Nightmare on Elm Street 4

"Nightmare on Elm Street 4" is one of the best entries in the series. Okay, the first is considered a classic, maybe because it had a feeling of poetic surrealism that is indeed lost here. But, come on, it is the FOURTH Freddy film, did you REALLY expect it to be scary? Freddy delivers indeed too many puns, however some of them actually hit the mark. After all, the quality of a slasher film doesn't depend exclusively on how "serious" and "vicious" the killer is - he was more serious in "Part 2", which was an embarrassment, he was less serious in "Part 3", which was an imaginative, entertaining film. As for "Part 4", it has way-above-average acting, a polished look (just compare it to some early "Friday The 13th" cheapies) and some gruesome, stunning visual effects. Above all, the movie exploits more possibilities about the links between reality and dreams than the "classic" original did. It is worth seeing.

The Best in the industry (at the time) were responsible for the stunning special effects. The special and practical effects together with the incredible make-up never disappoints in this series.

Several characters from 'A Nightmare on Elm Street 3' including Kirsten, Joey and Kincaid return. Joey and Kincaid are once again portrayed by Rodney Eastman and Ken Sagoes, but Kirsten is now played by Tuesday Knight, and unfortunately she wasn't as good as Patricia Arquette.

With Nancy gone and Kirsten not lasting very long, Alice (Lisa Wilcox) becomes the new heroin, having received Kirsten's powers of bringing people into dreams. Alice has a dream-like presence, which works so well for the movie. She has a crush on hunky Dan (Danny Hassel). This film brings an end to the last of the Elm Street children, and having tricked Kirsten, Freddy now has new victims to torment.

The film blends humour and horror amazingly well, without the humour getting in the way of the action or suspense. Ha-ha, and there's a dog named Jason in a Freddy movie!! Classic!

With 'A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master' having nice characters, a good story, fantastic effects, and being atmospheric, this almost felt like it ought to have been the start of a franchise, and not the fourth film in a franchise. The effects are hands down the best since the original and some of the best yet for an 80's horror movie in general. Made almost four decades ago, the effects are still incredible. This was also the best in the series since the original. This was awesome!

This doesn't have the well-known cast of the previous Nightmare 3 movie but the special effects are still good.....each very different and some of them very funny. They make this perhaps the most entertaining entry in the series.

Memorable scenes include a junkyard, a water bed, a classroom, faces in a pizza, a girl bench pressing and faces coming out of Freddy's flesh. The storyline, however, features its usual dumb and ridiculous theology and has its usual share of unlikable obnoxious teens. Their parents weren't pictured as any better, perhaps worse.

In fact, the kids and parents are so bad you wind up rooting for Freddy to do them in. Perhaps that's the idea!

The original 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is still to me one of the scariest and best horror films there is, as well as a truly great film in its own right and introduced us to one of the genre's most iconic villains in Freddy Krueger. It is always difficult to do a sequel that lives up to a film as good as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' let alone one to be on the same level.

While the best of the sequels from personal opinion is the third, the fourth one is another one of the series' better sequels. Like the third film it is not on the same level as the original, a very difficult feat, but it does have enough of what is a large appeal of the original and why it works so well. Not perfect, but a lot of very good things.

'The Dream Master' is not without its flaws. With a couple of exceptions, the acting is largely wooden (while not the worst offender as such, Tuesday Knight is no Patricia Arquette) and the beginning rock song is really cheesy and feels out of place. The story at times gets a little silly.

However, Lisa Wilcox is a winning lead and Robert Englund continues to terrify as the iconic character that epitomises "what nightmares are made of". 'The Dream Master' is to me the second best directed sequel, courtesy of Renny Harlin, giving a potentially clichéd premise freshness and imagination.

Special effects are neatly executed. The humour is darkly comic and very funny and there are some wickedly cracking one-liners. The scares are aplenty and they are legitimately creepy with some cool deaths (the water bed one is a strong example) and amazing dream sequences thrown into the mix. Alice being flung into the on-screen action from the cinema balcony is one of the series' most marvellous highlights.

It's a beautifully photographed film, particularly the dream sequences, and is the most unique-looking 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' sequel with its European art-horror visual style. The production design is both dream-like and nightmare while the music is suitably haunting.

Overall, good sequel and one of the series' better ones. 7/10 Bethany Cox

The third sequel in the long-running series is set firmly in the world of the late 1980s: we're talking lame fashions, big hair, rubbery special effects and a rather uneven tone veering midway between comedy and horror. It's all about what's over the top, with everybody involved aiming to outdo the scares and FX of the previous movies, but in the end none of this can disguise the fact that by this stage the story was wearing very thin. This is nothing more than a supernatural slasher that virtually reprises the plot of the first three films in the series with different characters.

Of course, watching Robert Englund hamming it up will always be a guilty pleasure, and I have to say that the special effects are also pretty impressive. In the days before CGI, the FX team here went all out in creating bizarre and inventive death scenes, most notably a moment involving a giant cockroach. Freddy's resurrection at the outset is gratuitously silly yet somehow still works, paying homage to the old Chris Lee/Dracula resurrections in spectacular fashion. There are lots of able technicians working hard behind the scenes, including Howard Berger and Screaming Mad George, and in a film this reliant on special effects their diligence pays off.

It's hard to review this title objectively, because watching it makes me nostalgic for '80s cinema in all its tacky badness. But I think it's fair to say that this is one of the better sequels out there; it's not frightening in the least, but it is entertaining and it's one of few enjoyable Renny Harlin-directed movies in existence, along with DIE HARD 2 and DEEP BLUE SEA.