Danny Hassel Movies

In the fifth installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Alice (Lisa Wilcox) begins the film with the notion that she is safe after she vanquished the evil Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) by learning how to battle the dreamworld psychopath within her own unconscious mind. But somehow Freddy has survived, and Alice discovers that he's found a place where Alice can't protect herself when he taps into the dreams of her unborn child. Freddy is soon leaving a trail of destruction while the child is still in the womb, and he will become even more deadly when the child comes to term. Memorable moments include Freddy's attack on a comic book artist and his Hellish experiences when "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs" is locked in an insane asylum with a nun. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was followed by Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, though Mr. Krueger popped up again in Wes Craven's New Nighmare. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This fourth trip down Freddy Lane was the most successful at the box-office, but although it has some impressive visuals, it is mostly an empty film. Credit must go to the effects team for some fine work, but otherwise, this entry from the director of Cutthroat Island (Renny Harlin) is extremely weak. Roland Kincaid falls asleep and awakens in the Springwood junkyard, where his dog -- named "Jason" in a sad foreshadowing of the film's giggly tone -- pees fire on Freddy's grave. The pyro-urinary baptism causes Krueger (Robert Englund) to reassemble from bones outward in an admittedly impressive sequence. Predictably, Freddy guts Kincaid, then appears in Joey's waterbed as a naked pinup girl (Hope-Marie Carlton) before slicing him to ribbons. And so it goes. The film has a few interesting ideas kicking around, but no real identification points. This is a video game, not a movie, and the characters seem to exist only in order to move the film from one effects sequence to another. There is a lot to be said for special effects, and the ones here are extraordinary and vivid. However, the wonderfully grim mood and subtle performances of Chuck Russell's outstanding third entry in the series are gone, abandoned by Harlin in favor of a splashy, comic book approach which would, unfortunately, dominate the series' later installments. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi