Full Attention - A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)

Cody goes through every minute of one of the least popular Elm Street sequels.


In Full Attention articles, I give my full, undivided attention to a movie - and prove it by making some kind of comment about every single minute in that movie. I don't claim to have invented this concept, this is just my version of it.

I know that running times can vary depending on regions and formats, so to help readers keep track of where I am in the movie I will talk about what's going on in certain minutes, but a description of events will never be the only thing I have to say about a minute.

There are R-rated and unrated cuts of A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child, but for this article I was watching the R-rated version of the film.

00:00 - 01:00

They tried to cheap out and replace Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger with a random stand-in for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, but by this point they had realized Englund was who people went to these movies to see. The fact that he was buried under horrific makeup for the role just made people want to see him more. He receives top billing in this one; Robert Englund in A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child.

This is the fifth film in the Elm Street franchise, but they left the 5 out of the title. The title appears on screen with what was meant to be a cool, stylish effect, but its comes off a bit subpar to me.

01:00 - 02:00

The title sequence plays out over glimpses of sweat-coated body parts bathed in blue lighting. Fingers running along writhing flesh, a foot running up someone else's leg. It looks like we're about to watch an erotic thriller.

02:00 - 03:00

The credits are presented as if they have been written on the screen with blue chalk. I'm not really into the look of that... or of the look of the blue letters that appeared before the chalk style took over. I'm also not too keen on the music track Jay Ferguson composed for this sequence. I already disagree with choices that were made for this movie!

The screenplay is credited to Leslie Bohem, working from a story by Bohem and the writing duo of John Skipp and Craig Spector. Despite these credits, it has been said only half of Bohem's script was used, while only one line written by Skipp and Spector made it into the film. David J. Schow and William Wisher did some work on the script, as did production executive Michael De Luca. The Dream Child was really slapped together in a mad scramble as New Line Cinema rushed it into production so it could reach theatres almost exactly one year after the record-breaking release of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The Dream Master had been released on August 19, 1988, and The Dream Child followed on August 11, 1989.

03:00 - 04:00

Speaking of things being rushed, director Stephen Hopkins has said he was hired in February to get the movie into theatres six months later. Hopkins had previously worked as an assistant director on Highlander, and made his directorial debut with a horror film called Dangerous Game in 1988. Dangerous Game didn't even get a proper release in the United States until 1991 - after moviegoers had already seen his work on The Dream Child and Predator 2.

By now we've seen that those writhing bodies belong to returning Dream Master characters Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and her boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel). When they're done with their writhing, Alice gets out of bed and goes to take a shower.

04:00 - 05:00

Plumbing problems. That truly is a nightmare. Alice's shower is disrupted by a disgusting brown liquid gurgling out of the drain, then the water pressure becomes so strong that it blasts tiles off the shower wall. The shower begins to fill with water and it looks like Alice might drown... Throughout this sequence there are shots of Alice's fully nude body as glimpsed through the detail-obscuring, opaque glass shower door. I assume that's a body double in the shower for these shots, but either way it's kind of surprising that a horror sequel would be showing that much of a returning heroine's body. Alice was the mousy girl who had to find herself in the previous film, now the camera is perving on her.

05:00 - 06:00

Alice busts through the shower door, but the water doesn't follow her out as she falls into a dark, dirty location that is clearly the domain of the dream stalker Freddy Krueger. It's shocking that none of these movies were ever called The Dream Stalker. The fact that Alice has to enter this place naked makes it a bit creepier, since she's more vulnerable that way, but her nudity doesn't last long. Just long enough for us to wonder how much they're going to show of her butt.

06:00 - 07:00

Now that the camera is moving through a room full of rambling, cackling men in filthy clothes, it becomes pretty obvious that the place Alice fell into is an insane asylum. One of these crazy men is played by Robert Englund, and he makes sure you notice him by looking straight into the camera for several seconds. If a viewer didn't know what Englund looked like under the Freddy makeup they probably thought this guy was a terrible extra.

A nun's habit has appeared on Alice's body and she's wearing a name tag that says Amanda Krueger. Freddy's mother; we met her ghostly spirit back in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

An orderly has been tasked with standing on a stairway landing overlooking this room and counting the men. He's supposed to make sure there are one hundred of them in there, a job that seems like it would be impossible to accomplish the way he's doing it. That's okay, he lets an impatient co-worker lead him out of the room before he's done anyway.

07:00 - 08:00

Alice/Amanda has been making her way through the crowd of men, something she really shouldn't have been doing. That's just dumb and ill-advised. It seems unlikely that a nun would actually be allowed to walk among one hundred insane men, but this is how we were told Freddy was conceived. His mom was a nun who was accidentally locked in with one hundred mental patients. Since the orderly didn't finish his counting job, that is exactly what has just happened to Alice/Amanda.

The Englund patient gets a creepy close-up before the mental patients start swarming in on the nun.

Then Alice wakes up in her bedroom, where she's comforted by Danny... who is then replaced by Englund's filthy mental patient for a quick bonus scare. This guy disappears when Alice pushes him off her bed, so now she's officially awake. Alone and safe.

08:00 - 09:00

Today happens to be graduation day at Springwood High in the franchise's setting of Springwood, Ohio, and Alice and Dan have earned their high school diplomas. After the graduation ceremony, we're introduced to friends of Alice's who weren't around for some reason in the previous movie. It's lucky for them that they weren't, since all of Alice's friends died except for Dan.

One friend is Summer School's Kelly Jo Minter as Yvonne, who knows that Dan visits Alice at night by sneaking in through her bedroom window. We'll find out that those secret rendezvous are what have set the story in motion.

09:00 - 10:00

Another friend is Mark (Joe Seely), a dweeby guy who has a crush - one that Alice deems hopeless - on her pal Greta (Erika Anderson). Mark has a lollipop he offers Greta a taste of, but she's stopped by her snooty mother (Pat Sturges) because "That's not what a cover girl puts in her body." Greta isn't the only one with parental issues, as Mark also appears to be annoyed by his obnoxious dad (Clarence Felder).

We don't see Yvonne's parents, but we do learn that she has swimming practice that evening and will have the keys to the school pool. So she intends to have a secret graduation party there. If this were a different sort of slasher movie, that pool would be the setting for the slaughter to come, but that's not Freddy's style. Well, he did attack a pool party in Freddy's Revenge, but what I'm saying is that he's not the kind of slasher who just picks off people one-by-one as they party in a single location.

10:00 - 11:00

Dan presents Alice with plane tickets to Paris, and she presents him with some bad news. She had a nightmare last night, and it was the first time she felt like she wasn't in control of her dreams since her encounters with Freddy in The Dream Master. Life would be pretty tough for a Freddy survivor - even after they've defeated him, they're going to have nightmares from time to time as their life goes on. They'll have to brush them off and believe Freddy is gone for good, otherwise they'll be living the rest of their life in paranoia.

11:00 - 12:00

Dan responds to Alice's dream concerns by saying, "If you don't dream him up, he can't hurt you or us." She takes this as a piece of comforting advice, even though it actually says nothing and puts a lot of responsibility on her shoulders. In other words, "If you don't control your dreams, I'm going to get killed. So shape up!"

Now we see that Dan also has issues with his parents, as his dad is so focused on making sure he'll continue playing football in college that he drags Dan off to have a conversation with a coach just minutes after the graduation ceremony has ended. This movie is very heavily focused on the idea of parents being the biggest nightmare of a teen's life. But given the whole "Dream Child" aspect, it makes sense that parents play such a large role.

12:00 - 13:00

Alice had said that her dad has a rule against drinking alcohol in their house, quite a turnaround from the previous film, where Mr. Johnson (Nick Mele) was an alcoholic. She has also spent the last few minutes feeling upset that he didn't attend her graduation, but now we see that he was there all along. He was just keeping his distance because he didn't want to spoil her day with his reputation. Mr. Johnson is sober now, a caring and attentive father rather than the douche he was before.

We clearly see that Alice and her friends are the class of 1989, which forces Elm Street fans to rethink the franchise's timeline. The first A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, but even though Freddy's Revenge was released a year later characters say the events of the first movie occurred five years earlier. So if the first movie was set in its year of release, Freddy's Revenge would take place in 1989. But we're a couple more sequels and a couple more years down the line now, and they're saying it's 1989 here. So do the math and rearrange those years.

13:00 - 14:00

Mr. Johnson doesn't seem too enthusiastic about Alice and Dan's plans for a European vacation, he isn't amused by Dan's joke that he'll have Alice back home by August. But that won't be an issue for long.

In The Dream Master, Alice joked that her greatest fear was that she would end up working at the Crave Inn restaurant forever. One year later she's still working at the Crave Inn, and she has to go to work before she can attend the unauthorized pool party Yvonne will be throwing. While walking from the school to the restaurant, she gets some confirmation that Freddy is indeed coming back. Passing through a park, she sees those ghostly kids that keep popping up in these movies, jumping rope and singing that creepy rhyme, "One, two, Freddy's coming for you."

Now we're meant to start wondering how this can even be possible. Alice was just at her graduation party and she's walking to work, when did she have the chance to fall asleep?

14:00 - 15:00

Alice must be just as confused as the viewer that she's managing to see the jump rope kids while she's awake, because she doesn't start freaking out as soon as she sees them. Instead she just looks curious and follows them out of the park... and doesn't even take note that day turned to night in the span of seconds.

The rhyme is supposed to end, "Nine, ten, never sleep again," but this time one of the kids ends it "Nine, ten, he's back again." But Alice still isn't freaking out.

15:00 - 16:00

The kids have led Alice to a massive Gothic cathedral, complete with gargoyles all over the place. She follows a nun into this building, and the location is brought to the screen through the use of an impressive matte painting.

I have always been under the impression that this was a place we have seen before, the Westin Hills institution from Dream Warriors, but that didn't make much sense because it looks totally different. Along the lines of the Myers house turning into a mansion between Halloween and Halloween 5. But, according to some websites, it seems fans have determined that this place and Westin Hills are two different locations.

16:00 - 17:00

A very stylized baby stroller, which was also prominently featured in marketing materials, is seen being pushed through the halls of the cathedral. That thing is very weird.

And now things enter full-on nightmare territory, as Alice suddenly finds herself on a gurney that's being pushed through the halls by an orderly. This is when she finally starts screaming, which I would have done as soon as I saw those jump rope kids.

17:00 - 18:00

Alice is pushed into a medical room where she's surrounded by a doctor, orderlies, nurses, and a nun. Then she switches places with someone else; she's no longer on the gurney, she's watching the woman on the gurney, who is Amanda Krueger (Beatrice Boepple). A younger Amanda than we saw in Dream Warriors. Amanda asks, "Why's this happening again?"

What's "this"? It's the birth of Freddy. Alice is witnessing the moment the murderer was born. It was a breach birth, but Amanda successfully pushes the baby out into the world. The doctor and the nun have shocked, repulsed reactions to the sight of the baby, which I don't think is a reflection of Freddy's actual birth. This is a nightmarish twist on the event.

18:00 - 19:00

We get a look at baby Freddy, and yeah, there's no way Freddy actually looked like this little creature when he was born. The nun drops the baby on the floor and it goes racing out of the room, already able to crawl at an amazing speed.

Alice follows the baby out of the medical room and right into the chapel set from The Dream Master. This set looks so awesome, I really wish it had been utilized in later Freddy movies. I had especially hoped for it to be seen in Freddy vs. Jason; imagine the sight of Jason Voorhees walking through this iconic location. Or if Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash had been made, it would have been incredible to see Ash Williams in there as well.

19:00 - 20:00

This is actually pretty freaky. The baby Freddy finds Freddy's clothes, which dropped to the floor when he disintegrated in the previous movie, and when it does it starts screaming in its little baby voice. The room begins to shake, the floor splits open, light shines through the floorboards, windows shatter. The altar with Freddy's clothes and the baby on it rises into the air... And we see that the baby is actually becoming the full grown adult Freddy right before our eyes.

20:00 - 21:00

They grow up so fast. Baby Freddy is now adult Freddy, although the transformation still isn't complete. Freddy still has the baby's gross arms and bare feet. While I prefer the shots of Freddy regenerating from a skeleton in The Dream Master, this transformation scene is pretty jaw-dropping in its own right.

Freddy slips on his glove and screeches the razor claws along a metal surface. He really loves doing that.

21:00 - 22:00

Now we get our first good shot of adult Freddy, still sporting an overly long baby arm. That's kind of reminiscent of the long arm trick he showed off in the first movie.

Freddy announces his triumphant return with a quip and a laugh. "It's a boy!" Apparently that's the one line Skipp and Spector wrote that made it into the movie. Not much to lay claim to.

Alice's reaction to the sight of Freddy is, "You can't come back!" As if that's going to make him change his mind about things. She says she locked the door on him, and when he says he "found the key" he puts his weird big baby hand on her stomach. Interesting...

Freddy's fun time is interrupted with the arrival of his mother Amanda, wearing her nun's habit and bathed in Heavenly light. Freddy brought her back so he could be resurrected, but now this dream spirit intends to make sure he's destroyed again. For good.

22:00 - 23:00

Amanda really rattled Freddy, he disappears and has lost enough control over the situation that his mom is already able to give Alice a clue on how to defeat him this time. It will require her to release Amanda from her "earthly prison", so she'll have to look for her "in the tower". Sure, it's not a lot to go on, but it's something.

Alice passes through a doorway and steps into the Crave Inn. She has finally made it to work. There's no waking up moment, because she was never asleep to begin with. Her fellow waitress at the restaurant is upset that Alice is four hours late for her shift. Four hours lost. That fellow waitress is also extremely dismissive when she hears that Alice's excuse involves being "in the dream" and "now he's back". The fact that this girl was working during the graduation ceremony is the only reason why I don't think she's the same age as Alice; she's young, but somehow there are young people in Springwood who never got caught up in the whole dream stalker situation, they still doubt it. Freddy has killed more than 20 people in Springwood in recent years, even attacked a pool party, and this waitress thinks Alice having a crazy dream is something to scoff at.

23:00 - 24:00

The pool party is in full swing when Yvonne demonstrates her high dive skills, setting up that aspect of her character for later. She then joins her friends Dan, Greta, and Mark just in time to listen to them complain about their parents.

Dan's parents think he's throwing his life away by going on vacation with Alice. Greta can't even get in the pool because her mom has a photographer coming over, she can't mess up her hair.

Yvonne's reaction to hearing that Dan and Greta's parents are trying to run their lives: "Don't let 'em." So that's why her parents aren't a factor in this movie, she's independent.

24:00 - 25:00

Mark compares his dad to Melicertes, a person of Greek myth who, "like, killed his kids because he didn't like the way they were running the kingdom". Mark comes off like a total California valley dude while telling this story, which is odd when this character is supposed to be a small town Ohio kid. No surprise, actor Joe Seely was born and raised in Los Angeles.

We are introduced to something very cool about Mark here, as he's seen drawing an illustration of a masked vigilante with guns in both hands, blasting away at someone. The Phantom Prowler. Mark draws his own comics that are "loaded with blood and guts", but he gets queasy at the sight of real blood. That's the case for many of us horror and action fans, we only like to see blood when it's fake.

25:00 - 26:00

Alice calls Dan away from the party, telling him that Freddy has returned. She says she saw him while she was awake somehow, "He must have dreamed himself up." As goofy as that line sounds, these movies rarely put much effort into explaining how Freddy was able to come back after being defeated in the previous movie, it was usually pretty easy for him, so they might as well have used that as the official explanation each time.

Dan has a reputation for being fast on the football field, his dad said he "feels the need for speed". So when Dan rushes out of the pool party and Mark says, "There he goes, the fastest man on three legs," when I was a kid I assumed that meant Dan runs so fast that it looks like he has three legs. Because they're moving in such a blur. It took years for me realize that was a joking way of implying that Dan has a large penis.

26:00 - 27:00

Dan really seems to like driving old pickup trucks. In The Dream Master he had a 1959 Ford, and as he drives over to the Crave Inn here we see that he has a 1964 Chevy or GMC. People on the Internet Movie Car Database disagree on what exactly it is, but whatever it is, it's old.

Dan's mom seemed cold toward Alice at the graduation ceremony, so when Dan hears her calling in to a radio talk show to complain about her son's girlfriend it does make some sense... but from the language and delivery, we can tell that Freddy is making up his own version of the relationship/family drama. Dan did yawn and nod his head a little, so there's a chance he actually did fall asleep while driving.

Then Freddy's fingers come out of the radio for no reason other than to give Hopkins a chance to show off a special effect.

Freddy takes control of Dan's pickup truck, strapping him down with extra seat belts, forcing him to push the gas pedal to the floor, and pulling the gear shift out of his reach while talking through the radio. That alone could have been enough for a dream sequence. But then Freddy appears in the passenger seat with his own steering wheel. He takes a drink of the champagne Dan bought for Alice when he thought they were going to celebrate happy times, then spits it on the dashboard, where it sizzles like acid... And we're about to see a lot more special effects that are there just for the sake of showing off special effects.

27:00 - 28:00

This dream sequence is way overdone. Freddy pours some champagne on his right shoulder and it burns through his sweater and flesh just like it burned the dashboard. He removes his arm, sticks the slimy stump against the wall, where it sticks in place, then straps the arm across himself like a seat belt, buckling in with his razor glove. Seconds later, the pickup truck portion of the dream is over, so that was a total waste.

Dan crashes the pickup truck and goes smashing through the windshield. Again, that could have been enough for a nightmare sequence. Dan should have been killed when he was thrown through the windshield. But the dream goes on so things can get more outlandish.

Dan lands in the pool area, which is now empty. The party's over. He runs outside to find his truck parked there, just fine. Problem is, it's locked. So he has to steal the Yamaha V-Max motorcycle that happens to be sitting beside it.

28:00 - 29:00

Why do we have Dan racing through the streets on a motorcycle now? Simply because he "feels the need for speed". And because the filmmakers apparently felt the need to try to live up to the roach transformation dream sequence in The Dream Master. As Dan drives, Freddy once again takes control of his vehicle, and then parts of the motorcycle start to combine with Dan's flesh as he screams in pain. Before our eyes he gets transformed into a hideous biomechanical creature, wires and tubes connecting him to the motorcycle.

A mechanical Freddy face appears in the motorcycle and starts spouting random lines, "Fuel injection! Power drive! Fast lane!" This may be the most annoying Freddy has ever been.

29:00 - 30:00

The only thing recognizable about Dan at this point is his eyes, otherwise he's a motorcycle creature. Freddy tells him not to dream and drive and we know he's heading for a crash... but when the crash occurs in reality, what vehicle is Dan driving? The pickup truck. There never was a motorcycle, so why bother with all of that?

Something I've never been able to wrap my head around when it comes to these transformation nightmares is, how could a character wake up unscathed from that? Other characters wake up with a burn on their arm if they touch a hot pipe in their dream, but what if Dan woke up from the motorcycle dream? Or what if the girl in The Dream Master had woken up after her arms fell off and were replaced by cockroach limbs? Those horrible things that happened to them would have had no effect to their waking bodies? It seems that way when a normal-looking Dan is seen crashing his truck here.

In the moment when Dan dies, Alice sees a vision of him falling down some kind of organic tube. Another flashy effect.

30:00 - 31:00

Freddy gets in one last quip before this nightmare sequence really ends, using Dan's corpse to taunt Alice. She faints... and wakes up in a hospital room, where we find out that Yvonne is a candy striper. When Yvonne informs Alice that Dan is dead, Alice tells her that Freddy killed him in a dream and Yvonne seems baffled. She's just like Alice's co-worker at the restaurant, somehow she's completely unaware that any teenagers have ever died while having a nightmare in her town.

31:00 - 32:00

Dan didn't drink, but since the busted champagne bottle was found in his truck the assumption is that he crashed because he was drinking and driving. It's true that Freddy can frame his victims very well and make their deaths look like accidents or suicides, but the fact that there are any teenagers that doubt his existence five movies into the franchise really tests my suspension of disbelief.

Mr. Johnson is at the hospital to check on his daughter, and as Alice goes on about Dan being killed and freaking out over Freddy, a doctor turns to Mr. Johnson and tells him that many woman have outbursts like this "in the beginning", especially if they've suffered a traumatic shock.

32:00 - 33:00

What was the doctor talking about? The reason this movie is called The Dream Child: Alice is pregnant. Various people have claimed credit for centering an Elm Street movie on a pregnant heroine, but that might not be a great thing to be trying to get credit for. Some have theorized that Dream Child didn't do as well financially as its predecessors because the teenagers these movies were aimed at didn't want teenage pregnancy drama mixed into what they expected to be a fun horror movie.

Mr. Johnson is comforting and supportive, but when Dan's parents hear this news while standing in the hospital room doorway, they just walk off. Doesn't look like Alice is going to be getting much support from them.

33:00 - 34:00

Nearly an entire minute has been dedicated to the sight of Alice crying in her hospital bed before the door to her room creaks open and we see a little kid standing in the doorway. He acts nice, but he comes off as creepy. He has a name Alice has always loved, Jacob, and somehow he knows that her boyfriend was killed. He offers his condolences before he hustles off down the hallway.

Jacob is played by Whitby Hertford. He currently has 81 acting credits to his name, but I know him for two things: Dream Child, and for the being the annoying kid who gives Sam Neill some grief in Jurassic Park.

34:00 - 35:00

Alice isn't the only one who's sad. Now the better part of another minute is spent watching Greta cry over Dan's death while sitting in her bedroom, which has unnerving porcelain dolls set up on every surface. There are so many dolls in this room, it looks like it would be very tough to navigate through it without breaking the things. Sure enough, when Greta moves, having been told by her mother that she needs to get her beauty sleep, one of the dolls falls and shatters.

The next day, Alice is released from the hospital and finds out that there were no little boys on her floor, and there is no children's ward. The existence of Jacob is a mystery to Yvonne.

35:00 - 36:00

Alice has gathered Yvonne, Greta, and Mark together so she can give them some information, but before the meeting Yvonne advises her not to tell Greta and Mark about the "dream stuff". Because no one talks about their nightmares or believes in a dream stalker in Springwood!

Alice does not take Yvonne's advice. By the end of the minute she has told her friends Freddy's whole back story. Nun Amanda Krueger was raped in the 1940s, gave birth to Freddy, Freddy grew up to become a serial killer who murdered twenty or thirty kids on Elm Street, he was arrested but freed on a technicality, the outraged parents delivered street justice and burned him alive. Now he kills people in their nightmares. Yvonne rolls her eyes. I like Kelly Jo Minter - of course I do, she was in Summer School! - but her character is extremely frustrating.

36:00 - 37:00

But Yvonne could be right. If Mark and Greta have made it all this time without becoming aware of Freddy, maybe they shouldn't be told now. Alice thinks she needs to warn them, but maybe she should be distancing herself from them. She's sort of making sure Freddy will take notice of them, she's pulling them into this mess. Her getting other people involved is why characters were dying in Dream Master even after Freddy had killed the last of the "Elm Street kids", the surviving children of the people who burned him. As she was dying, the last Elm Street kid made the bad decision of passing her Dream Warrior ability to pull other people into her dreams over to Alice, then Freddy took advantage of that ability to reach out to other random teenagers through Alice. Which is why Alice is so confused now, because she thought Freddy could only get to other people through her, but she wasn't asleep when Dan was killed.

Alice's friends try to talk to her about her pregnancy, and she gets upset that it's so easy for them to brush aside the Freddy story she just told them. She also gets upset that Mark is drawing the comic book character he created instead of giving her 100% attention. We're supposed to see it as a bad thing that she doesn't want to talk about the pregnancy, even though we know as well as she does that the Freddy threat is not something to take lightly. If she's going to tell them about it, they should pay attention.

37:00 - 38:00

Yvonne, Mark, and Greta agree that if anyone is going after Alice, they'll have to go through them first. Yep, that's how it goes.

Then we get another long look at Alice as she cries her eyes out. This is one somber, depressing movie. You have to assume they were hoping to make Dream Master level money again with this one, but if that was their goal they did it all wrong.

