Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

“Every town has an Elm Street!” – Freddy Krueger

By 1991, New Line Productions has grown considerably. In essence, “The House that Freddy Built” had outgrown its foundations and they thought it was time to move on to bigger and better productions. In hindsight, it was a bold move. The Freddy franchise has become threadbare with Freddy himself losing all his mystery and becoming a wisecracking anti-hero in place of the child killing monster he had started out as. The time had come to put Freddy to rest.

So, one of the many problems this film has is that it exists merely to kill Freddy off – but they’d done that at the end of every preceding film. Last time out, if you recall, his own “son” had symbolically assisted in the kill.

This is a standalone movie. No returning characters from previous films, and no actual reference to anything that had happened before or anybody who had appeared. This is the first time, because 2 referenced Nancy’s diary from the first. 3 had Nancy return. 4 & 5 continued the storyline and characters returned. All of them also included a scene resurrecting Freddy, apart from 2, which showed him very much weakened after the first film and gathering strength throughout the movie.

In a remarkably cheap and tawdry looking computer graphic that looks like it was created on a Spectrum, we’re told that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is set “10 years from now” and Freddy is inexplicably still at large. He has by now killed every child and teenager in Springwood – apart from one, who’s on a plane out of town. John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) is a nervous passenger, as the plane heads into a storm. The person next to him is suddenly sucked out of a hole in the roof, he falls through a hole in the floor, landing in a bed, which becomes a kind of Wizard of Oz inspired nightmare as the house is falling to the ground, while Freddy (Robert Englund), as the Wicked Witch on a broomstick quips a paraphrased line about getting him and his little soul too.

Yes, THAT’s the level we’re at, I’m afraid.

The film is a massive misfire, with a couple of good ideas thrown in here and there (that opening isn’t one of them) but there really isn’t enough of the good ideas to salvage this messy miscue, and overall, it becomes dependent on introducing brand new key characters that we’ve never heard of before – despite their seeming importance. That, and retrofitting new details that effectively undo the previous continuity so the whole thing unravels. Harsh? Maybe, but let’s take a look.

John Doe ends up just outside town having been run over by a bus, driven by Freddy after falling to the ground in his nightmare. Hitting his head on a rock, he has no idea who he is or how he got there. He ends up in a shelter for troubled youths. The place seems to only have two members of staff, Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane) who’s a counsellor and “Doc” (Yaphet Kotto) who’s in charge, evidently. There are only three resident patients as far as we know – kickboxing tough gal Tracey (Lezlie Dean) who was sexually abused by her father. Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) who was physically beaten to deafness by his mother, and Spencer (Breckin Meyer) a rich kid stoner.

They plan to run away to California, but end up in the Elm Street neighbourhood having stowed away in the shelter’s only van, while Maggie takes John Doe on a field trip to the neighbourhood having found a clipping about the area in his pocket. She hopes this will help get rid of his amnesia. They discover that Freddy had a child, the implication being that John is Krueger’s son. (That’s crazy because that means Krueger became a father AFTER he died and began to haunt kids’ dreams in the timeline.)

The kids drive around in circles, unable to leave so they decide to stay in a deserted house, which happens to be the familiar Nightmare house 1428 Elm Street. Krueger kills Carlos, Spencer and John. But before killing him, Krueger reveals to John that he did indeed have a child – a daughter. When Maggie and Tracey return to the shelter, nobody remembers that the three who died even existed.

Maggie discovers that SHE is actually Krueger’s daughter and her birth name is Katherine Krueger, she was put into care after her father was lynched. In the meantime, Doc has discovered that Freddy’s power comes from dream demons, who keep bringing him back. But he can be killed if he’s brought into the real world. (Yeah – we knew this right from the first film, so we’re going back there? And yet – he even managed to survive that.)

So, the plan is that Maggie dons a pair of 3D glasses to enter Freddy’s brain, and access his memories. The 3D glasses were necessary because this whole dream/Freddy’s mind sequence was originally presented in 3D. The original rental VHS of the film retained that gimmick and came with two pairs of FreddyVision glasses, but there’s no doubt that it WAS just a gimmick, and not a particularly well executed one at that. I can say this from experience, because I used to own that particular tape. It looks really stupid when things suddenly come lunging at the camera for no reason in 2D because the 3D version was never released on DVD/Blu-Ray.

We have a trip through Freddy’s memories – I’m not even going to try and explain how they access a dream’s memories, but whatever… we see he was a creepy kid in High School, we see him beaten with a belt by his abusive father (an uncredited cameo by Alice Cooper) …

Whoa…hold on. Wasn’t his father a nun-raping lunatic? What happened to THAT element of the story? In fact, no mention of the night in the asylum, or of Amanda Krueger? We see Maggie’s mother discover Freddy’s cellar workshop, with no mention of the boiler room where he lured the children, but we DO see the townsfolk corner him and set his hiding place on fire, with him in it. This is where these newly discovered dream demons, like three flying or floating little ugly fishies, find him.

So, anyway, Maggie finds Krueger, they fight, she drags him into the real world where she throws several martial arts throwing stars at him, stabs him with his own glove and finally blows him up with a pipe bomb. The dream demons leave him, unable to revive him in the real world. If that’s the case, how did he return for part 2?

There – that’s it. A plot involving several legacy characters teaming up to defeat him was abandoned in favour of…this. Director Rachel Talalay came up with this sorry story, believing that Freddy needed more humour. She failed to get a decent performance out of any of the main cast members, or to elicit any sense of menace or tension. She has since found her niche directing Doctor Who.

It was a sad ending to the franchise, especially one that had started out as strongly as this one, but had never shirked trying something new, as in the previous three films – even if the actual execution of those ideas wasn’t always great. The series had a great deal of potential, and often lived up to that potential.

But overexposure ultimately did Freddy in as much as Rachel Talalay’s ham fisted lack of direction, I think.