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A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (1987)
Opens with a Poe quote! This was the first Freddy movie to get into much of Freddy's backstory - if you do the math, you'll find that he was probably in his early 20's when his child-murderering ass was burned alive by a mob of angry parents, but here he gets a none-too-elaborate Bastard Son Of A Hundred Maniacs origin story related to us by a spooky nun (you just know she'd been waiting for YEARS to say that) who says "The unquiet spirit must be laid to rest." Then poof, she's gone, like that monkey's paw dealer in Marrakech. So, wait a sec - the reason Freddy does all this crazy shit is because he didn't get a FUNERAL? I always figured it was just because he really liked killing teenagers. If you like killing teenagers enough, you'll find a way to keep doing it even under difficult circumstances. Like being burned to death. That nun brings a mild bit of Catholi-horror to the Freddy franchise, which would get repeated a little a couple of installments down the road. Otherwise though, Freddy 3 is pretty much your standard Freddy sequel, maybe a little more grim than most but, given the one-liners, that's not saying much. Freddy returns, but he might have his work cut out for him this time because Nancy is still alive and seemingly well-adjusted and knows how to fall asleep at will. Heather Langenkamp's gigantic hair gets a new style (or hat) for almost every scene. She's a psychology dream-researcher-type person now, and wants to help a new crop of teenagers at a mental institution who are starting to have Freddy dreams. In Nancy's corner is a semi-disbelieving doctor (who's a lot more than semi-helpful) and Patricia Arquette as a girl with the special power of bringing other dreaming people into her own dream. A group-hypnosis session later on (Langenkamp's voice is well-suited to inducing hypnosis) brings them all together and forms the foundation of their attempts to fight Freddy on his own turf. These kids are pretty standard smattering of "troubled teen" types, though it helps that they actually look like they're still in high school, which is a difference between the Freddy movies and their competition at the time. The kids team up with Nancy and special-power-girl to fight Freddy on his own turf, using their own special powers they enjoy in their dreams. These kids display a woeful (and ultimately fatal) lack of imagination. A young and amusingly chubby-faced Jennifer Rubin is "beautiful...and bad", with a giant fauxhawk. She's in a dream and still can't go for a real mohawk. Dorky kid who plays a "we wouldn't pay for the rights to call it Dungeons & Dragons" game says "In my dream, I'm the Wizard Master!" He even gets a Wizard Master cape. He lives down the hall from Jennifer Rubin and in his dreams, he's the Wizard Master? Arquette knows Gymkata. Black kid with behavioural issues has super beefcake strength, for all the good it does him (Freddy's been living in the dream world for like 20 years, he can probably handle a kid who even in his dreams has to punch several times before breaking through a wall). At least it makes for a mild giggle when Freddy is "called out". Things start going wrong around the time Freddy gets his first full-on one-liner in a scene with the reeking-of-desperation stunt-casting of Zsa Zsa Gabor. It's a silly scene, and every murder after that gets a one-liner or two - this was a fairly humourless movie before this. Freddy 3 is afflicted by bad acting even by the standards of this series. When Arquette sees that papier-mache house, she betrays no feeling at all - that's not "underplaying it", that's just not playing it at all. Langenkamp actually pauses to think about it before saying that her mom...died in her sleep. Bad! Black guy spends the whole movie with exactly one facial expression (stunned incredulity, whether it's appropriate to the scene or not) and Craig Wasson as the doctor seems to have no mind of his own, loyally following Nancy around the plot whether he believes what she's telling him or not. The only cast members who really look at ease in front of the camera are John Saxon in the thankless role of Nancy's drunk, disbelieving dad (glad he came back for it though) and in a small role that doesn't get any Freddy action, Laurence Fishburne as a competent and humane orderly who has a theory for all this crazy dream shit. He blames LSD, as he pushes a cart of blue pills around. The other orderly is a total sleaze, taking sexual advantage of the patients and only shows up to make one teen's life miserable for a few minutes, and gets no comeuppance of his own. Oh, and Brooke Bundy is great as Swanson's mom, who treats her like a pet who's turned out to be more high-maintenance than expected. Production values are the highest so far, with lots of great effects - the sleepwalking scene's great, until they show a giant Freddy the size of Godzilla, looming over the hospital. There's some cool stop-motion work with a phallic Freddy-snake, a little puppet Freddy, and later on, a Harryhausen-like skeleton Freddy (wait a sec...why? How?). Some of the effects are actually kind of creepy too, like when Freddy turns the place from an antiseptic dream-building to something all Silent Hill, or a terrific moment where he sends an unmistakable message from the dream world to the waking world. Still, seeing as the dream-heavy Freddy franchise should in theory offer a wild amount of creative, visual and conceptual freedom, Freddy 3 is pretty much formula (not that damn rhyme again, less than five minutes in!) and even its moments of bucking formula generally don't pay off. I don't like this multiple-survivor shit. One last survivor faces death alone - it's the natural order of things. (c) Brian J. Wright 2008 BACK TO THE N's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |