A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - 1988 Kristen, Kincaid and Joey have all been released from Westin Hills Hospital and are living as normal teenagers again after their fight with Freddy Krueger in the previous film. Kristen has new friends, including Alice Johnson, a bright girl and daydreamer. Sheila, a genius who is also astmatic. Debbie, a tough girl with a fear of bugs, and her boyfriend Rick, who is also Alice's brother.
Kristen begins to sense that Freddy is not dead, and frequently upsets Kincaid and Joey by pulling them into her dreams of Freddy's house. Joey warns Kristen that the dreams might stir him up again, so to keep them from being pulled in, she doesn't sleep the next night.
However, Kincaid has a nightmare, awakening in the salvage yard where Freddy's bones were buried. His dog Jason inadvertently causes Freddy's resurrection. Kincaid puts up a good fight, but realizes he's trapped in the nightmare and his calls to Kristen go unheard as Freddy attacks and kills him.
Joey has a dream where a model appears within his waterbed, who turns out to be Freddy. He quaffs Joey's dream power by drowning him, then stabs him to death. His body is found within his waterbed the next morning by his mother.
Kincaid and Joey don't show up for class, which concerns Kristen and in her panic she is knocked out. She has a close encounter with Freddy before she is awakened by the school nurse.
She takes Alice, Rick and Dan Jordon, a crush of Alice's to Freddy's house and tells them the legend and how he kills people in their dreams. That evening, Kristen's mother Elaine gives her sleeping pills in her drink after noticing she is not sleeping.
Kristen falls asleep before she can get help and tries to follow Alice's advice to dream of someplace fun, but the tropical paradise she dreams herself into is quickly ruined by Freddy, who stomps her into the sand and into his house.
She makes her way down to the boiler room where Freddy goads her into calling out on one of her new friends. As being the last child from Elm Street, he would be powerless if he killed Kristen without a means to move on to a new group of kids.
Kristen calls Alice, who she is unable to awaken and Freddy throws Kristen into his boiler as she burns to death, she sends her powers to Alice as her soul passes into Freddy. After awakening in her bed, Alice and Rick rush to Kristen's house and find her in the midst of a bedroom fire, which devastates them both.
The next day, Alice falls asleep and accidentally pulls Sheila into her nightmare with Freddy. Freddy sucks the oxygen out of Sheila's lungs in a kiss, making it look like a normal asthma attack.
Rick begins to believe her due to the deaths, but he has a martial-arts inspired nightmare the following day, he almost gains the upperhand but Freddy cheats and kills him as well.
Alice discovers that her personality is changing, and that she is gaining the skills and personalities of her friends as well as their dream powers, and makes a plan with Dan and Debbie to defeat Freddy.
But her father, increasingly drunk after Rick's death forces her to stay in and Alice has a nightmare where she gives Debbie to him. Freddy keeps Alice and Dan in a time loop as he stalks Debbie and transforms her into a cockroach before killing her.
Alice sees Freddy while driving Dan's truck and runs into him, hitting a tree instead in reality. Injured, Dan is sent to the hospital, while Alice returns home to prepare for a battle with Freddy.
Freddy tries to attack Dan when he is put under for surgery and Alice intervenes. After the two of them fall into a church in the nightmare, Dan is awakened by the surgeons and Alice is left to face Freddy alone.
He fights her with the strength of his stolen souls, while she fights back with the dream powers of her friends, but his strength and experience is too great and Alice is nearly defeated.
Remembering a rhyme entitled the Dream Master, Alice turns Freddy's reflection back on him, causing the souls of the children to revolt and literally tear him apart, releasing themselves from his body as it becomes nothing more than a lifeless husk and falls to the ground.
Sometime later, Alice and Dan are dating and approach a fountain. Dan tells Alice to make a wish, and she thinks she sees Freddy's reflection in the water until Dan's coin strikes it. She tells Dan if she tells him her wish, it won't come true, and the two of them walk off hand in hand. |