Franchises: A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

The original VHS of this film is the one that left the least impression on me when I saw it at the video rental store. The cover, which was that poster, wasn't anything striking like some of the previous ones and the back of the box didn't show anything horrific, just some images of people who I didn't know (Roseanne, Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper, and Robert Englund out of makeup) and Freddy's hat, sweater, and glove lying in a pile at the bottom. The only major impression it did leave was the notion that this was seemingly the last one, with the title itself really driving home that idea (however, even then, I had a feeling that it wasn't really the last one, as I'll expound on when we talk about the next movie). Fittingly, this was the last of the films I saw (before the 2010 remake, that is) when I bought it very near the end of my senior year in high school in 2005. I didn't have much of a preconceived notion going into it, save for a small sense that, like the previous film, this one wasn't well liked amongst the fan base, that some of it was in 3-D, and that it had some cameos by people such as Roseanne and Johnny Depp. The one major review that I had read was by John Stanley in the Creature Features movie guide book, which was not a complimentary one at all, ending with him saying, "If Freddy's really dead, good!" But, like everything, I decided to give it a fair shake and make up my own opinion... which was, "Thank God this wasn't the last one!" In fact, if you've read my list of what I consider to be the worst or most disappointing sequels, then you'd already know how I feel about this movie before you even clicked on the page. This film just doesn't do it for me. Little about it feels right, mainly the overdone humor, the weird, quirky tone they were trying to go for, the pointless cameos, a number of the actors' performances, and the very underwhelming finale. Like The Dream Child, this film also tries to tackle some darker subject matter but it clashes horribly with the comedy, even worse here since the overall tone is very offbeat and comedic, and because of the tone, even though it does carry on from the past movies, it's always felt rather askew and disconnected from the rest of the series to me. There are some moments that I do smirk at and some of the sequences in the film are inventive but, overall, this is without a doubt my least favorite of the original continuity of the franchise.

By the year 2001, Freddy Krueger has wiped out all but one of the teenagers and children in Springwood, Ohio. The last teenager is harassed by Freddy in his dream until he sends him flying past the town border, causing him to hit his head on a rock and lose his memory. He wanders to a city miles away, where he's picked up by some cops and taken to a youth center. Once there, he tells Maggie, one of the therapists, that he doesn't know where he's from and that he has a feeling that he'll die if he falls asleep. That night, Maggie notices a newspaper article the teenager, who's been named John Doe, had in his pocket, which is about a, "Missing Kruger Woman," and mentions Springwood; it also seems to have some sort of link to a recurring dream that she's been having. Deciding that going to Springwood might be the best way to jog John's memory, Maggie and him set out the next day, despite John's reluctance since he has a feeling that it's a bad place. On the way, they discover that three other kids, Spencer, Tracy, and Carlos, have stowed away in an attempt to escape the youth shelter, and when they arrive in Springwood, that they see that all of the inhabitants are adults who are suffering from delusional psychosis. Maggie and John search around the town and learn that Freddy Krueger had a child of his own that was placed in an orphanage and John begins to suspect that it's him since Freddy left him alive. At the same time, Spencer, Tracy, and Carlos try to find their way out of town but continuously drive in circles and decide to stay the night at an empty house, which becomes the infamous one at 1428 Elm Street when they go inside. Carlos and Spencer soon fall prey to Freddy in their dreams and, despite their best efforts, Tracy, Maggie, and John are unable to save them. They decide to leave Springwood but John, who's in the dream after going in to try to save Spencer, is ultimately killed on the way by Freddy, who tells him that he kept him alive so he could bring him his daughter so she can take him to a whole new "playground." Freddy then goes into Maggie's subconscious and when she and Tracy arrive back at the shelter, they learn that nobody there remembers John, Spencer, and Carlos, except Doc, a therapist and dream specialist who's able to control his dreams. Remembering that John told her that Freddy's child was a girl before he died, Maggie learns that she was adopted and, in a dream, Freddy confirms that she is his long-lost daughter and that, now that all of the kids in Springwood are dead, he's used her to travel to a new town to continue his killing. Doc learns about how Freddy can be pulled into the real world by holding onto him when the sleeper awaken and decide that's the way to kill him, with Maggie deciding to go to sleep and enter his mind in order to pull him out.

Since The Dream Child didn't do that well, and because New Line Cinema had, over the years, grown from a struggling little production company to a thriving, independent studio, Bob Shaye had decided that A Nightmare on Elm Street had run its course and that it was time to move on from Freddy Krueger. And, while this was definitely not the end of Freddy, it is in a way the last of the original series of films since, after this, you had Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which is a completely different movie in every way, Freddy vs. Jason, which does follow this and the previous movies but was made many, many years after the series' heyday and was mainly a fulfillment of a long hoped-for fan dream rather than another sequel, and the 2010 remake. There's no sequel bait whatsoever here either; the film ends as soon as Freddy's been destroyed. And if you look back on how the film was marketed and publicized, it's obvious that they really did intend for this to be the last movie, so I don't think New Line can be accused of doing what Paramount, and later, they themselves, did with Friday the 13th in promising the end and then going on with more and more sequels. This is indeed the end of the road for the franchise the way it originally was.

I haven't mentioned Rachel Talalay yet at this point but she's been with the series since its inception. She started out as an assistant production manager on the original film, became the main production manager on Nightmare 2, was promoted to line producer on Nightmare 3, and was a main producer on Nightmare 4 (she wasn't involved with The Dream Child, possibly because she was working on the movie Cry Baby). Having risen up through the ranks over the course of the series, it was only natural that she would eventually get to direct one of the films but, unfortunately, she brought a weird, offbeat, overly cartooish, John Waters meets Twin Peaks type of sensibility to the film that I don't care for. I also have to admit that she kind of rubbed me the wrong way on the Never Sleep Again documentary when she, along with other people, was bashing on Nightmare 2, particularly the pool party scene, which she was describing as not making any sense, and yet she directed something this silly and, at points, incomprehensible in regards to the rules of the dreams. She seems like a nice enough lady in interviews but that just irritated me, especially since she has said that it was her intention to make this film the way it is. Fittingly, after she finally got to direct, she left New Line Cinema and went on to direct two more movies: Ghost in the Machine and Tank Girl, neither of which were well-received critically or commercially. Since then she's directed a lot of TV, working on shows like Ally McBeal, The Dead Zone, Greek, and Doctor Who, as well as directing the TV movies A Tale of Two Wives and The Wind in the Willows. According to IMDB, she is working on a feature called On the Farm that's due out in 2016.

It is refreshing to have an adult as the lead in one of these films rather than a teenager but, unfortunately, Lisa Zane as Maggie is far from one of the best leading ladies the series has had. Nancy Thompson, Lisa, Kristen, and especially Alice were all much, much more memorable and had more personality to them; Maggie has always felt kind of bland to me. They do try to give some meat to her character with her having these recurring dreams that she doesn't understand the significance of and, even though she won't admit it to anyone else, she does want to figure out what they mean, which is one of the reasons why she takes John Doe to Springwood since there does seem to be a connection there. This eventually leads her to learn that she's actually Katherine Krueger, Freddy's daughter, and that he's using her as a means to escape Springwood to continue his killing spree elsewhere now that he's done away with all of the kids there. This is some pretty heavy stuff and a lot for an actor to play around with but I've never found Zane's performance to be all that compelling. She doesn't seem to have that much expression in her face (it rarely changes from the way it looks in that image) and her voice and delivery typically feel kind of flat to me. There are some nice moments of emotion from her, like when she's seen crying over what's happened to John Doe, Carlos, and Spencer, when she attacks Freddy in the dream after remembering that he killed her mother, and some instances during their fight at the end, as well as something of a sense that she does care about the kids under her care, but for the most part, I don't find her to be very interesting or really care if she lives or dies. I got much more emotionally invested in the little kid version of her (Cassandra Rachel Freil) because of how cute and innocent she was and for when she's crying her big, cute eyes out when she comes across her father killing her mother. God, that was horrible, and so is the idea of him possibly abusing her afterward. Other than what happened to her mother, finding out that she's Freddy's daughter doesn't seem to affect her that much, actually. You'd think she'd have more of an emotional reaction to not only discovering that she's adopted but that her father was a horrible child-killer who's now an evil spirit that kills people in their dreams, all within the span of a few days as well, but not really. And, yeah, she is the one who kills Freddy at the end but, compared to how he's died, that's a lame way for him to go out and doesn't help her standing with me that much more.  If you ask me, to kill Freddy off in a much more satisfying manner, they should have brought Alice back for one last bout against him and have her really mess him up and destroy him for all of the torment he put her through, especially in the last movie.

The character who I wish was the lead was John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) because I got a lot more emotionally involved in him. I really felt bad for him when Freddy was tormenting him in the dream, not allowing him to leave Springwood, and for how he completely lost his memory save for the gut feeling that if he falls asleep, he'll die, and that wherever he's from, it wasn't a good place. He goes through a lot of personal hell in the film and when he and Maggie go back to Springwood, he's so earnest in trying to figure out who he is (which we never find out) that I wanted to see him succeed. He's also one character whose humor I've always found to be genuinely funny, like when he's singing to keep himself awake and somebody throws a pillow at him and says that they'll crack a bottle over his head if he doesn't shut up but he keeps on singing anyway, or the way he reacts to the crazy stuff that happens to him in the dreams, like when he yells, "Shit!" when he finds himself in a house that's falling from the sky and such. My favorite moment with him is when he finds himself in that house for the third time and declares that nothing is going to make him get off that bad... and the room suddenly catches on fire and he goes, "Damn it! I hate this house." Ultimately, the big thing about John is that you're led to believe that he might be Freddy's child, which he himself starts to suspect since he's been left alive, but, of course, you find out that's not the case and that he was just bait to lure his daughter back to Springwood (since he can't access anyone outside of Springwood, that has to mean that Freddy doesn't know where she is and so, that was an awful lot of faith to put into John that he would find her). Once his job is done, Freddy does him in, which sucks because of all the time you've spent with by that point and after everything he's been through. I really would have liked for him to have been one of the survivors and help the others in facing Freddy at the end.

I would have much rather he'd have lived as opposed to Tracy (Lezlie Deane). Man, I don't like this girl. I understand that she's severely traumatized from having been sexually abused by her hideous, sleazebag of a father, which is why she hides behind this tough persona, but she gets on my nerves to no end. Her shrill voice irritates me (and she screams a lot, which doesn't help), she acts like a major bitch for most of the first half of the movie, getting into fights and mouthing off to Maggie, Spencer, and Carlos, and, for all of her toughness, she doesn't do that much in the battle against Freddy, except knock him around in one of her dreams, which does nothing in the long run. One part where I want to reach through the TV screen and smack her across the face is when John dies in Maggie's arms outside of the van at the town limits. Throughout that bit where John tells her that Freddy's child is really a girl and when Freddy goes into her subconscious, Tracy is constantly yelling, "Maggie, come on! We've gotta get out of here! Maggie! Come on!" Ugh, shut up! God, why couldn't Freddy have killed her? She does get a little more tolerable during the film's second half, especially when you learn about her past, but by that point, I had already made up my mind that I really, really didn't like her and groaned every time she came back onscreen. And again, she ultimately isn't able to help Maggie fight Freddy at the end, so her tough persona didn't lead to much. One final note on her: if you decide to check out the Never Sleep Again documentary (which is a must-watch for any fan), be prepared to really raise your eyebrow whenever you see Deane's interview because it is really freakish, to say the least, and more frightening than anything Freddy could come up with!

Another character who I really did like and felt particularly bad for was Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan). He's one of those characters who just seems like a really nice, decent guy who, as you learn later on, got a raw deal in life with an abusive mother who made him go deaf by pushing a cue tip through his ear. As a result, the dream sequence leading up to his death is the most mean-spirited in the entire film for me, with Freddy forcing him to relive the abuse by his mother, taking away his hearing aid as well as cutting off his ear, and killing him by amplifying his hearing aid to the point where even the slightest sound is excruciatingly loud, eventually causing his head to explode. Because of the abuse he suffered, Carlos is the one kid who seems to be fairly close to Tracy and is also the only one who knows the details of what happened to her, with how he motions for Spencer not to mention the subject of fathers to her. But, what I like about him is that he's not as bitter and angry about it as Tracy and is still a likable person instead of being a prick to everyone like her (again, I understand that she was horribly tortured and violated but I can't help that I don't find her all that likable). And finally, one comical dream sequence involving him that does make me chuckle whenever I see it is the scene where he unfolds the map until it fills the entire back of the van and he eventually comes to a section that says, YOU'RE FUCKED. The payoff to it is when he wakes back up and when Tracy asks him for the map, he tosses it out of his hands and says, "Yeah, well, the map says we're fucked!" Oh, poor Carlos. Why couldn't he and John Doe have been the ones to live while Spencer and Tracy were the ones Freddy killed?

Of the four main kids, the one I have the least to say about is Spencer (Breckin Meyer). He's little more than a typical, laid back, stoner guy, with the only significant part of his character being that he has an overbearing, wealthy father who wants him to grow up to be an exact copy of him, leading to a lot of rebellion on the part of his son. Unfortunately, it doesn't go much further than us learning that he set his dad's garage on father and ran away from home, and Freddy, naturally, using that against him in the dream leading up to his death. Other than that, the only defining traits about him are his drug habits and that he likes video games, both of which Freddy also uses against him and leads into what has to be the absolute silliest dream sequence this series has ever seen. I can't say much more about him other than that.

My favorite character in the entire movie is Doc (Yaphet Kotto), mainly because he's the first adult character we've had in this series who knows from the beginning that there are more to dreams than meets the eye. As a result, he doesn't have to be convinced of Freddy's existence, which is refreshing; moreover, he's become such a specialist in dreams that he's able to control his own and resist Freddy's manipulation and deceit, allowing to keep his memories of John Doe, Carlos, and Spencer and giving him an advantage of over Freddy in the dream. I like how, when Freddy is trying to trick Doc by imitating Tracy's voice and calling for help, saying she's trapped in one of the lockers in the shelter's gym, he's not fooled and grabs a nearby baseball bat, ready to fight back against him when he does appear. As a result, it's satisfying to see him bash the crap out of Freddy with that bat and come up with the way to defeat him by pulling him out of the dream. On top of all that, he just comes across as a cool, helpful guy, trying to make Maggie face the fact that there's something significant about her recurring dream and later tells her that, given that there seems to be a connection between them and John Doe, whose dreams are not exactly ones you'd want to have, she may not be ready for what she's about to find. I also like the part where he warns Tracy that working out is going to make much of a difference because Freddy's going to go for her mind and, when Maggie is about to go into the dream, he warns her that he'll try to trick her in the same way. The only problems I have with Doc is, one, he brings up that ridiculous notion of those 3-D glasses being a way for Maggie to see what's real in the dream, which was nothing more than a gimmick for that last section of the movie, and two, like Tracy, he isn't able to help Maggie fight Freddy after she brings him out in the real world, which I think he would have been to given what he did to him in the dream. But, regardless, I still like him and I'm really thankful that at least he didn't die (when he got the job, Kotto might have told them, "Look, I got killed by the Alien; I'm not getting killed by Freddy Krueger,").

As for the cameos in the film, I have mixed feelings. The ones that I can say I don't like at all are Roseanne and Tom Arnold. For one, I don't like them to begin with; for another, they feel so out of place. I've heard that it was because they were fans of the series and wanted to be part of what was meant to be the last one, which I can appreciate, but seeing Roseanne show up out of nowhere to hug and cuddle Tracy, as well as act like she has her nose, and then have Tom Arnold pull her away because, "They bring him," does not feel like it belongs, regardless of the Twin Peaks feel they were going for. Johnny Depp's appearance makes more sense given that he was in the original movie and it's nice to see him in another one of these movies, although his suddenly showing up as a part of Freddy's dreams is rather inexplicable. (Some sources have said that he's supposed to be playing Glen again, his soul now trapped in purgatory and being used by Freddy, but I never made that connection before; I just thought of it as Johnny Depp doing a quick, cute thing for the filmmakers.) Personally, I would have much rather have seen him at the funeral scene in the next film but, unfortunately, Wes Craven was too nervous to ask him to be part of it. Incidentally, he's credited as Oprah Noodlemantra at the end(??) I like Johnny Depp but he sure is an oddball. The cameo that I think works the best is Alice Cooper as Freddy's vile, abusive adopted father whom you see whacking him with a belt in that flashback. This works well because they made it a part of the story and you can see how this evil man fed into Freddy's psychotic tendencies, making him grow to love both pain and, more importantly, inflicting it; you can think of him as the one who really brought the monster out of Freddy more than it already was. Another reason why I think it works is because they disguised the fact that this is Alice Cooper, making him look nothing like his usual self, so it doesn't become distracting (indeed, I don't know that was him until I read up on it).

I don't think that it's possible for Robert Englund to have played Freddy any sillier than he did in this movie even if he tried. This film takes the jokey, wise-cracking persona that Freddy began to develop several movies back and dials it up to 1,000. There is nothing remotely scary or menacing about him here. For 95% of the movie, he's goofing around, making corny jokes like, "No screamin' while the bus is in motion!", "Nice hearin' from ya, Carlos!", "Now I'm playin' with power!", among many, many others, and doing the most cartoonish things imaginable, like actually wearing a bus driver's uniform while driving one, sitting in an office in the boiler room and controlling Spencer in a video game, with a controller and even the infamous Power Glove, rolling a cart with spikes out in the middle of the road for John Doe to fall on, just like Wile E. Coyote setting a trap for the Road Runner, and doing acrobatics towards Doc. For God's sake, the first time you see Freddy in this film, he's riding a broom and dressed like the Wicked Witch, telling John, "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little soul too!" I had seen a bit of that in one of the promotions for Platinum DVD series on those VHS's of Nightmare 2 and 4 I bought but it went by so fast that I wasn't quite sure what it was; when I actually saw the movie, though, I knew I was in trouble when that happened. It's ridiculous, as is this whole film, but unlike Nightmare 5, at least this portrayal, for the most part, fits in with the tone and style of the movie; it just happens to be a tone and style that I don't care for. And I said for the most part because you also have those rather disturbing scenes where you see Freddy's life before he got burned to death as well as some of those moments between him and his daughter where he's trying to be somewhat menacing again. Not only do those parts, as well as some of the other rather nasty scenes that I get into, not fit with the film's overall zany tone, despite how effective some of them are, but it's also really hard to suddenly try to take Freddy seriously after the way he's been acting for the majority of the film. I will admit that Englund's performance as the "human" Freddy in the flashbacks is kind of effective since he does come across like a real psychopath there (except for that scene with the dream demons where he goes, "I want it all!") but in those moments with his adult daughter, it's impossible for me to take him seriously since he still acts kind of goofy shortly after the serious moments, like when he's explaining to Maggie how he made all of the adults in Springwood "pay" for taking her away. His delivery there is far too silly for a scene that should have been completely dead serious. The bottom line is that they needed to either try to tell a darker story or go all out cartoonish rather than try for an awkward combination of both, as they had done with both this and the the previous film.

This is the film where you learn the most about Freddy's backstory, with all of the missing pieces of his life before he was murdered being filled in. There are some parts of it that I like and others that I don't. The ones that I find to be really effective are when you see his childhood and his teenage years. That scene in the classroom where he smashes that hamster with a mallet (which you don't actually see, thankfully) is pretty disturbing, although the kids chanting, "Son of a hundred maniacs," feels melodramatic to me and I wonder why anyone would let these kids in on that disturbing little fact about his birth or why would they would be intent on finding that out for themselves. Even more well done is the scene with Freddy as a teenager. Tobe Sexton, who plays Freddy in that scene, does a really good job, even giving Englund a run for his money in his terrifying performance. He comes across as a very sick, sadistic young man, cutting himself open while cackling evilly and doing the same when his adopted father is smacking with a belt, going as far as to ask for more. And his line, "You wanna know the secret of pain? If you just stop feeling it, you can start using it," right before he uses the straight razor he was cutting himself with to kill his adopted father is delivered very well and is very creepy too. As for the part of the backstory where you learn that he had a wife and a kid that we've never heard of before, I don't hate it as much as other people do. For one, even though it was never mentioned before, it was never outright said that Fred Krueger was a loner with no family, either; all we ever learned was that he killed a bunch of kids in a boiler room where he worked and that he was burned alive. For another, it adds an even more disturbing layer to Freddy to know that he was a seemingly normal, loving family man who, unbeknownst to anyone, preyed on and killed innocent children with these hideous murder weapons that he made in a secret room in his cellar, making him akin to John Wayne Gacy and especially Dennis Raider, the BTK killer. And that moment where he murders his wife right in front of his little girl after she discovers his secret is a really effect one, especially with how Englund talks to the young Maggie about how, "Mommy just had to take her medicine for snooping in Daddy's special work. But you won't tell, will you?"

However, what I don't like is when Freddy hints that he killed all of the kids that he has out of revenge for taking Maggie away from him. Not only does that take away from the much simpler and more effective notion of him getting revenge on those who torched him but it also feels like it's trying to make you feel sympathy for Freddy, which I don't like at all. It's the same reason why I hate how they tried to make Michael Myers sympathetic in some of the Halloween films; Freddy is supposed to be a sick, twisted, evil person who became something even worse after he died and I don't want to feel sympathy for him. Granted, he could have just been saying that mess with Maggie's conscience since, at the end of the film, he tries to feign sympathy to make her let her guard down so he can kill her, but still, I don't like the idea, especially in that scene in his childhood when the other kids are calling him the son of a hundred maniacs. Besides, trying to make me feel bad for him when I can already see what a twisted little brat he was, killing a cute little hamster with a mallet, does not work at all! And finally, you have the concept of ancient dream demons being the ones who gave him the power to kill people in their nightmares. At least it doesn't come out of the blue at the end, being foreshadowed, very obviously, at the beginning when Doc explains the nature of the demons to Maggie, but still, they took away the final and scariest piece of Freddy's character. It was not necessary at all for us to learn how Freddy became the dream-stalker that he is, especially since this knowledge doesn't play into the finale one bit and is nothing less than pointless backstory. Wouldn't it have been freakier if, by the end of this film, this was still the one crucial aspect of Freddy that we didn't know? In fact, it may have made the other stuff they revealed work a little better (or maybe not because of how goofy the overall movie would still be but still...). But no, they not only explain it but they do so in a very uncreative way to boot. And it also doesn't help that those dream demons look and sound ridiculous and that their appearance right before Freddy's death is both inexplicable and awfully convenient for them to have found such an evil man moments before he's burned alive.

My least favorite of the makeups Robert Englund wore as Freddy will always be the one in Nightmare 5 but this one is a close second. It doesn't look quite as crappy to me as the previous makeup did but I still don't like it. Like that previous one, it doesn't look as moist and organic as the makeups that Kevin Yagher created and really does look like latex thanks to the less than stellar lighting. However, what really kills it for me is that it's far too restrained: there isn't enough gross scarification on it, no doubt to make it fit with the movie's comedic tone but to me, the Nightmare 4 makeup is the one that did that right. They really should have taken some cues from what Yagher did there. I don't think I can really blame David Miller for the way makeup turned out this time around since he's said that he himself did virtually no work on Freddy's Dead since he was tied up with other movies, with the people of his studio being the ones behind it (he's said that he doesn't think it came out looking that well on film), but it's still one of the worst makeup jobs that his name has ever been associated with. Now the glove, on the other hand, looks pretty good here, coming across as a bit better and slightly more threatening (at least, when it's not the Power Glove) than the ones in the last two movies and I even like the slightly green color that it has to it here. And I also like the idea that Freddy made a bunch of different gloves in his cellar, with those that have short, curved hooks on the fingertips looking particularly wicked and painful.

The part of this film that I detest the most is the section where the characters go to the town of Springwood and see for themselves what's become of it and its adult inhabitants now that Freddy has killed all of the kids because this is where it becomes both the dumbest and the most detached from the rest of the series in my opinion. I'm not a big fan of the overly cartoony stuff in the dreams either but I can deal with it since it is Freddy that's causing it; all of the adults walking around in a stupor and acting overly crazy throughout the town, however, feels like it doesn't belong in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie at all but rather in some dumb parody of it. That scene with the nutty school teacher who's teaching "Freddy 101" to an empty classroom, spouting off lines like, "1493, Freddy sailed across the sea," and the one in the orphanage with that woman singing, "Skip to my loo, my darling," are the absolute worst to me and drive home the reason why copying Twin Peaks was not a good idea for one of these movies, as is the fair scene where Roseanne and Tom Arnold show up. I've always personally thought that these movies work best when reality is completely normal in order to counterbalance the craziness that goes on in the dreams, a notion that is ruined here. I know that was what they were going for given the movie's overall tone but, as I've said before, it also comes down to personal tastes and the truth of the matter being that I don't like Twin Peaks, meaning that this film is doomed not to appeal to me from the start. Maybe they had a good reason for going the route they did and I'm sure there are people who like it but it's not my idea of a good movie.



Me while trying to figure out how this stuff works.

