Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare Reviews

The original 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is still to me one of the scariest and best horror films there is, as well as a truly great film in its own right and introduced us to one of the genre's most iconic villains in Freddy Krueger. It is always difficult to do a sequel that lives up to a film as good as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' let alone one to be on the same level.

As far as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' sequels go, there are good ones such as 'The Dream Master' (number 4) and especially 'Dream Warriors' (number 3) but also disappointing ones with 'The Dream Child (number 5) and this 'The Final Nightmare' (the second film 'Freddy's Revenge' was also underwhelming but not as much as 5 and 6).

Very little to recommend, with the only good things being Robert Englund doing his conscientious and freaky best and the haunting music.

While a little better-looking than the fifth film, being not as crude and self-indulgent, the suitably nightmarish at times production design is wasted by the film looking drab and dreary and it can look sloppy. The 3D looks cheap and was truly pointless. Like the previous film, erratically paced (both rushed and tedious), ridiculous and non-atmospheric story with scares that are unimaginatively derivative, too far and between and vapidly tame on the whole. It lacks any kind of originality and is all very ho-hum.

Englund aside, the acting is both bland and annoying. The cameos from Rosanne Barr, Johnny Depp and Alice Cooper were just as unnecessary as the 3D and are neither interesting or funny. Like the fifth film though, the cast have to work with an awkwardly clunky script and irritating characters that are written childishly and make decisions that frustrate. Even the humour doesn't work, Freddy's one-liners are more stale and toe-curlingly groan-worthy than twisted or witty and what was darkly comic before is replaced by an overload of cheese. The direction is largely unimaginative, while there is far too much of an over-reliance on gimmicks (none fresh or clever) and the ending is one of the lamest and most tacked on there is in horror.

Overall, an incredibly tired entry and suggestive that the series is dead. 2/10 Bethany Cox

The original 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is still to me one of the scariest and best horror films there is, as well as a truly great film in its own right and introduced us to one of the genre's most iconic villains in Freddy Krueger. It is always difficult to do a sequel that lives up to a film as good as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' let alone one to be on the same level.

As far as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' sequels go, there are good ones such as 'The Dream Master' (number 4) and especially 'Dream Warriors' (number 3) but also disappointing ones with 'The Dream Child (number 5) and this 'The Final Nightmare' (the second film 'Freddy's Revenge' was also underwhelming but not as much as 5 and 6).

Very little to recommend, with the only good things being Robert Englund doing his conscientious and freaky best and the haunting music.

While a little better-looking than the fifth film, being not as crude and self-indulgent, the suitably nightmarish at times production design is wasted by the film looking drab and dreary and it can look sloppy. The 3D looks cheap and was truly pointless. Like the previous film, erratically paced (both rushed and tedious), ridiculous and non-atmospheric story with scares that are unimaginatively derivative, too far and between and vapidly tame on the whole. It lacks any kind of originality and is all very ho-hum.

Englund aside, the acting is both bland and annoying. The cameos from Rosanne Barr, Johnny Depp and Alice Cooper were just as unnecessary as the 3D and are neither interesting or funny. Like the fifth film though, the cast have to work with an awkwardly clunky script and irritating characters that are written childishly and make decisions that frustrate. Even the humour doesn't work, Freddy's one-liners are more stale and toe-curlingly groan-worthy than twisted or witty and what was darkly comic before is replaced by an overload of cheese. The direction is largely unimaginative, while there is far too much of an over-reliance on gimmicks (none fresh or clever) and the ending is one of the lamest and most tacked on there is in horror.

Overall, an incredibly tired entry and suggestive that the series is dead. 2/10 Bethany Cox

Ah, hello my monstrous little darlings. If you haven't been paying attention to my reviews recently I have been talking about one particular series, the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise. In the previous installment I talked about Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child and how despite the few problems there was, that it was still an enjoyable installment. I also explained how we gained a bit more insight into how Freddy became the killer that he is today, but now we get his origin story in the form of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. The first thing you should know that the title is a misnomer since Freddy technically does come back but those two other installments willl be discussed afterwards. Second, we get a new cast of characters and this cast is pretty solid. We find that Freddy has killed off every single child and teen in Springwood except for John Doe, the one surviving teen.


John wakes up with amnesia after confronting Freddy in a dream and is taken with a group of other teens to a special place to live which is a shelter, by a woman simply known as Maggie (she's a vital part of this). He has just left Springwood. But it is explained he had a falling dream before he left, but Freddy didn't kill him - he let him go. So Maggie aims to cure his amnesia by taking him to Springwood, specifically the place where Freddy grew up.


I like that we get a look at Freddy's backstory and we learn he was a little demon child who liked hurting small creatures, specifically small animals, and that he had an abusive father who is played by none other than Alice Cooper. Yep, Alice has been with both Jason AND Freddy. Wow, between him and Ozzy Osborne, rock icons and horror go well together. Even the Rolling Stones have a few horror songs - although I really wish that Mick Jagger could have contributed a song for a few movies (we all know that Sympathy For The Devil would have been perfect for The Exorcist or The Omen or Night Of The Demons).


Also after suffering from a hallucination in which after the troop of teens tries to get away the map reads 'you're all fucked', they end up lost in a strange town. A strange town in which the only two residents appear to be a couple played by at the time couple Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold - don't worry, this was classic Roseanne, not controversial Roseanne (interestingly Roseanne did a halloween special with Robert Englund making a cameo as Freddy), it is later explained Freddy had a kid. Hang on a minute, in Elm Street 2 didn't he say and I quote...'You are all my children now.'? Yeah , he did.


John Doe has that same falling dream from before and he thinks that he is Freddy's son, only for it to turn out to be wrong as he falls and lands on a pit of spikes that Freddy sets up. I have to admit this death wasn't as creative as the previous deaths in the previous installments. And it does seem a bit more comedic as opposed to Dream Warriors or Dream Master or Dream Child.


This is considered the most hated of the Elm Street movies next to Freddy's Revenge...well up until the remake that is. I kind of found John's demise to be disappointing to be honest. But Carlos's death, while it is silly, it is kind of really disconcerting especially when Freddy cuts Carlos's ear off and it's made to be like everything is silent. And then there's when he gets his hearing back, or rather a super-hearing aid which stretches his ear and has these vine-like attachments forming around it, oh and to make it worse...super-sensitive hearing.


Of course Freddy naturally toys with him and uses this to his advantage, dropping pins onto the floor. Oh and if that's not enough, the ultimate ear-piercing sound to end all sounds is what kills the guy - nails on a chalkboard, or rather claws on a chalkboard. Ouch. Talk about an earful of pain. *he laughs* And yes, that terrible pun was intentionally. I did learn from the Cryptkeeper after all. And his lessons are so good they're scary, but I have to say if you must axe me any questions about it, I will say it will cost you.


It turns out that Freddy's child is female, not just any woman though but Maggie. Maggie or as she is formally known - Katherine, was Freddy's daughter. We also find out and see the dream demons, which I have to admit do look like a bit like tadpoles. We actually also get to see Freddy as he was before he got burned too, which is a nice touch, also through Maggie's dreams we see him about to kill his wife. The next death I admit is probably the funniest death of the series and the best one in the movie, basically Spencer the resident stoner of the trio has a dream while watching television and tripping out.


Also look who pops up to warn us of the evils of drug use on the brain, it's Johnny Depp. Depp was in the first Elm Street, it was his breakout role. It's funny he was in this and in the first Elm Street considering the year prior to the release of this movie he played another famous character with blades for hands/fingers in the movie Edward Scissorhands. So after a brilliant send up of those iconic 'This is your brain/This is your brain on drugs' PSAs, we get this really trippy sequences in which Spencer gets pulled into a television screen and it's like a video game, a video game where he has to run from enemies such as his own dad who chants 'be like me' .


And it's a real fun little sequence too, but unfortunately Spencer/Super Spencer doesn't live long as Freddy takes control and starts making it harder for him. In the real world, oh boy...Spencer is hopping around and moving on his own as if he is possessed by a demented cartoon character and it isn't too long until it's game over for him. Oh yes, and that powerglove line, you all know it...'Hey, you forgot the powerglove!' 'Now we're playing with power!' Hey..what, do you know, I beat my high score?'. Also we learn that just because they have left Spingwood doesn't mean they have left Elm Street, after all...as Freddy says, every town has an Elm Street. He's right you know, there's always that weird town that nobody goes near because it has a dark history to it...like Santa Carla with all those damn vampires, Stepford, Amityvile, Maine in pretty much any of Stephen King's horror novels, and Valkenvania. There is always a town like that.


Maggie finally gets to take down her 'father' by pulling him out of the dream world, attacking him with his own glove and giving him the old pipe bomb in the chest. But this won't be the last of him. This movie doesn't deserve to get as hated as it is, personally I like it...I found it to be fun.


True, it's a bit more comedic - actually it's a lot more comedic than the previous installments but I don't mind that, while there are some parts that are incredibly goofy like Freddy's impersonation of the Wicked Witch of The West, it's not terrible by any means.

Robert England is still good playing Freddy but unfortunately the film will scar his career because it sucked! A few clever puns and Alice Cooper (one of my favorite singers) were useful. Either than that it was mostly boring

Don’t you just love it when a moniker hoists a film with its own petard? It’s easy to be cynical about an entry in a successful horror franchise attempting a sense of finality but in reality this was the film which all but killed The Elm Street movies. Whilst it’s easy to see that this was intentioned to be the last in the main continuity of the Elm Street films you get the feeling that the plan was to spin Freddy into something a little more epic and do some cross-over type stuff in the 90s. The final shot of Jason Goes To Hell in 1993 seemed to suggest that a supernatural tag-team was going to the main event in 90s horror, and yet FREDDY vs. JASON wouldn’t materialise for over a decade after both series had run their course (with the FRIDAY films even attempting their own reboot with JASON X in the meantime). For whatever reason the public lost their taste for these killers and the 90s became something of an extended wake for everyone’s favourite Child Murderer and Avenging Retard.

