Out of all of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, Dream Warriors is the one that everyone seems to love, and it is the only one that ever gets respect from anyone. This may have something to do with the fact that Wes Craven returned to the series in a way, as one of the many writers, and that Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon, who starred in the original , were also back.

The movie's main character is Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette - Ed Wood). Kristen has been suffering from a series of Nightmares, all regarding a mysterious house. She has started building a model of this house to give her something to do to stay awake at night. But one Night, she falls asleep in the bathroom and the taps sprout claws and try to kill her, her mother (Brooke Bundy - Night Visitor) believes she has tried to slit her own wrists. She is put into a mental house with a group of other kids who are also viewed as being suicidal. The thing they all have in common, is that they claim they weren't attempting to top thereselves, but a man with a claw for a hand tried to kill them. Her fellow 'inmates' consist of would-be hardman Roland Kincaid (Ken Sagoes - The Backlot Murders), scared mute Joey Crusel (Rodney Eastman - The Opposite of Sex), Ex-drug addict Taryn (Jennifer Rubin - Red Scorpion 2), Wheelchair bound Dungeons and Dragons fan Will (Ira Heidern - Elvira, Mistress of the Dark),wannabe TV Star Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow - Dead Man Walking) and comparatively normal Phillip (Bradley Gregg - Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), who makes puppets in his spare time.
The institute is run by two doctors, the more open minded and friendly Dr.Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson - The Pornographer) and the nastier Dr.Simms (Priscilla Pointer - Desert Heat), who blames the kids themselves. But a new Doc, fresh out of education has arrived. That would be Dr.Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). She actually believes the kids about their dreams, and her suspicions are proven correct when Phillip 'jumps' to his death out of the abandoned building next door. Only we know the truth, Freddy turned him into a puppet of his own, using his arteries for strings.
Naturally no one but the kids and Nancy take Freddy seriously, until Jennifer dies in one of the movie's most memorable death scenes, where Freddy's head comes out of the TV, two arms shoot out of the sides, grabbing her and forcing her head first into the screen while Freddy declares "This is it, Jennifer: your big break in TV, Welcome to Prime time b*tch".
Nancy is on an experimental drug called Hypnocil, and believes the kids should be issued it. This drug causes dreamless sleep, and while Gordon is considerate, Simms won't have any of it.
Doc Gordon is starting to come round to the line of thought that these aren't suicides, and Nancy talks him into hypnotising all of the kids. In dreamland, she teaches them that dreams work both ways, and in dreams they can fight Freddy. In his dreams, Will can not only walk, but is a wizard. Kincaid has superhuman strength, Kristen can flip about like an athlete, as well as her unique ability to bring others into her dreams. But while the rest are showing off, Joey wanders away, and is seduced by the sexy nurse, who of course turns out to be Freddy, but instead of killing Joey, he captures him, which in real life equals Joey in a coma. Naturally Dr.Simms uses this incident to get the pair the sack.
Still concerned for the welfare of the kids, Nancy and the Doc talk about ways of stopping him. The Doc has had constant run-ins with a mysterious nun who occasionally helps out with voluntary work near the clinic. She says her name is Sister Mary Helena (Nan Martin - Shallow Hal), and she tells him about the birth of Freddy. The building next to the clinic, where Phillip jumped from, used to be a mental asylum. One night before the holidays, a nun by the name of Amanda Krueger, who was doing voluntary work there, got locked in with the mentalists. She was continually raped, and when she had the baby, it was named Fred, and would go on to quite a bit of infamy. She also informs him that the only way to truly stop him is to bury his remains in sacred ground.
Nancy, realising that there is only one person they can turn to for the whereabouts of the bones, tracks down her father, Lt.Thompson (John Saxon - Maximum Force). Initially reluctant, but after Nancy storms back to the institute after a phonecall, Doc Gordon convinces him. Simms has just drugged Kristen, and the others are worried for her sake. Nancy shows up at the institute, where the security guy Max (Laurence Fishburne - The Matrix) tells her she can't see Kristen. She asks if she can at least say goodbye to the others, and Max, being the coolest head in the place, lets her. The minute she is in, she hypnotises herself and the kids so they can go and help Kristen in her dreams.
Meanwhile, her dad and the Doc are in the scrap yard, where Freddy's remains are hidden in the boot of a cadillac. After some searching, they start to dig a grave for the "b*stard son of 100 maniacs".
In Dreamland, the group have been separated, and Freddy starts to pick them off one by one. After Will's magic fails and he meets the claw, Freddy plays on Taryn's former addiction by turning his hands into heroin filled syringes and giving her a lethal overdose. However, Nancy, Kristen and Kincaid unite and find a free Joey, whose dream-ability to talk causes Freddy some grief. But they are given a respite, due to the fact that Freddy senses what is happening to his remains, at which point he brings his skeleton to life to give the Doc and Lt.Thompson grief.
Eventually overpowering the skeleton, but not before the death of Thompson, Doc Gordon starts to bury it, and prepares to bless the ground with some holy water he stole from the church beforehand. But sensing his impending demise, Freddy decides to take Nancy with him, and tricks her by disguising himself as her dad.
After the ground is blessed, and Freddy stopped, we see the Doc, Kincaid, Kristen and Joey attend the funeral of not only their friends, but also Nancy and her father, but the Doc spots Sister Mary, who disapears right on the spot of a grave. The grave of Amanda Krueger.

