YMMV / A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

• Awesome Music: It's agreed that even if Dream Master wasn't the best sequel, it did have the best soundtrack, regarding both the background music and insert songs.
  • Go West's "Don't Be Afraid of Your Dreams". It's a beautiful power ballad that could very well serve as Alice's theme.
  • "Running From this Nightmare" by Tuesday Knight (who also plays Kristen), if you like your 80's pop music Darker and Edgier.
    • After 27 years with no official release, Tuesday released an EP with 7 different versions of it at fan demand.
  • Dramarama's "Anything, Anything (I'll Give You)".
  • The downright epic score during Alice's Lock-and-Load Montage, an instrumental rock version of "Don't Be Afraid of Your Dreams" that hasn't been officially released. "Fuckin' A", indeed.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Freddy is resurrected when Kincaid's dog pisses fire on his grave. It might be considered a joke since the dog's name is Jason.
  • Rick's dream sequence has him trapped in an elevator that got shot into space. You'd think that would be the way he died, but instead, he ends up in a karate dojo where he dies at the claw of Freddy instead. As the documentary Never Sleep Again reveals, they ran out of budget to film his intended death sequence, so the scene comes off as random instead.
• Contested Sequel: Over whether it marks the last of the good movies or the first of the bad movies. Some consider it a worthy follow-up to Dream Warriors with a strong, compelling lead character in Alice, while others consider it an absurd, shallow SFX spectacle that pointlessly overrode the previous film's ending and officially turned Freddy into a self-parody. And in the middle, there are those who consider it to be the most average entry in the series, feeling that it follows the previous film's template a little too closely, but otherwise doesn't commit any major mis-steps apart from killing off the previous film's survivors too quickly, and arguably amping up the humor around Freddy too much. Regardless of what this movie certainly has a better reputation then either of the following two sequels
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Kristen, Joey, and Kincaid impress at the beginning in their roles as more confident and self-assured Dream Warriors.
  • Debbie and Sheila get a decent amount of respect from fans, who enjoy their Odd Friendship and find the two entertaining and likable.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans treat this movie's ending as Freddy's final death, because him receiving karmic justice from the souls of his victims is seen as much more impressive than his anticlimactic actual death in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.
• Franchise Original Sin: This was the point where Freddy's motive was no longer to get Revenge by Proxy on the parents who murdered him, but just killing for the sake of it now that he'd already finished that job, leaving the plot unmoored and little more than an excuse to get to the kills and dream sequences. This would be the undoing of the next two films, which had to come up with new motives for Freddy to keep killing that merely fed into existing problems concerning his increasingly convoluted backstory. Here, however, the film went with a simpler and more sensible motive, one that the last three movies had already very well established: Freddy is evil and he likes killing people.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The film's theme tune was titled "Are You Ready For Freddy?" Cue an entire YouTube comments section filled with jokes about killer Suck E. Cheese's animatronics. Had the song been released just a year earlier, in 1987, it would've been perfect.
    • The fourth game makes the hilariousness come full circle, because now you play as a child who is being haunted by the animatronics in his sleep.
  • In the Treehouse of Horror parody Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace, Martin's death is a direct reference to Sheila's. You'll probably hear Nelson's "Ha-ha!" in your head upon rewatching the scene.
• Hollywood Homely: Enforced. Lisa Wilcox was initially passed over as Alice because she was considered too good-looking for the role, so she intentionally made herself look less flattering.
• Memetic Mutation: You may be cool, but you'll never be "Freddy Krueger wearing sunglasses" cool.
• Moe: Alice, due to her endearingly introverted personality, her sense of grief about all of the deaths, especially her brother's, and how she remains optimistic and caring even after she Took a Level in Badass.
• Moral Event Horizon: While Freddy was a horrible excuse for a human being before this, this is the movie that shows just how depraved he is. Upon running out of the victims his Deal with the Devil lets him at, rather than be content with his revenge, Freddy chooses to do everything he can to reach out and get more people to sadistically murder. His monstrous appetite, personality, and ambition only get worse from here with the rest of the series, rising to the heights of becoming an Omnicidal Maniac.
• One-Scene Wonder: The boy in the locker room who makes some Properly Paranoid comments about the recent deaths and then provokes Dan's Moment of Awesome with an insensitive comment about Alice is pretty memorable in his one scene.
• Shocking Moments: The zoom out revealing Kincaid isn't just in a junkyard, he's on an entire planet covered in a labyrinth made of scrapped cars.
• Signature Scene:
  • Debbie's horrifying death scene, transforming into a live cockroach as Freddy squishes her to death. Made even worse by Alice and Dan being absolutely helpless to stop it.
  • Alice suiting up to fight Freddy while taking items from her fallen friends, reaching the peak of her Character Development.
  • Alice's final fight against Freddy.
  • On a meta level, the shot of Freddy putting on a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. For many fans, it's the most spectacularly '80s moment in the entire series and a symbol of the franchise at the height of its "imperial phase" when Freddy was on top of the world as a pop culture icon.
• Squick: Freddy disguising himself as a human-like nurse. A make up-free Robert Englund in drag is surprisingly more disgusting than any violent act Freddy could dish out.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Kristen, Joey, and Kincaid, the three survivors of Dream Warriors, are quickly and brutally murdered at the end of the first act, with forty minutes left before the movie ends. Many fans consider this an insult and feel it makes their entire journey in Dream Warriors a waste of time. It would have been much more interesting to see them trying to find a way to defeat Freddy, only this time without the help of their mentor Nancy.
  • Dr. Neil Gordon, one of the few survivors of the third movie, is never mentioned in this chapter despite being the second main character of the previous film. You would imagine that Kristen would tell Alice of his existence so she could look for him and ask for his help against Freddy, including access to Hypnocil, or that Freddy would want to take revenge on him considering that he was primarily responsible for his defeat in the previous movie-to which this movie seemly ignores and plays off instead like Kristen defeated Freddy. However, he never appears again in the franchise and his fate is not revealed. This is especially irksome since he could have easily met the new teenagers at Kristen's funeral.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As argued by 1000 Misspent Hours and many casual fans, the concept of Freddy being limited to just killing the children of his killers could have resulted in him keeping Kristen in a coma (as he did with Joey in Dream Warriors), which would have been a good justification for the character to continue in the lead role (which could have maybe even been extended to Kincaid and Joey). Instead, Kristen is unceremoniously killed and Alice becomes the new heroine.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Alice tries to use the abilities she inherits from her friends to fight Krueger, but they don't do anything to actually harm him. It's only when she successfully recalls the full Dream Master rhyme and stands on her own that brings about Krueger's defeat. The power Alice receives from her friends can only take her so far. They give her the strength not just to fight Freddy, but to find the strength to fight him on her own.
• The Woobie: Kristen, Sheila, Debbie, and Alice.
  • Kristen, for being the actual last of the Elm Street kids and knowing that Krueger is too strong for her to beat on her own, so the only option she has is to let herself be killed to keep him from reaching the others. And it fails.
  • Sheila for being the very first non-Elm Street victim Krueger claims.
  • Debbie for her needlessly elaborate and cruel transformation into a giant cockroach before she's crushed to death.
  • Finally, Alice for being a victim of her father's emotional abuse, being dragged into a fight with an undead monster she had absolutely no connection to, watching her friends die, watching her brother die, and realizing that the only reason Krueger can get to them is because of her.