Ha, and again I say ha! It’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review
another picture for you, and this time I thought it ought to be A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors!
This was the first of the Freddy pictures I saw in the theatre – I had to sneak
in, of course, because after all I was too young! – and I really had a
spectacular time at the movies that night!
For that reason, and not so much because the movie is
actually all that great, I think very fondly of the third Elm Street installment! It’s certainly better than A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s
Revenge, ha ha! It has a slick look, courtesy of DP Roy H. Wagner, that
I consider the quintessential 80s horror cinematography! And it’s full to
bursting with superb trick effects!
The story is pretty nonsensical though! It seems there is a
group of youngsters living in a Bughouse For Troubled Teens because they’re all
suffering from terrible nightmares of a hideous man in a striped sweater! Their
doctor is Craig Wasson, from Ghost Story
and Body Double, and, unsurprisingly,
he’s no help at all! But with the arrival of a new psychiatrist, none other
than Nancy from the first movie, there is finally some hope! They discover that
Patricia Arquette, one of the troubled teens, has the special power of pulling
people into her dreams when things get hairy! Ha ha, shades of Dreamscape, which Chuck Russell, the
co-writer and director of this one, also had a hand in!
But in dreamsville this sorry lot all get superpowers for
some reason, and that’s where the movie starts to get really silly! Ha ha, you expect a certain level of silly in these
pictures, but there are subbasements of silly below that, grand levels of
bushwa, that no grown man should have to tolerate! I’ll quote one line of
dialogue, just to give you an idea: “In my dreams, I am the wizard master!”
Yikes, ha ha!
But despite these magical dream warriors being part of the
movie’s title, they actually don’t occupy much screen time, o blessed relief!
It seems as though the filmmakers started to feel maybe a bit abashed at the
nonsensicality of their motion picture, so pulled back from it a bit! Ha ha!
But I’ll tell you this: they spared no effort in their trick effects! There
some marvelous stop motion stuff – ha ha, they should still use that technique,
because it looks great! – and of course plenty of tricky makeup! Some of the
optical stuff is a bit fakey, but that’s okay!
The cast is an interesting one! Laurence Fishburne plays the
orderly, and he’s solid as always; Jennifer Rubin, whom I’ve always liked, is
one of the teens; and the guy who plays the big burly black teen, Kincaid, has
the most non-threatening air about him you could imagine, though he’s supposed
to be a tough young man! John Saxon returns, which is always nice to see! Craig
Wasson is a strange case, because I’ve always felt there was a weird air about
him! I know nothing about the man, but I have to say I just get a strange vibe!
Maybe that just means he’s a really good actor, ha ha!
I’m sorry to say that I don’t think Nancy is a very good
actor! She was a lot better in the first one, I thought! In this one – well,
best not to look at it too closely! Ha ha, she was given a tough part to play
(Doogie Howser meets Oliver Sacks, essentially!) and a lot of unspeakable
dialogue, so it’s not all her fault! Anyway, she doesn’t ruin the movie, which
is not scary or anything, but still sort of an enjoyable romp! I’m going to
award it two popsicle stick houses!
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