Review of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

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.