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Thursday, October 15, 2009

31 Days of Halloween - Day 15 - Movie













The plot is pretty simple, and Freddy himself seems a bit diminished, but "A Nightmare On Elm Street 5 - The Dream Child" (1989) may be my favorite in the series. It's certainly my favorite of the sequels, and a nice surprise improvement over the previous entry.

Freddy, using dream imagery of his mother, is literally reborn in this movie. Paralleling this event, Alice (Lisa Wilcox) discovers shortly after graduation, that she is pregnant. As her friends start getting killed off by Freddy while she's awake, she wonders how he is doing it, since he's clearly not using her to bring them into her dreams. She soon discovers that Freddy's using the dreams of her unborn son instead. This time, the only way to get rid of Freddy is to uncover the earthly remains of Freddy's mother.

Visually, this movie is the most striking and imaginative of the bunch, The nightmare killing scenarios are a step up from every previous entry, and are highly inventive, particularly the comic book inspired one that is mostly in black and white, and the M.C. Escher inspired sequence. The sets are fantastic, and the special effects are very nicely accomplished. The only lapse in judgement was the one death from overeating which could easily have been replaced with a death by creepy dolls, as seemed to be indicated.

I did get the sense that this movie had a lot of material excised from the screenplay. Characters seemed to come and go with some awkward gaps between appearances, and certain elements seemed to stall before going anywhere. In spite of this I was overall pleased by this movie.

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