2 out of 5

Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

During the first big Freddy reveal in NoES 5, the dream sequence into which Alice (the ‘Master’ from part 4) is thrust does an adequate job of building up the spectacle: a creepy church setting, an arcane altar of furled roots emerging from the ground, Freddy’s clothes inflating with the body of our killer, as the music reaches a crescendo and the altar grows to an obscene height, threatening to tip over, Kruger silhouetted by some rosy stained glass in the background… glass you know is going to explode.  And explode it does!… but instead of this being the rock and roll climax to the scene, the explosion knocks Freddy down, and the altar deflates.  Our creepy bad guy is fallible.  It totally ruins the momentum the scene had going for it.  This is a fairly good summary of the fifth entry in the series.

Film 5 stands shoulder-to-shoulder with ‘Freddy’s Revenge’ in terms of mismatched motives for the series.  ‘Revenge’ had its homoerotic subtext that was interesting, but didn’t properly leverage the film’s / characters’ strengths to promote it, and thus had no choice but to collapse upon itself by the end.  ‘Dream Child’ is trying to heighten the material somewhat by including some mature elements – teen pregnancy, anorexia – that certainly have their place in teen flicks (and teen horror) but, again, aren’t fully supported by the script.  It also drags the focus out and slows the film down; even though this is the shortest Freddy yet (falling shy of 90 minutes), it feels longer, Alice and her new batch of Freddy fodder slow to get to the horror, director Hopkins hoping that those singing girls and that creepy house and an opening with a baby prosthetic will be enough to keep us creeped until things finally start to go truly awry.  But even then, the film feels like it’s either trying too hard (the ‘speed demon’ gag, the prosthetics of which are too clumsily executed to recognize it as gruesome), or idea-checking the sequel with which I’ve compared it, straight up nabbing the ‘Freddy emerges from beneath the skin’ move from ‘Revenge’.

The character carryover is nice, and the overall idea – Alice’s baby as the vessel for Freddy – is pretty inspired, and well-woven into how it’s realized, allowing the progression from film four to here feel fairly natural, but sapped of the bananas aspect of ‘Dream Warriors’ – purposefully so, this being the ‘serious’ Nightmare flick – ‘The Dream Child’ just doesn’t have much going for it otherwise.  The cast dedicates themselves to the tone, and Hopkins similarly keeps things fairly dour, even recasting Kruger back as a more grim and spiteful ‘bitch’-slinging bastard, but again, there’s just not enough meat to the story to swing us over to this attempted new take.