If there was ever a Freddy blockbuster, this is it. There's not much plot, not much character, but there is a steep body count, and the aesthetics are fucking amazing.
The dream imagery is very vivid. The unnatural bright colors really convey that something is wrong under the facade of a nice suburb. It's almost got a David Lynch quality of a modern setting with these Fifties-looking buildings and cars.
I really can't call it my favorite due to lack of tension and plot and such, but it's probably the most fun of the series. The dream sequences are the more stream of consciousness kind of surreal than any of the others; the junkyard scene here the whole world is claustrophobically covered in cars, the pizza scene in the diner, all the long organic spinning hallways, the bug scene, the time loop, and the car crash. It's all amazing, and it all really scares me on a subconscious visual level.
But my favorite scene, the one that I still dream about (and didn't completely realize what I was dreaming of until last week), is the Purple Rose of Cairo scene. I really love everything about this scene. The green light at the box office is just so subtly creepy. Alice walks into an old grandiose theatre and sits on the balcony and watches an old black and white movie with all the dead kids. Then the movie turns into the diner and she gets sucked in while everyone else is unaffected. From the diner, she sees herself (in color) asleep in her chair. The the doors shut, the diner is now in color, and we're in a completely different dream.
Do you get how much I love the visuals of this movie? Now let's talk about the plot. The first third of film consists of Freddy finishing off the remaining kids from the last movie. So I guess what happens between Nightmare 3 and 4 is that after most kids institutionalized in Westin Hills (and one of their therapists) die, the remaining kids are released and they all go to the same high school. This implies that they all lived in the same town, even though they didn't know each other when they were committed. Either that, or their parents decided to all move into the same town after the kids were released.
Also, Kristen gives Alice her Dream Warrior powers as she's dying. Why would she do this? With Kristen dead, Freddy wouldn't be able to get more children without having her pull kids into her dream. And why would Freddy kill Kristen at this point? How did he know that she would give her powers to Alice? He could have fucked himself.
And then, as people die, Alice is supposed to get their powers. But really, she just knows Karate, gets the nerd girl's bug thing (which is an object; not a power), and says everyone's catch phrases. And that really doesn't help her stop Freddy anyway. When Alice finally goes through the looking glass to confront Freddy, these powers pretty much lead to a stalemate. She defeats him by hearing that Dream Master poem and holds up a piece of glass so that Freddy sees himself and explodes; possibly the lamest Freddy death yet.
I didn't really know how to fit this in, but I figured that I should also mention that the screenplay was co-written by Brian Helgeland and Linnea Quigley's boobs are in Freddy.
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