This is also the film where the line between dreams and reality become so blurred that I'm often confused as to where one ends and the other begins. For instance, the opening that begins with John Doe on an airplane and ends with him outside of the Springwood town limits: is John really on a plane and Freddy sucks him out of it when he falls asleep there or is the whole thing a dream, with Freddy flinging him around town in reality until he ends up outside of the town limits and hits his head on the rock, losing his memory? Also, when he kills Carlos in the dream by making his head explode, what happens to his body in reality? And did he really pull Spencer into the television or did he just sleep-walk off somewhere and then show back up when Freddy's controlling him? Plus, while Freddy has always affected reality before, the stuff that he's able to do here, like disguising the house at 1428 Elm Street as a completely different one and then blowing the cover off, make Spencer move like a video game character, accompanied with cartoony sound effects, and John up through the roof of a van and into the sky is outlandish even by this series' standards. And when Spencer, Carlos, and Tracy are unable to drive out of Springwood and keep winding up in the same spot, I assume that it's Freddy's doing but how exactly is he pulling it off since he's never been able to affect reality in this manner before? Yeah, he had Alice and Dan going in circles back in Nightmare 4 but at least there, it was confirmed that they were in a dream. It was confusing but at least you understood that part of it, whereas here, I'm completely lost. I know I've contradicted my feeling that you shouldn't question anything that happens in this series but the series used to be so less complicated: you fall asleep, Freddy kills you in your dreams, and you die in the real world, which he can affect in some ways. Here, it's so needlessly convoluted, and that's very ironic given that it's the first film since the original to bring back the fairly simple idea of being able to pull Freddy into the real world if you have a hold of him when you wake up.

Despite once again being courtesy of John Carl Buechler and Magical Media Industries, the makeup effects in Freddy's Dead aren't much to write home about. The most well-done work in the film is during Carlos' nightmare where Freddy takes his hearing aid and gives it back to him, only for it to mutate into a fleshy one that amplifies sound to painfully loud levels. The effect of it growing on his ear, as well as its overall design, is well-done, and the same goes for when his head begins to convulse, stretch, and bleed from the nose and eye-sockets when Freddy scrapes his knives along the chalkboard. The head exploding is a bit standard but it serves its purpose. There are some fairly simple blood gags in the film, like when the television set in the house overflows with blood after Spencer's death, when John falls on the bed of spikes in the dream and his chest gets punctured in the real world (that one doesn't look that great, though, because you can tell he's wearing some kind of vest under his chest with holes in it to create the effect), and the punishment that Freddy takes during the climactic battle with his daughter, with the best-looking being a crow-bar being shoved through the palm of his hand and all the way through his chest behind it, with the shot where he tries to twist it out a few moments later being a bit cringe-inducing. The broken hand that she gives him also kind of makes you wince but it also looks a bit fake to me. The best makeup effect involving Freddy himself is when he lists some of the ways in which he's been killed to Doc, slicing off a finger on his left hand for each one as green bloody squirts out. That one looks well done, a nice update on the similar gag in the original movie. The effect where his head appears to inflate and bubble when Maggie is trying to pull him out of the dream, as well as when his arms stretch out when he grabs onto something for support, look okay but they're, again, pretty standard. And that messed up face that Tracy gives him after she beats him up when he's disguised as her abusive father... that just looks like a big glob of latex and doesn't work for me. So, all in all, if there's anything you'd want to watch Freddy's Dead for, great makeup effects isn't one of them.

The visual effects, which are courtesy of Dream Quest Images again, feel pretty dated for the most part, like the animation used for shots such as when John's body disappears after he's murdered, the purple energy surges when Maggie finds herself in that hallway of doors in Freddy's mind, and some less than stellar blue screen work throughout the movie (like that really bad shot of John walking up invisible stairs), but there are some well done ones too. While the concept behind it confuses me, that image of John going through the border from the dream world to the real world and leaving the figure of his body cut through it looks really good, as it does when Freddy closes it up. The shots from above of him looking out the window of the falling house as it plunges to Earth also look good and so does the moment when the van shatters the border between the town and the rest of the world for Freddy when it drives off after he's gone into his daughter's subconscious (a shot that also looks pretty good). There's another nice effect early on when the picture of the woman later revealed to have been Freddy's wife rises up from the newspaper article, becomes a three-dimensional, transparent character, and says a line. And all of the effects surrounding the video game sequence, with those psychedelic colors pouring out of the TV and enveloping him as he's sucked into it, the matting of Breckin Meyer into the animation, and his real-world movements, as silly as they are, are pulled off well. I know there are some I'm forgetting but those are the ones that stuck out for me. There's some great use of miniatures and physical effects as well (courtesy of a number of different groups like Reel Efx, True Vision Effects, and Stetson Visual Services), with the best one being when the house Tracy, Spencer, and Carlos go into transforms into the one at 1428 Elm when they go inside. Like John getting flung through the border, I don't competely understand the context behind it, but it looks really cool, with how the fake house literally bursts open to reveal the real one underneath. The shots of the house hurtling through the sky are pretty good, successfully reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, and the model of the inside of Freddy's brain during the 3-D sequence is interesting, even if you can tell that it is a model. As for the puppeteering of the snake demons that you see at the beginning of that sequence, there isn't anything that special about them since they barely even move.

Speaking of which, let's talk about that 3-D sequence... or at least, about some of the visuals since I've never seen it in 3-D, on DVD or otherwise, although I've heard that the 3-D wasn't that good in the theater and doesn't work at all on the DVD in the box-set. In any case, looking at it now, it looks as predictably hokey and dumb as you would expect, with the traveling POV shot the sequence starts out with, things being held right up to the camera, or coming at it, especially those dream demons, which are very early CGI and look like floating, cackling sperm more than anything else (making it all the more insulting to think that they're the ones who made Freddy the undead monster that he is now). That shot of Freddy's head coming towards the camera before blowing up also looks really lame, especially with how it looks like it warps outward from its mouth to create another head. And the way they try to incorporate the actual 3-D glasses into the story by having Maggie use them as a way to see through Freddy's deceit in the dream world, which was really just a way to let the audience know when it was time to put the glasses on (which apparently still didn't work because it's been said that some got confused when the screen suddenly became distorted, not knowing that they were supposed to put the glasses on), is impossible to take seriously. Making the film's last act three-dimensional was an interesting idea but the technology was too young at the time and the effect, whether you can actually see it or not, is now nothing more than a poorly dated link to the time when the movie was made.

The film opens with the image of a black and white map of the United States and some text informs us that, ten years from the "now" (given that this film was released in 1991, I assume that means it's set in 2001), all of the children and teenagers in the town of Springwood, Ohio have been wiped out by "mysterious killings and suicides" and that the adults are now experiencing mass psychosis. However, there's evidence that there's one teenager left. It then switches to an airliner flying through a very bad thunderstorm and inside, the captain tells the passengers that they can't get above or below the storm and that they'll just have to hang in there. The aforementioned last remaining teenager looks out the window and notices that the plane's wing doesn't seem to be in very good shape, prompting him to ask a nearby stewardess if he can sit somewhere else. Unfortunately, the plane is full up, so he's going to have to stay where he is. The woman sitting next to him turns on the overhead lights, with one of the bulbs shorting out and hurting his eyes, and then when he looks at the window, he sees that rain is actually seeping in through the glass. A little girl with pigtails leans over the seat in front of him and says, "He's going to make you help him... because you're the last." The teenager then frantically pushes the button to call for the stewardess again and tells her that he really needs to change his seat but she says that there's nothing she can do. He then explains to the woman next to him that he's afraid of heights, to which she responds, "Don't be a pussy." Suddenly, a piece of the plane's roof gets torn off and the woman is sucked right up through it. The teenager yells, "It's not fair! I was almost out!" when his seat is sucked down through the bottom of the plane. He plummets back down to Earth, screaming the whole way, and heads straight for the roof of a house in the town down below. Just when he's about to hit the roof, he wakes up with a gasp in a bedroom. Although it seems like everything is fine, he doesn't seem so sure and cautiously gets out of bed and walks to the window. When he opens it and looks out, he yells, "Shit!" when he sees that the house he's in is falling to Earth. The other windows in the room explode and the furniture tips over as he tries to keep his balance. He hears cackling outside and when he looks out one of the windows, he sees what appears to be the Wicked Witch of the West hovering down on her broom. However, the next cut reveals that it's actually Freddy dressed up like a witch and he tells the teenager, "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little soul too!" He then flies back up as the house crashes to the ground and the teenager gets thrown out one of the windows by the force of it.

Getting to his feet, he stumbles around the outside of the now grounded house, whose mailbox reveals it to be 1427 Elm Street. When he sees the infamous 1428 Elm Street across from him, he turns and runs down the street, hopping a picket fence and realizing too late that it's at the top of a very steep hill. He tumbles down the hill for what seems like an eternity, as the majority of the opening credits roll, until he finally reaches the bottom and he gets up and runs for it. He comes to a road and finds a ticket booth operated by a rather creepy man (Bob Shaye, proving that he can't act to save his life) who slips him a bus ticket with a certain glove with knives on the fingers. The man tells him to hurry up and that he doesn't want to miss the bus. The kid backs away from the booth and when he turns to his right, he sees a bus coming right at him. It shimmers like a mirage at first but when it gets up to him, he realizes that it's very real. It slams into him and he ends up stuck on the front, which allows us to see that Freddy's the one driving. He laughs as the poor kid starts screaming and then tells him, "No screamin' while the bus is in motion!" Coming upon the town limits, Freddy hits the brakes and sends the guy flying backwards, out of the dream world and into reality, where he whacks the side of his head on a rock. Back in the dream world, Freddy steps out of the bus after laughing at what he did and walks up to the opening that the guy left in-between the two worlds, closing it up. He then says, "Now be a good little doggy, and go fetch!" Some time later, the teenager comes to in the real world and stumbles to his feet. Finding that he has very little money, KEEP AWAKE pills, and a small newspaper article whose headline is, Krueger Woman Still Missing, in his pockets, he heads on down the road to the nearest town.

The next dream scene is kind of a twofer that happens at the youth shelter. First, we see one of Maggie's recurring dreams when, after she falls asleep at her desk upon looking at the article the teenager, now named John Doe, had in his pocket, the photo of the woman in the picture rises up out of it and she says, "I won't tell." Switching to her actual dream, you see the little, pig-tailed girl from John's dream in a suburban backyard, glancing at a nearby water tower (which was in the photo in the article) before proceeding to play tag with a man whose face you don't see. Just as she sees about to run into his arms when he says, "Come to daddy," the girl hears a woman scream behind her and when she turns around, a woman walks out of the house's cellar with a shocked look on her face. Maggie then wakes up. Meanwhile, John is awoken by water dripping down on him from a pipe on the ceiling but, in a cut, it turns into dripping blood from a big splotch on the ceiling... the ceiling of a completely different bedroom, that is. Sitting up, John sees the little girl standing next to his bed. He asks her to tell him who he is but she says, "I won't tell," and walks away. He follows her into the next room and up a flight of stairs, showing that this is the inside of the Elm Street house. Some glances back into reality show that he's apparently sleepwalking, getting the attention of one of the security guards, although he apparently didn't see him walking up in invisible steps in the hallway. Following the little girl to the house's upper floor, John walks after her into a brightly lit room, with a cut and a camera turn showing that it's a white, padded cell, with a man in a straightjacket sitting in the middle of some blood in the corner, his back turned to John. He turns around to reveal that he is John, yelling, "Free me, you idiot! I'm your fucking memory!" Horrified, John yells and steps back, waking up when he knocks into the security guard from earlier who followed him, causing him to fall out a window. Looking out the window, John goes, "Oh, shit!" but in the next cut, we see that the window is on the ground floor and the guard, although irritated, is fine.

On the way to Springwood, John falls asleep in the van and dreams that, after being woken up in the van by a bump, he sees the little girl in the road up ahead, telling him to go back. Panicking, he grabs the steering wheel out of Maggie's hands, nearly causing them to crash as the van swerves while Maggie hits the brakes. The force of it throws Tracy, Spencer, and Carlos out of their hiding spot in the back of the van, much to Maggie's irritation. Later on when they arrive in Springwood, while the stowaways try to drive out of town to no avail, John and Maggie come across the first part of a running gag that I don't think the film ever fully completes. Walking to the school, they find a chalk drawing of Freddy on the pavement, with the lyrics, "One, two, Freddy's Coming for You," written below it. Instead of having kids sing the song, the filmmakers decided to do this, having the lyrics written in various spots throughout the movie. You see, "3, 4, BETTER LOCK YOUR DOOR," written in graffiti on the outside of the school, and inside, that whacky teacher pulls down a map that has, "FIVE, SIX, GRAB YOUR CRUCIFIX," written on it in red, but I don't remember ever having seen, "Seven, eight, gonna stay up late," written anywhere. You do see, "NINE, TEN, NEVER SLEEP AGAIN," much later on a newspaper but I think they skipped the next to last verse, which is really odd. The film was originally 105 minutes long and was cut down to 87 minutes for the theatrical release, so it's possible that verse was a part of the deleted material. If anybody knows for sure, please let me know. In any case, after driving around for a while and still not able to find a way out of town, Tracy reluctantly asks Carlos, who's fallen asleep in the back, for the map. Grabbing it, he starts to unfold it... and he unfolds it, unfolds it, and unfolds it, until it fills up the entire back of the van. When he finally gets to the last section, he sees that the words, YOU'RE FUCKED, are written in red. Tracy asks again for the map, waking Carlos up and prompting him to toss the map away from him, telling her, "Yeah, well the map says we're fucked!" This is when Spencer decides that he's had enough and makes Tracy let him drive.

That night, after having still not found the way out of town, Tracy, Spencer, and Carlos, or rather Tracy, decide to spend the night in a house on Elm Street with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn but, once they're inside, blood pours down the front of the door and the house transforms, blowing off its exterior to reveal the house at 1428 Elm Street underneath, with the FOR SALE sign catching on fire. Once inside, Carlos goes upstairs and finds a bedroom, while Tracy and Spencer look around downstairs. Tracy calls for Carlos, who has fallen sleep upstairs, and he appears to hear her and get out of bed to follow the sound. He walks out into the hallway, following the sound of Tracy's voice, but when he turns a corner, he finds himself in the hallway of a rundown, sleazy apartment complex and when he attempts to turn around to go back the way he came, he runs into a brick wall. Calling for Tracy and asking where she is, Carlos hears a Hispanic voice say, "Behind you." When he turns around, he sees what looks like his mother. He walks up to her, happy to see her, but gets slapped on the side of the face and knocked against the wall, falling to his knees. She then pulls out a very long cue tip, saying that maybe she should clean out his ears. Frightened, Carlos rambles frantically, begging her not to make him deaf again and saying that he's sorry. His head then gets lifted up by the chin and his mother has been replaced by Freddy, who says, "I'm not." He then pushes the cue tip into Carlos' left ear and forces it all the way through, popping out of his right ear and knocking his hearing aid. Freddy wrenches the cue tip around and then leaves it in, with Carlos painfuly pulling it back out. Freddy then tells Carlos to lend him his ear and he then cuts his right ear off, with the sound suddenly muting save for Carlos' breathing and a steady heartbeat. After jangling the ear in front of him, Freddy grabs Carlos and throws him through a brick wall on the other side. He crashes through it and tumbles down a stairwell outside, landing on his back on a walkway. Looking down, he sees that the place drops down a long shaft made up of walkways and steaming pipes and then looks back up to see where he fell from. Getting up, he backs up and gets blasted in the face by some steam from a pipe, prompting him to run down some steps to the bottom, which is full of turbines and a boiler. Walking down a corridor between the turbines, Carlos is unable to hear Freddy sneak up behind him and yell at him repeatedly, going as far as to jump up down while holding his hat in one hand. As Carlos walks on, Freddy, breaking the fourth wall by shushing the audience, walks behind him and runs off down another hallway, thunder crashing as he hops around a corner.



The last thing you'd ever want to see him get near.

Desperate, Carlos falls to his knees and yells for Freddy to give him back his hearing. Freddy is then seen on a walkway up above and appears to grant Carlos his wish, tossing the hearing aid down to him. Seeing it bounce along the floor, Carlos scrambles for it and manages to get it after it falls through some grating. He puts it onto his left ear but the thing suddenly sprouts tick-legs and clamps onto the side of his head, with blood coming out of one of his eyes. Becoming swollen and pulsating, the aid begins amplifying the sounds around Carlos to painful volumes, causing water dripping from a faucet to sound like a loud banging. Searching frantically for the source of the noise, Carlos runs to the faucet and turns it completely off, wiping off one last drop of water before it can fall. Looking up at Freddy, Carlos sees him pull a pin out of his left index finger and pleads for him not to drop it, but Freddy shushes him and then lets it go, the pin making a very high-pitched, whistling as it falls. Carlos manages to catch it before it can hit the floor and breathes a sigh of relief, but when he looks back up at Freddy, he sees him hold out his hands to reveal that it's full of pins. Carlos asks, "You wouldn't do that, would you, man?" (what do you think, moron?) but Freddy, despite his pleas, drops all of the pins at once, with Carlos ducking down in pain from all of the loud whistling and clanging when they hit some objects on the way down. After they make some very loud, metallic bangs when they hit the floor, Carlos looks back up and sees that Freddy is gone. Backing away, he silently laughs, thinking Freddy gave up, when he suddenly knocks into him from behind. Slowly backing up from him, Carlos watches as Freddy takes out a small chalkboard and stretches it lengthwise and width-wise until it forms a perfect square. Resting it on a pipe, Freddy curls his gloved hand around its right side and puts one of his knives on the actual board. Carlos frantically says, "No, no, no, no," (which is what I was doing the first time I saw this) but Freddy slowly scrapes the knife down it, causing Carlos recoil in pain. Standing back up, he realizes that there's blood coming out of one of his nostrils and as Freddy moves his glove back at the chalkboard, he again begs him not to do it. Freddy, being the sadist that he is, begins scraping all of his knives along the board like crazy, making a circular motion and causing Carlos' ear and head to pulsate from the pain being inflicted upon him. With his eyes filling up with blood and his head stretching, Carlos can't stand anymore and his head literally explodes. Freddy catches his hearing aid and jokes, "Nice hearin' from ya, Carlos!" Back in the real world, Tracy finds the bedroom Carlos was staying in but there's no sign of him save for his hearing aid. Going downstairs, she tells Spencer that she can't find Carlos but Spencer is completely wasted on the couch, looking at the busted TV set. Tracy decides to go look for Carlos in the van and after she leaves, Spencer sees some zombie-like people on the TV's screen, walking up to it and moaning. Carlos then makes his way through the crowd and yells for Spencer not to fall asleep and for him to get out but he's too wasted and does indeed nod off.

