I remember when I first started hearing about Freddy Kreuger in the 1980’s. I was too young to know the term “lucid dreaming”, but I understood the concept (and years later how to actually do it), and I always thought that if I was in the situation the Elm Street Kids found themselves in, I would have used it to battle Freddy.
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to think of this, as that’s exactly what happens in Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy Thompson, the only surviving Elm Street child from the first movie, who is now a psychiatrist specializing in dream therapy. Nancy arrives at a psychiatric hospital specializing in sleep disorders, and finds that the last of the Elm Street Kids are being terrorized by Freddy. This time, however, things are not quite as one-sided as they were during her first encounter. One of the children, Kristen, has a special gift that allows her to pull others into her own dream. They devise a plan to use this gift, along with lucid dreaming, to fight Freddy and beat him at his own game. Meanwhile, Freddy’s horrible origins are further revealed, and an attempt is made to destroy him by laying his earthly remains to rest.
So far (I’m watching the movies in order), this is my favorite of the series. The imagination that was so lacking from the second movie is present here; and if I was going to write one of these, this is the how I would do it (conceptually speaking, anyway). The Elm Street kids aren’t terribly creative, given that they could make themselves into anything in their dreams, and the best they came up with was a fruity looking wizard, and there is some 1980’s cheese (not to mention some 1980’s cheesecake), all in all, I thought this one was pretty good. Four stars.