The first thing to point out about Dream Warriors, is that unlike it's prequel, Freddy's Revenge, it is at least watchable, and to a certain degree even enjoyable.
The acting in the movie is pretty decent, although Langenkamp isn't as good as she was in the first movie. She doesn't pull off the well educated Dr. role very well. As the naive teen turned demon killer she excelled, but maybe it was the character was too stretched from its original conception that made Nancy less effective here.
Wasson is actually pretty good as Dr. Gordon, who is almost lost in all the chaos surrounding him. He pulls off his role as the amazingly confused, yet trying to get his head around it Doc very well.
This was where Freddy really started to make the transition from scary shadow stalker to brightly lit wise-cracking anti-hero. However, Robert Englund still manages to keep the creepy voice and body language to stop Freddy from coming accross as a complete idiot. Englund does pretty well with the role, even if this isn't one of Freddy's more memorable showings.
Most of the actors playing the kids are decent enough, but hardly set the screen on fire with greatness. In fact, the thing that stands out most about any of these actors is that the guy who is Phillip looks so much like the guy who played the boyfriend in that Sabrina program, yet doesn't actually seem to be him.
Oh, and in his shockingly small role, John Saxon is still awesome as Nancy's eternally angry, forever disbelieving father.
Musically, the movie isnt anything great. While it does occasionally delve into the excellent score from the original movie, the new stuff is pretty forgettable, if better than Part 2's music. Sadly, the movie theme tune is a really crappy track from turbo-soft metal tripe band Dokken. This would start a trend in the next few Nightmare movies of theme tunes, thankfully dropped for Craven's return with New Nightmare.
The special effects in the movie, while not exactly state of the art, are pretty good, I spotted some claymation in there, and the Freddy make up is back looking pretty burnt and creepy after the prequel's prune head Fred. The sets in Freddy's dream world are all suitably nasty, and his reanimated skeleton, a nice piece of stop-motion work, looks like something out of Jason and the Argonauts, in that it isn't realistic, but it looks cool enough that you forgive it.
The premise behind this movie is actually really cool, although I have to say I thought of it the first time I ever watched the original Nightmare movie. Its a dream, in dreams anything is possible, so Freddy can be fought. This was something I really liked, until they completely contradicted the entire plot of the movie with Will's death. Will is shooting Freddy with lightning, when Freddy suddenly stops being affected and says "I don't believe in fairytales'. By that frame of logic, Nancy's way of beating him at the end of the original movie should have worked, and also makes you wonder why he was weak to her aerobics or Kincaid's strength.
Speaking of the original, it brings back Nancy and her dad without even trying to explain the end of the first movie. Last we seen of Nancy, she was with Glen and co. in his car, where it got possessed by Freddy and drove away while he grabbed her mother and pulled her through the window. She mentions that the inmates are the 'last of the Elm Street kids', which would hint that Glen and co. did die, as we saw in the first film, but that doesn't explain the ending in the least. Or how Nancy is still alive, Freddy seemed surprised to see her, as is if she had been gone (perhaps he can't leave Elm Street, this was said in Freddy's Dead, but this movie predates that pile of guff.
Also on the subject of Nancy and her father, I thought it was a complete waste to bring the pair back just to kill them both off without them having all that much impact on the story. Every great villain needs a hero to go up against. Dracula had Van Helsing, Jason Voorhees was at his best when up against Tommy Jarvis, part of the appeal of this was having his original nemesis back.
This movie was also the beggining of the non-scary deaths. Only Phillip's 'puppet' death, which actually is very gruesome, can be held in the same light as the deaths from the original Nightmare. That death shows Freddy's twisted sense of humour, which every death from here until New Nightmare tries, but the brutal nature of that one makes it stand out. The death by TV scene is only really memorable due to the fact it is possibly the only Freddy killing/wisecrack that is actually moderately amusing. Taryn's death is a good idea, but the way it is shot, where we think she is gonna fight him, but just gives up, makes for boring viewing. You also have to wonder about them being the last of the cursed generation of Elm Street kids. They are clearly younger than Nancy, and all the main characters of Nightmare 1 were all her age, and also why he didn't go after them in his spree in Nightmare 1.
On the whole though, the movie is at least moderately entertaining. In comparison to Part 2, it is a godsend. The story moves along at a quick enough pace to keep the viewer interested, and is actually going pretty well until Will's death contradicts most of the story.
Fans of the series should probably check it out. It isn't the worst in the series, but it doesn't come remotely close to the top of the list either. I really have no idea why it proves so popular with the majority of Nightmare fans, given its lack of continuity and blatant plot contradictions.
So, for Nightmare fans, it is worth checking out. For fans of horror movies in general, it is still worth at least a thought if it is on TV. For anyone else, personally, I would stick to the original movie, the spin-off New Nightmare, or even parts 4+5, which had semi-better plots than this.
I wonder how much Craven actually had to do with the script, I would imagine the 'Dream Warriors' idea was his, but there is just so much un-Craven like problems with the story that I get the feeling he possibly wrote the original draft of the script, only to have it butchered. If you want an idea of how it compares to the original, look at how often it gets mentioned in Wes Craven's New Nightmare. I don't know if it even gets mentioned. Another indicator of its quality would be the audio-commentary on the Laserdisc/DVD of the original movie, where Saxon references it as "the other one".
At the end of the day, I feel two stars is a fair score. It probably would have got 3, were it not for Will's death, and thew fact they brought Nancy and Lt. Thompson back, just to kill them which just really annoyed me. I could have possibly forgiven the lack of explanation between this and part 1 (it could be assumed part 2 was ignored, although it was set 5 years after the original, so may actually have taken place after this). The movie is greatly flawed, but at the same time, is watchable. While I haven't done much to sell its good points, it does have a couple, such as the gruesome Phillip death, and the animated skeleton. There is also a briefly glimpsed Freddy puppet, that for some reason the McFarlane Toys Freddy Krueger action figure came packaged with, just in case you ever saw that figure and wondered what the little Freddy was.

Other Related Reviews
Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age