[6]
Freddy’s franchise continues with a fifth worthwhile installment directed by Stephen Hopkins (The Ghost and the Darkness, Predator 2). Freddy (Robert Englund) continues his killing spree by haunting the dreams of an unborn child. The child in question belongs to Alice (returning player Lisa Wilcox), who already lost her brother and several friends to Freddy in the previous film. To stop him this time, she and her dwindling posse must free the spirit of Freddy’s birth mother so she can help put some supernatural smack-down on him.
The Dream Child does commendably well for a sequel deep into a horror franchise’s run. It offers up the same high level of inventive mayhem sustained all the previous films, while also adding to the mythos. I like the backstory of Freddy’s conception and the depiction of his mother (Beatrice Boepple), a nun at an insane asylum who gets ravaged by a hundred maniacs. It’s hard for these films to keep coming up with new ways of defeating Freddy, but when your own mama wants to drag your ass to the grave with her, that’s pretty compelling drama for a horror movie.
The logic — even ‘dream world’ logic — gets a little strained at times, but a little forgiveness is essential if you want to keep resurrecting your favorite boogey man this many times. The dark humor is on point, the cast is amiable enough, and the screenplay by Leslie Boehm (Daylight, Dante’s Peak) is one of the more concise and focused in the franchise. Highlights, as always, include some of those imaginative kill scenes. Alice’s hunky boyfriend (Danny Hassel, another returning player) merges with a motorcycle in a surprisingly sophisticated sequence reminiscent of a David Cronenberg movie, and a comic book nerd (Joe Seely) goes up against ‘Super Freddy’ inside the pages of a comic book
With Kelly Jo Minter, Erika Anderson, Nick Mele, and Whitby Hertford.