A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Movie poster
Directed by	Renny Harlin
Written by	Characters Wes Craven Story William Kotzwinkle and Brian Helgeland Screenplay Brian Helgeland and Scott Pierce
Produced by	Robert Shaye Rachel Talalay
Starring	Lisa Wilcox Rodney Eastman Danny Hassel Andras Jones Tuesday Knight Ken Sagoes Brooke Bundy Nicholas Mele Toy Newkirk Brooke Theiss Robert Englund
Cinematography	Steven Fierberg
Edited by	Michael N. Knue Jack Turner Chuck Weiss
Music by	John Easdale Craig Safan
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release date	August 19, 1988
Running time	99 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$13,000,000
Box office	$49,369,899 (domestically)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is the fourth film in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. It was released in 1988. The film was directed by Renny Harlin.

Plot summary

Kristen (Tuesday Knight, who replaced Patricia Arquette), Joey (Rodney Eastman), and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), have been released from the Westin Hills Asylum and are now living normal lives and attending high school. Kristen has managed to make some new friends: Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a young, bright girl who is a frequent daydreamer; Sheila (Toy Newkirk), a brainy, quiet girl with asthma; and Debbie (Brooke Theiss), a tough girl who hates bugs. She has also found herself a boyfriend, Rick (Andras Jones), who happens to be Alice's brother.

Kristen begins to have bad dreams and feels as though Freddy has once again come back from the dead. During one of her nightmares, she pulls Kincaid and Joey into her dream. In school the next day, Kincaid and Joey confront Kristen about pulling them into the dream.

As it turns out, Freddy is indeed back. Kincaid wakes up one night, only to find himself locked in the trunk of an old junked car. When he opens the hood, he realizes that he is in a salvage yard - the same one that Freddy's body was buried in. Kincaid spies his dog, Jason, digging and urinating in the ground nearby. The ground begins to shake and the plot where Freddy lies begins to sink deeper into the ground and open up. Inside the grave, the bones begin to grow flesh. As soon as Freddy is resurrected, a pile of junked cars comes crashing down on him. Freddy quickly recoups and kills Kincaid. A little later, as Joey is watching television, he begins to feel something moving beneath his waterbed. When he pulls back the sheets he finds a naked woman swimming in his bed. Before he can react, Freddy bursts through and kills him.

The following day at school, Kristen is concerned when her friends fail to show up for class. She confides to Alice about nightmares. Kristen hits her head and passes out, being attacked by Freddy but revived in time. So she goes to Nancy's home's remains, with Rick, Dan, and Alice. Rick tells Dan the story of Freddy, and Alice reveals a part of the dream master spell. Alice suggests to Kristen that you are in control of your own dreams. At home that night, her mother gives her a sedative to help her sleep. When Kristen falls asleep this time, on Alice's advice, she tries to convert nightmares into pleasant dreams, to no avail. While she meets a child named Alice in her dream, creating a sand castle, even in her good dreams, Freddy appears and ruins everything. Kristen eventually finds herself in Freddy's boiler room. It is explained that Kristen is the last child from Elm Street, and Freddy needs her help to get more children. When Freddy is about to kill her, she screams for Alice. Alice appears suddenly in the boiler room just as Krueger kills Kristen. Before Kristen dies, she sends her power, the power to pull people into her dreams, to Alice. Before the power can reach her, it passes through Freddy first.

Alice awakens immediately, realizing that Kristen's in danger. She turns out to be right, as Kristen's room is on fire. As Alice tries to understand what has happened, and who exactly Freddy is, her friends begin to die. First, Sheila and Rick are killed. While taking a test, Alice accidentally pulls Sheila into a dream where Freddy is waiting; the same thing happens to Rick later. Yet, after every death, including Kristen's, Alice picks up new talents and abilities. She also picks up the dream powers of the children who have died. She is obviously Freddy's supernatural opposite, albeit too weak to truly conquer or even resist him yet. After his death, Alice teams up with Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel), who was one of Rick's closest friends. Together with Dan, Alice tries to get to Debbie, their last surviving friend, before Freddy finds her. Unbeknown to the two teens, Freddy is able to control their movements. Trapping Alice and Dan, Freddy is able to reach Debbie and kill her (by transforming her into a cockroach and trapping her inside a roach motel) before Alice and Dan intervene.

