Despite featuring in three more movies after this, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare really does represent the last solo appearance of this incarnation of Freddy Krueger as portrayed by the wonderful Robert Englund. After 6 films and a few cameos in TV and music videos, Writer/Director Rachel Talalay was given the task of finally ridding the troubled teens of Springwood of the monster that had plagued them for years. (Spoilers abound)
1991 saw the arrival of Freddy’s Dead and the anticipation amongst the horror community was high. Had they saved the best for last? Was this going to be the pinnacle of the Elm Street series?
Short answer. No.
Let’s get into the long answer.
In my retrospective on Part 5: The Dream Child I made a point on how forgiving we are with films we like which we are far less inclined to do with a film that we don’t particularly like whether it be quality of special effects, plot holes or something we just perceive as downright stupid.
Not only does Freddy’s Dead prove this point but it seems to go out of its way to do so. Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge received criticism for failing to adhere to the rules that had been established in the original. This is slightly unfair as there had been only one film in the series so there was a little wriggle room to play with the rules. Freddy’s Dead doesn’t have this excuse.
We’re informed at the start that it is ten years since the events of Part 5 and that the town has been wiped clean of all children and teenagers and that the adults are experiencing mass psychosis. Wow! Freddy really amped up his work in the last decade. Who was he using to be able to enter the dreams of all these youths? Don’t worry about that. The film certainly doesn’t and, if you were hoping to see more of Alice and Jacob then you’ll be disappointed as this film bypasses any semblance of continuity from the previous entries as we’re introduced to the last, remaining Springwood teen, John Doe (Shon Grenblatt) as he looks to escape from the town.
The film quickly stops making sense with anything that any of the other films established and I’m not going to let it get away with the excuse “We never said “X” couldn’t or didn’t happen” as that’s just too damn lazy, even for a horror franchise.
John Doe goes from being in a dream sequence that starts in a plane which breaks apart then into a house which itself is falling as we get introduced to Freddy doing an impersonation of the Wicked Witch of the West which is, by a country mile, his least auspicious introduction into an entry in this series. From there, John is thrown out of the window and finds himself outside the familiar house at 1428 Elm Street which just so happens to have a bus stop outside so, after buying a ticket from Producer Robert Shaye (making a cameo as he had done in Parts 2 and 4) , John is smashed into by a bus being driven by Freddy.
The make-up job on Robert Englund in Freddy’s Dead is the most understated and so far removed from the horribly burnt visage we were seeing in the earlier entries that I can only assume that it was to save Robert Englund from an overly long stint in the make-up chair. The look doesn’t work for me. Even though I never found many of the films especially scary, I could, at least, acknowledge that the main villain looked unnerving. Not so much here sadly.
The bus plows on and, as Freddy hits the brakes at the city limits, John creates a Looney Tunes hole in the night exposing daylight beyond as Freddy approaches the barrier and requests for an unconscious John to bring him more victims.
My big question here was where did John fall asleep exactly?
Okay…….we’ll let that slide. Not everything here has to make sense.
Discovered by police, the amnesiac is taken to the imaginatively named Recovery House Youth Centre which looks after troubled teens and is nowhere near similar to the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital from Part 3 which looked after troubled teens. It looks like a demilitarised zone though so the youths within must be extremely dangerous as well as troubled.
We don’t get to meet many of the staff or prisoners, sorry, teens but let’s see who we do meet.
Staff wise there’s only really two of note that have any kind of characterisation. Maggie (Lisa Zane – older sister of “Titanic” actor Billy Zane) is a doctor/counsellor and Doc (Yaphet Kotto) is the resident therapist who we meet when he shows Maggie a picture on the wall showing what he says are dream demons who roam through the dreams of the living (opposed to the dreams of the dead?) until they find a truly evil being to imbue with the power to cross over and turn our nightmares into reality. Even as we scratch our heads, wondering what or who he could be talking about, we also learn that Maggie is having recurring dreams, the most prominent feature of which is a water tower.
The same water tower appears in a newspaper clipping held by John Doe who only remembers that, wherever he is from, he is the last.
Establishing that John is from Springwood, Maggie takes the world’s dirtiest looking van to the town along with him to see if they can shake up any memories.
Along for the ride, as they were looking to runaway but didn’t really make it very far, are the teen characters who we have come to know very familiarly as “Freddy fodder”.
Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) is a victim of physical abuse from his parents which left him with a hearing disability. Tracy (Lezlie Deane – who had worked on the film 976-Evil in 1988 and an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares in 1989, both directed by Robert Englund himself) was sexually abused by her father and Spencer (Breckin Meyer) is a spoilt rich kid and easily the character we’re least concerned to see die.
After a brief stop at the towns Summer Faire where there’s a noticeable lack of children and the adults (including cameos by Roseanne Barr and her real life husband at the time, Tom Arnold who exist in the film seemingly only so you can see them and say “Hey, that’s Roseanne off the TV) are acting very, very strangely towards the teens.
Maggie sends the stowaways back to the youth centre while she and John investigate the local school. The clipping that John has referring to the missing “Krueger woman” comes from a scrapbook in this school which also has lots of clippings about Freddy and the child murders. A deranged teacher tells them that in 1966 Freddy had a child taken away which leads them to an orphanage. Finding a drawing by a K. Krueger, John states that that is why he has been kept alive. He’s Freddy’s child!!
This is a plot device I was, again, not fond of. I know they never said in any previous story that he did not have a child but this is something that I just couldn’t get away from feeling would have come up in what backstory we did have to date.
The three runaways find themselves in a loop, similar to how Alice and Dan found themselves in Part 4, unable to leave town, so decide to take shelter in a lovely looking suburban house which, as they enter, transforms into the Elm Street house.
How??? Who is sleeping here to cause this? I can buy into almost any fiction, no matter how crazy, as long as it stays true to itself, but this film tries my patience and my forgiving nature.
Finding myself wishing Freddy would appear and start offing teenagers if only to shift my brain away from its incredulous state, my wish was granted as Carlos is the first to fall asleep.
The poor lad suffered some severe ear trauma so, of course, that becomes the focus for Freddy’s game. Included in this scene is a moment where Freddy actually looks at us, the audience, as he indicates for us to stay quiet as he stalks the hearing impaired Carlos. Eventually, after cutting his ear off and amplifying the volume of what Carlos hears, Freddy produces a blackboard and scratches his nails across it constantly until Carlos’ head explodes.