A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Holy crap! This film... this is exactly what I was hoping for when I started watching the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. If you haven’t seen these films and but have heard about them then Dream Warriors is probably the closest that comes to what you were expecting.

Dream Warriors takes place in a psychiatric hospital with seven troubled teenagers. All of them have seen Freddy Krueger in their dreams, which the doctors think is some kind of group psychosis. But these are the last of the Elm Street kids, whose parents killed Freddy Krueger all those years ago.

We see the return of Nancy from the first film, who is now a psychiatrist and new staff member at the hospital. It turns out that the real ending of the first film was pretty much everything that happened before the actual end of the film. Good, this gives a clear cut point from which to build this film from. Over the years she has had to deal with the nightmares and takes a new experimental drug to suppress them. She now works at this hospital in order to help these teenagers against Freddy.

There’s a lot that makes this film more interesting. For one we learn more about Freddy. We learn about his tragic past as the child of a woman raped by mental patients. We also get to see Freddy’s powers more consistently. He is able to alter the dream world completely to his liking. What we see is quite frightening as he completely changes rooms and the buildings on a whim. We also see that he is able to control people in their sleep, so when one might think the person is sleepwalking he’s actually being controlled by Freddy.

But most of all it’s the title that brings the most interest. The so-called ‘Dream Warriors’. Though this might be a bit of a powerful term, it’s what these kids are. They all get brought into the same group dream and have their own powers based upon their own fantasies. So the nerd gets to be a wizard master whilst the quiet guy has a strong and powerful voice.

It’s fucking awesome! This is what should have happened in previous films: the kids getting together in the same dream to try and fight off Freddy. Sure, the dream powers might seem a little ridiculous, but this is the dream world, so they can try and use it to their own advantage. The fact that the kids are actively fighting back just makes everything so much better and so much more entertaining.

Freddy is also great in this film. This time he pretty much sticks in the dream world, where he belongs and where he is most powerful. He is fun and scary at the same time, delivering some great lines and being truly terrifying through his manipulation of both the world around him and the kids.

All of this comes together rather nicely during an exciting climax. Freddy must be defeated in the dream world as well as the real world, where his bones need to be buried on hallowed ground to stop him from having any powers, and so be put to rest. Characters commit acts of badassery and some die in their attempts to defeat Freddy, but they overcome all odds and defeat him. Though there was most probably no other way to end the film it is still intense and you are never too sure if they will actually win.

This is definitely the first of these films that I have liked. It has all the elements of a good horror film. If the previous two films were more similar to this in tone and made more sense then I probably would have liked them. This just did it all correctly and had fun whilst doing it. It’s now a question of whether or not the rest of these films will keep this standard.

Final Verdict: 8/10