When Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child didn't really perform as well as expected in the cinemas, New Line had to get their thinking caps on to find a way to attract viewers in for one last flogging of the dead (and horribly burnt) horse. What would draw viewers in more than the promise that this would be the last outing? it worked with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, so Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was born. Released in 1991, it originally had a gimmick right out of the olden days, and later the 1980s stables of B-Movie cinema. 3D. While I'm not sure what happened in cinemas, on video, you were given so many pairs of 3D glasses, and the last 15 minutes or something was in 3D. Gimmicks Ahoy.

This movie is set ten years in the future (from 1991, which means it actually happened 3 years ago), in which Springwood Ohio now has only one child left after years of Freddy's slaughter. That one child is dropped by Freddy in a separate town, where he is taken to a runaway children's institute. He is suffering from amnesia, and all he has in his pocket is an article about a town called Springwood, the accompanying picture is of a water tower. This John Doe (Shon Greenblatt - Chopper Chicks in Zombietown) is recieving help from a young psychiatrist type named Maggie (Lisa Zane - Gross Anatomy), who constantly dreams of her childhood, but the only thing she can remember is a water tower. John Doe refuses to sleep, and Maggie thinks the only way to help him is to take him to this Springwood.
As they take the Institute Van, they fail to notice 3 stowaways. Part deaf Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan - Back to the Future Part 2), kickboxing abused orphan Tracy (Lezlie Deane - 976-EVIL) and rich kid who doggs responsibility Spencer (Breckin Meyer - Escape from LA). Finding them and ordering them to phone back at the home and tell them where they are, Maggie and John go around town, where the townspeople are mad. There are no kids, but the town still holds school to empty classes and such. After several unsuccessful attempts to leave in the van, the group ends up spending a night at a house that is all too familiar to Maggie, a fact that becomes painfully clear when she steps out into the back yard, and sees the water tower she remembers. After Freddy, who has been dormant with a lack of kids to kill, catches wind of them being in Springwood, he quickly gets to work and offs Carlos and Spencer while they are still at the house. John, Tracy and Maggie mount an escape, but just before they leave Springwood, Freddy strikes killing John, and putting himself 'inside' Maggie. You see, Maggie is his daughter, and he needed her body to escape Springwood. Now free to kill in anyone's dreams the world over, Maggie and Tracy, along with some help from dream specialist Doc (Yaphet Kotto - The Running Man) they plan to drag Freddy out into the real world, and off him once and for all. Doc also knows the secret of Freddy, he gained his powers from ancient dream demons who search the souls of all humans to find one evil enough to earn their powers. When Maggie goes to sleep, she will have to look inside the mind of her father, a man she hasn't known since she was 6 and taken away from him to put up for adoption, and not only beat his mind, but also catch him, bring him into reality and do what all the others have failed to do, kill Freddy.

The acting in this film is, to be honest, pretty poor, granted the script and general story of the film don't do them any favours. Lisa, brother of Billy, Zane is ok as Maggie, but she doesn't exactly scream out to become a leading lady of blockbuster movies. None of the teens in the cast are exceptionally bad, just none of them strike me as being anything but mediocre at best. Even Robert Englund seems to have stopped trying his hardest, granted it is hard to bring any amount of terror to a character who has now become nother more than a joker. I don't even see a point in Freddy having his glove of knives in this movie, he doesn't actually use it on anyone, and I don't think Englund even does the menacing pose with the fingers in this movie.

The music also gave up on trying to build up any suspense long before this movie was made. This entry is more trying to sell soundtrack records than anything. Not to say that the soundtrack is that bad, there is a pretty cool original song by Iggy Pop that plays over the credits, and the Goo Goo Dolls, a band that Im not a fan of, but they are decent enough, appear on the soundtrack. But the thing is, these songs aren't scary! Who remembers Charles Bernstein's theme from the first movie? awesomely creepy. Even the work of other composers for the sequels look great and suitable compared to this.

The special effects are also pretty crap. Freddy Himself looks alright, but it isn't his best makeup. The creature that goes in Carlos' ear is decent, but the 'Spencer in a videogame' effects, and the 'dream demons' just look like sh*t. While the dream demons looking so bad could be down to the fact that they were meant to appear in 3D, the design of them sucks as well. They look like something from Creatures from the Abyss, a dire Italian horror movie from master of crap Al Passeri.

