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.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child!!!

Note the absence of the number 5. Just like with people, when you need to start hiding your series' age, it's time to think about wrapping it up.

Fifth instalments generally suck, and The Dream Child largely falls under the curse. Maybe it's because horror franchises have a natural lifespan of four movies: Friday the 13th Part 4 was called "The Final Chapter" (it wasn't), Hellraiser 4 was the last one to get a theatrical release, and Final Destination 4 was dubbed, simply, "The Final Destination" (it also wasn't). Parts 5 always seem to be extending the premise a little too far, too gimmicky, and redundant. But as sad and tired as Dream Child sometimes feels, it still has moments and a ton of style that endear it to me, and probably to no one else.

The Jacob's Ladder/Silent Hill/Event Horizon tier aesthetics in the asylum scenes are consistently on point.

This time the movie starts off with Alice and Dan from Part 4 having secks. This is the origin of the pregnancy around which the drama revolves. Alice has a dream about being a nun gang-raped by 100 maniacs who then gives birth to BABY FREDDY. Although Freddy was burned by a mob as an adult, Baby Freddy in the dream world still appears to be burned, although maybe it's just ugly, I don't know.

Separated at birth: Fred Krueger and a Bitcoin investor (respectively).

Everything in this movie is great up until Freddy's resurrection. It has a nice, dark, kind of expressionistic quality to it. But when Freddy shows up the pacing gets all weird and the tone of the movie vacillates wildly between dark serious horror and unfunny comedy, making it irritating. It doesn't help that Freddy only has three kills in this movie, and one of them is the lamest yet.

Taaake oooon meeee

So Freddy bumps off Dan and proceeds to try and corrupt Alice's unborn child for...some reason, I guess. Maybe to be reborn through him, or use him as an agent in the real world? I don't know, and neither did the writer. Probably to be a dick, by this point.

2bf imagine the genes you'd get from her.

The retardation kicks into high gear at the end of the second act when Freddy kills a comic book geek by skateboarding toward him on a bladed skateboard, disappearing, calling him names, turning into Super Freddy, complete with cape (yes), and finally turning him into paper and then cutting him to bits. This scene encapsulates, albeit hilariously, everything that went wrong with the series: by this point Freddy could no longer be described as scary or even menacing, but annoying. If Part 5-era Freddy came up to you in a dream, you'd be like, "go away". That's why I think they should have stuck with the Freddy Baby the whole time, because it's creepy as shit, except when you see it moving from behind and it looks like a rubber chicken.

Every Frame An Edgy Metal Album Cover

There are, however, a few things I really liked about this movie. Alice's drunk dad from Part 4 is now going to meetings and trying to be a better person, which is a completely unexpected bit of character development that makes us care about him, making me wonder if he was supposed to be attacked at some point (he isn't). The opening and ending sequences have some wildly imaginative Gothic/Expressionistic uses of space, shadows, lenses and camera movements. We also learn that Freddy is such an asshole he calls his own mother "bitch" (although to be fair this is how he addresses everyone).

I get this shit from my mom too.

Moreover, Lisa Wilcox is again great as Alice, and it's nice to see her character move forward with some closure and new hope for the future. As much as the series was starting to get old, in a way it was also growing up. So forgive the worst parts of 5 because there's good stuff in there too, and it's a lot higher effort than, say, the same year's Jason Takes Manhattan. After this there would be one more regular sequel, and it would be the worst in the whole series, but don't worry, after Freddy's Dead everything got better! Until the remake.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master!!!

We're going all the way with this.

Just as Dream Warriors was the mid-80s time capsule that threw Dungeons and Dragons, hair metal, The Breakfast Club and most of its cast into a blender and just about got away with it, so part 4: The Dream Master moves with the times by giving us "the MTV Nightmare", complete with MTV title spots, water beds, The Karate Kid, and other 80s-core that hipster flicks of today cram in because DUDE THE 80S LMAO but which was, in its original context, actually endearing (80s nostalgia is actually misidentified nostalgia for a time when you could put Fu Man Chews in a movie without some 500-lb Umm Excuse Me umm-excuse-meing about it, but I digress).

Welcome to MY lightshow.

So if you're determined to see A Nightmare on Elm Street as a scary horror series and Freddy Krueger as a dark, menacing figure, immediately skip to Wes Craven's New Nightmare, because at this point, the scares are gone. This movie doesn't even attempt to be scary at any point, and brazenly ushers Freddy himself into the spotlight as a ham and cheese pop culture villain who does shit like pose with sunglasses on a beach and order pizza with the faces of his victims depicted as meatballs on it.

Yes, that really happens.