It’s perhaps easy to see how FREDDY’S DEAD nurtured a distaste for the character of Freddy Kruger, whilst I’m far kinder to it than most people it’s impossible to argue that this was an Elm Street film turned up to 11. The problem is that in doing so the creators of the film sort of exposed how gauche the series had become and how the focus had ultimately shifted from children being terrorised by a burnt maniac with finger knives to the Freddy Kruger show. This change had been occurred in pop culture long before FREDDY’S DEAD but it was this film which made that cultural switch implicit.

As such FREDDY’S DEAD is a film populated with ciphers and concerned with the nature of Kruger. We see way more of his back story in the film, we learn of the reason behind his powers, and we get closure on the series. The problem is that Freddy’s back story isn’t all that interesting outside of what we already know and in making Freddy the star of the show the film effectively neuters the one consistent element of quality in the series which was Robert Englund’s ability to switch between the broad comedy of the character and an almost startlingly level of hate and anger. Even in the DREAM CHILD Freddy maintained a hint of an edge, but in this film he’s practically vaudevillian and it defuses any tension whatsoever.
Where the film works for me, and doesn’t for a lot of others, is how far the film is willing to go with that vaudevillian tone. The film is pure camp. It’s illogical, it’s silly, it’s garish and it’s cheesy as all hell but it’s also far more memorable than Stephen Hopkin’s dreary previous film. Director Rachel Talalay does a lot with very little and even if ultimately the film doesn’t work, and it really doesn’t work at all, I still respect the ambition. The main problem with FREDDY’S DEAD is that it looks cheap and that’s because despite having a grander scope than the previous film it’s got the, allegedly, the smallest budget of all of the films in the series. Whilst there’s an attempt at a cartoony visual aesthetic it feels utterly flat compared to all but the second film in the series.
The film’s saving grace is a sense of humour which is kind of off kilter. Most people remember the film as being kind of retarded, but there’s something infectiously funny about certain moments in the film. Freddy beating the crap out of some kid with a power glove is just ridiculous, but the scene goes on so long and is film with such gusto that the concept actually transforms into something almost deliriously funny. The problem is that the film gets compromised a few too many times in the name of a quick joke and it feels like tonally the film doesn’t know what to do with itself. On one hand you’ve got Freddy at his broadest, most ‘anti-heroic’ and on the other hand you’ve got a group of kids whose back story is pitch black. It’s kind of odd that we’re watching a film where we’re expected to delight in the torture and murder of children who, it can be inferred, suffered all manner of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their parents. As such we’ve got Freddy in one dream sequence taking the form of one kid’s parent and attempting to recreate a rape but we’ve also got Freddy prancing around behind a deaf kid and shhing the audience. It’s an odd dichotomy and it brings the inherent conflict of the character to the fore. By highlighting and heightening these two conflicting ideas of Freddy as audience hero and Freddy as brutal, primal, force of horror it gives the film a weirdly unpleasant feel.
At the end of the day the biggest issue with FREDDY’S DEAD is that it feels like no one has a fucking clue as to what they’re doing.

The extended back story for Kruger is so boring and staid that it feels like we still don’t know all that much about the man, although learning about Kruger’s pre-burn life just seems to be a bad idea anyways, and the rest of the film just feels tonally dislocated. It’s populated with weird one-shot cameos that probably were a lot of fun at the time but just feel odd now. We’ve got Roseanne and Tom Arnold showing up for a few minutes, but because it’s not the early 90s anymore it just feels like we’re seeing some weird couple walk onto the film for a few minutes. Similarly Alice Cooper’s cameo in the film as Freddy’s dad only really works if you know its Alice Cooper and understand the context of why that was funny; within the film itself it just looks like Harry Dean Stanton walked onto set for a few minutes.

What’s frustrating is that stuff works in the film. Kruger stalking a deaf kid through his dreams shows perhaps the most interesting visual design in the entire sequence and it’s predicated on good idea, after good idea, but it goes on so long and ends on such an odd note that the piece feels deflated. Even the stuff with the stupid dream demons feels like it could work as part of a broader, more mythical, take on the character but despite these threats to expand the concept the conclusion of the film feels far too small and literal. After all the set up with dream demons, and Kruger’s back-story, and the idea of Freddy expanding his domain beyond the borders of Springwood the final confrontation happens in an anonymous basement. It’s frustrating and reductive and it feels like we’ve been watching the film spin its wheels for 80 minutes so that it could show us the really boring flashbacks of Freddy being an abusive husband and creepy child. The thing is that Freddy Kruger as a child killer brought back to haunt the dreams of children through sheer force of will is a far more terrifying prospect than Freddy Kruger, some fucked up kid who became a fucked up guy who sold his soul for more power.

This movie scared the s*** out of me so bad, i could not sleep for almost 2 weeks.



i was 7 years old.