Friday, June 10, 2011

80's horror film reviews: Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Yet another entry in the Nightmare Series. At first I was a little in between with this one. It definitely has a different tone than the first three films. It's more.....how can I say this.....cartoony? Not that I'm saying it's bad but some of the scenes puts the capital C into cheese. This definally has a more lighter not if comic book feel into the movie series and it got only worse with the rest(Dream child and Freddy's dead). But what I like about this is it's actually fun to watch. It's not scary but fun to watch though.
The story starts off with the three remaining survivors of the thrid film, Kristen, Joey and Kincad. When Kristen(played by the underused Tuesday Knight) is having the feeling that freddy is coming back to raise hell once again. When he finally succeds in killing the dream warriors including Kristen, Freddy sets his sights on Alice(Lisa Wilcox) who inherits Kristen's power after she's killed. Freddy not only has his eyes on Alice but her friends as well and it's up to her to stop him.
This mostly tells the story of Alice's inner strength and much more lengthy character development from shy, quiet girl to kick-ass action girl at the film's end. The acting of Lisa Wilcox is a little shaky at first but overall gives her character more competence. The acting of Tuesday Knight, however, is only ok. She seems to get strong in her role but ultimately falls flat a little at the end. For the rest, some were good, some were ok and some were underused. That is all.
The special effects are quite colorful, especially for a horror film. I felt like I was watching some afternoon kid's show but it doesn't really ruin the film as much, there quite good actually. Just to mention though, the kills are strangely bloodless for some reason. To the point where this were more appealing to kids around age 9 to 12 if they wanted to watch this.
Of course, this was the start of Freddy becoming something of a comedian of sorts. Which in my opinion, is not so good. Freddy is supposed to be dark and scary not happy and funny. Whatever writer or creator came up with this idea was pretty stupid if you asked me. The script was actually a lot more darker, even having a scary scene written there. But the executives made a one last decison and had a not-so scary horror film.
So my last word is: Fun to watch but lacks the spark that was the original

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