Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare [M]

Thanks to Freddy Kruger there are no kids or teenagers left in Springwood… except one. A nameless amnesia case is picked up by the cops and dumped in a neighbouring town’s youth centre, with no clues as to his identity but a clipping from a newspaper. His doctor suggests a trip back to Springwood to jog his memory, but the trip goes bad when two out of three stowaway patients meet grizzly ends in their sleep whilst there and only one development is made in the John Doe case: Freddy Krueger had a child. 

The final chapter in the Freddy ‘saga’, Freddy’s Dead does prove to be a little bit of an improvement of its predecessor at least in terms of writing… well, for the base idea at least. It still follows in the footsteps of the entire string of spin-off movies: being a trashy 1980s B-grade horror flick, but at least, at the very least there was a bit of an effort made to salvage Freddy’s history… if only just a bit. 

Essentially what this movie was, was an attempt to put a lid on the string of Nightmare movies whilst simultaneously being a last minute attempt to salvage the severely mutilated history that lazy and clichéd writers had dreamed up for Freddy. Mixing spiritualism, religion, and psychology, the Freddy history that we are given in this film is much more compelling and believable than the satanic spawn theory of Dream Child. Having said that, there still are a few gaping plot holes: namely the fact that this movie doesn’t link on from the others in any way at all. Admittedly, they set it for ten years from ‘now’ (whether that ‘now’ is the leave-off point from the last film or the actual present is unclear), so kudos for trying. Then the recurring dream and the sudden information dump that Freddy had a child is a bit of an unstable bomb, but it works for the rest of the film, loosely. The story, however flimsily written, does succeed in depicting a believable tale of incredibly troubled childhood resulting in a psychologically fractured man so, for me after Dream Child, that was a massive relief. 

The rest is more or less, take it or leave it, the same. Freddy’s killings become a little less creative and a little bit predictable with the gore in this film being dialled down a notch… during some parts. 

Englund still delivers a classic Freddy performance complete with the memorable wise cracks and one-liners and the other thing that I liked about this movie was the sneaky appearance from Johnny Depp! Little bit of intertextual satire there, which was priceless. 

Starring Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt, Lezlie Deane, Ricky Dean Logan, Tom Arnold, Roseanne Barr, Yaphet Kotto, Elinor Donahue, Breckin Meyer, anda sneaky, sinister appearance from Alice Cooper Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is a shameless close to the Nightmare saga and to give credit where credit is due, it did resurrect the franchise slightly with the rewritten history of one of cinema’s iconic slashers. Filled with action, horror, gore, violence, drama, trauma, and comedy, it’s still a fun and trashy ‘80s B-grade horror movie, but it’s shameless about what it is and I liked that about it.