Following a car accident, where Dan is injured and rushed to the hospital, Alice returns home to prepare for one final battle with Freddy. Alice goes to sleep to help Dan before Freddy can kill him. As Alice and Dan search for Freddy, Dan is injured. Alice wills him awake right at the moment the doctors wake Dan and he is pulled from the dreamworld. Alice, facing Freddy alone, attempts to use all of her newly absorbed abilities against him. The fight is relatively equal, except that she has a mortal body and he has not, giving him the advantage of immortality. It's an advantage that proves nearly too great to overcome. He declares that he's been guarding his gate for too long to be taken down by her. But just as he is preparing to kill her, she recalls the final verse of the dream master spell. For the first and only time, someone defeats Freddy, by using the power of the spell to make him see the evil that is inside. Using her power as guardian of the gate of good dreams (which Kristen never was, nor was Nancy,) Alice releases the tortured souls that Freddy imprisoned into the gates of good dreams where he can no longer harm them. Krueger's clothes fall lifelessly to the floor. The film ends with Dan and Alice at a fountain some time later. She tosses a coin in and makes a wish. As she and Dan depart, she decides to keep the wish to herself as Freddy's image appears in the ripples left in the fountain from the tossed coin.

"Dream Powers"

Continuing the tradition from the previous film, the protagonists of this film have dream powers. They do not personally use these powers, but after Alice absorbs them, she displays powers from each of her friends. The exceptions of these are Kincaid and Joey who died prior to Alice's introduction to Krueger.

• Kristen - Kristen's gift of pulling people into her dreams are what Freddy uses, when Alice absorbs them, he forces her to reveal a potential victim. Since she has not yet developed any kind of control beyond that, he is able to eject her from interfering. The exception to this being Dan, whom she wills awake. She can also see into her dreams, for when Dan gets into trouble, she can join him. Her acrobatic skills are also implemented, though to a much smaller degree than Kristen's.

• Sheila - Sheila's natural ability of using her inventions were given to Alice, as displayed when she connected a power cable from a wall to the back of a device Sheila created to fire a beam of energy at Krueger.

• Rick - Rick's abilities as a martial artist are given to Alice, she first learns this when she handles a pair of nunchucks with ease, out of character from her naturally clumsy handling.

• Debbie - Debbie provides Alice with a serious toughness and strength as Alice displays several times for her last conflict. Enabling Alice to know how to balance her strengths given by Rick, she also uses it to punch into a wall to attain a power cord for Sheila's invention.

Alice - Alice has no official dream power herself; for her they are irrelevant. Her power is that she can either summon or become, depending on interpretation, the spiritual opposite of Freddy, the dream master who can rescue the dead. Having been taught the dream master spell by her mother before her mother's death, Alice is able to use this spell to reassert control over her dreams in the film's final fight with Freddy.

Reception

Commercial

The film opened in 1,765 theaters grossing $12.8 million its opening weekend. The domestic gross of the movie is $49.3 million, the second highest grossing Nightmare movie aside from Freddy vs. Jason.

The film is the only one in the Nightmare on Elm Street series to spend more than one weekend in the top spot at the box office.

Critical

Whereas its predecessor received mostly positive reviews, the fourth Nightmare film received mixed reviews. It has an average score of 58% 'fresh' on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 19 professional reviews.^[1]

Music videos

With the popularity of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, many songs on the soundtrack had music videos:

• The Fat Boys featuring Robert Englund performing "Are You Ready For Freddy?" showing one of the Fat Boys inheriting the Elm Street house and staying the night in order to complete the inheritance, even including Freddy rapping and audio of Heather Langenkamp's famous line "don't fall asleep" from the original film. This video can be found on 1999 boxset bonus disc.

• Vinnie Vincent Invasion performing "Love Kills", a music video featuring scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. It is not featured on any DVD release.

References

External links

• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master at IMDb
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master at AllMovie
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master at Rotten Tomatoes
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master at Box Office Mojo
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master at The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion