Spooky season continues at B-Movie Enema!

Welcome to this week’s review. Last week, I checked Leatherface off the list of horror icons that I haven’t checked in with for a long time. This week, it’s Freddy Krueger. Now, here’s what I think is likely a hot take. I don’t actually care much for the Elm Street franchise. Of all the slashers and serial killers, Freddy ranks pretty dang low. I know, I know… There are lots of Freddy stans out there.

I actually get it. The first film in the series, A Nightmare on Elm Street, is really the best slasher film of the 80s. It’s well-written and very well-acted. The first sequel is interesting but not truly a great movie. It’s great camp, so that puts it in another category. The third film is one of the best horror sequels of all time. In 1994, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is a very good new take on the series. I don’t care much for the other sequels much at all. So when it comes to the series itself, the first three films, to me, are pretty watchable. The last one is a completely different type of movie and should be kept separate from the other six. I never saw the remake. I didn’t care to. I already covered the fifth film in the franchise when things were truly and fully off the rails with Freddy’s over-the-top jokey personality.

And then there’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.

Let’s go back to September 1991. I was a couple weeks into my freshman year of high school. There was a certain buzz among the cool kids like me (trust me, I was definitely a cool kid) about the advertised final Nightmare on Elm Street film. Jason had taken on the New Blood and took Manhattan and didn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon. We were waiting around for the conclusion of that fifth Michael Myers movie. Pinhead was a little more indie, and almost came off as far more mature, but we didn’t know a third film in that series was coming just one year later. It seemed to be time for Freddy to shuffle off the celluloid coil.

But, ooh! Oh! This one was going to be in 3-D! (In parts at least.)

I was 14 years old. I was kind of an idiot. I was kind of a Freddy fan. I had seen the fourth and fifth films in the theater. Remember, I was a cool kid. That means I got to see R-rated horror films in the theater. I think it was the knives on the glove. Right? That was a cool trait he had. Jason had the hockey mask and the machete. Michael Myers had that Captain Kirk mask and the butcher’s knife. But the guy who creeps into your dreams while you were asleep and can kill you with that glove of his? That’s a good basis.

As I said, that first movie was great! So, it was off to a good start under the scripting and directing talents of Wes Craven. While the third film is one of my favorite horror sequels ever, the personality was starting to leak through. Freddy likes to crack jokes and be punny and all that stuff. It’s fine when it works, but when it doesn’t? It’s pretty bad. And I immediately start to squirm and groan and check out when he gets a little too much.

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare comes along at the very height of the funny Freddy time that took over the character’s personality on the back end of the series. Now, one positive thing that was in the mix of the Elm Street series at this time was the recognition character actor Robert Englund was enjoying at the time. Englund had been acting in film since the 70s. Prior to getting the role as Freddy Krueger, Englund’s most recognizable role was in the popular 1983 miniseries V. In that, he played the friendly visitor Willie. He wasn’t a complete unknown but under the Freddy Krueger makeup, Englund became a superstar.

I appreciate Robert Englund. I am a fan of how he treats his fans. He loves attending conventions and meeting his fans. That makes him really likable and it’s because of how he played Freddy Krueger.

“But, Geoff, how can you say you don’t like the character but like the actor and how that actor molded the character to become a star and appreciative of the fans?”

Well, dear readers, that’s what you call nuance. It’s possible for me to appreciate how the character affects fans of the series and also be able to say the character is not for me. I know there are a lot of people whose first horror movies were the Elm Street movies. They watched with friends at sleepovers and what have you. I get it. I watched other movies with my brothers before I saw the first film in the series, so I get having a nostalgic draw to a particular horror movie or series. For me, it’s Friday the 13th. For many, many others, it’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. So, I can hold the opposite opinions of appreciating Robert Englund and the Elm Street series while also not being a fan of the character of Freddy Krueger and the series on a larger scale.

But, allow me to now state my case as we go through this movie as to why Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is just the worst, okay?

Fucking Christ, already with this shit, huh?

Okay, let me back up a minute. The movie begins with a map of the US on the screen and title cards saying that this movie takes place in Springwood, Ohio, Ten Years From Now. There is stuff about mysterious killings and suicides having a horrible effect on the children and teenagers of the sleepy town. Adults are not handling this well as they have all gone crazy over the loss of their children. But! There’s one surviving teenager still living there.

That kid is on an airplane and it’s going through some pretty rough turbulence. A creepy girl turns around in her seat and tells this guy that “He’s” going to make this kid help “him” because he is the last of the teens. He then is pulled out of the plane and falls toward his home in Springwood. He then wakes up in his bed after screaming that it wasn’t fair because he was almost out of the town. Yes, it’s a nightmare. But then, that nightmare continues because he looks out the window to see his house flying through the sky like Wizard of Oz. Yes, Freddy is the Wicked Witch flying alongside him.

