1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare May Be the Single Stupidest Movie Ever Made
Now they're playing with power!
Peter Jackson might never have had an opportunity to transform The Lord of the Rings into a multi-billion dollar pop culture phenomenon if he hadn’t wiggled his way through the door at New Line by writing a screenplay for a fifth Nightmare on Elm Street sequel.
Jackson’s screenplay for the slasher sequel was rejected, but by that point, New Zealand had established a relationship with the studio that would make the Lord of the Rings movies.
I can’t conceive of a world where a warped genius like Jackson wrote a slasher sequel screenplay worse than the one that got green-lit.
New Line, audiences and critics alike were disappointed by Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Stephen Hopkins’ contribution to the long-running series was seen as too grim and brutal.
New Line mogul and series producer Robert Shaye was so disappointed by Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child that he decided it was finally time to end the series with a movie that would act as a corrective to the dour humorlessness of the previous entry.
Unfortunately, they went too far in making the stupidest fucking movie ever. They wanted to make a fun movie for fans that acknowledged, even celebrated, Freddy Krueger’s strange evolution from a terrifying figure of pure fright to a wisecracking kiddie favorite.
New Line wanted to make a movie for fans. Instead, they made a movie for stupid babies. I remembered Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Dead being silly. I didn’t remember just how silly.
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master producer Rachel Talalay received a big promotion to director in addition to writing the film’s story.
Talalay’s contribution to the series boasts a premise as audacious as it is ultimately unpalatable. The future Tank Girl director dreamed up a dystopian future that takes place “ten years from now,” where Freddy has slaughtered every child and teenager in Springwood, Ohio, except an Amnesiac teen known as John Doe (Shon Greenblatt).
Freddy’s prolific killing spree precedes the film’s events. That’s good because Craven’s iconic creation has never been less scary or more cartoonish. Robert Englund doesn’t break the fourth wall and wink at the camera at the start of each scene, but he might as well.
Throughout the film, Englund sports a self-satisfied expression that silently but incontrovertibly says, “Ain’t I a stinker?”
In Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, the razor-clawed villain morphs into an unfunny version of Bugs Bunny. He’s not a monster; he’s a cartoon character. He’s a goof. He’s a comedian. He’s a wisecracker. He’s a rapscallion. He’s got jokes. He’s got props. He’s the Carrot Top of dream-haunting serial child killers but somehow less creepy.
Freddy Krueger is introduced cosplaying as the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz while riding a broom and quipping, “ I'll get you, my pretty! And your little soul, too!”
This, bizarrely and unfortunately, is as serious and scary as Freddy Krueger gets here. He only gets stupider and sillier.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare leans unbecomingly into Freddy’s strange transformation from a dark and menacing figure of pure terror to a wisecracking goofball, from a child killer to a pop icon who killed with kids and teens.
The absence of children and teenagers and Freddy Krueger’s brutal domination have driven the adults of Springwood insane. Like much of the film, this provocative and intriguing idea is destroyed through execution.
The residents of Springwood possess the frothing at the mouth, babbling jibberish, padded walls, straight jackets, and being chased by orderlies with butterfly nets form of insanity. It’s a form of madness seen in old cartoons, sitcoms, and zany comedies rather than real life.
Roseanne and Tom Arnold, who were at the peak of their popularity at the time, contribute campy, tongue-in-cheek cameos as parents who have gone loopy with grief and sadness because all of the kiddies and babies are gone.
In any other Nightmare on Elm Street movie, the scene would be a goofy outlier. In Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, however, it perfectly suits the tone of the rest of the film. ALL of this unfortunate sequel is that silly.
Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger is as proficient with a wisecrack as he is a razor glove. He’s a source of dark comedy as well as horror. As a wild overreaction to the grimness of the previous entry, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare isn’t a slasher movie but rather a horror comedy. In an even more ill-advised move, the movie is more of a comedy than a horror film. Unfortunately, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is just as hopeless as a comedy as it is as a horror film.
John Doe ends up at a shelter for juvenile delinquents alongside Tracy Swan (Lezlie Dean), a tomboy molested by her father, the half-deaf Carlos Rodriguez, and finally, stoner video game fiend Spencer Lewis (Breckin Meyer).
John Doe thinks that he alone survived Freddy’s massacre because he’s Freddy’s son, but it turns out that Freddy is actually keen to reunite with his daughter Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane).
Maggie went on to become a doctor after conveniently forgetting her traumatic childhood as the only child survivor of a prolific kiddie killer.
The misguided doctor takes John Doe to Springwood in a misguided attempt to jog his memory. The other teens steal a ride to Springwood by hiding in a van.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare distinguishes itself further through some of the stupidest, most insultingly obvious kills of the series. Freddy and the filmmakers have gotten very lazy with their cheap psychology.
The competition for the stupidest scene in a movie that’s nothing but flagrant idiocy proves fierce. This shuddering embarrassment hits a new nadir every fifteen minutes, but it’s hard to beat the notorious video game sequence.
Breckin Meyer’s stupid stoner is cross-addicted to marijuana and video games. Freddy customizes his torture by transforming Spencer into a video game character facing fearsome foes like a dad who hits him over the head with a tennis racket while braying, “Be like me!” when he’d rather be sparking up doobies and playing with his Gameboy.
There’s only one way this tableau can end, and that’s with Spencer’s grisly demise. This sequence is cartoonish and comic by design but it doesn’t have to be quite so insultingly idiotic. I’m at least a little bit stupider for having suffered through Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. I don’t know if marijuana kills brain cells. This godawful movie certainly does.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare features only slightly less product placement for the Power Glove than The Wizard, a motion picture created solely to promote the awesome-looking but mostly useless contraption.
Englund’s deranged jokester even paraphrases the Power Glove’s iconic slogan when he observes of his new set up, “Now I’m playing with power!”
The formerly beloved Johnny Depp, who made his film debut in the 1984 original, returns to contribute yet another winking cameo in a parody of the “This is your brain on drugs” commercial notable primarily for featuring a troubled soul more famous at this point for abusing drugs than acting.
This insult to the series and its fans closes on an appropriately appalling note. Freddy’s not so doting daughter stabs Freddy with his own glove and then sticks a pipe bomb inside him.
It’s a development that is more appropriate for a Roadrunner cartoon than a slasher sequel. It’s a godawful kill for the series to end on but then Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is godawful in every conceivable sense.
It’s sole redeeming facet is a late 3-D sequence that’s just as cheesy as the rest of the movie but in a fun rather than dispiriting fashion.
There’s nothing wrong with dumb fun but Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is almost inconceivably stupid without being much fun at all beyond the gimmicky 3-D climax.
I suspect that one of the reasons Wes Craven returned to the franchise with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is because he could not stand the idea of his brainchild ending with such an anti-climax.
Craven is a horror filmmaker of ideas. He’s famously smart and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare couldn’t be stupider.
Freddy was becoming more of a goof, I guess. The Nintendo game was kind of dorky as well and that came out in Oct. of 1990. Maybe they saw more money in the pre-teen demographic.
Let's not forget Alice Cooper's unpleasant cameo in this one. It's wildly removed from the goofy Depp and Rosanne scenes in its grimness.