Unless I'm sadly mistaken, I rented A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 several years ago and there was a music video, I'm pretty sure which was called Dream Warriors, at the end of it, and I rented this one on DVD hoping that the video would be there because it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's amazing how stuff from the 80s is so funny now, but nothing is funnier than 80s rap videos. There was this rap group singing that song Dream Warriors on the VHS version of this movie after the credits, and they're all wearing like denim jackets with no shirt underneath and form fitting jean shorts that are all frayed at the bottoms like Daisy Dukes. What could make a rap group look more foolish I can't imagine.

(spoilers) At any rate, I was disappointed in looking for that video on the DVD version, so all I had was this mediocre installment in the Freddy Krueger series. The movie sort of starts off with the same idea as part 2, with the main character witnessing all kinds of gruesome murders and then sort of coming out of a trance and finding himself with the bloody hands. Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) has a nightmare about the infamous house that Nancy Thompson used to live in, then runs to the bathroom, the sink's handles turn into Freddy's hands and attack her, and then she wakes up standing in her bathroom having slit her own wrists. From there, the movie turns into the usual mental hospital installment. 

`Larry' Fishburne, tired of always playing the bad guy in his roles, was happy to take on the role in this film as a nice-guy orderly, stern but accommodating when the patients want to bend the rules a little. Not surprisingly, he turns in what is by leaps and bounds the best performance in the movie. Arquette later goes on to become an accomplished actor, but had not perfected her acting skills when she starred in this film. The characters in the movie are mostly all patients at the mental hospital that Kristen is placed into after cutting her wrists. All of them are cynical and uncooperative, almost none believing that they really belong there at all. Eventually, they realize and are able to convince the staff that they are all having dreams about the same man and it's not just some kind of group hysteria.

Heather Langenkamp has returned in her famous role as Nancy Thompson, this time grown up into a dream researcher as a result of her childhood experiences involving Freddy Krueger. Not surprisingly, she is able to quickly relate to the hysterical Kristen and the rest of the patients, since she had experienced exactly what they're going through. There are some interesting murders in this installment, and the technology used for the special effects have taken a huge jump. There is a gigantic, worm-like Freddy that tries to swallow Kristen whole, there is a scene where a television turns into Freddy and with mechanical arms he picks up one of the patients there for some late night entertainment and punishes her for sitting too close to the TV, but there is also an unconvincing go-motion scene where a couple guys have a fight with Freddy Krueger's skeleton, which has been rotting in the trunk of some car in a car junkyard. And one of the more groan-inducing scenes was one where Freddy attacks one of the patients in his dream (the one famous for sleepwalking), tearing the muscles and tendons out of his arms and legs and leading him around like a puppet. Ouch.

We get a peek into Freddy's past in this installment. Not only do we meet his mother, but we also find out the circumstances that led to Freddy being fathered by more than 100 maniacs. In fighting Freddy, the patients all band together and, in their dreams, use their special powers (most of which reflect their shortcomings in real life) to fight him. One student, bound to a wheelchair, is able to walk in his dreams, another has the hilarious powers of what he calls the `Wizard Master,' another is `beautiful and bad' (she has lots of makeup, her hair stands up in a foot-high Mohawk, and she has knives). Clever, but the movie falters when it has only one of the patients, the one who can't speak, not have any powers in his dreams until the climax of the movie, when he suddenly realizes that he can talk in his dreams (at just the right moment to save the day). His dream power was a little too obvious to have been left out for that long, but collectively, now you see why the movie was subtitled Dream Warriors.

Altogether, this is not an entirely weak entry into the series. The acting is pretty shoddy, but it's actually pretty good for a horror movie. Larry Fishburne vastly overshadows the rest of the cast, displaying wonderful acting skills early on in his career, and the movie is not simply a rehash of either of the first two  a problem that plagues the Friday the 13th movies much more than the Elm Street films. The characters are never developed enough to allow for the later creation of much tension, which is why most of the deaths come across more as creative ways to kill off someone in a horror film than the tragic loss of the life of one of the characters that we've come to know and root for their triumph over evil. But then again, not a lot of horror movies take the time to really develop their characters to the point where you throw up your hands in defeat when they are killed, or are on the edge of your seat as they run for their lives. But it's important to note that the few horror films that actually do that are almost invariably the best ones

Sentiment: negative