38:00 - 39:00

Alice's brother Rick was killed in the previous movie, and there's a nod to him as Alice and her dad discuss her pregnancy. Mr. Johnson is hoping her baby will be a boy because it will be nice to have a boy playing in the house again. Mr. Johnson continues to act caring and supportive, a complete 180 from his behavior in Dream Master.

Greta isn't in a Freddy nightmare yet, but she is living through a nightmare. A fancy dinner with her hobknobbing mother while she's feeling sad over Dan's death. The way these people behave and speak to each other is almost scarier than Freddy.

39:00 - 40:00

Greta turns down food, which starts an argument between her and her mother. Her mother is always telling her to watch her weight, but she says the purpose of dieting is so they can indulge during social events. Pat Sturges only has 9 credits to her name, and it's surprising she wasn't deluged with offers to play despicable, hateful women after this. The way she plays Greta's mother shows that she was flawless at it.

Freddy makes his entrance and he's a relief compared to Greta's mom.

40:00 - 41:00

Greta is locked into her chair as if she's in a baby's high chair. There is now a large spoon among the razor claws on Freddy's glove and he uses it to force feed Greta various foods, stuffing her mouth until her cheeks are puffed out to a disfiguring degree. Eventually he's feeding Greta her own guts - but you can't really tell that in the R-rated cut of the film.

An unrated cut, which ran two minutes longer and extended the Dan and Greta death sequences, was only officially released on VHS. I think Dan's death still works fine in the R cut, but Greta's goes by way too quickly and obscures what's going on with her.

At her house, Alice opens her refrigerator and a really neat claymation effect plays out as the food grows moldy and rots, and the meatballs in a bowl of spaghetti turn into blinking eyeballs.

41:00 - 42:00

The top half of Greta's body reaches out to Alice from the inside of the refrigerator door, and Hopkins hides the fact that the actress is sticking through the door. Alice tries to help Greta, but then Freddy reaches out from within the fridge, grabs Greta, and pulls her toward him, which causes the door to slam shut. When Alice opens the door again, everything is back to normal, Freddy and Greta have disappeared. It's a good scene for effects.

42:00 - 43:00

Alice and Yvonne go to visit Mark and console him now that word is out that Greta has died. Oddly, Mark seems to live in the back of a vast warehouse that his dad owns.

Mark is starting to believe Alice's stories of a dream stalker, and when Yvonne continues to act skeptical Mark snaps at her, with the approval of every viewer.

43:00 - 44:00

But Mark is a nice and caring guy, so he still apologizes to Yvonne and is a bit too hard on himself for yelling at her. Thankfully, Yvonne still has to leave even after the apology, so we don't have to listen to her doubt Alice anymore.

44:00 - 45:00

Mark takes Alice back into his bedroom, which is still set up like warehouse space. It just happens to have artwork of Mark's character The Phantom Prowler (plus Wolverine) all over the place. Mark says the Phantom Prowler would have had the guts to tell Greta how he felt about her, "He's not even real and he's more of a human being than I am." As a writer, I can really relate to that line. The characters I write are much better at life than I am.

45:00 - 46:00

Alice made coffee in hopes of keeping Mark awake while she tells him more about Freddy, but by the time she gets back with the coffee Mark has already fallen asleep - and she sees an animated version of him, reminiscent of a-ha's "Take On Me" video, in a drawing he made of 1428 Elm Street, the now-abandoned house from previous movies.

She draws herself into the artwork, a simple stick figure with her name written above it, and that successfully allows her to enter Mark's dream and follow him into 1428 Elm. There are some wacky things in these movies, but that's a pretty awesome example of wackiness.

46:00 - 47:00

Mark only made it a few steps into the house before he fell through a hole in the floor and is now dangling over that organic tube thing Dan fell into earlier. That would have been one of the quickest nightmare deaths ever if he hadn't managed to grab onto the edge of the hole.

47:00 - 48:00

Alice helps Mark out of the hole, but before they can leave the house he notices that the palms of his hands are now bloody. The sight of the blood makes him faint, and when he hits the floor he disappears. I can't explain the logic of this, but it's a way to get Mark out of the scene so Alice can talk to Jacob, who just happens to be standing nearby.

I saw The Dream Child in the theatre in 1989, and as I recall the moment of Mark seeing the blood on his hands, saying "Oh shit", and fainting got one of the best reactions from the audience.

Jacob says he has been having bad dreams. He knows about Greta's death, and assures Alice that his mom isn't worried about him, as she doesn't want him around.

48:00 - 49:00

Jacob's wording makes Alice realize that she is the mom he's talking about. She is his mom, and she is communicating with her baby. He says his "friend with the funny hand" has been telling him that Alice doesn't care about him. This is a whole new level of twisted for Freddy, warping the mind of a fetus. And a whole new level of weird for this franchise, because how is a fetus able to appear as a little kid who is able to carry on conversations? He's like a little dream baby time traveler.

Jacobs runs off because his "friend" is calling him, and when Alice goes to follow him she finds herself back in Mark's bedroom.

49:00 - 50:00

As she bandages Mark's hands, Alice tells him she thinks Freddy is trying to hurt "Jacob". That's when they both realize she has already named her baby. But she didn't name him, he told her his name in their first scene together. See, it is like a time travel movie.

Alice suggests that she needs to leave Springwood, which people should have been doing several movies ago, but Mark says the only way to escape Freddy would be to leave the planet. But not even leaving the planet is enough to escape from dreams. The characters don't know that Freddy can't leave the Springwood city limits, because that information isn't given until the next sequel.

50:00 - 51:00

Alice has Yvonne set up an ultrasound for her, with Yvonne warning her not to mention any dream stuff to the doctor. Of course, the first thing we hear Alice say to the doctor is, "Do unborn babies dream?" The doctor provides the exposition that fetuses can spend up to 70% of their day dreaming. This is how Freddy is appearing to Alice even when she's awake; through the dreams of her fetus. Now that the heroine has finally figured out what's going on in this movie, she can start working toward the climax.

