Rating: ***1/2
Starring: Robert Englund, Rodney Eastman, Lisa Wilcox

A year (or two) has passed since the three remaining (and original) Elm Street children defeated the dream-world bogeyman known as Freddy Krueger, living somewhat normal lives free of fear of him ever coming back. Save for one; Kristen, an Elm Street girl with the power to call in other dreaming teenagers into her own dream. She can't seem to budge off the feeling that the dream demon is far from gone and true enough, Freddy somehow finds a way back into existing and starts to murder off the three, saving Kristen for last.

With the level of comic one-liners noticeably higher and the deaths elaborately more cartoonish, Dream Master marks the beginning of Freddy's downfall as a horror villain and rise as a global 80s pop culture icon. Take notice that the previous Elm Street entries had Freddy staying in the shadows, his jokes sicker than laughable; here, he takes a lot of his action in the light, his lines streaming across comedy, and his kills lacking a decent amount of blood splash. Yes, the kills are imaginative, but they starting to get too imaginative as they're more outrageous than the last, a reason why many hardcore horror fans seems doubtful labeling this franchise a slasher series.

With the plot revolving more around the Springwood slasher's dream haunting and killing, even more interesting that it also resembles a sort of reboot since it now focuses on a new generation of Elm street teens, it's not too hard to have a good chunk of the film with him being outrageously evil in an inviting, near cartoon-villain manner. Whenever he is around, there's bound to be some strange crud going on until in the end wherein Alice hardens up and goes kung-fu punkette against Freddy in one of slasher history's most entertaining mano (lady-o?)-a-monster final brawl, with a gruesome (momentary) demise for Mr. Krueger himself. This being mentioned, it may sounds like the rest of the teen casts are pretty much there just to be meat for Krueger's cutting. Well, that's a yes and a no; while only a few of them are properly developed and characterized, some are leaning close to a parody of a character they are portraying. They are likable enough to stand out during their short screen time and you can really feel they're close.

Slipping into a cheesier foray not only in terms of human-faced pizza toppings, Dream Master fairs well as a movie but as a sequel, it red lights us that our Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs may get sillier in his later adventures...
Bodycount:
1 male stabbed on the gut with a razor glove
1 male slashed with a razor glove, drowned in water bed
1 female thrown into a furnace, burned to death
1 female suffocates
1 male gets a flying razor glove to the gut
1 female crushed to death
Total: 6
It's remarkable how little blood there is in this one... It's gooey, but not gory.
ReplyDeleteThe way I see it, the further this franchise went, the lesser the blood flow...that was until Freddy vs Jason, but arguably, a lot of them blood was by the J-Man.
Delete