For the fourth entry in a goddamned 80's slasher movie franchise, this movie's actually got some shit going on under the hood. I was honestly expecting an inferior and more tongue-in-cheek version of It, you know? Ha ha ha hey kid, you got this special interest/defining feature? Let me torment you with it in a nightmare and then murder you, gotcha bitch. Some of the kills in the movie take that form, yes, but it's what happens after that's interesting. It's what happens before that's also a little interesting; namely the last three survivors of the previous movie getting picked off by a revived Freddy. The last movie, if you'll recall, had this running subtext of mental health care being an incompetent joke that let poor people slip between the cracks and die terribly. This is the logical endpoint of that. The three who lived survived, but in the end their demon got them. Their demon being a razor glove dream demon rather than any mental illness, but one must work with what one's given. Kristen, the girl who got to scream that incompetent mental health workers were letting them die, gets a similar belter to go out on. Her mother slips her sleeping pills, thinking a little sleep will make her all better, and as Kristen struggles to stay awake. she flat-out says it. "Mother, you just murdered me.". She ends up being right, as well. Freddy gets her. She's gone.
Of course, this being a full-length movie, that's not the end of it. Kristen had the power to pull people into her dreams, and she accidentally tugs a new friend into hers before she dies. Alice here somehow inherits the dream-pulling power, and Freddy needs to use this to his advantage because Kristen was the last child of the adults who roasted him alive. He can't get to anyone else unless Alice pulls them into her dream, and Alice can't control it so she ends up tugging close friends along every time she falls asleep, and Freddy ends up killing them one by one. Sounds like standard stuff, but there's some interesting shit going on under the hood here. Let's poke it with a wrench. First of all, Freddy's continued bloodlust for killing teenagers in their own nightmares. It's interesting because when Kristen dies, Freddy's effectively won. He's gotten his revenge on the parents who burned him alive. Every one of their children has been murdered by him, cut down in their prime. It took him three and a half movies, but he did it. By vengeful ghost logic he ought to vanish... but we also have slasher villain logic. Freddy's popular and makes the dollars, so he can't be done. No, he just really likes killing teens with ironic nightmares now, and Alice is his conduit to do it. A fresh meat supply, so to speak, using her close friends and taking them from her.
Which neatly leads us into the other powerful theme of the movie, grief and loss. Really. The movie even dovetails that from Kristen to Alice with Kristen's last biting line to her mother. Her mother has now suffered the loss of her daughter, and will mourn. So, too, will Alice lose her friends one by one. The symbolism gets a bit obvious, but shockingly poignant for a movie about teens getting murdered. Alice has this mirror in her bedroom covered by the photos of her friends. As they die, she takes the photos down, revealing more and more of the mirror and seeing more and more of herself. As they die, her dream powers mean she takes on aspects of them. Smoking like Kristen did, even though Alice doesn't smoke. Being able to use nunchucks like her late martial-artist brother. The friends also leave behind keepsakes, things Alice treasures that remind her of the friends she's lost along the way. Though they're dead, they live on within her in her memory. T
here's some absolutely gonzo shit about titular dream masters and dream gates, positive and negative. Alice is gathering the positive memory of her friends, their power. Freddy is gathering their souls, trapping them within himself as sustenance for his negative energy. Alice and Freddy are mirroring each other, and when Alice heads into dreamland for her final confrontation, she fucking dropkicks her way into the fully uncovered mirror in her bedroom. She fights back against Freddy, not alone, but with the power of her friends. Her brother's martial arts. Her brainy friend's soundwave device. Eventually it's a rhyme from her dead mother which reveals that Freddy's weakness is seeing his own reflection, at which point the souls rip Freddy to shreds in a ghoulish goddamned sequence. That's Nightmare Part 4. I really did not expect anything quite so deep and rich as this from a slasher, but fuck. We got it. I might actually like it more than 3 for those rich themes. Neat. See you next year for Part 5, which I hope won't botch things in a silly way.
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