ban was absurd, as the film was not very graphic. Critical response The film has an approval rating of 71% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 38 reviews; the average rating is 6.8/10. The consensus reads, "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors offers an imaginative and surprisingly satisfying rebound for a franchise already starting to succumb to sequelitis." Variety wrote that Russell's poor direction makes the film's intended and unintended humor difficult to differentiate. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated it one and a half out of four stars; he liked the production values but said that it "never generated any sympathy for its characters." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "The film's dream sequences are ingenious, and they feature some remarkable nightmare images and special effects." Although he criticizes Langenkamp's acting, Kim Newman wrote in Empire that the "film delivers amazing scenes in spades, bringing to life the sort of bizarre images which used to be found only on comic book covers". Influence on later works In the franchise, Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital and the dream suppressing drug Hypnocil introduced in Dream Warriors would reappear in Freddy vs. Jason, where it is shown that prolonged use of the drug will render its user irreversibly comatose. In the comics Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash: The Nightmare Warriors, the drug is referenced when Maggie Burroughs taunts Dr. Neil Gordon for being a "Hypnocil junkie" and that if he hadn't been, he would have seen her betrayal and corruption by her demonic father coming. The drug appears in the film Stitches (2012), where the main character Tommy takes a drug by that name to suppress visions of the undead killer clown Stitches. Josh Boone, co-writer and director of the superhero film The New Mutants (2020) about the Marvel Comics superhero team New Mutants, has cited Dream Warriors as one of the major influences on his film, which has been described as a supernatural horror film. An earlier screenplay by Michael Almereyda for what became Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) involved bringing back members of the Dream Warriors as a form of "dream police" to help Jacob Johnson in fighting Freddy. In Friday the 13th: The Game, in the Friday the 13th franchise, the "Tommy Tapes" hints at Tommy Jarvis being sent to Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, to be cared for by Dr. Neil Gordon. Roy H. Wagner