What happened? Those were the first words to come to mind after this awful movie finished for the first and last time on my computer screen. Nightmare on Elm St. had gone noticeably downhill after it's cult-classic of a first film, but I doubt anybody expected this horrible aberration. Nobody expected this cosmic joke of a film, and nobody is more distraught about it than I am.<br /><br />This is by far the worst ANOES film of the lot. It doesn't seem too bad at the beginning, with a genuinely creepy intro and a rather elongated shower scene featuring Alice. But then we hit rock bottom right at the beginning with bad acting and a jumbled sequence of events. I mean, sure, Freddy movies are supposed to be dreamlike and creepy, but this one is like a train-wreck in it's poor sequencing of events and awful plot setup. It feels like you're coming down with a terrible headache, not like you're getting scared. So the directing totally fails. None of the suspense and well crafted horror from previous sequels is found here, and even the death scenes are mostly just crass and moronic (the death by food especially), except for that one cool scene that's crafted like a comic book battle. That's why this movie gets a point.<br /><br />The storyline...lame, lame, lame, LAME. It was an excuse to gross people out and to make the MPAA mad, and nothing more.<br /><br />The acting...should I mention how Freddy has been turned into a childish boogey-man-like clown figure? How his rebirth scene made him look like a monster out of a 7 year old's horror book instead of the foreboding and nightmarish dream killer we've all known and loathed since the first film? That arm waving and stupid chuckling as he appeared again...ugh. And his one liners, too. Throughout the whole movie, they suck. Badly. A grade-schooler could come up with funnier stuff then the vomit Freddy spews throughout the 90 minute duration of the film. Hell, a chimpanzee could come up with much funnier lines than what Freddy's been told to say here. Who wrote the script for this? This movie is really irritating, too. It seems so pointless. Like a gnat buzzing around your head, a gnat that just WON'T go away. Freddy is just an annoyance now. We've seen him so many times before. This one's nothing different, and a lot of the time you just want him to take his awful one-liners and get off your TV screen. Alice, instead of the thoughtful and quiet girl from the last movie, seems annoying and very shallow, and this is obviously due to the horrible, horrible script this movie was fitted with. Lisa Wilcox may be a great actor, and sometimes it shines through the cracks here, but she can't save this movie. The other actors just suck, mostly.<br /><br />The last 15 or 20 minutes of Freddy's existence in this film are awful and embarrassing. I hope Englund was ashamed of this. Who wants to see Freddy running around like a mutated gorilla with his limbs stretched out, laughing like a cartoon villain? This movie destroyed anything positive I felt for the Nightmare series. I can't ever watch them again without this image running through my head; of the mangled cartoon abomination that Krueger became. He was slowly becoming a jokey, retarded pop culture icon, but this is the lowest of the low. This is rock bottom. Nobody will ever take Freddy Krueger seriously again after seeing this film. He's naught but a joke, a clown that is long overdue for retirement. Pathetic.<br /><br />Of all the movies I could hate, why did it have to be Nightmare on Elm St, a series which I once adored and liked a lot? The Dream Child represents the death of a legend, and the shattering of any hope I had in the Nightmare on Elm St. series. Freddy would go on to continue his downward spiral into clown status in the next installment, Freddy's Dead (which was more entertaining than this was, actually), and then he would go on to bring down the mood in Freddy VS Jason, and finally he would putter out into nothing, which is for the best.<br /><br />I know this has mostly been a rant about why Freddy sucks now, but this movie is overall, horrible, and one of the worst movies ever made. Not recommended to anyone, and even ANOES completionists won't want to see this one again.