| Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare Released: 1991 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Slasher Nuts and Bolts: Freddy is back and he’s found that Elm Street is not enough to sate his appetite any longer. Can the last surviving Krueger family member be the one to finally end Freddy’s reign forever? Summary: This film takes place ten years after Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Here we have a young amnesiac known only as John Doe. John is asleep on the side of a desert highway. How he came to be in this state is unknown. In his dreams, he has a tremendous fear of heights. He sees himself falling from the bottom of a rapidly failing airplane flight only to land in a nice soft bed. But things aren’t what they seem and the house he finds himself in is torn from the ground and tossed into the eye of a large twister. As John looks out the window, he sees Freddy Krueger riding a broomstick ala Margaret Hamilton in the Wizard of Oz. Freddy torments John mercilessly until John awakens on the side of the road. He soon wanders into a recovery center for troubled teens in a down-and-out section of Ohio. Here he meets guidance councilor Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane) and the physician known only as Doc (Yaphet Kotto). Maggie realizes that John Doe’s nightmares bear a striking similarity to her own. Maggie works with three other troubled kids as well. There is Spencer who is basically just a rich kid stoner who’s bitter because his father wants him to be like him. Then there’s Carlos, who is nearly deaf and needs to wear an advanced hearing aid to hear correctly. Then there’s Tracy, the hard-nosed martial arts she-bitch. Maggie believes that the key to solving John’s memory issues may lie in the town of Springwood Ohio. They all jump in a piece of shit van and take off. Arriving in Springfield, the entire town looks like it’s in its death throes. People walk about aimlessly and they erect festivals with no children present. Forlorn looking parents wander about wondering what happened to their children. After driving in circles for about a day and a half, the kids finally arrive at the Thompson house (The home from the first three Nightmare movies). One by one, they begin to fall asleep and come face to face with their worse nightmares. While Tracy, Carlos and Spencer wander about the house, Maggie and John investigate the Springwood elementary school. Carlos is the first victim. In his nightmare, Freddy steals his hearing aid and replaces it with some kind of strange organism that elevates Carlos’ hearing a hundred fold. Now even the drop of a pin sends the boy into fits of agony. Freddy accentuates the trauma by first dropping a palm full of noisy nails on the ground and then scraping his claws across a blackboard. He then attacks Carlos directly by plunging a long cotton swab into his ear, shoving it through his head until it comes out the other side. The agony becomes so great that Carlos’ head explodes. One piggy down. Next on the list for gene pool cleansing is Spencer. This useless fuck has nothing better to do than sit around and get stoned. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) He passes out in front of the TV and Freddy appears on the screen in a blur of psychedelic colors. Like a leftover from the cast of Poltergeist, Spencer gets drawn into the television set and becomes an icon on Freddy Krueger’s favorite video game. Meanwhile, Maggie and John find an old drawing at the Springwood school (As well as a crazy old teacher). Maggie has been trying to piece together a puzzle involving the disappearance of the last Krueger family member. John suspects that he may in fact be Freddy’s illegitimate son. The signature on the drawing says K Krueger. John believes it to be his own. Meanwhile back at dipshit central, Freddy is playing his video games with Spencer as the video character. He wisecracks Spencer all about the screen in one of the most insipidly stupid segments I have ever seen in a movie. At the risk of making myself nauseous even thinking about it, let’s just say the little twerp gets killed. Now John believes that Freddy spared him for a reason. He has Tracy brain him with a lead pipe so that he can enter the dream world. (This was actually quite humorous.) Tracy enters the dream realm soon after of her own accord. They run about the house until they finally encounter Freddy. Freddy creates a large hot air balloon out of John’s shirt and the two take off into the air. John thinks he’s hot shit by declaring that Freddy won’t kill him because he’s family. But Freddy gets the last laugh. He explains that he only kept John alive long enough so that he could lead him to his daughter, Katherine. (Remember the name K Krueger on the drawing.) Freddy literally cuts his ties with John and the loser falls to his death. About fucking time I say! Christ this git is annoying. Now it is revealed that Maggie Burroughs is actually Katherine Krueger, the last child of Freddy who was sent to an orphanage when she was six years old. Apparently she had forgotten about the trauma of her youth. Maggie and Tracy head back towards the recovery center to touch base with Doc. Doc is something of a dream expert and he explains to them about the existence of dream demons (yawn). In what is possibly the cheesiest move I’ve ever seen in a movie, Doc has Maggie don special 3-D glasses and hooks her up to some kind of machine. She is going to attempt to get inside of Freddy’s mind through her dream. They also plan on grabbing hold of him and yanking his ass out of the dreamtime the same way Nancy did in part 1. Note: The theatrical release of Freddy’s Dead contained a 3-D segment. It was at this point that we were meant to don our own special Freddy’s Dead glasses and join in on the zaniness. So now we venture inside the dark macabre domain of Freddy’s mind. We encounter the way-too-cool-for-words Dream Demons with large menacing heads and fangs that seem to leap RIGHT out at you! (Is my sarcasm dripping enough yet?) Anywho, this part of the film is actually one of the up-sides. Despite the corny 3D effects, we get some more insight into the background of everyone’s favorite psychopathic killer. Apparently, Freddy grew up with an ugly drunk for a father. The man routinely whipped him and beat upon him for the sheer thrill of it. This turned our boy into quite the troubled teen. Even his schoolmates used to poke fun of him calling him names like Son-of-a-hundred-maniacs. Of course, Freddy did little to discourage these jibes since he spent the bulk of his school days squashing mice with a hammer. Then we see the life of an older Fred Krueger. Here we see him all grown up with a nice house, a wife and a daughter. But apparently our boy has a few side projects that he likes to work on. Freddy had been killing a bunch of local kids and hiding them in his cellar. But curious old Mrs. Krueger had to keep poking her nose around and finally learned the truth about her husband’s nocturnal activities. Well, Freddy can’t abide that so I guess its time to kill this bitch too right? At this point in time Katherine is about six years old. She witnesses the murder of her own mother and is sent to an orphanage. Now all of Katherine’s/Maggie’s memories are complete. We also get to see the final moments of the mortal Fred Krueger. At the point in time when he is trapped in the burning boiler room facility, three serpentine dream demons approach him. In order to become a host for the demons, a person must be a completely vile piece of shit. Since Freddy fits that bill to a T, they choose him as their next Nightmare agent. Maggie comes out of the dream world and she’s even brought Freddy with her. From here on out, its pretty much just an action flick. Maggie and Freddy fight one on one and Maggie gets the chance to show off some skills that we never knew she had. Like Jackie Chan on meth, Maggie begins hurling ninja stars and throwing-knives into Freddy, pinning him to a wall. She then shoves a pipe bomb through his chest and kisses him on the cheek. Freddy rolls his eyes and says “Kids” before his body completely explodes. We assume this to be the true end of Freddy Krueger as we see the serpentine Dream demons leaving his remains. Acting/Dialogue: There is nothing impressive here. Now I realize that Robert Englund is not an a-list actor, but he should be ashamed of himself for ever agreeing to do this film. Even Doug Bradley of Hellraiser fame had enough balls to say “Yo! You’re script sucks!” Freddy is no longer the haunting nightmare menace as seen in earlier films. Now he is a three dimensional cartoon character more along the lines of the Mask. Where’s Jim Carey when you need him? I’m sure HE probably would’ve put a little bit more ‘menace’ into this role. Even Yaphet Kotto fell apart in this movie. I’ve seen him in other things, so I know he’s quality goods, but he plodded through his lines like he didn’t even care. To be honest, he looked like he had about as much interest in reading his lines as we did in watching the movie. Everybody else is pretty much a hack one-shot actor wannabe who we’ll never see again. Gore: There’s a pretty cool scene where this kid gets a cotton swab jammed in his ear right before his head explodes. That’s about it. All the other deaths have a gore level that is comparable to that of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Guilty Pleasures: No tits. Hell, not even a sliver of an ass-crack. I guess the only guilty pleasure in this one is the afore mentioned exploding head. The Good: The only part I liked were the areas where they explored Freddy’s history. It helps to flesh out the dangling parts of his origin supplied by the other films. Although I wish they could have gone into more detail as to why he’s so fucked up. They give you the impression that he was angered because they took his daughter away. But the film clearly shows that he was a whack-job even before this. Although the three dream demons were kind of hokey looking, I’m glad they showed them. We also get to see the exact moment when Fred Krueger ceases to be a human being and becomes the nightmare man. This is about the only thing keeping this moose vomit of a film from getting the dreaded One-severed-head rating. Oh yeah…and we get treated to a cameo of Alice Cooper who plays Freddy’s adoptive father. Pretty cool, huh? The Bad: Sweet fucking Christ with a chainsaw, this movie sucked! This optical insult was administered to us by Rachel Talalay. I say administered rather than directed because there really is no direction here at all. Talalay is all over the place with this film. The dream sequences are way way too long. They have none of the mystique that was brought to us in the first three films. In the original concepts, it was difficult to determine what took place in the real world and what took place in the nightmare. In Talalay’s version, the difference is about as obvious as a dirty diaper. There’s even a scene where John Doe breaks the barrier between the dimensions. He literally rips through the fabric of reality leaving behind a hole in the shape of his own body. Sylvester the Cat would be proud. The other dream sequences are just as ludicrous. Carlos’ death was probably the least cheese encrusted of them all, but regardless, Talalay seems damned and determined to make us all endure this broken roller coaster ride. Don’t even get me started on Spencer’s untimely demise. This goof ball bounces around the house knocking into walls and ceilings. And I don’t mean that figuratively either. I mean he ACTUALLY bounces up and down making cartoon sounds as he goes. And what the fuck is up with John Doe? They really gear this guy up to be the main character and then they just drop everything in favor of Maggie. We don’t even find out what his real name is or what his connection to the original Elm Street is. Not that I really care, because I think he’s an annoying little turd. But shit, a little closure would be nice! Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold make a cameo in this movie as a pair of childless parents. Yeah, I know it’s an oxymoron but then again, so are Roseanne and Tom. There’s also a small cameo by Johnny Depp as a television personality for a public service announcement. It really serves no purpose, but I suppose it’s kind of neat since he was a major character in the first Nightmare. None of the characters are likable here, not even Freddy. Even after we see them get killed, we kind of wish they would come back just so they could die again. Part of what makes a good horror flick is that the director has to make certain that we feel for the loss of the victims. But to be honest the only true victims here are the ones who paid full price for this piece of shit. I am ashamed to admit that I actually took my girlfriend to see this in the theater. Needless to say, I didn’t get laid THAT night. This film is actually embarrassing to watch. How could Rachel Talalay do this to our beloved Freddy Krueger? I swear if I ever meet this bitch I think I’ll slap her good and proper. I was so angry after watching this film that I violently ripped the tape from the VCR, threw it on the floor, pulled my pants down and took a nice greasy shit all over it. After all, one good pile of flop deserves another doesn’t it? Great Lines: “I’ll get you yet my pretty and your little soul too!” --Freddy mimicking the Wicked Witch of the West. This isn’t a great line really. But it’s a good example of some of the lame-ass one-liners that Freddy belts out in this turkey. “Every town has an Elm Street.” --Freddy expanding his domain. Actually this was a pretty cool fucking line. Overall Rating: 2 out of 10 heads. Alice Cooper is the only thing keeping this from being a 1. |
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