But if you want a pacy, nonsensical, 80s-hip trip into unabashed surrealistic effects-driven moviemaking, The Dream Master has a lot to recommend it. This is also the one where a dog pisses fire on Freddy Krueger's grave, bringing him back to life, which is both an apt metaphor for the state of the series for the next couple of flicks and a characteristically left-field, genuinely imaginative and dreamlike image that encapsulates everything Renny Harlin's flickkino (or kinoflick) gets right. I don't know if it's the dumbest smart movie or the smartest dumb joint I've seen, but it's one of them.

"Very observant. The sacred and the propane" - horror producer "Little" Carmine Lupertazzi

The thing is, for everything about part 4 that sucks (Freddy's glove cutting through the water like a shark's fin, the Karate Kid death) there's something boldly imaginative or downright artistic, like the body-horror-inspired cockroach death or Alice flying backwards into the cinema screen. It's like watching alternating scenes directed by Michael Bay and David Lynch. Since it's one of the longer entries, I wonder how much a judicious fan edit could actually improve it (I think this about part 5 too).

"This is really turning out to be a nightmare on Elm Street for: the Dream Master." I turned 360 degrees and walked right out of the kinoplex.

What we can all agree on is that Tuesday Knight's opening song is top tier pop and Lisa Wilcox is excellent as Alice, the new Final Girl who has the distinction of being the only two times undefeated champion of Nightmare on Elm Street films. She's the Dream Master of the title, a concept that's barely explained in some background dialogue delivered by Bob Shaye in a classroom scene. Basically there's a positive gate and a negative gate, and Freddy is the guardian of the negative gate, making Alice his equal and opposite, the guardian of the positive gate. I actually love how half-assedly this exposition is delivered because it shows that Harlin knows details like that don't matter, that film editing is basically free-associative in nature, and that gives the film, at times, a real dreamlike feeling.

Lost Burning Youth is not, so far as I can tell, a real film. However, not only does it sum up the condition of our unlucky protagonists, but it sounds like some arthouse film, which would make Reefer Madness the punchline to the double bill. No image therefore sums up The Dream Master quite like this one.

So while some of these movies are objectively pretty bad (2, 5 and 6), part 4 exists in a weird quantum state. It's no 1, 3 or 7, but it's a really intriguing oddity, and was the most successful release in the series at the time (though this probably has a lot to do with the positive reaction to 3). It also killed off the survivors from 3 in short order, and part 5, released less than a year after it, was a much diminished success, so this was clearly where the wave peaked in terms of popular interest. Nonetheless the studio capitalised on that moment in every way it could, with the two-season Freddy's Nightmares TV show spinoff following and all manner of merchandising like pinball machines appearing around this time. Not many pop culture phenomena reach such glorious heights and self-parodic lows at the very same time. And this, more than anything, shows us why the 80s are unrepeatable.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors!!!

Spoilers below.

Dream Warriors is to A Nightmare on Elm Street as Aliens is to Alien, except both are better because Ridley Scott is a fart-huffing turbofedora and James Cameron is a meathead douchebag who whacks it to blue catgirls and mechs in about equal measure. But while Alien was carried by ELP album artist H.R. Geiger, Aliens had superior bantz and much better effects, and didn't have that awful hard cut between the puppet robot head and Bilbo which pisses me off every time I've watched Alien (twice).

They dropped "Part" from the title, probably because "Part 2" wasn't part 2 of anything.

So what I really mean is that, while Freddy's Revenge veered off into the insane, Dream Warriors is a proper sequel that expands on the impressive foundations laid by the original, going bigger and more action-packed while bringing back and further developing characters from the original. This one set the template the next three would try to match, usually with far diminished returns, but it was also a perfect time capsule of 1986, and, if nothing else, the subsequent sequels kept up that tradition beautifully.

Freddy: The Hair Years.

The kino opens (and closes) to the strains of Dokken, who are the Beethoven of hair metal bands.  Our /mu/ patrician Kristen (Patricia Arquette) is trying to stay awake by blasting "Into the Fire" and making a house out of Popsicle sticks, but she's thwarted by her mom, drifts off to sleep and is soon in the land of dreams. Freddy shows up and chases her, and cuts her wrist, so when she wakes up screaming it looks like she tried to kill herself.

Me after watching five minutes of Freddy's Dead.

This is interesting because in the first film Freddy arranged the murders so that Rod looked like he killed Tina, and then hanged himself in his cell, and now it looks like he's back to sort of covering his tracks by making his murders look like suicides. Coincidentally or otherwise, Kristen is committed to the same mental institution where other Freddy victims are holed up. Doctor Neil Gordon is baffled by their condition, until Nancy Thompson, Final Girl of part 1, shows up with her brand of expertise.

Incidentally, Nancy >>> Laurie Strode.

