“Freddy Delivers”

Not so much. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 is the first film in the series that I would love to skip when doing these reviews. It’s one of the worst reviewed and least favorite films of the entire series. It takes place directly after Part 4 which now that I’ve seen this one I realize wasn’t all that bad. Alice is living a seemingly happy life with her new boyfriend Dan however, shockingly Freddy Kruger has come back to life and he is now attacking the dreams of Alice’s unborn child and the friends around her. Not an entirely awful premise by any means but it’s executed so poorly by director Stephen Hopkins that it’s almost an embarrassment to watch.

Nightmare 5 is also the first in the series to not carry the same vibe as the first four films. It’s kind of an oddly done horror film. The first four Nightmare on Elm Street films had a sort of campy-scary-gothic vibe to them and this one doesn’t. It’s got a really odd tone and it’s kind of hard to explain unless you watch the film. Alice our lead doesn’t even feel like the same character as she was in part 4. In Dream Master Alice was a mix of vulnerability and smarts and you could understand to an extent why she was cast in the role. In this film she comes off as really boring. That may be attributed to the awful screenplay but Lisa Wilcox should have stepped it up a little bit. Robert Englund returns once again as Freddy Kruger and plays virtually the same role as he does in previous films. Each Nightmare film has a vibe to the Kruger character though and this is one of the more boring versions of Freddy. Even in the last installment part 4 he had some decent one liners but you can clearly see that the series was really running out of steam here and even Englund couldn’t save it.

Nightmare 5 is a typical horror sequel. I think the film itself is a cash in on the Kruger character because nothing of great interest happens. Everything in this film just has a sort of uninspired feeling to it. I wrongfully graded a couple of the Kruger films with some pretty low grades these past couple days and I will probably bump them up because compared to this film they are masterpieces. It’s really sad to view a film like this lose all of it’s luster. Freddy is such a fun character and one of iconic stature in the 80′s but all this film does is hurt his own legacy. It’s probably a grand wish to think that a horror franchise could get better with the sequels it puts out and a few franchises have done that before but Nightmare isn’t one of them. It’s kind of an inconsistent horror franchise with some great films mixed with some awful ones.

To review Nightmare 5 without talking about all of the awful scenes is an impossible task. The film itself is just bloated and boring and doesn’t really do anything to further push the legacy of Kruger. There is one scene in particular in the entire film that I liked and it is the scene with the comic books. It had an A-Ha feeling to it but it was still nicely done it’s too bad that the rest of the film couldn’t have been as interesting as that one scene. It’s sad to see a horror franchise fall so hard in a sequel but Nightmare 5 does just that it’s a pain to watch even as a Nightmare fan. Englund and couple of okay scenes make the film watchable to an extent but this one is just really poorly done and way too awful for anyone to consider it among a list of good horror sequels.

Changed Grades on some of these after some more thought

Nightmare Series Ranked

1. A Nightmare on Elm Street- 9.5
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors- 8
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master- 4
4. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge- 4
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child- 1.5

The next film I review will be Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

~ by resdog55 on May 6, 2010.