children jumping rope nearby are humming Freddy's rhyme, hinting at Freddy's return.
See main article: List of cast members of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and List of A Nightmare on Elm Street characters.
Freddy Krueger is also briefly portrayed onscreen by actors Michael Bailey Smith (as 'Super Freddy') and Noble Craig (as 'Merging Freddy').[2] [3]
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master was released in 1988 and quickly became a financial success and the highest-grossing film in the series to that point. With the production of the TV spin-off Freddy's Nightmares and a plethora of merchandise available, the profile of the franchise was at its highest point thus far.
Screenwriter Leslie Bohem, as interviewed in the 2010 documentary Never Sleep Again, originally pitched the basic storyline for The Dream Child to New Line executives during pre-production for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. New Line executive Sara Risher was pregnant at the time and took exception to the idea of a newborn Freddy Krueger clawing his way out of a woman's womb. After giving birth, Risher started to think about the storyline and realized that the teenagers who had watched the original film in 1984 were now starting to grow up and have their own families, prompting the development of The Dream Child in late 1988.
Pre-production was challenging primarily due to the frequently changing script. Director Stephen Hopkins recalled that the bulk of the final film came from Leslie Bohem's script, although John Skipp and Craig Spector also added material, causing the Writers Guild of America to intervene when deciding ultimate credits. Bohem's original draft had Alice and her friends rehearsing a school performance of Medea and he said it was, "very weird". Director Hopkins was keen for the film to have more Gothic imagery than its predecessors, leading to inserted footage of towers, castles, and a dungeon-like asylum.
The final editing was challenging due to the demands made by the MPAA to reduce the onscreen violence, blood, and gore. The most altered sequences were those for Dan and Greta which were edited down several times before a theatrical release with an R rating in the United States.
Several scenes were removed from the final cut. The graduation sequence, which showed Alice's father giving her the camera, was significantly reduced. As a result, there are several minor continuity errors such as Alice holding airplane tickets moments before Dan gives them to her as a surprise gift.
Upon its release, the movie was subjected to some cuts in the sequences of Dan's, Mark's and Greta's deaths to avoid being classified X by MPAA due to their extremely violent and graphic nature. An unrated version of the film, which contained longer, more graphic versions of Dan's, Greta's and Mark's death scenes, was originally released on VHS and Laserdisc formats. In Dan's scene, cables can be seen sliding under the skin of Dan's arm, a large piece of the bike pierces his leg, and the skin on Dan's head is much more graphically torn off while he screams in pain. In Greta's scene, Freddy slices open a doll that begins to bleed and Greta is shown to have a gaping wound in her stomach, from which Freddy starts to feed to her. In Australia, the scenes were cut in cinemas, but restored to the VHS release.[4]
The soundtrack has ten tracks. The first side is heavy metal and hard rock songs, and the second is primarily hip hop songs.
Bruce Dickinson, lead singer of heavy metal band Iron Maiden, wrote and performed the song "Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter" for the film. A second version of the song recorded with Iron Maiden became the band's only Number 1 single in its native UK when released in December 1990.
These were previously unreleased, until the A Nightmare On Elm Street - 8 CD Box Set.[5]
The film was released on VHS and Laserdisc on December 20, 1989.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was released on August 11, 1989, in 1,902 theaters in North America. On the first weekend, the film opened $8.1 million, falling behind Parenthood ($9.7 million) and James Cameron's The Abyss ($9.3 million).[6] The film ranked eighth at the second-weekend box office, with a revenue of $3.6 million, and it dropped out of the Top 10 list ranked at eleventh and fourteenth on the third and the fourth weekends, respectively. Overall, the film grossed $22.1 million at U.S. box office.
It is the highest grossing slasher film released in 1989. It is currently the second-lowest-grossing Nightmare on Elm Street film. The film ranked number forty-three of the Top fifty highest-grossing films released in the U.S. in 1989 and is thirty-seventh of all slasher films cataloged by Box Office Mojo.[7]
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 30% approval rating and an average rating of 4.12/10 based on 33 reviews. The site's consensus is: "A Nightmare on Elm Street feels exhausted by this cheesy fifth entry, bogged down by a convoluted mythology while showing none of the chilling technique that kicked off the franchise."[8] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 54 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
Caryn James of The New York Times wrote that the film "doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is – a genre film that won't totally insult your intelligence or your eyes".[9] Variety called it "a poorly constructed special effects showcase" with "highly variable" acting, but praised the special effects, stating that "saving grace is the series of spectacular special effects set pieces featuring fanciful makeup, mattes, stopmotion animation and opticals".[10] Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune praised the direction of director Stephen Hopkins, stating, "Using a style heavily indebted to music videos - lots of fast cutting, odd angles and gratuitous camera movements - Hopkins keeps the energy level up, though his manner is a bit too choppy to keep all of the diverse elements together." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times described it as "a dynamic, fully visually realized experience", complimenting the acting, set design, and directing. Thomas identifies Krueger as representing the irrational adult world to teenagers.[11] Richard Harrington of The Washington Post ranked it below the first and third films, saying the plot is too confusing.[12]
In 2016, Robert Englund recollected the experience working with Hopkins, "I met Stephen Hopkins, who's like the handsomest man in Hollywood, at a Thai restaurant in Culver City. Stephen was doing storyboards and he's such a great illustrator that I just said, 'Take me now.' He goes, 'I want this whole sequence to be like M. C. Escher.' I went 'Oh, perfect for a dream sequence, I get it.' That's all he had to say to me and show me his doodle on a napkin, and I was hooked." In the same interview, he also praised the special effects and experience when shooting the film, "My best time on that was the sequence in the insane asylum. That was fun because that was my first time with the floating crane camera. There's no crew. It was just me and 100 extras, and this little teeny camera. It was like having a drone on a little wiry crane ... and there's a lot of wide shots in that magnificent set."[13]
In a 1990 interview promoting the film Predator 2, Hopkins expressed disappointment with the final product, stating that "It was a rushed schedule without a reasonable budget and after I finished it, New Line and the MPAA came in and cut the guts out of it completely. What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can't even watch it anymore."[14]
