A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master Review

After arguably the best film in the series so far with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, it was inevitable that the quality would dip. How low the series could go was a worrying thought, but considering the relative consistency from the previous films, I held out hope for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. I wish I hadn’t, especially since this may be one of the worst films out there. Somehow removing all the talent, interest, humour and gory horror of the third film, but also the campy innovation of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, this entrance into the series provides hopefully the lowest point of Freddy Krueger’s appearances.

Made to appeal to the 80s teen demographic, Renny Harlin’s magnum opus has aged about as poorly as you would expect. Outdated slang, overblown hairstyles and generic, one-note characters linger around every corner. Introducing us to yet another new group of protagonists, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master has no narrative weight to it. Simplistic, straight to the point, and not interesting in the slightest. Bland caricatures litter the narrative, and it’s at this point in the history of this series where the audience can actively root for the monster, rather than the protagonists. It’s not difficult, either, considering how useless and infantile most of these leading performers are.

Each have one, simple character trait that is later utilised in one of the most contrived, hilariously poor finales I’ve ever seen put to film. Pooling together the worst parts of The Breakfast Club with the many poor aspects of It: Chapter 2, the final half-hour of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, is nothing short of awful. Whereas this could be forgiven if the film fell under the umbrella of “so bad it’s good”, I didn’t get any humour out of this one. After such a strong third entry, I was hoping for more of the same thrills and creativity that Chuck Russell had to offer, but no such luck with this one. It’s so bad it’s incompetent, and there’s not much to laugh at when the film is being egregiously dreadful.

Incompetent on every level, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is neither scary nor entertaining. One of the very few films I could name that holds absolutely no value whatsoever. As a concept, it’s clumsy and a tad boring, upon execution, it’s worse than I could have ever imagined. Bland characters that are one-note from start to finish without even a tinge of development, uninspired moments of violence that fall to pieces when compared with even the more plodding parts of the earlier films, this is a nightmare in of itself, and not a chilling one.