Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

During the 1980s I enjoyed the Nightmare on Elm Street series above that of other slasher franchises.  I wasn't a big Jason or Michael Meyers fan, so Freddy Krueger was something else entirely.  He was a monster that haunted dreams and, if there is one thing I have been obsessed with all my life, it is dreams.  Dreamscape is an obscure film now but it was one of my favorites back at the time, and I remember making up an entire fantasy dream world in which I was fighting some evil mastermind named Zimberman long before Freddy ever began haunting Springwood.  There is also H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which remains one of my favorite books. 

I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street at a function where I had to remain awake for the night to earn money for a traveling performance I was involved in and saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors at another function where I got together with a bunch of people with whom I had attended summer camp.  Like any '80s kid these movies were part of my childhood.  Unfortunately, since it was childhood, seeing them in a theater without an adult wasn't going to happen.  Luckily most video stores didn't care if teenagers rented R-rated movies as long as they were horror and action and not softcore.  There was also cable.  I was not aware that A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child had done so poorly in the theater.  I just knew by that time that slashers had played out years before and it really was time to put old Freddy to bed.  Plus, by 1991, I could finally see one of these movies in the theater, and in 3-D.  

Adulthood is so full of disappointments.

10 years after the events in The Dream Child Springwood is a wasteland.  Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has killed off all the children in town.  The remaining inhabitants are all adults with various degrees of PTSD and psychoses.  However, there is one survivor: an amnesiac teenager branded John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) who arrives in an unnamed city and is put into a shelter for young kids.  A woman named Maggie (Lisa Zane) just happens to work there who is having the same dreams as John and, at the urging of her colleague Doc (Yaphet Kotto), travels to Springwood to find out who the boy is.

Stowing away in the van is Spencer (Breckin Meyer), Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) and Tracy (Lezlie Deane).  With a fresh load of teenagers entering Springwood, Freddy goes to work.  It turns out he has a kid of his own and, even though John thinks it's him, it happens to be Maggie.  Since she is blood it allows him to escape the confines of Springwood so that he can prey on children wherever she may travel.  With the help of Doc and Traci Maggie decides to bring Freddy out of her dreams and get rid of him once and for all. 

I went into Freddy's Dead wondering what a 3-D movie was like.  The fad had come and gone again in the early 1980s, so any movies from that time I only saw (and still have only seen) in their standard versions, which look silly in their attempts to stick things at the audience.  Despite the promise only part of Freddy's Dead is in 3-D and they played that up in the movie to the point that it was corny.  There were instructions to wait until instructed to put on the glasses and, in the original version, Maggie tells the audience, "Now!" just before she dons them.  As for the effects with them on they were underwhelming.  The dream demons guarding the gate as she enters were well done, but beyond that one was stuck sitting there wearing a pair of uncomfortable cardboard glasses as a bunch of stuff played out, and not in three dimensions.  The remaining parts that were featured primitive CGI which looked as fake then as it does now. 

This also had some of the worst deaths in it.  I know Robert Englund likes how Carlos dies, and I will admit that has a bit of creativity, but Spencer's demise was just silly and embarrassing.  Despite the darker tone of The Dream Child there was more effort to bring comedy to the fore, albeit quite dark at times.  The whole slapstick video game sequence went way too far, especially since it begins with a psychedelic journey that could have been so much more.  On the other hand it does have a cameo by Alice Cooper as Freddy's dad, although it also has Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold show up as well. 

There aren't a lot of deaths in this entry.  There are attempts to tie it in with the other films, and in original drafts John was the Dream Child from the previous film, but other than Freddy referencing how he had died this goes in a completely different direction.  I typically like Rachel Talalay, finding Ghost in the Machine much more fun than The Lawnmower Man or Shocker, both films that it rips off.  She is also the one behind Tank Girl, which managed to find its audience decades later despite being uncompromisingly non-commercial.  Little of that individuality shows up here.  

Although I remember seeing it in an empty, out-of-the-way theater shortly after it came out, apparently Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was the third highest grossing film in the series.  Still, other than Freddy vs. Jason, New Line did the smart thing and kept him dead.  At least in his own movie world, that is. 

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Time: 89 minutes

Starring: Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt, Yaphet Kotto, Lezlie Deane, Robert Englund

Director: Rachel Talalay