After Tracy finds Maggie and John at the orphanage, we cut back to Spencer, who's woken up by a high-pitched beep on the television set. Looking at it, he sees a guy (Johnny Depp) come on the screen and perform one of those classic drug advertisements about what happens to your brain when you take drugs. When he asks, "Questions?" he gets a frying pan across the face courtesy of Freddy, who says, "Yeah, what are you on? Looks like a frying pan and some eggs to me." Spencer finds this funny and Freddy then tells him, "Let's trip out." The lights in the room dim and the background behind the TV changes, with some colorful lights now back there. As Spencer gets up off the couch and approaches the TV, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly begins playing and the screen fills with very vibrant, psychedelic colors, which Freddy disappears into. Crouching down in front of the screen, Spencer is then surprised when the colors pour out of the TV and envelop him, with a pull back showing that he's now inside the set. At that moment, Tracy comes back with the others and sees that Spencer is now gone as well. The three of them split up to look for him, while Spencer finds himself inside a video game that Freddy is playing in an office in the boiler room. Controlling Spencer, he has him jump over some rats and fall down a pipe where he's confronted by a big caricature of his father who proceeds to beat him with a tennis racket while saying, "Be like me." Freddy is apparently controlling this character, saying, "Father knows best," as the character continues to hit Spencer. Spencer, however, manages to take the racket away and pounds the character into the ground. That's when he hears a very deep voice say, "Be like me," and turns around to see a much bigger caricature of his father. Proclaiming, "Now I'm playin' with power!", Freddy whacks Spencer clear across the level, landing on the top of a tree. A piece of fruit comes loose from the branches and Spencer takes a bite, which makes a glowing, red energy field appear around him as he says, "Super Spencer!" Bouncing back on the platform, he manages to blast the character to pieces, with Freddy commenting, "Great graphics."

While Maggie walks out into the backyard and realizes that she's in the yard where her recurring dream is set, John wanders around the house, looking for Carlos and Spencer. In the dream, Freddy has Spencer punching his way through a brick wall, eventually blowing through it and flying through a window into the dining room in reality, right in front of John. He yells that he's found Spencer and he and Tracy drag him into the next room, while in the dream, he's getting pounded on by a big caricature of Freddy, making his gut cave-in repeatedly in reality. Maggie comes in and sees what's happening, with John explaining that Spencer's stuck in a nightmare. Maggie says to wake him up but Tracy says that he's too wasted. As Spencer continues to get pounded, John says that he'll go into the dream and pull him out before he gets killed. Maggie tells him his idea is crazy but when Spencer suddenly bolts to his feet and very slowly jumps all the way up to the ceiling, leaving a big hole and getting stuck in place, John says, "Well, what do you call that? Rational?" Spencer then hops down and marches into the next room, bouncing up down the entire height of the hallway like a bouncy ball and then punching holes in the wall before sliding on his feet into the next room. As Maggie walks down the hallway he was just in, Freddy has Spencer punch away at a wall again, causing him to punch his hand through the wall in front of Maggie, who sees him turning crazily and then take off in the room beyond. Freddy has Spencer wreak more havoc across the house, smashing everything in sight, John, now determined to go into the dream, gives Tracy a club and tells her to knock him out. Tracy tries to tell him that Doc taught her a different way but John, impatient, screams at her to do it, smacking her across the face and prompting her to knock him out in response. Landing in the dream on some oil drums, John gets to his feet and sees Tracy materialize into the dream magically, explaining it as concentration-meditation courtesy of Doc. The two of them then see the office where Freddy is playing the video game and they rush towards him. Seeing that a caricature of Freddy is after Spencer on the TV, Tracy kicks the controller out of Freddy's hand and yanks it out of the TV, allowing Spencer to cream the caricature that was after him. Tracy and John run out of the officer but Freddy whips out the Power Glove (which I had never heard of before I saw this movie; I was only four when this film was released), turns it on, and tells them that they forgot about it before closing the door to the office. Tracy tries to get back inside as Freddy uses the Power Glove to knock Spencer backwards, with him hopping up the stairs in reality, before falling off a ledge and into a pack of caricatures of his father. In reality, Spencer tumbles down the stairs and when Maggie tries to help him, a hellish pit open as the bottom and she's unable to keep him from tumbling down in there. In the dream, Freddy looks at the score screen on the TV and remarks that he beat his high score. He laughs as the TV in the house fills up with blood and a white light swirls out of the hellish pit, which Freddy absorbs in the dream world as the blood gushes out of the TV.

Freddy says that it's great to be back in business and that it's all thanks to John. Tracy then jumps, very impressively, up to where Freddy is, preparing to fight him. When he says that her father is waiting for her, Tracy tells him to shut up and kicks him right in the balls, which does seem to cause him some pain. He then whips his glove out but when he swipes at her, she disappears out of the dream when Maggie wakes her up. She tells Tracy that she couldn't save Spencer and adds that she can't wake John up. The two of them pick up John's sleeping body and carry him outside to the van. As they're driving out of Springwood, John dreams that he's in that same bedroom he was before. Getting out of bed, he very cautiously walks over to the window and opens it up, revealing a nice, sunny day in a suburban neighborhood outside. Walking out the front door and onto the WELCOME mat, he has a smile on his face when he feels that maybe it was all a dream... when he gets knocked off his feet from the force of the house shooting up into space. John then wakes up back in the same bedroom and, having had enough, he declares that nothing is going to make him get off the bed... and then, the room catches on fire. Irritated, John hops off the bed and, after saying how much he hates the house, he dives out the window and plummets to Earth. As the van reaches the town border in reality, John sees a string on his shirt with a tag that says, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PULL STRING. When he does so, his shirt opens up into a huge parachute that retards his fall, although his body gets pulled up through the roof of the van in reality, prompting Maggie to stop just short of the town border. In the dream, John hears Freddy call for him and when he looks up, he sees him floating up against the parachute, laughing as usual. Freddy falls down towards him and grabs onto one of the chute's strings. When John tells him that he knows why he let him go, Freddy informs him that he's wrong about the idea of him being his father, cutting off the right strap of the parachute in the process. Telling him that he left him alive long enough so he could bring back his daughter, who's going to take him to a whole new playground, Freddy cuts the other strap and sends John plummeting again. Down on the road below, Freddy pushes a cart of spikes underneath John, who gets impaled right on them, with puncture wounds appearing on his chest in reality, much to Maggie's horror. John tries to tell Maggie that Freddy's child is a daughter but he dies before he can finish his sentence, disappearing in a flash of light that goes into the dream world and gets absorbed by Freddy. He rubs and pats hi chest, saying, "You forgot where ya came from, kid, but I know where you're goin'." Slashing the population number on the town's sign down by one, Freddy says, "It's travelin' time!" and becomes a beam of light that goes into Maggie's forehead in the real world. Getting into the van after feeling out of it for a bit, she drives through the town border, shattering it as Freddy is now able to finally leave town.

