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Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare


#9 - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
Rachel Talalay, 1991


In his quest to find new victims, a supernatural serial killer uses an amnesiac teenager to lure others back to his hometown.

It's always at least a little interesting to see how franchises that really get up there in terms of installments try to keep the experience fresh, especially when it comes to horror franchises that would nominally have the most to suffer due to the diminishing returns on their original scariness. I've noted my fascination with how A Nightmare on Elm Street handled this issue, mainly by trying to take its premise to imaginative new levels regarding the dream world in which series villain Freddy Krueger stalks his victims and how they would ultimately figure out how to beat the sweater-clad sicko at his own game. Even then, there's only so many ways that that could be done and that seems clear enough in the franchise's sixth entry, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. I skipped over fifth entry The Dream Child but it doesn't matter as this film does away with using recurring protagonists in favour of a standalone story that starts off weird even for this franchise - an Escape From New York-style prologue establishes the film takes place "ten years from now" and that Freddy's hometown/stalking ground of Springwood has no children left for him to prey upon and that all the adults have gone insane. Since he's effectively bound to the town, he takes one surviving teen and sends him out into the world with no memory but enough clues to lead back to Springwood so he can escape. The lucky people who get to go to Springwood with this walking John Doe? A youth worker who takes him on as a case and a handful of delinquent stowaways from said youth worker's workplace. So the nightmare begins...

Like James Bond, Freddy Krueger exists at this paradoxical nexus of serious and silly - after all, is it really the best idea to take a serial murderer who explicitly preys on children and turn him into a candy-coated joke machine? It is especially weird to note how this latest collection of victims all come from a halfway-house for troubled teens whose various personal troubles tend to seem a little too serious to turn into material for Freddy (one was sexually abused by her own father, another is hard of hearing), plus the relatively small number of characters means that Freddy really takes his time tormenting them (look no further than his Looney Tunes-like treatment of the aforementioned deaf character). At least it's somewhat salvaged by the story just embracing the lunacy, often quite literally as seen in how Springwood has become a ghost town populated by crazed adults whose town fair looks like something out of the back half of a Herzog movie. At least the underlying story - that of the heroes once again trying to figure out how to stop Freddy once and for all - kind of works despite all that. As such, I'm not exactly inclined to think that Freddy's Dead is a good movie, but I surprisingly didn't hate it either (it's not my least favourite of the ones I've seen, anyway). It moves at a clip, maintains the series' ever-increasing craziness without suffering too much for it (occasional moment of exceptionally bad taste aside), and at least commits to providing a definitive conclusion to the franchise (which as of writing, it seems to have done just fine).