Full Review: Freddys Dead: The Final Nightmare (Nightmare on Elm St. 6) 1991

People in the Movie:  Robert Englund, Lisa Zane

Director:  Rachel Talalay  

Pigeonhole:  Horror / Teen Slasher

The Basics: Freddy Krueger (Englund) has killed all but one teen left and in Springwood, Ohio.  He luckily  escapes town (and Freddy), but with amnesia, and he ends up in contact with Dr Maggie Buroughs (Zane).  Maggie and John Doe (as he is now called), along with 3 other teens travel back to Springwood, where some interesting discoveries are made.  Freddy, before he was killed by the mob, had a child.  It is a fight to the end, and to not ruin it, but as the title suggests, Freddy is dead.     

Recommendation: Fans of the series should see this one.  As a standalone (meaning you have not seen any of the preceding films) it would make very little sense.  “R” rating is for violence, and language.  

My Take:  This is a tough movie to gauge.  It does not feel like any of the other Nightmare films despite Freddy killing several teens, and it’s almost as if it stands alone in some ways bringing in elements that the audience was never aware of to the Freddy mythology.  The tone feels almost detached either intentionally to separate it from the other Nightmare movies, or because of poor writing.  Nothing going on seems to be real, like a dream within a dream, or some other similar metaphor.  The final 10 minutes were shot in 3D, this being the first Nightmare movie to have that feature.  By the end of the film I was almost expecting someone to wake up from a nightmare, having imagined it “all”.  Some entertaining cameos are made by Johnny Depp, Tom and Roseanne Arnold, and Alice Cooper.  There is a great montage run during the credits of some of the “best scenes” from all the prior films.

**spoiler alert** There seems to a lot of head-scratching new plot items in this movie.  Maybe it was the writer’s desire to not really expand the storyline, but more to go in a different direction from the previous 5 films. 

The story picks up 10 years after Alice’s last encounter with Freddy in ‘Dream Child’.  We do not know how he came back, or how he managed to kill all the teens in Springwood.  Further disjointing the mythology are 2 facts; Freddy had a daughter before he was killed (we also see that she may have inadvertently caused his mental state to crumble), and that Freddy’s power to invade people’s dreams and exist on a different plane has come from 3 “Dream Demons” that live in his essence.  The daughter element is somewhat entertaining, and the fact it is his daughter who takes him down at the end makes it somewhat sweeter.  However, the Dream Demon element was completely absurd.  I have always preferred the idea of a “bad” character being evil by his/her own choice or doing.  Doing the bidding of or for a demon just does not have the same weight, in my opinion.  I will give credit to writer for bring back an element from the first film: to defeat Freddy, Maggie had to pull him out of the dream world and into the “real world”.

While Freddy’s demise is probably the best part of the film, there is one somewhat goofy kill he makes with a teen stuck in a video game.  Freddy plugs his glove into a game deck (a la the Powerglove from Nintendo) and “plays” with the character.   As I also mentioned earlier, Alice Cooper has a nice little cameo as Freddy’s adoptive father who is scummy pimp-type guy.

Not the best Nightmare installment, but certainly not the worst.      

Final Thought/Extras/For Fun:  While this was supposed to have been the end of Freddy Krueger, there were two more Robert Englund Freddy/Nightmare movies, plus now the reboots with Jackie Earle Haley…