Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Ignoring the events of the last movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors expands upon the story of the first one, while taking the series in a new direction. Wes Craven is back as one of several screenwriters that would also include Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, TV’s The Walking Dead). Also co-writing is director Chuck Russell, who went on to direct the remake of The Blob, and The Mask.
This is a thrilling movie with memorable characters. I like what it does with the returning characters from the first movie, showing how they’ve dealt with the events of the first movie in very different ways.
This is also perhaps the signature Freddy. He’s cracking one-liners upon every kill, yet he’s still scary, unlike in some of the later movies. This is also the movie that begins to establish more of his backstory.
The movie starts with Kristen Parker, played by future Oscar winner Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), building a model of a house with papier mache and popsicle sticks. We see her attempting to stay awake with instant coffee, soda, and loud music, when she’s interrupted by her mother (Brooke Bundy), who has her go to bed. Kristen falls asleep and ends up in the creepiest dream in the series yet.
She shows up at the Elm Street house, the full-size version of the one she had made, and sees the typical jump roping girls. The visuals here are really strong and eerie. There’s a little girl in a tricycle that tells her Freddy’s home. Suddenly afraid, Kristen picks up the little girl and runs. We get a few brief glimpses of Freddy chasing her. She ends up in a room with dozens of hanged corpses, perhaps the creepiest image in the movie.
She looks down and sees that the girl she had been holding is now a skeleton. She ends up back in her bedroom, and heads to the bathroom, where she’s attacked by Freddy through the sink, revealing himself through the mirror. He slashes her across the arm, and Kristen’s mother shows up, to see Kristen holding a razor blade.
Her mother takes Kristen to a mental hospital, explaining that she knows her daughter, and that she’s just doing this for attention. Dr. Simms (Priscilla Pointer) and Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) are ready to admit her, though, and discuss the upcoming arrival of a graduate student performing groundbreaking research on nightmares. Kristen isn’t taking being admitted well, and attacks the orderly, Max Daniels (Laurence Fishburne). She backs up, holding a scalpel, ready to attack any doctor, orderly, or nurse that approaches her, and begins reciting the “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you,” song while she’s crying. Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), the new graduate student, shows up and completes the song’s lyrics, making Kristen immediately trust her as someone understanding. They embrace.
Max then takes Nancy around to meet some of the patients. She meets Philip (Bradley Gregg), a sleepwalker who’s interested in making marionettes, and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), a funny and emotional character who’s probably the most likable in the series. There’s also Taryn (Jennifer Rubin), a young woman with a history of drug abuse, the mute Joey (Rodney Eastman), who has a crush on an attractive nurse, an aspiring TV star Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow), and the nerdy wheelchair-bound Will (Ira Heiden), who has been paralyzed from the waist down following a suicide attempt.
We get a creepy story when Dr. Gordon is talking to Nancy about a patient that they had who was found with their eyelids cut off, trying to stay awake. Dr. Gordon also finds an experimental dream suppressant drug in Nancy’s purse, and that will come back later.
So, all the teens in this place have nightmares of Freddy, and the doctors don’t appreciate the danger, though Nancy of course does.
In another dream, Kristen is attacked by Freddy in the form of a giant snake.
She calls out for Nancy, and Nancy appears in the dream with her, fighting off Freddy, who recognizes her, with a shard of broken glass. The next day, Nancy observes that the house Kristen has built a model of used to be hers, and Kristen reveals that she was able to pull people into her dreams as a little kid.
In a really great scene, Freddy appears as one of Philip’s puppets, and reverts to normal size to tear out his veins and tendons and use them to drag Philip across the hospital, who appears to be sleepwalking to Kincaid. He’s taken through the hospital doors and up to the roof, where Joey, keeping watch for his roommate Will, notices him, and drags him to the window to see. Will starts yelling out for Philip, and Joey, unspeaking, gets everyone’s attention. They are unable to stop Freddy from killing him, however, as Krueger, appearing giant in the sky, cuts the veins with his finger knives, allowing Philip to fall to his death in an apparent suicide.
At group session the next day, Dr. Simms suggests it was a sleepwalking accident, while Dr. Gordon is more blunt, saying that Philip gave up and committed suicide, which upsets the other teens. Kincaid lashes out, and he’s taken into the silent room. Nancy, however, is able to convince Dr. Gordon, still not convinced of the Freddy threat, to prescribe Hypnocil.
While watching TV, Jennifer tries to keep herself awake by burning cigarettes on her skin, but it doesn’t work. On TV, Dick Cavett, interviewing Zsa Zsa Gabor, suddenly becomes Freddy, before the TV turns to static. She approaches it, and Freddy appears from the top of the TV, with mechanical arms, and delivers his most memorable line of the series before he kills her by smashing her head into the TV.
The film cuts to Jennifer’s funeral, when Dr. Gordon notices a mysterious nun, Sister Mary Helena (Nan Martin), whom he had seen earlier. He goes to talk to her, and she tells him about Freddy’s conception. In the hospital where Dr. Gordon works, a nun was accidentally locked in overnight with a thousand crazy people, who all raped her repeatedly, until she conceived. She also says something about stopping Freddy by means of burying him in hallowed ground.
