Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Review by the Fiend of Grue
Freddy Krueger…the bastard son of a thousand maniacs, pedophile, murderer, dream stalker, horror movie icon. You would be hard pressed to find a person who hasn’t heard the name Freddy Krueger. The razorblade gloved, burnt maniac has become a legend over the years. We first saw Freddy in A Nightmare on Elm Street, a movie that will no doubt go down in history as one of the legendary horror movies that came out of the 1980’s. Freddy quickly became an American sensation through the course of the next couple of years, but oversaturation kills anything. When New Line Cinema began to see a turn for the worst in profits, their only logical step left was to kill Freddy off. And so Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare was conceived.
Right off the bat, New Line shows us that this time they are pulling out all stops for Freddy’s last (yeah right) movie. We are shown a teen (who is never named, played by Shon Greeenblatt) as he is put through a series of elaborate dream sequences that include references to Twilight Zone The Movie and The Wizard Of Oz. This John Doe teen ends up in the office of Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane), a child psychologist. After finding out that John Doe has amnesia, Maggie finds a newspaper article on Mr. Doe that talks about a missing woman in Springwood. Maggie has been having reoccurring nightmares of a house and a little girl with “brown hair and a blue bow.” The next morning, when Maggie finds out that John Doe has been having the same dreams, she decides that they should take a trip to Springwood, Ohio to find out who John is, get to the bottom of the missing woman and hopefully find some answers to their dreams.
They get to Springwood, where there are no children and many of the adults have lost their minds and I’ll let you take a little guess at what happens next…You are correct, sir! They do in fact stir up Freddy, who once again goes on a dream-induced, claw-slashing, special effects-laden murdering spree.
After a disappointing audience reaction to A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (opened at $8 million the first weekend), New Line, in a last ditch effort to cash in on the Freddy craze, decided to call the next movie Freddy’s Dead in hopes of fooling the audience into believing that they’d better come out this time cause Freddy’s really done after this one!
Freddy was a cultural icon and was showing up everywhere, but the gag was wearing thin. Freddy had now become the late night talk shows’ whipping boy, so New Line decided serious action needed to be taken. With Freddy’s Dead, New Line not only promised his demise but this time they were also boasting the biggest budget to date for a Nightmare movie that was going to have not only bigger effects than ever before, but was also 3-D and had a host of famous cameos.
By this point in the franchise, all fear, suspense and terror has been replaced with clever (and not so clever) one-liners and Freddy’s comedic posturing. Throughout the sequels, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. In Freddy’s Dead, it almost never works. The 3-D in the movie also turned out less than spectacular and cameos from Rosanne Bar, Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper and even Johnny Depp failed to help the gimmicky movie any – although the Freddy backstory was fairly interesting and has been rumored to be the storyline of the much talked about prequel possibility.
In the end though, no matter what New Line attempted, Freddy’s Dead just fell flat from a weak, diluted storyline, weak characters and as mentioned…too much Freddy in the media. Freddy’s Dead opened on September 13th 1991 to the tune of almost $13 million dollars on opening weekend and eventually brought in $32 million domestically, which isn’t bad, but it was still looked at as a lukewarm reception.
All in all, Freddy’s Dead isn’t all DOA… it has its moments and being a big fan of Freddy, I can’t hate the movie completely. Although this is one of the weaker entries to the franchise, it’s still worth watching on a rare occasion because, after all, Freddy is Freddy and oversaturated or not…he still kicks ass!
Popularity: 2% [?]
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