A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
“Welcome to prime time, bitch” – Freddy Krueger
As oddly lacklustre as Nightmare 2 may have been compared with the original, it made a bigger profit for New Line than the first film had. Enough, in fact to immediately greenlight a third movie which cemented Freddy Krueger’s position as a pop culture icon and kind of an anti-hero. Not bad going for a child murderer. But in this third outing, Freddy starts his habit of making wisecracks while killing, and his powers of invading dreams become a bit broadened, as do the scale of the dreams themselves. More importantly, although not in the director’s chair, Wes Craven came back to the franchise as both screenwriter and executive producer – and the jump in quality is seen immediately. This is a rare case of the third in the series being as strong as the first. And is the beginning of a trilogy within the series, as parts 4 & 5 both continue the storyline with recurring characters. Consequently, there isn’t much for me to criticise or make fun of.
As the titles roll, we’re shown a series of shot of someone building a model house, which turns out to be good old 1428 Elm Street. This is Kristen (Patricia Arquette) a girl prone to nightmares, daughter of a snobbish, self-absorbed woman played by Brooke Bundy. Sent to bed by her mother she falls asleep despite taking mouthfuls of coffee granules and slugs of Cola a few minutes earlier.
Waking in her dream, she finds it’s dark, she’s outside 1428 which is run down and boarded up, and there are creepy little kids singing the Freddy rhyme while skipping. Entering the house with a little girl, she goes further into her nightmare, the little girl becomes a mummified corpse, there’s a room full of kids hung up by the neck, and Freddy (Robert Englund) chases her. Waking up, barely avoiding a lunge from Freddy’s razor gloved hand, she goes to the bathroom, where she sees Freddy in the mirror. The handles on the washbasin taps transform into Freddy’s hands and as he motions, her wrist is slashed. But this is a dream within a dream, and waking up for real, Kristen finds she has slashed her own wrist.
Thinking she’s suicidal, her unsympathetic mother has her sent to a psychiatric hospital where she’s under the care of Dr Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) and his new intern therapist Nancy Thompson (played by the returning and still tepidly under-acting Heather Langenkamp) who recognises and finishes the Freddy rhyme she’s reciting like a mantra. Nancy knows what’s happening and who’s responsible.
The rest of the kids on the ward are all having the same nightmares about someone stalking them. This is like a buffet for Freddy, although no explanation is offered or sought as to how he survived his fate in the previous film. One kid who’s a sleepwalker and spends his days creating marionettes is himself turned into a grisly marionette in his dreams and thrown off a bell tower when his “strings” are cut. Another, a self-harmer, has her head bashed into a television screen. Freddy attacks Kirsten in the form of a giant snake – but she pulls Nancy into her dream and they both escape. (Incidentally, these incidents all happen on Nancy’s first two days on the job.)
Nancy tells them about her experience with Freddy during a therapy session when she and Gordon conduct a group hypnosis session to share a dream. But Joey, a mute kid wanders off and becomes Freddy’s prisoner. (In a glaring continuity error, the first time we see Joey, he clearly has a teardrop tattoo under his right eye – which then isn’t seen for the rest of the film.) Both Nancy and Gordon are suspended from duty (on her third day in the new job) and while packing his stuff in his car, Gordon encounters a nun, who tells his that Freddy must be defeated. And this is where some more of Freddy’s disturbing origin is filled in. A young nurse at the mental institute in the forties was accidentally locked in with the patients over a holiday weekend. They hid her and raped her hundreds of times, leaving her with child. The child was Freddy, the bastard son of a hundred maniacs. Freddy’s remains need to be given a proper burial or he’ll never rest.
Gordon’s boss has the rest of the kids sedated to make sure they sleep, and in the meantime, Nancy and Gordon visit Nancy’s father, again played by John Saxon to ask him the precise location of Freddy’s bones. While Nancy does a mercy dash back to the hospital, Gordon is taken by Thompson to a scrap metal yard, where the remains are hidden in a sack inside one of the cars.
Nancy starts another unauthorised session with the now rapidly depleting kids, one has died of a drug overdose from Freddy while another crippled kid was run down by a demonic wheelchair. Joey, the mute kid is saved, and actually saves the rest of them by suddenly regaining his voice and screaming.
While all this is going on, Freddy’s skeleton has come to life in the real world and in a scene reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, attacks Thompson, killing him – and appearing to Nancy as the spirit of her father, stabs her fatally with his knife glove before Gordon douses Freddy’s skeleton with holy water and buries it, vanquishing him.
At Nancy’s funeral, Gordon sees the nun again, and it’s revealed that Sister Mary Helena was only her assumed name in Christ, as a nun. Her given name was Amanda Krueger, and she died several years ago.
A final scene shows us the model of the Elm Street house that Kristen made, a light goes on inside.
The media juggernaut that Freddy was becoming had just left the station and was gathering momentum.