51:00 - 52:00

Freddy ruins Alice's first ultrasound. Right after she hears her baby's heartbeat and gets a first look at the developing fetus, the situation turns into a nightmare. Alice is basically zapped into her own womb, going into the ultrasound screen and down an organic tunnel. A character going into their own womb, who could have ever guessed an Elm Street movie would feature a scene like that?

52:00 - 53:00

The Jacob fetus is sleeping peacefully while Freddy hangs out in Alice's womb with him, feeding him the souls of Dan and Greta through his umbilical cord. "Soul food for my boy," Freddy cracks, a twist on a line he already said to Alice in The Dream Master. There they were served a pizza in a nightmare diner that had the meatball-souls of his victims on it as a topping, and he said, "I love soul food!" This just makes me think of how much more entertaining The Dream Master was.

53:00 - 54:00

By the time she leaves her own womb, Alice has figured out that Freddy is feeding baby Jacob people's souls to make the baby like him. We just don't know why quite yet. She gives this information to Yvonne, and makes the mistake of doing so in front of the doctor.

Now we move on to Alice's bedroom, which has a fascinatingly weird decoration; a pair of legs wearing blue jeans and Converse, but in place of the upper body is a potted plant.

54:00 - 55:00

That very distracting plant-thing gets a lot of screen time while Alice and Yvonne have a conversation about Freddy and Yvonne's continuing doubts.

At this point Alice is wearing the outfit she'll continue wearing through the climax of the film, and this is the look that is most prominent in my mind when I think of The Dream Child.

Things get heated with Yvonne as she refuses to accept the idea that Freddy might exist. She even raises her voice and gets in Alice's face over it. What a pain in the ass she is. Mark enters the bedroom in the middle of the conversation and gets a look on his face like he can't believe he has to deal with Yvonne's nonsense again.

55:00 - 56:00

Mark has been doing research, he has a stack of printed newspaper articles about Freddy's shenanigans, and Yvonne knocks it out of his hands as she storms out of the room.

Mark then brings up the possibility of Alice having an abortion. "No baby, no baby's dreams." Yes, just the subject matter teens wanted to hear discussed when they went out to see the new Freddy movie with their friends. Alice has decided to keep the baby.

56:00 - 57:00

As Alice helps Mark pick up his newspaper excerpts, we get a glimpse of one headline that refers to Freddy as a "child molester". This is a major error as far as most Elm Street fans are concerned, they will argue this point and defend Freddy, "He was a child killer, not a child molester." He has certainly been a pervy creep toward some teenagers in these movies, though.

57:00 - 58:00

Dan's parents have stopped by with the offer to adopt the baby and raise it as their own. They're concerned that Alice may not be mentally capable to raise a child; they got a concerning phone call from the doctor. All of the actors handle the emotions of this dramatic scene quite well, but my favorite thing about it is when we see Mark awkwardly lurking in the background.

58:00 - 59:00

Alice tells off Dan's parents and leaves the house, but Mark lingers behind for some extra seconds to give them disapproving looks that really amuse me.

Then Alice and Mark go back to Mark's bedroom for some of the most baffling exposition I have ever heard. According to Mark, everyone believes Amanda Krueger "flipped out" and hanged herself after her son was tried (and released) for killing children. But they couldn't prove it, because there was no body. This has never made any sense to me, how the hell do people come to the conclusion that someone has hanged themselves - specifically, hanged - when there's no body?

59:00 - 60:00

Even though there's no proof that Amanda killed herself, Mark is convinced that she did, and thus her soul is going to be in torment, trapped in its earthly resting place. So now Alice has to find where she died and release her soul. A lot of writers worked on this movie, but watching it gives the viewer a strong feeling that even more work should have been done on the script.

60:00 - 61:00

Alice needs to go searching through the dream world and asks Mark to keep an eye on her as she sleeps. This is a set-up that happens often in Elm Street movies.

Yvonne missed swim practice, but she has still gone to the pool for a late night dip. She's upset and near tears as she gets ready at her locker, apparently it takes a lot out of her to be so annoying all the time.

61:00 - 62:00

While Alice runs through the sanitarium in her dreams, Mark is watching over her and keeping himself awake by reading comic books. He has somehow managed to make a trail of comics to himself across the floor, as if he keeps crawling a couple inches and leaving the book behind every time he finishes an issue. As a comic book collector, it bothers me a bit to see that he's just tossing comics aside on the floor.

62:00 - 63:00

Freddy finally pays a visit to Yvonne, so viewers aren't going to have to listen to her doubt Alice anymore. Her nightmare takes place at the swimming pool, and we are made aware of Freddy's presence in the pool area when he scrapes his razor claws along a metal railing. He's only doing that for himself in this moment; Yvonne doesn't even notice the metal screeching sounds.

She does notice when the diving board crumbles beneath her feet and the end of the board curls up at her like a giant claw.

63:00 - 64:00

Jumping from the nightmarish diving board, Yvonne falls a great distance and then displays some impressive skills when the pool below her turns into a small puddle and she manages to dive right through it. She surfaces in something that is basically Freddy's version of a hot tub, which is to say that it looks very nasty.

Kudos to Englund for being willing to get this water in his mouth. As Freddy rises out of the water, he's spitting out a stream of water like a little kid.

64:00 - 65:00

This "hot tub" is located in the sanitarium, and Freddy hinders himself when he forces Alice to join him and Yvonne in the water. Even though he just demonstrated the ability to use supernatural force to pin Alice against a wall and make her roll all the way down a hallway, Alice is still able to rescue Yvonne from him by grabbing a pool skimmer out of the water and jamming it into his mouth. His power really seems to fluctuate at all times.

As Alice sticks the pool skimmer into Freddy's mouth, she says, "Why don't you just shut up?" When this footage was reused for a recap at the beginning of Freddy vs. Jason, that line was replaced with "Die, motherf---er!"

Alice and Yvonne leave the hot tub, but Freddy is afraid to follow them "because of Amanda".

65:00 - 66:00

In his bedroom, Mark picks up a comic book called Nightmare from Hell. As he flips through it, he sees black and white illustrations of scenes from this movie, and eventually he reaches a page that shows him in his bedroom, leafing through this issue of Nightmare from Hell.