The thing that really destroys this movie, is that it isn't even mildly scary. It isn't very funny either, so it just ends up being an atrocious movie with no purpose.
The movie only kills 3 people, and in not one of the scenes are you even remotely scared. Spencer's death is just so poorly done and an atrocious idea that you want to take the movie and destroy it the minute you know it will happen, which is pretty early. We are introduced to him playing a videogame (one of those LCD handheld things, of Ninja Gaiden no less), and he dies by being put in a (terribly created) videogame.
Spencer's death is also foreseeable. Early on he complains about needing a hearing aid, did anyone else guess something to do with his ears would play a part in his death?. The scariest part of his death is when he imagines returning to his mother whom he ran away from, and she is about to make him deaf my pushing a stick into his ear. This is honestly scarier than anything else in the movie.
I won't even talk about John's death, mainly because it is actually such a terrible waste of film that it hurts my head thinking of it.

I really just found that there was very little to like about this movie. In the audio commentary on the Freddy vs. Jason DVD, Robert Englund says that Wes Craven wasn't happy with this movie because of what they had turned Freddy into, and I think Wes was right. Even the worst of sequels prior to this at least made Freddy slightly menacing and had at least a death memorable for some reason other than it being garbage.

The plot doesn't even reference Alice, the heroine from the last two movies, and what happened to him needing someone to pull the new kids into their dreams for Freddy to get them? and the whole plot about there being no teens left in Springwood is just plain dumb. While I semi-admire them for trying it, it was just pulled off in such a horrible manner it made me want to cry. The scenes of the orphanage and the school were really, really diabolical. The teacher talking to an empty class was just embarassing, as was the fact he was talking about Freddy's history.
That's another thing that bothered me, out of the blue John knew who Freddy Krueger was. To start with he just refused to sleep, and it seemed to be that he didn't know why, he just knew he couldn't sleep. Then, out of nowhere, at one point he knows near enough everything about Freddy.
The more I think about the Springwood thing, the more stupid I think it is. Why don't people just move away?
And the fact that the house they stay in is supposed to be Freddy's house makes me wonder if they ever bothered to watch the first movie. THAT IS NANCY'S HOUSE! Her family lived there while Freddy killed people!, it wasn't his house at all!
With that said, I did think they handled the daughter thing decently, they don't explain why he needs her to leave Springwood. I always believed it was because it was the parents on Elm Street that torched him, so he was tied to the town because of that. Where his daughter figures into it I don't know.
We also see some scenes from Freddy's past, where he was taunted at school ("b*****d son of 100 maniacs") and he kills the class hamster, we see his (adopted?) dad , as played by Alice Cooper beating him and such. The one about his dad bothered me a bit, because the previous movie had made out as if his nun mother had raised him, and I doubt she would have lived with a drunken child abuser.

The ending of the movie, which owes a lot to the ending of the first movie, and is pretty much an extension of Nancy's plan to pull him out and kill him, is actually pretty decent, but it can't make up for the messy hour and ten minutes that preceded it. Freddy is hardly even in the movie, and I don't mean like he was in the first movie, largely hidden and obscured, I mean he just plain isn't in this movie much, and when he is it is just to kill off someone in a rubbish manner and make a really crappy one-liner.

There really isn't much to recommend Freddy's Dead on. It seems to ignore any reference to previous movies other than the house, which it gets wrong, and just completely fails. The acting isn't good, it isn't scary, it isn't funny, it is just ...there.

I won't recommend this horrid film to anyone. Fans of the series may be tempted to see it, but personally I would just ignore it. Even Freddy's Revenge was better than this, because at least it had some unintentional comedy on its side, this is just a dull waste of time, money and effort.

The sad thing is, that they got Johnny Depp to do a cameo (well, if he knew about it I don't know) on a commercial on TV, Wes Craven has said that he would have liked to have had Depp in a cameo in New Nightmare, but didn't have it in him to ask, and let's be honest, New Nightmare deserved his cameo more than this steaming pile of faeces.
It should also be noted that Roseanne and Tom Arnold make cameos, but their cameos are in one of the failed 'comedy' scenes, so I'm really not a fan of it.

Freddy's Dead really has no redeeming features to it. The DVD didn't even have a trailer on it. Personally, unless you are buying the Nightmare box set, I wouldn't touch this disgustingly bad movie.

Related Reviews
Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Recommended:
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