Things slow down for a while, with Maggie and Tracy returning back to the shelter to find that John, Carlos, and Spencer have been erased from everyone's memory (although you hear that some of the kids are dreaming about them) and Maggie, remembering what John said about Freddy's child, investigates a hunch and learns that she was adopted. Following that, both Maggie and Tracy go to sleep at the shelter and the former has her recurring dream about the backyard and playing tag with a man when a woman suddenly screams as she comes out of the cellar of the house. This time, it goes on to where she says, "I won't tell." She's then confronted by the man, who is revealed to be Fred Krueger when he was alive, telling her that they need to talk. He tells the little girl to go inside and as she does, walking down into the cellar, you can see Fred grabbing his wife and shaking her, telling her that he said for her to never go down there. The little girl walks through the cellar and prepares to go up the stairs when a door right next to them slowly swings open. Going inside, she finds a horrifying workshop filled with various types of murderous gloves and newspaper articles about the Springwood killer, as well as other unnameable things. Walking back out, the little girl becomes Maggie, albeit still wearing the same dress and pigtails, and is confronted by Freddy, who's standing there tapping his foot and flicking one of his knife fingers. Calling her Katherine, he whips out a crayon drawing that she and John found at the Springwood Orphanage that was signed, K. Krueger, and tells her that she was such a little artist. Maggie is taken aback, saying that she knows who she is, but Freddy says that she's his blood and only she could have brought him out of Springwood in her mind. He explains that they took her away from him but he got back at them by taking away all their children and now, that's over. Motioning her over to the cellar door, he opens it up to reveal the youth shelter, saying that it's time to start all over again. When Maggie says that this isn't Springwood, Freddy proclaims, "Every town has an Elm Street," and laughs as a sign that reads, ELM ST., bursts out of the ground nearby. When Maggie lunges at Freddy, he slams the cellar door down on her, waking her up.

In the next scene, Tracy appears to be washing her face in the shelter's restroom but when she looks up into the mirror, she sees that the room has become the ratty apartment she used to live in. Looking around, she becomes upset and when she turns back around, she sees that the restroom has become the apartment's kitchen. Walking over to the sink, on the verge of tears, she hears the unwelcome sound of her father's voice saying that he's home. Tracy tells herself that he's dead as he walks into the room, revealing himself to be a disgusting, fat slob of a man, as he tells her to come say hello. Tracy says she doesn't want to, as her father walks up right behind her and says, "Come on. Give Daddy some honey." He creepily runs his hands down the sides of her arms, saying, "No one has to know," as Tracy is now severely freaked out and about ready to cry. Swinging around, she pushes him away, saying that he's not her father, and grabs a coffee pot and whacks him repeatedly on the head with it, knocking him to his knees and down onto the floor, wrapping the cord around her arm and smacking the living crap out of him with the pot. When she's finished, she exhaustedly yells that her father is dead, suggesting that what we just saw was a repeat of when she killed him, but is horrified when he gets back up, his face now smashed into a nasty mess, and says, "No honey for Daddy?" Getting to his feet, he laughs evilly at her as he turns into Freddy as the camera pans around, saying, "What's with kids today, huh? No respect." Tracy tells him that he can't scare her anymore but Freddy mocks her, saying that he can't hear her because of his "deaf ear," pulling out one of Carlos' severed ears. Enraged, Tracy kicks him across the face and then in the gut, but when she goes for another kick, Freddy manages to block it with his arm and backhand her in the face, knocking her to the floor. Freddy says, "Kung... fu... this, bitch!" but Tracy kicks him in the face again and knocks his legs out from under him. When he hits the floor, Tracy takes the opportunity to grab his right arm and put him in a lock. Tracy proclaims, "This is my dream, and I do what I want," but Freddy then says, "It might be your dream, but it's my rules!", spinning his hand around like a blender and knocking Tracy's grip loose. Getting up, Freddy blocks her path when she attempts to run for it and circles around her, chuckling. Spying the lit stove, Tracy knocks the pots off of the eyes and burns her arms, waking herself up screaming in pain. Maggie bursts into her room and Tracy says that she needs to talk to Doc, the two of them running out to find him.

Doc enters the room where Tracy works out, calling for her, when the lights in there blink. Knowing something's not right, Doc calls for Tracy again and walks up to the punching bag, which is slowly swinging back and forth, and grabs it, everything suddenly becoming eerily quiet at that moment. He then hears the muffled sound of Tracy calling for him and he asks her where she is, grabbing a nearby baseball bat since he knows that this could be a trick. She says that she's stuck in one of the lockers and he runs over to them, frantically opening the doors, but doesn't find anything. When he again asks where she is, he hears her voice behind him, saying, "Right here." Turning around, he sees Freddy standing at the other end of the room, who says, "You taught her a lot," while still speaking in Tracy's voice, switching back to his own when he adds, "but there's so much more to learn." He then does a bunch of acrobatic moves towards Doc, asking him what he thinks of them. Doc responds by knocking him to the floor with the bat and beating him repeatedly with it until he stops moving. He then crouches down and bends over to Freddy to make sure he's dead, when he pops his head back up at him and quickly gets to his feet. He tells Doc, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but nothin' will ever kill me." He then proceeds to list some of the ways people have tried to kill him in the past, including burning him, burying him, and using holy water, cutting off a finger on his left hand for every method, making a middle finger gesture when he gets to the third one. Putting his hand down off-camera and then holding it back up, his fingers are back in place and he says, "But I just keep on tickin', because they promised me that." When Doc inquires about who "they" are, Freddy says, "The dream people. The ones that gave me this job. In dreams, I.. am... forever!" Looking at Doc, he then adds, "Too bad you're not!" Doc then grabs the tail of Freddy's sweater and rips a piece of it off, with Freddy responding by jumping down and cornering him against the lockers, slowly coming in for the kill with his glove at the ready. Doc's watch then beeps just as Freddy is about to slice him and he wakes up, with a brain monitor he had on when he went to sleep doing so with a buzzing sound. Getting up and turning the machine off, Doc is startled when Maggie and Tracy come running into the room but when he calms down, he shows them the piece of Freddy's sweater, saying, "I think I've got a way to get him."

The climax begins with Maggie preparing to enter the dream to try to pull Freddy into the real world, with Doc warning her about how he'll try to trick her like he did Tracy and that she can't rely on her eyes. That's when he gives her the 3-D glasses and tells her that in the dream, they can be anything she wants, telling her to use them to get inside Freddy's head. Hooked up to Doc's brain monitor, Maggie then lies down, with Doc counting down from ten, as she falls asleep. When she opens her eyes, she finds herself in the room alone and, after looking around, she puts on the 3-D glasses, which magically vanish when she does. Now seeing things differently, she focuses on the picture of the ancient dream demons on Doc's wall, with the snake-like demons now moving and calling to her. She walks up to the picture and floats through the door under the demons, entering Freddy's mind as he yells. A POV shot traveling through the inside of Freddy's brain follows, with a couple of doors closing in front of it before it can go through them, the dream demons flying right up to the camera, cackling, and the camera finally going up into a glowing section of the brain. In the next cut, Maggie tumbles into a temple-like hallway filled with doors, pillars, and purple energy surges sparking through some cables along the ceiling. Maggie attempts to open one of the metal doors but a surge of energy hits it, electrifying the metal. She tries to open the one next to it and the same thing happens. A bracelet she wears on her left wrist becomes electrified from the surges and she takes it off and flicks it at the junction box on one of the arches that the surges are coming from, shorting it out and stopping them. Now able to open the doors, she goes through one of them and finds herself in a classroom filled with rowdy kids, with a young Freddy taking a hamster out of its cage and smashing it with a mallet, making her realize that she's in his memories. The other kids then come up behind him and start chanting, "Son of a hundred maniacs!" as Freddy turns around and looks at them, the kids randomly turning into mocking adults for a split second. The scene switches to a basement where Maggie now sees Freddy as a teenager, mutilating himself and getting ecstacy out of it, when his abusive adopted father comes down the stairs with a belt, telling him it's time to take his medicine. Freddy gets up and faces his father, who begins smacking him across the shoulders with the belt as he laughs at the pain and thanks him for it. When he stops, Freddy asks if he can have another and his father responds with more smacks while yelling in frustration, making him laugh even more. Freddy then grabs his right arm and tells him the secret of pain, taking out his razor blade and attacking him with it off-screen. The scene switches again and Maggie is now at the moment when Freddy was cornered in a shack (not a boiler room, as has always been said) by angry mob after he'd been freed and one of them throws a molotov cocktail through the window. The place goes up like a torch but as Freddy is surrounded by the flames, the dream demons come to him and tell him that they know what he wants. When he says that he wants it all, they tell him to open and he'll be forever, with the demons then proceeding to go inside of him.

