← Back to Reviews
in
FREDDY'S DEAD:
The Final Nightmare
(directed by Rachel Talalay, 1991)
Why do people like confusing crap like David Lynch movies so much and yet turn around and blast fun, interesting, easy to understand films like Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare? This thought came to my mind while watching the movie. The film is the sixth (but not final -- although it was supposed to be at the time) entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Because a movie is a "part six" people are gonna automatically think low of it, no matter what it is. Even Star Wars gets trashed as it goes on. Watch -- the new films starting to come out in that series next year will probably get trashed somewhat, too.
In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy Krueger is out to start a new gameplan. He's killed every kid in Springwood, Ohio, where he's been on a killing spree throughout the rest of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but he hasn't killed one teenage boy, yet. This guy winds up in a different town where he meets Maggie (Lisa Zane) and the black guy from Alien (Yaphet Kotto). They want to help him because he's got amnesia and he hasn't slept in a long time (to avoid being killed by Freddy). They drive him back to Springwood (minus black guy from Alien) with some other teenagers in tow and they come face to face with Freddy Krueger, as well as Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold in cameos.
The other teenagers all come from a shelter for troubled kids (or something like that), which is where Maggie and Black Guy from Alien work, as social workers and dream psychologists. One of the teenagers is deaf and this leads to Freddy killing him by cutting off his ear and replacing it with some kind of creature hearing aid with legs that makes him have super strong hearing so that when Freddy scrapes his finger knives across a chalkboard, it's so loud that it makes the deaf guy's head explode. Anyway, Freddy is out to move out of Springwood and into a new town -- preferably the town where the shelter is -- so he can kill all of the kids there since Springwood is now dry of teenagers and there's only adults suffering from mass delusions, caused apparently by Freddy.
There is a mystery, though, involving Lisa Zane's Maggie character (the mystery is that she's Freddy Krueger's daughter) that runs throughout the entire movie until the end when we finally learn the truth, even though you may be able to figure it out early through clues (or, you know because I just told you). She ends up becoming the woman who finally kills Freddy in the end. Freddy's Dead, you see, is a tale about bad parenting and the ever annoying father figure who stalks your traumatized psyche through life until you finally vanquish him (unless you had a good father who doesn't need vanquishing). Maggie has not seen her dad, Freddy, since she was a very little girl. She was the one who told the authorities about her demented dad, which led to his arrest and his "death" by fire from a mob of angry citizens. He had, you see, strangled to death her mother after her mother found his secret murder room in the house. So Maggie is plagued by dreams of water towers and being chased around a yard by a man throughout all of her life -- she's totally forgotten her life as Freddy Krueger's daughter. Until... now.
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.
I saw this when it first came out. It was released in 3-D. Only the last act of the movie was in 3-D, though, when they kill Freddy. My DVD had the option to turn the 3-D ending on. I do have glasses, but I did not watch the 3-D ending.
This is a fast moving, sort of entertaining, enjoyable, yeah whatever kind of movie. I'd rather watch it than so many other stupid movies, though. I have, actually. I've seen this movie lots of times.
There's not many deaths in the movie, though. Also, all of the deaths are of males. No female deaths at all. So the movie has a kind of anti-male subtext going on, I feel. Different than the other Freddy movies. And this one was directed by a woman. But, I like it and I look forward to watching it again someday.
The Final Nightmare
(directed by Rachel Talalay, 1991)
Why do people like confusing crap like David Lynch movies so much and yet turn around and blast fun, interesting, easy to understand films like Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare? This thought came to my mind while watching the movie. The film is the sixth (but not final -- although it was supposed to be at the time) entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Because a movie is a "part six" people are gonna automatically think low of it, no matter what it is. Even Star Wars gets trashed as it goes on. Watch -- the new films starting to come out in that series next year will probably get trashed somewhat, too.
In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy Krueger is out to start a new gameplan. He's killed every kid in Springwood, Ohio, where he's been on a killing spree throughout the rest of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but he hasn't killed one teenage boy, yet. This guy winds up in a different town where he meets Maggie (Lisa Zane) and the black guy from Alien (Yaphet Kotto). They want to help him because he's got amnesia and he hasn't slept in a long time (to avoid being killed by Freddy). They drive him back to Springwood (minus black guy from Alien) with some other teenagers in tow and they come face to face with Freddy Krueger, as well as Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold in cameos.
The other teenagers all come from a shelter for troubled kids (or something like that), which is where Maggie and Black Guy from Alien work, as social workers and dream psychologists. One of the teenagers is deaf and this leads to Freddy killing him by cutting off his ear and replacing it with some kind of creature hearing aid with legs that makes him have super strong hearing so that when Freddy scrapes his finger knives across a chalkboard, it's so loud that it makes the deaf guy's head explode. Anyway, Freddy is out to move out of Springwood and into a new town -- preferably the town where the shelter is -- so he can kill all of the kids there since Springwood is now dry of teenagers and there's only adults suffering from mass delusions, caused apparently by Freddy.
There is a mystery, though, involving Lisa Zane's Maggie character (the mystery is that she's Freddy Krueger's daughter) that runs throughout the entire movie until the end when we finally learn the truth, even though you may be able to figure it out early through clues (or, you know because I just told you). She ends up becoming the woman who finally kills Freddy in the end. Freddy's Dead, you see, is a tale about bad parenting and the ever annoying father figure who stalks your traumatized psyche through life until you finally vanquish him (unless you had a good father who doesn't need vanquishing). Maggie has not seen her dad, Freddy, since she was a very little girl. She was the one who told the authorities about her demented dad, which led to his arrest and his "death" by fire from a mob of angry citizens. He had, you see, strangled to death her mother after her mother found his secret murder room in the house. So Maggie is plagued by dreams of water towers and being chased around a yard by a man throughout all of her life -- she's totally forgotten her life as Freddy Krueger's daughter. Until... now.
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.
I saw this when it first came out. It was released in 3-D. Only the last act of the movie was in 3-D, though, when they kill Freddy. My DVD had the option to turn the 3-D ending on. I do have glasses, but I did not watch the 3-D ending.
This is a fast moving, sort of entertaining, enjoyable, yeah whatever kind of movie. I'd rather watch it than so many other stupid movies, though. I have, actually. I've seen this movie lots of times.
There's not many deaths in the movie, though. Also, all of the deaths are of males. No female deaths at all. So the movie has a kind of anti-male subtext going on, I feel. Different than the other Freddy movies. And this one was directed by a woman. But, I like it and I look forward to watching it again someday.