Happy Halloween: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Director: Chuck Russell

Cast: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Craig Wasson, Laurence Fishburne, Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Rubin, Ira Heidan, Ken Sagoes, Rodney Eastman, Bradley Gregg, Penelope Sudrow, John Saxon, Nan Martin, Priscilla Pointer

★★★ (out of ★★★★)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors was a turning point in the Elm Street saga. In the first movie, any unfortunate soul that fell asleep and encountered the dream demon Freddy Kruger (Robert England), they were chased through the boiler room where Freddy kidnapped and killed a number of kids when he was alive. In the second movie (which I sort of liked even though so many fans didn’t), Freddy tried to take possession of a young man’s body and wreck some havoc in the real world.

With this third movie, we are back in the dream world, and the visuals here were certainly the most elaborate in the franchise at that time. Floating doors in one room would transport those who walk through it into another dimension; one poor woman has a dream where she’s attacked by the sink in her bathroom (I’m not even joking); and while Freddy wears his customary striped sweater and dusty fedora, he explodes from the floor in one scene as a giant worm, where he attempts to eat a young woman alive.

The famous Elm Street house where Nancy Thompson lived in the first movie and the homo repressed Jesse lived in the second is now a dilapidated house of horrors, filled with endless shadowy corridors, exploding mirrors, and a special room where Freddy keeps reminders of his previous victims (what sort of reminders I’ll leave for you to discover). Freddy himself is getting wildly creative in his attacks. In one scene, a mute teen boy has a dream where he’s being seduced by a nurse. The nurse then ties the young man to a bed with human tongues and suspends him over the fires of hell (I hate it when that happens).

As a creative visual effects extravaganza, the movie is really effective, and keeps surprising you with its many original and unquestionably nasty sights (one kid turns into a marionette; don’t ask what Freddy uses as the strings). In terms of story, the screenplay by Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, Frank Darabont, and director Chuck Russell takes what could have been a straightforward hack-‘n-slash and brings a number of interesting layers to the material.

The story here takes place in a psychiatric hospital, where the “last of Elm Street children” (whose parents were responsible for burning Freddy alive) reside. They can’t get either their parents or the doctors there to listen to them. The head nurse believes that the kids dreaming about Freddy is partly due to sexual repression (strong man Kincaid – played by Ken Sagoes – had a great response to that), and the sympathetic orderly Max (Laurence Fishburne) cares about them but believes that they’re all a danger to themselves and other people.

There are only two people who take them seriously. The first is OG survivor Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), who is interning at the hospital, and the second friendly Dr. Gordon (a likable Craig Wasson), who gets into a lot of professional trouble by giving Nancy the benefit of the doubt. Patricia Arquette co-stars as one of the teens named Kristen Parker, who has the ability to pull other people into her dream. Nancy believes that if Kristen pulled her and the others into her, they might have a chance of defeating Freddy.

How will they do this? Kristen pulling others into her dream is her “dream power,” and the others discovering their own dream powers helps in making them something more than typically indistinguishable horror movie victims. The wheel-chair bound Will (Ira Heidan) plays role-playing fantasy games when awake and imagines himself as a wizard master in his dream. Ex-druggie Taryn (Jennifer Rubin) imagines herself as a leather-clad, knife-wielding badass. Giving the kids their own dream power doesn’t make them three-dimensional, but the cast is likable here, so much so that you care whether they make it to the end or not.

Another interesting addition is the helpful nun (Nan Martin) that Gordon sees around the hospital. She knows that Freddy was conceived when her mother was locked in a madhouse, thus earning Freddy the name “The bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” While the doctors believe they can help the kids through scientific means, the nun says Freddy’s remains must be buried and doused with holy water. No joke, the holy water and a crucifix play a huge part in defeating Freddy this time (score one for the Catholics!).

The ending makes a couple of missteps, including a surprisingly hokey fake-out that leads to a shocking death in the finale. That minor quibble aside, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors works not only because of its creativity, but also because there was clearly more thought put into its story than was really necessary for a teenaged slasher flick. That’s not to say that the movie is a masterpiece of the genre, only that it ends up being a whole lot better than it needed to be. You see, this is what happens when you put thought into how your movie is written and made.

Rated R for graphic violence, gore, profanity, brief nudity, sexual content, drug content