The scene transitions again, with Maggie now in the cellar of the Krueger family house again, watching as her young self, after stumbling into her father's workshop of horrors, goes back outside to see him killing her mother. Crying for her mother, tears run down her face as she looks at her father, who walks up to her and tells her, "Don't worry, baby. Mommy just had to take her medicine for snooping in Daddy's 'special work.'" Looking down at her, he then says, "But you won't tell, will you?" Little Maggie then says, "I won't tell." Horrified at what she's just seen, Maggie stumbles back down into the cellar, which is now the boiler room, and Freddy comes up behind her, puts his hand on her shoulder, and says, "But ya did tell, didn't ya? And now, it's time to take your medicine." Furious now that she knows the truth, Maggie pulls a pipe out of the wall and bashes Freddy in the face with it, grabbing onto him when he recoils from the pain. In reality, Doc and Tracy can tell from her arm gestures that she has Freddy and Doc begins to use the machine to wake her up. Freddy's head begins to bulge and stretch as he's about to be pulled into reality and, struggling to get free, he grabs onto the pipes and Maggie pulls him back, trying to make him let go, his arms stretching very far as a result. Maggie slowly awakens and she and Freddy disappear from the dream world into reality. When Maggie wakes up, she and the others are surprised when Freddy doesn't appear. Tracy ponders if the trip into reality killed him but Maggie says that it's not over because she's still seeing things the way she did in her dream. The three of them head down into the shelter's cellar and Maggie opens up a locker full of dangerous items that the cops were supposed to pick up, saying that they're going to have to hit Freddy with everything they've got. She gets ahold of a club with nails jammed into its end while Tracy takes a couple of knives. She and Doc walk off to the other side of the room while Maggie, feeling something, enters a section that's blocked off by a door with wires going through it and the walls.

Going into the back of the room, she finds Freddy, unburned but still wearing his trademark outfit, cowering on the floor, apparently sobbing. Maggie approaches him and when he looks up at her, he tells her that it wasn't his fault, blaming what happened to him when he was a kid and then saying that he tried to be good but that it wasn't right when they took her away from him. This whole time, Freddy has his gloved hand behind his back and then raises it up, saying, "Come to Daddy." Maggie, however, wasn't fooled and smacks him in the gut with club, knocking him onto a table behind him, before hitting the glove and sending it flying across the room, skidding across the floor. Maggie picks it up and when Doc and Tracy appear outside the section, she turns to look at them, saying that she's okay. They then see Freddy crawling across the ceiling behind her and Doc yells for her to watch out. He runs for the door but Freddy closes it on him, it locking when it hits. Doc and Tracy look for the key while Freddy hops down in front of Maggie, holding his side and telling her, "I didn't need a glove to kill your bitch of a mother, and I don't need one now." Walking up to her, he grabs her by the throat, choking her to try to make her let go of the glove. Struggling to make her do it, Freddy grabs her arm but she headbutts him, knocking him back and giving her time to slice him across the face with the glove a few times before he catches her arm and tells her, "Give Daddy the glove back, princess." The two of them then fall to the floor, rolling over and struggling for the glove, with Maggie biting Freddy's nose at one point and, after rolling on top of him, breaking the fingers on his right hand, telling him that she remembers when they held hands when she was a kid and that she didn't like it then either. He comments on how he forgot how much it hurts to be human, while Doc tries to break the door down with a bat. Freddy twists his fingers back into place and then smacks Maggie, knocking her off him and to the floor, causing her to drop the glove. Getting up, Freddy walks over and stops her from taking the glove, putting his foot on her arm and ripping the glove out of her hand. Backing up against the wall, he prepares to put the glove back on his hand, while Tracy tosses Maggie a knife, some shurikens, and other weapons through the fence. He painfully straightens his fingers and is about to slip the glove on, when Maggie throws the knife and pins his right arm to a crate and throws the shurikens and other bladed objects at him, sticking him in various spots and pinning him even more. Tracy tosses her a small crossbow and she shoots Freddy in the leg before coming at him with a metal bar and sticking it through his hand when he tries to block it and into his chest as well. Panting heavily, Freddy looks up at his daughter with the glove and tells her to go ahead and put it on, that it's in her blood. Freeing his right hand and pulling out the metal rod in his chest, he continues to goad her into putting it on, which she does. He asks her if it feels good, and as Maggie looks at it on her hand, he says, "Let your daddy show you how to use it."

She then surprises him by brandishing it like he always does and coming at him with it, stabbing him right in the gut and jamming the knives in deep. Leaving the glove sticking in her father's glove, Maggie catches a pipe bomb that Tracy tosses to her and sticks it in his chest. She tells him, "Happy Father's Day," and kisses him on the cheek before running out the door, which Doc manages to tear off its hinges, and the three of them take cover off to the side. Freddy's last comment is simply, "Kids," before he's blown up, his yelling head coming at the screen before splattering, with the cackling dream demons now free to fly off. And that's another reason why this film is rather lame: after all the ways he's been defeated before, especially at the end of Nightmare 3 and 4, simply blowing Freddy up with a pipe bomb is a disappointing finale for what was meant to be the last film in the series, with the lousy 3-D effect not helping matters. In any case, once the shock from the explosion subsides, Maggie's 3-D glasses reappear, signifying that it is over, and the three of them smile, with Maggie proclaiming, "Freddy's dead." The ending credits then show a montage of scenes from all of the movies, ending with a shot of Freddy from this film with a red R.I.P. in front of him, another indication that this was indeed meant to be the last movie.

I really don't have much to say about the film's music score by Brian May, a prominent Australian composer who died in 1997. The only piece that sticks out to me is this version of Night on Bald Mountain that plays during the dream scenes with John, particularly in the moments with the falling house and when he's parachuting, and during the POV shot going through Freddy's mind in the third act. Other than that, a brief, violin version of the theme that you hear after John stumbles out of the house at the beginning, and some magical-sounding, twinkling bits you hear a number of times throughout the score, the majority of the music feels very generic and forgettable to me. I will say, though, that I like the use of one of the actual versions of the original theme that Charles Bernstein did when Maggie is walking through the town in the rain. Granted, it doesn't fit that well with the tone of the movie but it's nice to hear it.

The actual soundtrack is much more memorable to me, although not always in a good way. Starting on a good note, though, you have I'm Awake Now by the Goo Goo Dolls, which I really like the sound of, which is appropriately dreamy, and in a way, it's kind of fitting for what was meant to be the last of the series. It just has a feeling of finality to it, especially with the prominent title lyric. The Goo Goo Dolls also composed a couple of other songs for the film, one called You Know What I Mean, which you hear when the kids are trying to find their way out of Springwood, which isn't bad, and Two Days in February, which I don't remember in the actual movie but, nevertheless, is also okay, although not a song I'd listen to all the time. I feel the same way about Johnny Law's Hold Me Down, which you hear when John staggers to his feet and walks off down the road at the beginning: not bad but not a song I'd listen to on a regular basis. I much prefer Remember the Night, which I think you hear when Maggie and John depart for Springwood. Tracy listens to a couple of rap songs when she's working out, Treat 'em Right by Chubb Rock and Give Me A Beat by Young Lords, neither of which I have much of an opinion on since I don't care much for rap. Although it's not on the soundtrack album, Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is featured, like I said, when Freddy pulls Spencer into the TV and while Spencer was on weed instead of LSD, it still fits since that has to be the quintessential song associated with drugs. Hate to say it but my least favorite song on the soundtrack is Iggy Pop's Freddy's Dead song, also called Why Was I Born? While I don't think it deserved to be nominated for a Razzie, I'm still not a fan of it. I just don't like the sound of it or the lyrics. And the last song you hear, which is the Junk Monkeys' Everything Remains The Same, was something I couldn't believe I was hearing when I first saw the movie. The film had been completely silly throughout, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but still, I was like, "This was meant to be the last Nightmare on Elm Street and you're going to end it on this?" I think a recap of I'm Awake Now would have been so much better. In conclusion, this soundtrack is better than that of The Dream Child by a mile but is still a very mixed bag in my opinion.

Thankfully, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare wasn't the last movie to feature Freddy Krueger because it would have been a really bad way for the series to go out. The film's tone is far too comical and offbeat, with the section in Springwood being the worst example of this, it's hard to take the film seriously when it tries to go into some heavy subject matter and it also just plain feels out of place, some of the actors aren't the best, Robert Englund is a complete goofball joke as Freddy and the film tells you more about his backstory than I think was necessary, the makeup effects aren't much, some of the opticals, especially in the 3-D section, are horribly dated, the music is mostly forgettable, some of the songs on the soundtrack aren't the best, and, worst of all, for what was meant to be the final showdown with Freddy, the finale is pretty freaking disappointing. That said, there are some good notes to the movie, such as a good cast overall, some inventive and well-done dream sequences, as silly as they are, some nice visual and model effects to balance out the dated ones, and some really nice songs on the soundtrack along with those that I don't care much for. But, overall, of the original continuity of Nightmare on Elm Street movies, this is my least favorite and marks the moment where the series severely jumped the shark and hit its nadir, even more so than with the not so stellar previous film.