Nancy's on the hypnocil, an experimental drug that suppresses dreams, which suggests that Freddy continued to pursue her after the end of the original, but Kristen manages to pull her into her own dream, tipping Nancy off that these kids can develop their will into "powers" to fight back in the dream world. This makes some sense and is consistent with the idea of "taking back control" of the dream introduced in the original. It also ties into two of the great mid-80s motifs of the film: the Breakfast Club misfits banding together in the face of adversity and the Dungeons and Dragons-style party of adventurers approaching the unknown. On the other hand, some of the powers and costumes are pretty gay such as this Harry Potter looking NERD:

"I am the wizard master!" - Urkel "Screech" Poindexter, before getting killed.

Never mind that though. For every idea that sputters and dies on the vine, there's something great to make up for it, whether it's Kincaid's top tier trash talk, Freddy's Harryhausen-style stop-motion animated skeleton, the return of based John Saxon as Donald Thompson (Nancy's father), or best girl, fellow Dokken fan and junkiefu Taryn White (Jennifer Rubin), who, as she explains, is "beautiful...and bad":

>tfw no 11/10 punk rock gf with two feet tall mohawk and glitter on her chest

This one also introduces the idea of creative, personalised kills, such as puppet-making loner Philip who is killed in the best way maybe ever conceived in a horror movie: Freddy rips his veins or tendons out of his feet and wrists and uses them to walk him off a ledge like a marionette. Like everything else in Dream Warriors, they get the fine balance between creativity, darkness and goofiness just about right - a feat never again to be successfully completed. It's like Tim Burton's Batman kinos before Joel Schumacher took the wheel and plowed the franchise straight off a cliff.

He'll feel that in the morning.

Yet another way Dream Warriors creeps right up to the precipice is in its handling of backstory, something everyone thinks they want but no one ever likes when they get it. Dream Warriors reveals just the right amount by introducing Freddy's childhood nickname: The Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs, earned when he was conceived by the gang rape of a nun in an old wing of the mental hospital when she was locked in with the lunatics. This was exactly enough backstory (and, most importantly, creepy enough) to last Freddy forever. We didn't need any more, and no more of it was good past this point.

This sounds like something they'd say on Memri TV.

So everything about Dream Warriors works while exhausting the possibilities for further sequels by pushing it to its absolute limit. The one-liners and gag deaths are great, but just a tiny nudge would make them terrible and excessive. It even blows its wad by killing off Nancy herself, arguably the best Final Girl in slasher history, an audacious decision which lends the ending a significance and weight that, once again, can never be repeated. So this is what it looks like when a series reaches its natural and logical endpoint, pulling out all the stops and giving us a little bit of everything, and just about getting away with it.

And then they made three more.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge!!!

Time for the gay one!!!

IDK why this font choice is so funny to me but it is.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge is easily the most deranged instalment in the series. Part of its adorably insane charm comes from the fact that the writer intentionally filled the script with gay innuendo, while the director (allegedly) remained blissfully unaware of the subtext. In this film, Freddy returns after a five-year absence with a new plan that has nothing to do with the rest of the series. None of the protagonists are children of the mob that killed him, so the title Freddy's Revenge makes no sense, unless Freddy's Revenge is an euphemism, like Montezuma's Revenge, in which case it makes perfect sense.

The nuclear family. Only 30-year-old boomers will remember this.

A new family has moved into the former Thompson residence to pursue a life of mid-20th Century situation comedy. The dad, played by Clu Gulager from Return of the Living Dead, is every sitcom dad rolled into one, and his wife is always rolling her eyes and going "oh, Ken", before a freeze frame and yellow font credits. They have a pet budgie that explodes (yes), and their daughter eats by far the best fictional cereal ever created: Fu Man Chews.

If it's not """"racist"""" in 2018, it's just not hysterically funny.

Additions to series continuity from this movie include the name of the town, Springwood, and the demonym "The Springwood Slasher" (Freddy), but for some inexplicable reason, Fu Man Chews never appeared in any of the subsequent movies, despite being the best thing about Freddy's Revenge, the 80s, and human history.

Our very heterosexual, no really, protagonist.

Anyway, the Richie in this veritable 1980s Cunningham family, Jesse, starts having nightmares about our badly tanned antagonist. This time, however, Freddy has a new goal: to possess Jesse, and thereby enter the real world. This plot blurs the lines between reality and dream even more than the first film did, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional. For instance, there's a sequence where Jesse goes out walking in the rain, enters a gay bar where he encounters his high school coach, who takes him back to the gym (still in the middle of the night), and makes him run laps, which seems like it must be a dream because it's just so fucking strange. But no, apparently that's real, as Freddy then shows up and kills the coach, which is confirmed real by his being found dead at the gym the day after.

Yes, this is New Line founder Bob Shaye in a cameo in the gay bar. Interestingly he also cameos as a teacher in 4 who is presumably promoted to principal by Freddy Vs Jason. Make of that what you will.

