Sweet Dreams: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare!!!

Nominal series endings generally at least try to go out on a high note. Friday the 13th had two (The Final Chapter and The Final Friday), one of which was good and the other tried, bless it. A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, approached its death in an advanced state of dementia, drooling and shitting all over itself. Fortunately, this wasn't the last movie, because nothing with "final" in the title ever is. Without further ado, let's delve into the heart of retardation.

The glasses do nothing! I'm still watching Freddy's Dead!

Freddy's Dead opens with a guy on a plane. He's obviously having a nightmare. His seat flies out of the plane and he wakes up in bed. He goes over to the window and finds Freddy flying on a broomstick dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West. You know those Comics Code approved Joker stories from Silver Age comics where instead of killing people he played pranks and stole that kid's report card? This is the equivalent of that for horror movies. Jesus Christ.

There's jumping the shark and then there's this bullshit.

So the kid makes his way to a delinquents' centre run by Maggie Burroughs and her shoulder pads. Breckin Myer (Road Trip) is there, along with Tracy, who likes violence but dislikes being touched, and Carlos, who has a hearing aid. As lame as this is, it's still more characterisation than most movies these days have, so whatever. Maggie takes the nameless kid back to Springwood to find out all about him, and the others stow away in the van because this is a wacky comedy (Road Trip).

A fun game is to pause at any second of this joint and see whose expression matches your own.

Springwood is a ghost town in this movie because Freddy killed everyone offscreen between movies. Why they thought that would be less interesting to show us than Freddy playing Nintendo and stealing a deaf kid's hearing aid for 90 minutes, I have no idea. The town with no children could have been a fantastically creepy setting, but instead it sucked.

The Twin Peaks nod is nice and all, but imagine if this flick had half the atmosphere of that show.

So Freddy offs the kids in increasingly stupid ways, stopping only to shill for Nintendo, and then somehow follows Maggie and Tracy back to wherever they come from. I guess the rules for this instalment are that Freddy can't leave Springwood without someone to carry him, so he sent out the John Doe character to bring someone back for him to hitch a ride on. So why didn't he just hitch a ride with the John Doe? Anyway, Maggie learns that she's Freddy's daughter (dumb) and that he got his powers from three floating skull things (gay) and that he lived in the famous Elm Street house, meaning that Nancy's mom moved into the house of the guy she torched (Road Trip).

A twist of some potential fascination teased, then instantly abandoned for more dumb shlock.

Freddy still has powers in the waking world, he just stops using them immediately after this for no reason at all.

Look, you've read my part 5 writeup. You know I'll defend practically anything with the Elm Street name attached to it. This piece of shit is on its own.

You know you're looking at a classy production when all the newspaper articles are copypasted from the sports page and World War 2 history books.

The once feared dream demon kills time by taunting a deaf kid.

Finally Maggie defeats Freddy with the power of 3D glasses, probably because they realised Friday the 13th had a 3D instalment and didn't want to miss out on the trendwhoring, even though 3D wasn't even trendy in the early 90s. Is there anything good about this movie? Well, I liked the fact that Alice Cooper is Freddy's stepdad. I liked the gag where he cuts off his fingers while counting down the ways people have killed him in the past. Maggie was pretty hot. Oh, and Iggy Pop wrote a song for the credits in like two minutes for it, which I thought was funny.

Just close your eyes and think of Dream Warriors.

What did Rachel Talalay mean by this?

The best way to view this one is not even as part of the series but as a parody of it, but even that doesn't work too well because it doesn't even have enough jokes per minute to work as a Hot Shots style parody. But if the intention was to kill off any interest in the series, they succeeded. Killing off Freddy gave it a small box office bump but by the time of Wes Craven's New Nightmare a few years later, nobody cared about Freddy anymore. That's a shame because New Nightmare is one of the best in the series, and almost certainly the best seventh instalment in any film series.