Alice (Lisa Wilcox) has no sooner graduated from high school when boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel) is killed in a car accident. Convinced that Freddy Krueger has returned but unable to understand how he is getting to her friends while she is awake—in the previous film, he used her own sleep state as a portal—Alice gets her answer when she discovers she's pregnant. "A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child" is a decided step down from most of the pictures that preceded it. Director Stephen Hopkins brings to the material a darkened gothic sensibility—the murder sequences are especially brutal, and the climax is like an M.C. Escher painting sprung to life—but this tone doesn't blend well at all with the jokey Freddy Krueger, by now a full-blown cartoonish caricature of his initially dread-induced former self. Lisa Wilcox, returning as Alice, brings levity to her role, but she is let down by a pedestrian script that was clearly put into production before the necessary rewrites were carried out.