There were no new Nightmares for the two years I was in junior high school, which is probably all right, junior high was a bad enough nightmare. Still, the horror didn’t stop. A week before I began the eighth grade, the night before my thirteenth birthday, I saw a profile of Stephen King on ABC’s Primetime Live. It made me more curious about him than ever so the next day I bought his novel The Shining. By chapter 3, I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was 1990.

I don’t remember when I first learned of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 1991, but feel like it was in a movie poster. Either way, learning about a new Nightmare to open on September 13th (it was a Friday), just weeks after I began high school, was pretty cool. So there I was in the theater during the opening weekend, with my 3D glasses waiting for the right moment and….

Would it be hyperbolic to say that I knew it would be a turd before the movie’s title had even shown up? At the start of both Dream Warriors and The Dream Master, the writers/directors put quotes from Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible respectively. The Dream Child skipped this but director Rachel Talalay (who concocted this story and co-wrote the screenplay) and co-screenwriter Michael DeLuca (who had written episodes of Freddy’s Nightmares—A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series) put in a quote by Frederich Nietzsche.

Okay, says fourteen-year-old Billy. That’s a good quote. Then comes another quote:

And we’re off. I knew this would be garbage. At fourteen-friggin’-years-old I knew this movie would suck, but I hoped I was wrong. I could end the essay right here because there’s really no reason to go further. But I will, because I’m compulsive (and perhaps too self-indulgent) and because you’ve stuck with me to find out which Nightmare I deemed THE WORST NIGHTMARE EVER.

After that wonderful quote, the title comes falling down one letter at a time like boulders, a title that I hated when I first learned of it: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. It pretty much says everything right there. Why see it? Then a really horrible map that appears to be shot from a computer screen pops up, revealing that Springwood, the town that Freddy has haunted since 1984, is in…Ohio? But what about Tina’s reference to weird things happening before earthquakes in the first movie? And the palm trees that pop up in shots throughout the series? O-fuckin’-hio?

Then the shit really hit the fan, and with it in 3D, oh, what a mess was made.

I left the theater numb. (Well, I always leave a movie theater numb. I actually refuse to talk about a movie for a while after I see it and never speak of the movie while still in the theater…unless it’s so good or so bad that I cannot help myself). I left the theater with a hatred for Rachel Talalay and Michael DeLuca and Robert Shaye and New Line Cinema for ruining The Greatest Monster Of All Time.

So, let’s get our gloves on and dissect this muthafuggah, shall we?

The Dreams

Yaphet Kotto. He acts in this movie. He is one of two people who do. Like Dr. Neil Gordon (and one could argue Nancy was also an adult in Dream Warriors), he is an adult that believes in Freddy and is willing to help dispose of him. Unlike Dr. Neil Gordon, he didn’t have good writers like Frank Darabont to give him much to do. His talent is wasted.

Lezlie Deane plays Tracy. She’s also pretty good in this movie. Her portrayal of the damaged girl with anger management issues is pretty right on and she’s worth watching.

Lezlie Deane as Tracy and Yaphet Kotto as Doc.

The running time is 96 minutes. I used this same joke on Freddy’s Revenge. Deal with it.

Speaking of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, this movie makes the second of the series look like Citizen Kane. This is a dream for that movie.

The clips that run through the closing credits. They remind viewers that Freddy Krueger had some good moments before this movie.

The Nightmares

The story/script. The story was by Rachel Talalay and the screenplay by her and Michael DeLuca. Talalay had been working on the Nightmare movies since the first movie when she was an assistant of some kind. She worked her way up to producer and somehow convinced New Line to let her take control of this movie. In interviews on the 1999 DVD set, Talalay shows the same sort of stupid arrogance that Jack Sholder shows in his interview regarding Freddy’s Revenge. They blame this factor and that factor on why their movies sucked, and Talalay points that this was wrong and that was wrong with the predecessors and that her budget wasn’t good and the 3D gimmick was forced on her by New Line and….

Neither of the directors of the two failures of the series seems to want to shoulder the responsibility. Neither wants to cop to the fact that they are horrible storytellers, yet both have proven it with the movies they’ve done after Freddy’s Dead. Go to the IMDb and look. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. The story gives us another revelation about Freddy: he was married and had a child! And it appeared that he lived in Nancy’s house at the time. And this house, which we’ve been following since 1984 (which seemed to have changed locations in 1988 when Kristen and her friends went to visit it), suddenly sprung a water tower behind it. Anyway, there’s a boy (Shon Greenblatt) who leaves Springwood and ends up in some city where the authorities place him in a home for troubled kids. In the hopes of fixing his amnesia, Dr. Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane) brings him back to Springwood, which we find has no children because Freddy got them all (although I think Roseanne Barr/Arnold/Barr and Tom Arnold ate them all), and…. Oh, it doesn’t matter. The story is a mess. And the math is off. Even when folks have tried to bring the timeline together in the expanded universe, it’s off and doesn’t make sense.

A Krueger family reunion.

“I wanted this movie to have a more gritty and urban feel and a distinct visual style to it. What I tried to bring to The Final Nightmare was a real story,” Rachel Talalay said in an article from Fangoria (thanks, again, to The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion for this quote). If it was “a more urban and gritty feel” she was after, she failed. First off, the idea of A Nightmare on Elm Street was, I would think, the horrifying acts of suburban parents and how it comes back to haunt their children. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Freddy kills suburban children, gets arrested, gets out of jail free. Suburban parents burn Freddy. Ten years later, Freddy comes back for the suburban kids–several of them coming from broken homes (most likely having something to do with roasting someone)–through nightmares. As far as her “distinct visual style,” Talalay’s direction is sloppy. There are hardly any transitions, neither in the story nor between clips. The camera seems to move when it should be still and is still when it should move. I think she wanted the 3D feel throughout the movie, even though it’s only at the end where the 3D comes in.

The acting is horrendous. It has, arguably, one of the best casts in the series when you look at it on paper. Lisa Zane had a name at this point in some independent movies and some B-movies, Brecken Meyer–who wasn’t known but was headed for an okay career, and the aforementioned Kotto. Yet, except for the two actors listed above in the Dreams section of this essay, none of the actors pulls it off. Shon Greenblatt, who plays John Doe, is the first person we’re introduced to and he’s terrible. He gets angry for no reason and overacts. His lines are given as naturally as pus being expelled from a pimple, with nastier results. And his character is stupid, and I use the term stupid, I don’t mean that I don’t like the character so he’s stupid, but that John Doe had the mental capacity of a sack of oats. I mentioned above that the math doesn’t make sense. John Doe is supposed to be a teenager and he believes that he’s Freddy’s child, but even a fourteen-year-old who was horrible at math (me) knew that he was too damn young to be Freddy’s child. Freddy was already toast by the time he was born. Meyer plays the spoiled pot-head with about as much skill as a rock. Luckily for him, Clueless and The Craft were coming up. Ricky Dean Logan as Carlos is okay, but isn’t great. He’s a deaf Hispanic kid who uses his disability to annoy those around him by removing his hearing aid to shut out their voices. And finally, Lisa Zane sleepwalks through the movie. Maybe she signed on before reading the script? I don’t know, but what a waste.

We look bad-ass, but we’re just bad.

Robert Englund as Freddy. Freddy is a comedian in this movie, except he’s not funny. The acting is overdone, most of Freddy’s lines are shouted, the lines are just terrible, and silly pantomimes are used too often. Don’t get me started on the makeup, which is the worst makeup of the series. Freddy Krueger is the star but this movie is crap and he’s crap in it. The best parts in the movie with Freddy, funny enough, are when Englund is out of makeup, and he’s almost good in then.

Freddy!

Now don’t think I’m a hater. (Yes, I wrote that). Robert Englund is a classically trained actor and his portrayal of Fred Krueger in the original Nightmare elevated the character to great heights. But as I said in my last essay, the character, and his portrayal of the character, is too diluted. And even if it’s the editor’s/director’s fault for choosing the humorous takes over the scary ones, Englund holds some responsibility–there’s only so much you can blame on the editor. The very first time we see Freddy in this movie is when John Doe’s house is in the air and Freddy comes by with a black cape, pointed witch hat, and riding a broom. He shouts, “I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little soul, too!” I would think at that point, he must have had at least a leetle veto power.

The cameos. Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold. Johnny Depp poking fun at the “This is your brain on drugs” PSAs that used to run and were already old when these culturally hip people put the movie together. Alice Cooper as Freddy’s adoptive father. Each one of these cameos cheapens the movie. They worked in The Muppet Movie but not in Freddy’s Dead.

The dream demons. These are horribly-done puppets/CG characters that float around and promise Freddy immortality and power in the dream world, answering the question: How did Freddy get his power? To me, he was scarier without us knowing. That’s the magic of the horror story: answers aren’t needed. The makers of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare disagreed and they give answers. As is so often the case, the answers are lame.

The dream demons.

The 3D effects. Now, folks, I like some of the recent results of the new 3D craze. I think that digital 3D can be great and is fun for some movies (though I did feel it detracted from Avatar, which needed all the help it could get). Freddy’s Dead‘s 3D was almost twenty years before digital 3D and it was bad. It made a bad movie even worse.

The clips running through the end credits. Yeah, they were great to see on the big screen, but they only pointed out how horrible this movie was.

The Morning After

I put off watching this movie on DVD and actually skipped it last summer when I did my Nightmare-a-thon, but decided I should watch it when this kakameme idea came to post these little write-ups. Maybe, I thought (hoped), like Freddy’s Revenge, Freddy’s Dead would have some charm. Nope. It didn’t. At least the makers of the second one had the excuse that they didn’t realize how big Freddy and A Nightmare on Elm Street would become.

The movie makes me sad. With a little bit of thought, with a little bit of understanding, with a little bit of caring, even this movie could have redeemed the issues with the prior two movies. Instead, it felt like a big ol’ Fuck you to the fans. It was as though New Line Cinema, aka “The House That Freddy Built”, were laughing at the people who’d made them the company they had become, a company that would be bought by Time-Warner a few years later and would go on to make The Lord of the Rings.

The movie still feels that way. Of course, as an adult, I know that nothing lasts forever. There can only be a finite number of stories before you have to rethink something. The comic books have been doing that for seventy-five years with Superman, Batman, etc. Still, a television series like Lost proves that quality storytelling can be done in far more time than it takes to watch the entire Nightmare movies, if the story is told by people who care about the story they’re telling, and the audience who is receiving it.

Yeah, Talalay, this looks urban and gritty.