Movie Review: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
The sixth movie in the franchise doesn’t really have anything to do with the previous movies. It opens by pointing out that it’s the future, and all the teens except for one from Springwood, Ohio, are dead. So I guess Alice and Yvonne were eventually killed. Or, it is ten years into the future, so maybe Freddy’s just letting them be now that they’re in their late twenties.
We meet an amnesiac teen (Shon Greenblatt), who’s on a plane to leave his home until the plane rips open and he starts falling. He wakes up in his bed, and finds that the house is flying. Freddy makes his first appearance, as the Witch in The Wizard of Oz.
As much as I don’t like goofy Freddy, I’m at least glad that they established the tone of the movie early on. You know right away not to take anything seriously.
He eventually wakes up, and is brought to a shelter for troubled youths. It’s like the setting for Dream Warriors, except it looks a lot worse. Running it are a doctor (Yaphet Kotto, Live and Let Die) and a counselor, Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane, Billy’s sister). We are introduced to the other main characters. There’s Spencer (Breckin Meyer, Road Trip), a pothead who likes video games and hates his father. There’s Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan, Back to the Future Part II), a young man with a hearing aid. Lastly, there’s Tracy(Lezlie Deane), a young woman who hates being touched after having been raped by her father, and likes boxing or MMA or whatever.
Maggie meets the guy from the beginning, going by the name John Doe. He doesn’t know who he is or where he’s from, but Maggie finds a newspaper clipping from Springwood, so she decides to take him there to see if anything will trigger his memory. They take the van that Tracy, Carlos, and Spencer have secretly hidden themselves in, and they all arrive at Springwood, a town without any kids.
There’s a creepy carnival, and I actually like this scene, except for the cameos by Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold.
The three stowaways try to drive away, but keep going in a circle for hours. I guess Freddy can effect the real world when they’re not dreaming now.
While this is going on, Maggie and John Doe try to find out more information, and come to a school to find a teacher teaching an empty classroom, and a bunch of news clippings about Freddy, and murdered or missing children. I sort of like this scene, too.
At the oprhanage, the two of them find a drawing by a K. Krueger, and they think that John Doe is Freddy’s son.
The other three give up on trying to leave and instead find the Elm Stret House to get some sleep. Carlos falls asleep first, and gets his ear taken off by Freddy, and replaced with a new hearing aid, which reacts strongly to noise. Freddy kills him by scratching a chalkboard with his glove, which makes his head explode.
Spencer falls asleep while watching television, and Johnny Depp appears in a fun cameo rendition of the “This is your brain on drugs” ad. He gets knocked out by Freddy, who makes the room go psychedelic as a bunch of colors come out of the TV to the sound of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly.
Spencer is sucked into a video game, where he’s beaten by his father. We see Freddy controlling him. John Doe and Maggie find Tracy, who is looking in vain for Carlos. They hurry back to the house and see Spencer bouncing all around the house comically.
John and Tracy join him in the dream, a power that was previously reserved for only a select few characters. They take Freddy’s game controller, but, as he puts it, “You forgot the Power Glove.”
This movie is very cartoonish, and that is not just the tone and the plot, but even the look of Freddy is less sinister than before. He’s had a somewhat different look in each movie, but never has he looked less threatening.
Maggie sees Spencer die in the real world, and Tracy wakes up. Unable to wake up John, they take him in their van and head back to the shelter. John dreams that he’s falling from the sky, but he has a parachute. After he uses it, Freddy appears, taunting him. He tells him he’s not his father, and then cuts the parachute, leaving him to fall onto a bed of spikes.
With the van stopped, Maggie and Tracy see his soul leave and go into Freddy after he tried to tell Maggie that Freddy has a daughter. When they return to the shelter, the only person who has any memory of Spencer, Carlos, or John Doe, is Yaphet Kotto’s character.
Maggie learns that she is Freddy’s daughter, and that she was adopted after Freddy killed her mother, which happened after she had discovered his stash of dead children and knife glove. It’s a very predictable twist.
Yaphet Kotto learns that Freddy can be killed if they bring him into the real world, so Maggie goes under to get him. When he’s brought into the real world, Maggie ends up fighting him, knocking off his glove. She then tosses some nails and ninja stars at him, pinning him to the wall, and stabs him with his own glove. Tracy tosses him a pipe bomb, and she puts it in him, exploding him to death.
It’s a mess of a movie, and the climax is maybe the most disappointing part. The last ten minutes or so were shot in 3D, and that just seems to me like a very strange route to take. Not only did this movie come well after the second 3D craze (Friday the 13th Part III was released nine years before), but only using the gimmick for a small part of the movie seems like a waste.
The movie was directed by Rachel Talalay, who had produced the fourth movie in the series. Dream Child was a huge disappointment at the box office, so I’m guessing the producers wanted to get someone involved with the most successful movie in the series. What resulted was a movie with nothing in common with the best movies in the series. It’s a comedy.
The movie does do what the last three movies attempted in terms of going into the backstory of Freddy, but nothing too interesting comes out of this.
Rating: 4/10