At group session, Nancy takes charge and explains to them that they’re the last children of the parents that burned Freddy Kruger to death. She mentions Kristen’s power, and how they can use that to defeat Krueger. They then all practice an exercise to see if they can end up in the same dream. When it works, each of the teens reveals that they have some kind of dream power. Will is able to walk, and also mentions that he’s the Wizard Master, which is probably the dumbest aspect of the movie. Kincaid demonstrates his strength by bending the legs to his chair. Taryn appears in a punk makeover with a couple of switchblades. Lastly, Kristen shows off some nice acrobatics.
In Joey’s dream, that nurse he was crushing on is into him, and he sneaks off to have sex with her, but she ties him to the bed by spitting out some tongues, and reveals herself to be Freddy. When the session is interrupted, it’s revealed that Joey is still alive, but in a coma, and Dr. Gordon and Nancy have been fired.
Dr. Gordon convinces Nancy that they need to find Freddy’s remains, and she knows who might know where those are: her father, Donald Thompson (John Saxon). They meet him in a bar, where he’s very drunk, and still pretty dismissive of the Freddy situation. It’s a fairly emotional scene, as she apparently hasn’t seen him in years, and it’s not hard to imagine why. One of the more interesting aspects of this movie is seeing the two Thompsons react to the events of the first movie in very different ways, with it making Nancy strong, and her father weak.
Donald reluctantly agrees to help Dr. Gordon, and Nancy returns to the hospital to take the teens into a dream and find Joey. Dr. Gordon stops at a church and steals some holy water and a crucifix.
The orderly, Max, has been given strict instructions to not allow Nancy into the wing to see the teens, but he relents when she promises she’ll only be a few minutes and just wants to say goodbye. She then leads them on their dream exercise, assuring them that they could all easily die, and giving them the chance to back out. They all join, but we cut to Kristen’s perspective, where we get a different version of the opening scene when her mother comes home. Freddy decapitates her mother.
Taryn appears in a back alley and gets in a knife fight with Freddy, before he kills her with syringes for fingers. Will meets Freddy in a dark hallway, and Freddy sends a spiked wheelchair after him, which he evades, and hits with his Wizard Master magic, causing it to explode. As I said, this is the weakest aspect of the movie, and it’s probably the single worst scene, as well. Will appears in a kind of cape that I guess is part of his Wizard Master costume. Freddy then kills him easily, and I really don’t feel bad about it.
Kristen meets up with Nancy, and they both find Kincaid, who starts taunting Freddy to come get them. They find Joey in a hellish boiler room set, and they all use their powers to help each other. Eventually, Freddy is stabbed with a pole, but he pulls it out, unharmed. He reveals the souls of all the children he’s killed on his torso, and apparently those have made him stronger. When he’s about to kill them, however, he senses his remains have been found, and hast to leave.
Dr. Gordon and Donald arrive at a junkyard, where Freddy’s bones are hidden in one of the cars. When they find the car, Dr. Gordon takes the keys so that Donald can’t drive away. When they find the remains, the skeleton comes to life and starts fighting them, killing Donald by impaling him on some scrap metal. The skeleton then knocks out Dr. Gordon.
Freddy returns to haunt the teens, now with Joey, in a hall of mirrors, pulling all but Joey in. The mute Joey screams loudly, and all the mirrors break, allowing the others to escape, with Kincaid in particular overjoyed that Joey has found his dream power.
Nancy’s father appears to her, telling her that he’s passed on, but eventually revealing himself to be Freddy, who stabs Nancy, who fights back and stabs him in response as he is attacking Kristen. In the real world, Dr. Gordon comes to, and is able to push the bones into a grave that he had already dug, pouring holy water on it, and eventually throwing the crucifix in, too. In the dream world, Freddy is killed, and Kristen holds Nancy as she dies.
The film cuts to Nancy’s funeral, which Dr. Gordon leaves to follow the nun, who disappears in front of a grave marked Amanda Krueger, and he realizes that she was the spirit of Freddy’s mother.
This is a really fun movie. It expands the Freddy mythology in an interesting way, which marked a new direction for the series to take. It’s a perfect companion piece to the first film, and feels like it completes Nancy’s story in a satisfying way.
This is also really the start of Freddy Krueger becoming the icon that we know today. He was ultra-serious in the second film, and had really only one joke in the first movie, but here, he cracks one-liners at every kill. The movie was also a huge hit, surpassing either of the first two movies, showing the Nightmare series to be gaining momentum as it headed into the late ’80s, while the Friday series was losing it.
It’s a pretty well made movie. It’s imaginative, if a little silly, and it has some good performances. Patricia Arquette really stands out in her first film role, and I really like all the characters. It’s the perfect tone for a Nightmare movie. It has fun with the material and plenty of humor, but the threat is still treated seriously.
Rating: 8/10