Then my favorite part of The Dream Child, the only thing I truly love about this movie, begins when Mark turns into a black and white illustration himself and is sucked into the pages of the comic book. He then arrives, full color, in a black and white version of the warehouse he lives in.

66:00 - 67:00

A black and white Freddy Krueger rides a skateboard - which, of course, has blades sticking out of it - through the warehouse, slashing the supports on the racks that fill the place. Freddy rides right up to Mark, and that could have been the end of the nightmare right there, because Mark is totally defenseless in this moment. But instead of killing Mark, Freddy vanishes.

67:00 - 68:00

Freddy decides to torment Mark a little bit by making Greta appear in the warehouse. Mark then has to watch while Greta pleads for his help and Freddy scoops some more of her guts out of her stomach with his spoon glove. Greta falls to the floor and turns into a blood-filled porcelain doll that shatters... and this really pisses Mark off. He taps into a dream ability and turns into his own comic book creation, the gun-wielding masked vigilante known as The Phantom Prowler. For a brief moment, The Dream Child turns into a superhero movie, as The Phantom Prowler blasts away at Freddy with his two guns.

68:00 - 69:00

The Phantom Prowler appears to have shot Freddy to death. But that's clearly not going to be the way the movie ends, and his victory is short-lived. Freddy rises as a supervillain in a costume of his own. This Super Freddy, played by Michael Bailey Smith (who would go on to play a different character created by Wes Craven, Pluto, in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes), is as bulletproof as Superman, so now even The Phantom Prowler is powerless against him.

Freddy proceeds to slash up a paper version of Mark, who bleeds color until he's black and white. This comic book dream is pretty great.

69:00 - 70:00

I really don't like the shot of Mark's bloody arm flopping over the pages of an open comic book on the floor of his bedroom, because the fake blood surely ruined that comic. It appears to be an issue of Spider-Man that features both Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson.

Alice wakes to find Mark dead with a bunch of racks collapsed on top of him. When the police arrive, they comment that nothing in his room was "up to code", so Freddy has successfully made this death look like an accident.

70:00 - 71:00

The characters in this movie aren't the quickest bunch. It has taken nearly the entire running time, but Yvonne has finally joined Alice in her "stop Freddy" mission, and Alice has finally realized that Amanda's advice to look for her "in the tower" might have actually meant something.

Again, I'm left wondering how it can be assumed someone died from hanging if their body was never found. Did Amanda leave a note specifically saying she planned to hang herself?

71:00 - 72:00

Yvonne drives over to the asylum, which still looks like something out of a Gothic nightmare even in waking reality. In addition to being much larger than Westin Hills, it has also fallen further into disrepair than Westin Hills would have since the events of Dream Warriors, so I'm buying into the idea that they're two different places and I have been mistaken about them being the same for the last thirty-one years.

72:00 - 73:00

Alice's dad took her home, but that hasn't deterred her from her plan to go to sleep again so she can have a final confrontation with Freddy. As soon as she enters the dream version of the asylum, she starts calling out for Freddy to come out and face her. She's definitely a heroine with guts, it's easy to see why Nightmare fans love her so much - this movie isn't very good, but Alice is still a badass when she needs to be.

73:00 - 74:00

Alice has figured out Freddy's trying to make Jacob like him so he can live through the kid's dreams, and she threatens to sic Freddy's mom on him. Freddy is keeping his distance, so it seems like he's genuinely concerned.

While Alice and Freddy are in the dream asylum, Yvonne is searching through the asylum in reality. She has to knock bricks out of a wall to reach the area where Amanda's body is... Who walled in this nun's corpse? Did that person see her hanging there, is that how word spread that she had hanged herself? So many unanswered questions.

74:00 - 75:00

Alice even goes so far as to call Freddy a "f---ing coward".

There's a pretty cool effect in here as Freddy walks down a hallway that has several large lights hanging from the ceiling. A couple times, he vanishes and then reappears a step or two further down the hall. It's completely pointless, but neat nonetheless.

Then Alice is able to turn her nightmare into Freddy's nightmare by impaling him with that weird stroller, pushing him down a hall on it, and dumping into the room where those "hundred maniacs" are hanging out.

75:00 - 76:00

Being in the vicinity of his mom's spirit really messes Freddy up. He has lost so much control in this dream that the maniacs start tearing him apart. Literally, they tear one of his arms off. But he's still powerful enough to turn that arm into spiders that crawl onto Alice once it hits the ground.

76:00 - 77:00

This is one of the most memorable set pieces of The Dream Child, taking place in a room filled with gravity-defying elements. Stairways go in all different directions; a character can be standing on one set of stairs and appear upside down to a character on another set of stairs. Chains somehow hang straight out from a wall. The design was inspired by M.C. Escher artwork.

Alice finds Freddy and Jacob together in this area, and Freddy is looking beat up from his encounter with the maniacs seconds before. His left arm is still detached from his body, but he has tied it up in his sweater sleeve. It's an interesting look, although nonsensical.

77:00 - 78:00

This Escher-inspired area mostly looks like the asylum, but there's also a section that looks like the Crave Inn Diner, and it's in this area that Dan makes an appearance. Actually, it's Freddy taking on the appearance of Dan, trying to trick Jacob, who has run away from him. The trick isn't successful, but I enjoy the fact that it gives Danny Hassel a chance to play Freddy for a few seconds.

78:00 - 79:00

Alice and Jacob meet up on a small patch of stained glass, which is where the climax of the film is going to take place. Jacob tells his mom-to-be that Freddy is hiding inside her, so Alice has to force him out of her body. This requires a great special effect, as Alice's face takes on Freddy's burn scars, then his face begins to emerge from hers. For a crazy moment, Alice and Freddy are attached, face-to-face.

79:00 - 80:00

Alice hasn't managed to push Freddy all the way out of her. His top half is sticking out of her torso, his legs burst out of her back, his glove hand comes tearing out of her left forearm. It's very twisted and strange, and accomplished with some more terrific effects.

Lucky for Alice, Yvonne has finally reached Amanda's walled-in corpse and finds her kneeling beneath a window, having rotted away into a habit-wearing skeleton. And there's still no evidence that she ever hanged herself. Then the skeleton vanishes like a ghost.

