Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 + 5




Nightmare 4: The Dream Master
This now is my personal favoured of the Nightmare sequels.
For a simple reason so: It’s been directed by Renny Harlin who formerly directed Prison for Charles Band’s Empire International.
Also it features one of my fave lines in the series:
“I bet you're the only male in this school suffering from penis envy.”

If that made you cringe, though I bet that Freud would have loved to analyse this series, then the bland way in which works like Alice in Wonderland or Kafka’s The Transformation are quoted will leave you crying. I’m not positively sure if Alice’s travel through the movie screen into a drab black & white dream world is meant as a nod to Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy escapes her drab reality into a Technicolor dream world, but I’m not ruling out that possibility.
My love for the movie aside, even I find it difficult to overlook the fact how different Lisa Wilcox looks from her double in the required 80’s montage sequence, I mean c’mon, how hard would it have been to find a remotely matching wig?

Nomen est omen: Alice prepares the way through the looking-glass.








Nightmare 5: The Dream Child
Not much to say about this entry, while not as strong as the fourth it was still a solidly entertaining take, with a note worthy nod to a-ha's classic 80's hit Take on me.

What else was there?
Freddy's lair, finalizes the connection between Krueger and Jareth from Labyrinth.





Shared interior designer, Jareth's and Freddy's lair.

1 comment:

  1. There are some interesting ideas - a narcissist being turned into a cockroach, an asthmatic having the air sucked out of her, but the whole thing lacks the tension and nightmarish qualities of the previous film.

    ReplyDelete