The major conflict in the film is between Jesse's desire to pursue a relationship with his young-Meryl-Streep-looking neighbour, and his implied repressed homosexuality, into which Freddy figures...somehow, I don't know. Meryl doesn't believe Jesse's insistence that he's having nightmares, being possessed, or going insane, but for some reason she does believe he's getting psychic messages, for reasons she never sees fit to divulge.

Freddy Vs Kramer (1985, colourised)

Anyway, eventually Freddy takes over Jesse's body and runs around at a pool party slashing away at people, and Meryl must find a way to draw Jesse back out from Freddy's control. The pool party is the only time we really see Freddy wailing on a bunch of people at a time, which is pretty cool, and yields the hilarious scene in which a guy tries to talk down the burn-scarred, razor-fingered demon like he's just had too much to drink.

"Don't slash me bro" - Albert Einstein here.

Finally, Meryl confronts Freddy in the old abandoned factory where he used to take his victims in life. The entrance is guarded by two dogs with the faces of diseased babies. Sadly they don't chase her or anything, just sit around. Like so much else in this movie, I would have loved to see more of these monster dogs, and less of the coach's bare ass.

Even Fu Manchu wouldn't eat these fucking hounds.

Meryl kills Freddy with the power of love (really), and Jesse emerges from the charred ashes of his body, and the very next day they're off to school, all smiles, despite like ten people having died. Could this be a clue that it's a dream? Of course it is. No matter how Freddy is killed in these movies, he always just shows up again for no reason. It's entirely possible that everything that happens in this series is a dream, and Freddy's deaths are just another elaborate way of fucking with the teenagers of Springwood.

Note that about halfway through the movie Freddy's weapon changes from a glove of knives to knives just sticking out of his actual hand. Despite the amount of work required to create two versions, this is never explained.

I think the 2010 remake should have been of this film. There are plenty of cool ideas raised here that are never satisfactorily explored, and even more dumb shit that could have been ironed out. But, if you're looking for a genuinely unique motion picture experience, Freddy's Revenge is that.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street!!!

A Nightmare on Elm Street is the best kino of all time. This is the famous movie in which a burn victim with knives for fingers stalks a group of teenagers including Johnny Depp and the best Final Girl ever, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). I have the series documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and I've watched all four hours of it and all the extras twice. I have a copy of I Am Nancy, the Nancy documentary, signed by Heather Langenkamp, and I've seen everything in the series at least five times, even the bad ones. I even have a DVD of the first three Freddy's Nightmares episodes that was released in the UK (they never put out another one). On my assburgers diagnosis, this movie is listed as the cause.

Remember poster art?

The movie starts with Tina (Amanda Wyss) having a nightmare about 80s synth music, which is rudely interrupted by a cackling boogyman we'll come to know as Freddy Krueger. Tina is set up to be our Final Girl, but is killed off in a sweet switcheroo involving a revolving room gag from a Fred Astaire movie. It's a Hitchcockian twist so audacious it would have shocked audiences everywhere, if not for the fact the poster clearly identifies Nancy as the Final Girl. But who cares? It's a great poster, featuring the best tagline ever: "If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all".

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a rarity among slasher movies for having a plot and character arcs and all that screenwriting bullshit you used to get in movies in the olden days. Nancy grows up, takes charge of her life, learns to beat the monster, and bitches out her drunk mom all in the space of 90 minutes. Compare and contrast: The Hobbit (2012-2014).

Nancy becomes the voice of everyone who hated hall monitors (everyone).

So Nancy, who is into survival, does some detective work and finds that she can pull items out of her dream, specifically Freddy's hat, from which she learns his name, uncovering the dark secret her parents have been keeping from her. We've all had these moments in our lives when we discover that the world isn't quite right, and I don't think I've ever seen it captured better in a movie. But whereas most of us turn into bottle-pissing shut-ins who write blogs about horror movies, Nancy instead decides to use her knowledge to overcome her demons, which is pretty typical of the earnest positivity in post-Hills Have Eyes Craven, which is rare in horror, and kind of refreshing.

*Blocks ur path*

I haven't talked that much about Freddy yet, because the movie isn't really about him in the way the sequels were. Clive Barker described the original Hellraiser as a twisted family drama, and that's kind of true here too. Nancy learns her parents are murderers whose dysfunctions are manifestations of trauma from burning a guy to death, which must be an adjustment to say the least. But Freddy is scary in this film, which is easy to forget if you've seen some of the sequels. This is the one where he reaches up out of the bath with his knived glove and sprays Johnny Depp all over his room.

I think if this movie hadn't had all those sequels and become a great big merchandising machine, it would be regarded among the top tier of horror movies where it belongs. On the other hand, some of the sequels were underrated and good, and others were Ed Wood-like in their Icarean aspirations.

How to pronounce heavy metal band names

This blogue is now a Wikihow.

Any questions?