To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Up next; the supposed closing chapter of A Nightmare on Elm Street – Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare…
The tagline reads, “they saved the best for last”. That’s a lie.
As discussed during the Child’s Play 3 entry of Countdown to Halloween, the early 90s were spelling death for slasher movies (no pun intended). Not only was the quality of movies dropping rapdily, but the audience numbers were also in a huge decline. Critical responses were never favourable towards the genre, but reviews for the last few Nightmare on Elm Street movies had been really poor and with the acquisition of the Friday the 13th franchise from Paramount, the decision was made to kill off Freddy Krueger once and for all so they could move forward with Freddy vs. Jason. With New Line bringing death to the character that saved them from going under, how would they end the series?
There were two ideas that were leading into Freddy’s swan song. The first acting as a direct sequel to the previous two movies with Alice (now in her thirties) being killed off and her son Jacob receiving help from the former Dream Warriors, now named the Dream Police. In what would have been a great tribute to the franchise, Tayrn, Kincade and Joey would return for one final showdown with The Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs to stop him once and for all. The second proposed story, written by future Lord of the Rings helmer Peter Jackson, would see a dramatic turn in tone for the franchise. Titled A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: The Dream Lover, Freddy would be an aged, weiry and beaten man who is tormented by teenagers who purposly fall asleep to beat him up in their dreams – until he starts to regain some of his power and kinaps one of the teenager’s father. After two pun-tastic movies, Jackson’s script would have been a really interesting concept and could have brought something new and fresh for what was becoming a tired formula.
However, director Rachel Talalay (who also helped with the idea for the disappointing A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child) didn’t like either script and went down a different route to create a wacky comedy movie with a convoluted plot, contrived characters and a rather silly conclusion. Set 10 years after the previous movie, a mysterious teenager named John Doe is on the run from Freddy, fearing that is actually the son of the Bastard Son. Along the way he encounters three troubled teenagers and their case worker Maggie and together they try to track down the truth of Freddy’s offspring to see if they can finally destroy Freddy’s reign of terror.
After A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, Freddy Krueger had stopped being a scary slasher bad guy and instead became a pop cultute icon. During the late 80s and early 90s, there wasn’t a piece of merchandise that New Line didn’t exploit with Freddy’s face and this idea of him being a comedy character was reflected in his movies with Freddy puns being a key part of his repitore. However, both A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child at least posed Freddy as an evil entity who would simply used quips as the exclamation point of his kills whereas the first time we see Kruger in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, he’s riding a broom quoting lines from The Wizard of Oz. He’d finally jumped the shark.
The comedy doesn’t stop there either. One kill sees Freddy knock-off the deaf teenager with his knife-fingers and an extending chalk board (“nice hearing from you Carlos!”) and another inside of a computer game controlled by a demonic Nintendo Power Glove (“great graphics!”). The latter of the two was actually proposed to Nintendo for some sort of endorsement, who unsurprisingly didn’t go for it. And considering Nintendo signed off on The Wizard and was home to a Nightmare on Elm Street game by LJN on their system, it shows just how little some people now thought of this franchise.
But aside from the unfunny comedy, the problem with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is that it’s just a bit boring. Nothing happens for a long time and with only three kills in the entire movie (which in fairness was the same number as the previous installment), the pacing of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is just horrendous. Slasher superfan and former New Line producer Jeff Katz put it best in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy when he said, “too many people survive in that movie” with around 80% of its cast making it to the end credits. For a character known for slashing victims, it seems stupid that Freddy’s final movie would have such a low kill count – especially when many of the characters are totally expendable.
The film also features a 3D gimmick during its final showdown to further entice in the audience that abandoned the franchise during the previous two movies. Despite being incredibly contrived with Maggie having to “wear these special glasses to assist her in the dream world”, it also comes off as a little goofy with some cheap looking effects, silly visuals and a daft conclusion. It actually makes the 3D in Friday the 13th Part III look less gimmicky.
In the world of cinema, there are often times were the production is more interesting than the film itself and this is very much the case with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. The film may be boring and stupid, but it had a hell of a promotional push with New Line Cinemas even hosting a public funeral for Krueger with many cast members from previous movies. The proposed ideas gave a lot of promise, but Talalay (who was given the director’s chair really as a thank you for all her hard work on the franchise) made a poor move with her script choice, providing a bland movie with no excitemement, a low amount of deaths and an absurd amount of comedy. After ruining the dreams of teenagers for nearly a decade, this was not a fitting ending for Freddy Krueger.
With the Nightmare on Elm Street series now closed, New Line could push ahead with their plans for a showdown between Kruger and a certain hockey mask wearing psychopath. But series creator Wes Craven has different plans to celebrate 10 years of Nightmares by giving Freddy Fans a movie that would show a different side to the Bastard Son.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Flickering Myth will be presenting a one-night only screening of zombie-comedy Stalled at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London on Novemeber 14th 2013. For more information on where to buy tickets, click here.
Originally published October 27, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
