Review: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Springwood resident Shon Greenblatt is targeted by Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) who finally gets to the kid, but rather than kill him, decides he has other plans for him instead. He wipes the teenager’s memory and instructs him to find ‘her’. Next thing he’s wandering around in a daze before being picked up by the state, and thrown into a shelter for wayward teens as a ‘John Doe’. The shelter is run by counsellor Maggie (Lisa Zane) and dream therapist Doc (Yaphet Kotto). Maggie wants to jog ‘John Doe’s memory, so she drives him back to Springwood, but several of the other teens tag along unbeknownst to Maggie. At any rate, Springwood is a bizarro ghost town that is only populated by creepy adults, with all of the children gone thanks to Freddy Krueger, who it appears is looking for a long-lost relative. The other patients include stoner Breckin Meyer, tough boxer chick Lezlie Deane, and deaf kid Ricky Dean Logan. Several famous faces have cameos.

 

This 1991 Rachel Talalay (a long-time producer of the series making her inauspicious directorial debut) film was strangely enough a kind of milestone for me. It was the first horror film I ever saw on a big screen, the drive-ins to be specific. In preparation for it, I saw the previous “The Dream Child” earlier in the day on video (and I’m pretty sure I saw “Graveyard Shift” and “Stephen King’s IT” around roughly the same time too). The film didn’t leave all that much of an impression on me back then, and my impression of it now is even worse to be honest. This is pretty pathetic, tame stuff, basically a straight comedy if you ask me, and not a very funny one either. Oh, and the 3D was shite, too.

 

We get a cute opener that references the classic “Twilight Zone” story ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’, but then it quickly gets way too cute with Freddy making like the Wicked Witch of the West. Honestly, this is about 70% comedy at least, and pretty poor comedy at that. The only funny thing about the film is the crappy, rundown-looking carnival, but that gets somewhat sullied by the awful comic cameos by Roseanne and Tom Arnold, who I guess were all the rage as a couple for about three minutes or so. Johnny Depp’s cameo is just plain idiotic. Robert Englund is all one-liners and forced cackling, with only “Freddy’s Revenge” keeping this from the bottom of the “Elm Street” pile.

 

Lisa Zane is appalling in the lead, there’s just something completely ‘off’ about her. Breckin Meyer’s big scene cracked me up when I was 11, but 36 year-old me thinks it’s fucking moronic, including Freddy’s power glove quip ‘Now I’m playing with power!’. Also, Freddy’s makeup here is some of the series’ worst. Yaphet Kotto is far too talented an actor to be found in something like this, but here he is all the same. I hope he was handsomely paid.

 

For me the only worthwhile thing in this whole film is Freddy’s backstory, right down to the cameo by Alice Cooper of all people, as Freddy’s brutal father. All that stuff is interesting (if perhaps not entirely consistent with what we’ve previously heard about Freddy’s parentage), the rest pretty much sucks. Based on a story by Talalay (who would later direct “Ghost in the Machine” and the cult-y “Tank Girl”), the screenplay is by Michael De Luca (“A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child”, “Judge Dredd”).

 

Lame, mostly comedic flick barely qualifies as a horror film, but the laughs aren’t much chop either. Really cheesy, mostly badly acted, and the generic rock soundtrack sucks too.

 

Rating: D+