Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Well, okay, this film already has one big strike against it: it's dated badly. Not that this is the movie's fault; who could have stopped The Powers That Be from, despite this movie's title, making two more Freddy movies, A New Nightmare and Jason vs. Freddy. You can argue that the former doesn't count, since it takes place in a parallel universe where Freddy is (more or less) fictional, but word has it that, yes, the latter does have the real Freddy Kreuger getting back to business once more, despite this movie's promises of his being "terminally inconvenienced." Freddy's Dead was supposed to be a milestone, not only the finale of a long-running series of films, but also the killing off of a real cultural icon. Sure, no one at the time probably expected the Powers That Be to keep their promise of leaving Freddy six feet under (the movie itself realizes this, as the last line of the song that plays over the closing montage asks, So do you really think that Freddy's dead?), but the significance of the gesture was there. But now that we're in a once again Freddy-full future, does the movie still have any point at all? Can it still stand alone?

Surprisingly, yes...

There are two main things that Freddy's Dead gets right. First, it cuts up and throws out most of the damned continuity. Sure, the elements of Amanda Kreuger and her hundred maniacs are still there, but they're put into the background and tinkered with a bit. It's suggested that Amanda, because of her traumas, was an abusive mother and at least threw Freddy out. Plus the film flat out states that Freddy's evil isn't because he was the "son of a hundred maniacs," but because he was known as the "son of a hundred maniacs." The Dream Master thing is thankfully tossed out the window entirely. Alice and her son Jacob don't make an appearance or merit a passing reference. (I think we're supposed to guess that Alice and Jacob either moved away or were eventually killed off by Freddy, but since the IMDB has 'Alice' and 'Jacob' as appearing in Jason vs. Freddy, I guess it's the former.)

The other thing is that Freddy's Dead doesn't even bother trying to be a traditional horror movie and embraces Freddy as a wisecracking icon. Although there are a few genuine efforts at creepiness (the scene involving one character confronting her sexually abusive father in a dream comes to mind), for the most part Freddy's murders border on the cartoonish. Sometimes this works (who can forget Freddy's use of death by chalkboard?) and sometimes it really doesn't (the effectiveness of Freddy's one-liners during the death of a video game addict depends on how well the viewer remembers commercials run for Nintendo over twelve years ago), but it's rarely boring.

It helps that the movie is directed by Rachel Talalay, who, as shown by her other film the seriously underrated Tank Girl, knows pop culture and knows how to make a film that is overabundant in kinetic energy. The entire film manages to be a love letter to fans without rehashing everything stale from the previous Nightmares. As in Tank Girl, the soundtrack and the film are both perfectly matched, concluding with the aforementioned little montage on scenes from past Nightmare movies that's played out like a music video.

Rachel also did a fine job writing the story basis for the script. The various cameos, while at the risk of being gratuitous, are trotted out quickly enough. The premise for the film is both risky and has a built-in immunity from most of the series' past continuity: the town of Springwood, Freddy's hunting ground, has seen all of its children, adolescents, and teenagers die "mysteriously," throwing all the adults in the town into a state of mass insanity.

Unfortunately, the movie's big problem is that it only milks a few good scenes out of this idea and uses it to set up the rest of the plot. While a lot of the old continuity is ignored or played down, the plot eventually sets up more gratuitous elements to replace them: suddenly Freddy is the avatar of these demonic entities and he had a daughter who was taken in by social services, which gave Freddy the motive for taking other people's children away permenantly. That's right, the movie pulls off the old Darth Vaderian plot twist. While, as some moves have oh so painfully demonstrated, it could have been much worse, rewritting old continuity, especially if it just brings up a flock of timetable problems and unanswered questions (like, why the hell would a poor sociopath like Freddy have such a large, nice suburban house in the flashbacks?), is rarely a good idea.

Nevertheless, even with the plot problems (and the goofy excuse used to justify the use of 3-D effects in the last twenty minutes of the movie), this is a fun movie, something that can't be said for some of the previous installments in the series and a great number of slasher movies in general.


Cast Connections

Scriptwriter Michael De Luca also wrote one of my favorite recent horror movies, In The Mouth of Madness, and Judge Dredd.