Freddy Visits The Looney Bin

A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors marks the high point of the franchise. For many people the first Wes Craven movie will remain king thanks to it's originality, iconic shock moments and the fact the evil dream antagonist, Freddy Kruger, is still scary. And that's all fine and dandy as Elm Street number one is a damn good horror movie.

A great sequel has to balance two basic elements; retain enough of what made the original successful and introduce enough new elements so that an audience won't get bored. If the film-makers are unimaginative then they'll tell the exact same story and simply change the setting or the characters. If the sequel makers have a bigger budget to play with, they'll simply expand the scale (instead of six gruesome teen deaths, there will now be 20 or instead of setting it in a small town, an entire city is now at stake).

Elm Street 3 balances the basic elements perfectly building onto the existing Elm Street mythology in a fascinating way, while giving us a likable young cast (rare in a teen horror movie) to root for. It expands the mythos in several ways; Freddy Kruger gets an origin (The Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs) and a Nun Mommy. It's now set in a psychiatric hospital allowing fantasy and the supernatural to butt heads as it did, so many years earlier, in The Exorcist. And we get to explore the parameters of how the dream scape works....hypnotism and comas work just as well as sleeping, drugs exist to repress dreams, psychics have the ability to pull others into their dreams and dreamers have the power to manipulate their own abilities in the dreamland (you can be a wizard, if you so wish...nifty).

Then, after the complete absence of original movie characters in the first sequel, the second sequel re-introduces Nancy Thompson and her Dad. Doing this has pros and cons. The positive effect is that it raises the stakes of the story as Nancy has beaten Kruger once and, now trained as a dream specialist, is prepared to do battle armed with her medical knowledge and experience. The downside, of course, is that Nancy is once again played my Heather Langenkamp...an actress more wooden than a Giant Redwood forest and more stiff than a horny adolescent in a Beauty Pageant's changing room. Saxon, might not be wooden, but he sure is one of the corniest actors to have worked in the movie industry. Fortunately, the positives outweigh the negatives.

Finally there's much more inventiveness and imagination on show here than in other installments. The set pieces are wildly different, and each gleeful teen death comes with some great one-liner witticisms from Mr Kruger. Yep, he's now comedy killer horror icon but THIS is why Robert England will forever be remember in the role of Freddy. Kruger using his helpless, sleepwalking victim is a particular favorite moment of mine. But there are so many, whether it's the Ray Harryhausen skeleton homage or Freddy in a tux proclaiming "I said, where's the fucking bourbon?" before decapitating a mother.

Like Cameron did with Aliens, director Chuck Russell decided not to make an all out horror film and introduced a different genre instead. In this case fantasy. And, by 'eck, it works!