A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

A flimsily plotted but visually impressive addition to the endless Freddy Krueger saga, with an unsavoury gynaecological flavour. Teenage Alice (Wilcox) is terrorised by a reborn Freddy (Englund), who is attempting to massacre her Springwood High chums by stalking them through the dreams of Alice's unborn child. Retreading old ground, the chaotic storyline flashes back to the now legendary rape of Amanda Krueger by a throng of maniacs, and the subsequent birth of Old Pizza Face. 'It's a breech-birth...It's backwards!' screams a nurse as a frog-legged Freddy foetus (courtesy David Miller) hightails it out of the womb. Later, director Hopkins goes one step further and takes us inside Alice's womb, where her unborn child is being fed the souls of Krueger's victims by a flesh-faced Freddy, functioning as a decidedly suspect intra-uterine device. The rest is a series of disjointed but nevertheless diverting special effects set pieces. Leslie Bohem's script dishes up the requisite helping of one-liners, and all the usual quasi-religious mythical tosh is present and correct.