DVD Artwork
We all love Jamie Lee Curtis, don’t we? Sure. She ran from Michael Myers, she hid from the evil clown in Terror Train, she did some hot disco dancing in Prom Night and she showed us all her amazing tits in Trading Places. There is absolutely no reason for us not to love Jamie Lee Curtis.
But why do we not afford that same kind of love to Heather Langenkamp? In the amazingly shaky franchise known as A Nightmare on Elm Street, she was the real glue that held the movies together. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you don’t need to watch any NOES that she isn’t in. She, and her character, Nancy Thompson, are the heart and soul of these flicks, even when she’s nowhere near them. Nancy has always been Freddy’s greatest nemesis and most devoted fighter. Wanna prove me wrong? You can’t. Watch the abysmal dung heap subtitled Freddy’s Revenge. Where’s Nancy? Don’t know. And that movie sucks so much ass even Jeff Stryker bowed and admitted its superiority.
In this, the third installment, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is still hunting down the Elm St. children through their dreams. He focuses his killing ways on Kristen (Patricia Arquette), a sort of homely blonde who tries to stay awake by drinking a hideous concoction of Diet Coke and instant coffee. She also is into paper mache, and her latest artistic creation is a house… one of the Elm St. houses. Kristen’s mother is a drunken whore and, when Mommy comes home with her latest version of Eric Braeden , standing downstairs demanding to know where the bourbon is, Mommy forces Kristen to go to bed. And the dreams begin…
If you’ve seen an NOES movie ever, you know the terror really comes from the subtle reality shifts that occur. You’re never quite sure when reality and dreamworld switch spots until the weirdness really starts to go down. When Kristen wakes up, in her bed, in front of the real house she’s been modeling in paper mache, we know the nightmares have begun and Freddy can’t be far behind.
Suffice to say that Kristen’s active dreamlife is enough to make her slutmother a nervous wreck, and Kristen ends up in the psycho ward. She has some other kids to keep her company. Taryn (Jennifer Rubin of the overlooked classic, Bad Dreams) is a former junkie. Joey (Rodney Eastman) hasn’t said a word in years. Will (Ira Heiden) is a paraplegic. Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow) is a sullen girl who wants to be a TV star. Phillip (Bradley Gregg) is the sleepwalking smart-ass and Roland (Ken Sagoes) is the bad-ass. They all have one thing in common… terrible nightmares about a burnt man in a dirty brown hat with razors for fingers.
Their doctor, Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson), has been conducting their group therapy for months with no real results. However, the arrival of a new intern, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), could signal the end of that. She understands what is going on with these kids, especially after Kristen psychically pulls Nancy into one of her dreams. Nancy rescues Kristen from a terrible monster, a monster who knows Nancy by name. That’s right, Freddy has returned for not only the Elm St. kids, but for a now grown Nancy.
After Freddy dispatches a couple of young’uns and takes poor mute Joey hostage in his fiery dreamworld, it’s up to the rest of the misfits to band together, using Kristen’s power to pull others into her dreams, to fight Freddy on his own turf.
Can Nancy convince the staff of the hospital that the kids’ dreams are real? No. Fuck no. That would be too easy. Can Nancy figure out how to send Freddy back to hell for good? Probably not. That would also be amazingly simple. Can you watch this movie and not feel insulted, angered or cheated? Yes. Yes, you can.
Dream Warriors is a strong solid entry in the NOES series, but it also signaled the decline of the series. Freddy starts making horrible puns in this entry, becoming the Arnold Schwarzenegger of horror movies. As he yanks one unfortunate girl into a television set head-first, electrocuting her, Freddy says, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” Great line, but it was the beginning of the end. You couldn’t really take Freddy seriously after that (at least not until Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. in which Freddy finally became terrifying again). The movies that followed proved that point. Freddy became a mockery of himself. Yes, he was the scary guy who killed you in your dreams, but he was also the comic relief in a series of movies that didn’t really benefit from comic relief.
While there is some great intensity in Dream Warriors, you can see the terror moving out of the foreground and off to the side.
The thing that makes Dream Warriors worth watching is the continuation of the Nancy story. Langenkamp turns in a good, down-to-earth performance. The swatch of pure white hair above her ear, retained from the original Nightmare, speaks volumes about the shit this girl has been through. Her concern for the kids comes across as believable, as does her strained reunion with her father (John Saxon). She may not be the first scream queen that comes to mind, but that may be because she was an actress first. She helps keep this movie firmly grounded in reality, even while most of the action takes place in a non-realistic realm.
I also loved how the script brought in some aspects of real life dream research. We go into lucid dreaming, night terrors and sleepwalking in Dream Warriors. We’re also introduced to the dream suppressant medication, Hypnocil, which played such an important part in Freddy vs. Jason. In other words, this is a historically important film to geeks.
Some of the cast and crew of this movie, released in 1987, are impressive now because of what they’ve done since. Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) co-wrote the script with Wes Craven. The cast includes Lawrence Fishburne as the compassionate orderly, Max. Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks) composed the score. And you can’t forget two rockin’ tunes by one of the greatest bands of the ‘80’s, Dokken. I used to have a “Rockin’ with Dokken” t-shirt back in the day. I’m not sorry.
There may be a lot of Freddy movies, but there are only three real Nightmare on Elm Street movies as far as I’m concerned. Watch the first one, this one and New Nightmare and you’ve got one of the best horror sagas of our time. And I send much love to Heather Langenkamp, the heroine the genre forgot.