The only thing cool about Yvonne is the large peace sign belt buckle she wears when she goes searching for Amanda.

80:00 - 81:00

As soon as Amanda disappears from the waking world, she reappears in the dream world, where Jacob is watching Alice struggle with Freddy. And then she initiates the weirdest ending in Elm Street history. She tells Jacob he needs to help Alice, so Jacob lets his face take on the burned Freddy look and he tells Freddy that Alice is "no fun anymore" and he wants to learn stuff from his nightmare buddy.

Alice is pretty out of it by this point, so Freddy just gives her a slurpy kiss and tosses her aside. That's the problem with living through a baby that's gestating in the womb of one of your greatest enemies, you have to keep her around.

81:00 - 82:00

Told by Amanda to unleash the power Freddy has given to him, Jacob projectile vomits some kind of huge organic thing across the room, and when it hits Freddy's body it is absorbed into him. Apparently Jacob just spit up the souls Freddy had fed to him, but even though Freddy usually gets stronger when he takes someone's soul this time it doesn't work out for him. The souls of Dan, Greta, and Mark come bursting out of Freddy's back and, attached to him by organic cords, start dragging him toward Amanda.

Hopkins and/or the effects crew chose not to have the soul-faces pulling Freddy across the stained glass floor look like the characters looked on an average day. Instead, they all have the different appearances the characters took on in their final nightmares. Dan is the motorcycle thing he transformed into, Greta's cheeks are puffed out because she was fed to death, and Mark's soul has the face of the Phantom Prowler. This was an interesting choice, and adds another level of oddness to a moment that is already incredibly strange.

And then it gets weirder, because we see that the souls are attached to the body of baby Freddy, who comes bursting out of Freddy's back. When the baby version of himself comes out of him, the body of adult Freddy disappears, his empty clothes dropping to the ground.

82:00 - 83:00

Baby Freddy isn't the only baby around. Jacob has also turned into a baby. As Alice picks up her baby, Amanda picks up her own hideous little monster... and these babies are absorbed into the wombs of their mothers. I'm very ambivalent about all of this. On one hand, I like that a mainstream horror movie features such crazy, weird stuff. On the other, I'm baffled that enough people though this was a good idea that the movie actually got made and released.

83:00 - 84:00

Hopkins brought some very questionable ideas to the screen in this film, but he certainly had a vision for it all. Freddy's last moment in the movie is very stylish. As Amanda steps into a hallway, Freddy's clawed glove comes ripping out of her stomach as we hear Freddy demand that she let him out of her. The camera then pulls back down the hall, and a series of doors slam in front of us, blocking our view of Amanda as she struggles with the hand sticking out of her. Most of these doors only block our view for a brief moment, though, because then they explode. Finally a sturdier door slams shut and remains in place.

When I watched this movie as a kid, I thought this hallway/door shot was amazing.

A time jump then takes us to happier times, as we see that Alice has given birth and is having a picnic in the park with her dad and Yvonne. The baby's middle name is Daniel, in honor of his father.

84:00 - 85:00

But we can't end on an entirely happy note. The jump rope kids are also playing in the park, humming their rhyme about Freddy Krueger, letting us know that Freddy's still out there and there's going to be another sequel.

The end credits start to roll. I'm surprised to see that Michael Bailey Smith was credited as Mike Smith for his role as Super Freddy.

I became a horror fan at a very young age, but I didn't manage to start going to see horror movies at the theatre until 1989. I was only five at the time, but I understood that this was all just entertainment and I was fascinated by big screen monsters like Freddy. I saw The Dream Child in the theatre when it was released, and Super Freddy was one of my favorite things about it. I loved that Freddy was able to alter his appearance in his movies, whether he was transforming into Super Freddy, baby Freddy, or being a giant snake-like creature in Dream Warriors. Even his skeleton came alive to attack people in Dream Warriors. That sort of thing was always so awesome to me.

85:00 - 86:00

George P. Wilbur performed some of the stunts in this movie. Wilbur is best known for playing Michael Myers in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween (6): The Curse of Michael Myers.

The first assistant director was Kristine Peterson, who would go on to direct Critters 3.

86:00 - 87:00

Playing on the soundtrack during the credits in the song "Let's Go" by Kool Moe Dee, a song I don't really like and yet it often comes to my mind. I find myself singing the line "Want me to get 'em? Well I got 'em. My mouth is an Uzi and I shot 'em" way too often.

Freddy Krueger's makeup in this film was courtesy of David Miller, who previously worked on the first film. Miller would go on to work with Freddy on Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and the TV series Freddy's Nightmares.

87:00 - 88:00

The credits don't just list the names of the FX crews, they break down which group of people handled which effects. Freddy Baby, Freddy De-Merge, Freddy Bike, etc. The best section name in here is "Womb with a View".

88:00 - 89:00

The FX credits continue, with KNB getting their credit for creating Freddy's head for the "de-merge" sequence (when Freddy is pushed out of Alice's body). These days KNB's Greg Nicotero is a major creative force behind The Walking Dead and the Creepshow series.

Highlander director Russell Mulcahy gets a special thanks.

The music credits let us know that, in addition to Kool Moe Dee, the film also featured songs by Bruce Dickinson, Romeo's Daughter, Mammoth, Wasp, Samantha Fox, Doctor Ice, and Schoolly D.

89:00 - 90:00

The credits end.

The Dream Child was special to me as a kid because it was the first Freddy movie I got to see on the big screen, but aside from it having that special place in my heart it's not a movie I get much enjoyment out of. There's about as much dumb stuff in it as there is weird stuff, and we have firmly established that it gets jaw-droppingly weird. Despite the fact that the script was cobbled together by a village of contributors, it needed more work... and maybe they just shouldn't have given the greenlight to this "dream child" concept at all.

This isn't my least favorite Freddy movie, though. That would be the next sequel.

I'm open to receiving suggestions on what movies I should cover in Full Attention articles. If there's a movie you would like to see me write about minute by minute, let me know by leaving a comment or sending an email. All suggestions will be considered, although those that are meant to be endurance challenges are less likely to be accepted.