The best news I received this week was that box office earnings for "Friday the 13th, Part VIII" dropped off drastically in its second week and its poor performance thus far is causing Paramount to have second thoughts about giving the green light to "Part IX."
I tell you that to tell you this: The radio-sponsored screening of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child" Thursday night had one of the smallest audiences I've ever seen seen at a freebie — the theater was half empty.
What's more, some of the kids in the audience — it was easily 99 percent young folk — complained throughout that it wasn't as good as previous entries in the series and booed when it was over.
If that's any indication, maybe "Nightmare 5" will be the last episode of this miserable series. (Now what can we do about the TV show?)
This may be wishful thinking on my part, but you have to have hope in this life.
"Nightmare 5" has young Alice (Lisa Wilcox) returning from "Nightmare 4," this time finding she is pregnant and that Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has found a way to enter her dreams through the sleeping fetus within her.
Somehow she also sees a child in her dreams who is a slightly older incarnation of her own child, and Freddy is befriending the youngster to get to Mama.
Meanwhile, Freddy creatively kills three of Alice's best friends, one by gorging her with food until her face inflates, another by somehow having him meld with a motorcycle and another by turning him into a cartoon then ripping him to shreds.
If this sounds disgusting, it is, of course. That's the point, after all.
But where the last couple of "Nightmare" movies have at least boasted dazzling special effects, "Nightmare 5" doesn't even have that going for it. The production values are lousy, the set design is right out of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and the acting is nonexistent.
This ripoff of "Rosemary's Baby," "Psycho" and dozens of other horror flicks is just chaotic and loud.
"Nightmare 5" is also the most illogical, incomprehensible of the bunch. Even horror movies need some kind of rules to go by — but "Nightmare 5" is all over the map, little more than a bizarre free-for-all. It is confusing and dumb.
And, as you might suspect, it is rated R for violence, sex, nudity and profanity.