Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

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Director: Rachel Talalay

Screenplay: Michael De Luca

Cast: Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger; Lisa Zane as Maggie Burroughs; Lezlie Deane as Tracy; Shon Greenblatt as John Doe; Breckin Meyer as Spencer; Ricky Dean Logan as Carlos; Yaphet Kotto as Doc

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #134

The first appearance of Freddy Kruger in Freddy's Dead is dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz (1939), a black witch's hat riding a broomstick. We've come a long way from Kansas here, at least removed completely from Wes Craven's original 1984 film that was creepy and scary even if small moments were unintentionally camp. Now here you've entered into a la la land with arguably the worst of the Elm Street series out of the original franchise. It's still a compelling viewing experience, one with good within it, but it's difficult to question what is an ungodly mess even in terms of the idea behind it let alone execution. The issue begins with how director Rachel Talalay, who worked on almost all the films in various roles and who'd later direct Tank Girl (1995), wanted to add the influence of Twin Peaks and Lynchian weirdness to the series. The issue is that this was already a franchise split in two halves in complete conflict to each other, the original surreal horror and comedy that was never really funny even when added to Dream Warriors (1987), which never came off as funny but adding cruelty to a character like Freddy Kruger by showing him glibly saying one liners as he killed people. The emphasis on wackier comedy could've worked if this had actually took a piece of David Lynch's work and succeeded, humour and lightness which in tone could violently shift into darkness with significant effect and done with elegance. Sadly the result here is a disaster. The film already had a messy production, including New Zealander Peter Jackson working on a script, but what actually passed is mind numbing in what was executed.

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Freddy's Dead is mainly played for laughs, an absurd cartoonish world where Talalay visually creates an intriguing, hyperactive and colourful world but whose story gracelessly lunges between darkness and light. The darker material jars badly, this film emphasising Kruger's back-story as a child murderer in a laborious plot of him having a child, flashbacks to an idyllic family life undercut by his secret. Or that one of the main teenagers in this plot Tracey (Lezlie Deane) is a victim of sexual molestation, her nightmare with Kruger a reinterpretation of this with her father a scuzzy slime ball touching her up in a kitchen. This material, earnest, is so completely out of place for a film that doesn't juggle the weird and the serious as its initial plan was meant to but is a comedy with a 3D gimmick ending and Kruger waving around a Nintendo Power Glove in a video game segment. It doesn't help either that the story's garbled. The child of Kruger plot line is trite, spun from desperation as a sequel and committing the crime of rewriting canon for no particularly rich dramatic reason. Even with Yaphet Kotto, a godsend for the film in his personality, you still have to witness him try to convince the protagonist that wearing 3D glasses will allow her to enter Freddy's dreamworld rather than be the moment the 3D glasses were meant to be put on in the audience.

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The humour itself is not funny either. This isn't a problem that can be blamed merely for details like the Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold cameos, which take place in one of the more rewarding segments where Springwood, the original setting of Elm Street, has become childless due to Kruger and all the surviving adults have lost their minds, the one moment of dark humour that works. No, the issue is that it's meant to be wacky but equates that with actual cartoon sound effects, bad puns and Robert Englund being hung out to dry. The overly silly tone is violently hit-and-miss without quality control for the ideas, the tone openly aware of its wackiness for the worse as Kruger is a mere caricature and it has a smugness about its jokes. If there was more restraint and ideas ditched, there's stuff where the film hits its tone perfectly, particularly every dream "John Doe" (Shon Greenblatt) has, the last Elm Street kid used by Kruger to increase his reach across country, involving him being a house falling out the sky, removed from the dream logic of the earliest films but still a deliciously strange weirdness with its own logic, willing to be unfair to him by setting his bed on fire when he refuses to play ball with said nightmare in one of the scenes. When its eccentric with invention the film succeeds but then there's also that aforementioned videogame sequence, which is done with bad animation removed from any pixel videogame from the time.

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It was meant to end the series after the box office drop for The Dream Child (1989), a tribute to the series which was meant to actually close the franchise off. The result feels less like a fateful conclusion but what seeing a cinematic prolapse is probably like. The hindsight of where the series closes before the 2010 remake, with Wes Craven returning in 1994, softens the blow and allows some camp fun to be had with Freddy's Dead but I won't lie in how baffling the film is in terms of its production decisions. I find myself amazed that a mainstream horror production can feel as disjointed as this, attempting to be hip but feeling off the mark by a long shot. The end credits got through all the highlight of all the six films which passed, a celebration of the franchise with a song by Iggy Pop on the soundtrack. What I felt was misery, looking back at all the films before and realising, for all their flaws in later sequels, how much of an anticlimax this was, the party mood becoming one of the embarrassing celebrations you wish to leave, wondering for how much quality was thrown at the screen to celebrate (Pop, Alice Cooper as Kruger's dad, Johnny Depp in a cameo) but with the resulting combination unfocused and botched. That it would've been an awful end to the original franchise...until thankfully Craven did return three years later with New Nightmare...but that's for another review. 

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