This last remaining teen goes by John Doe. This is mostly due to him having a bad case of amnesia when he does return to the land of the awoken outside the city limits of Springwood and he’s not sure who he is or why he’s there. In his dream, he goes to get a bus ticket to leave town and it’s vended by none other than producer and New Line Cinema head honcho Robert Shaye.

What’s kind of wild about this film is who the director is. Rachel Talalay is no slouch really. She worked on the first four Nightmare films and is a producer on the fourth entry. She also directed the mid-90s cult classic movie Tank Girl. More recently, Talalay’s contributions to television is not something to overlook – particularly Doctor Who. In each of the three Peter Capaldi, Twelfth Doctor seasons, she directed the finales. One of the best episodes, “Heaven Sent” and the second part, “Hell Bent”, are thought of to be major achievements for the series.

Oh, and it should also be mentioned that Talalay is a film professor at University of British Columbia so, clearly, she is, as I said, no slouch when it comes to working in film and TV.

Let’s get back to the movie and the one thing I can say I always did like about this movie – leading lady Lisa Zane. In this, she plays Maggie and she counsels troubled teens. We first see her talking to one of her patients, Spencer (played by Breckin Meyer), and you think maybe he’s just a slacker who has issues with his conservative, businessman dad, but he also had a pipe bomb in his room at this place. We also meet Tracy (Lezlie Deane) who has personal space and anger issues and Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) who is deaf without his hearing aide (which clearly means he’s a troubled youth because he’s hard of hearing). I like to call these three kids the cannon fodder of this film.

Because they are.

Because we already know exactly how they are going to die – video game slackerdom, karate, and something to do with hearing.

We also meet a few of the kids’ other psychiatrist, Doc, played by Yaphet Kotto. True story… Kotto is in a lot of awesome movies. These include Alien and Live and Let Die. It does not include Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.

John Doe is brought to the halfway house to be looked over by Maggie. She determines that he’s been sleep-deprived for about three weeks. John has no idea who he is or where he’s from. He tells her that if he goes to sleep, there’s trouble. She finds a clipping that John had about a missing woman from Springwood with the last name of Krueger. This seems to register something with her. Meanwhile, John is fitting in nicely with the other kids at this sanitarium as he keeps them awake by incessantly singing “99 Bottles of Beer” over and over.

So here’s the story we’re vaguely let in on in these early stages of this movie. Freddy’s power is waning. He’s not got anymore of those sweet sweet souls of kids from Springwood anymore. He’s allowed John Doe to live to help gather and obtain souls for him. I’m guessing it has to do with him being taken to this halfway house or something. There’s that newspaper clipping he has of what has to be Freddy’s wife who has gone missing. It’s basically teased that John is Freddy’s kid, but, spoilers, it doesn’t make quite a lot of sense because Freddy still wants to have John’s soul too. Plus, it’s clear Lisa Zane has some connection to Springwood too.

In a way, it seems like Freddy’s Dead is going in the direction of the first sequel, Freddy’s Revenge, and using someone to do some dirty work for him. That’s interesting. That movie is interesting and almost works as a sequel in this series. but most of the interesting bits of that first sequel is the somewhat bonkers turns it makes instead of being a little more straightforward (pun intended). Plus all the behind the scenes stuff and its legacy is interesting as well. I digress.

John sleepwalks on his first night after dozing off. One of those creepy little girls that always chant the Freddy rhyme leads him through the Krueger house. He finds his true memories locked up in a padded cell. When he is scared out of his dream, he wakes up to back into the security guard and knocks him out of the window. Maggie, after hearing about how John was dreaming, decides to take him back to Springwood to see if that jars his memories. When he dreams the little girl is standing in the middle of the road imploring him to go back, he tries to force the van off the road. When Maggie stops the van, it causes the cannon fodder to tumble out into the front, revealing they have stowed away.

Is… Is this Freddy’s plan? For John to tell someone he has amnesia, has dreams, and then have these kids, who are already trying to find a way out of the halfway house and off to California, mind you, stow away and end up in Springwood? This is pretty convoluted, Freddy.

They do get into Springwood. The town is having a fair and it is a pretty creepy sight to behold…

Yes, yes… Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr had cameos in this film. That’s not what I’m talking about when I say it’s a creepy sight. (Though, I’ve seen what Roseanne talks about after a fistful of Ambien, so…) No, the fair is just adults kind of listlessly wandering about and muttering things. The place is completely devoid of kids and the adults are all insane. Roseanne wants to take the cannon fodder gang in as new kids and even says she’ll do a better job of hiding them this time. Tom Arnold tells her that kids are a definite no-go as it brings “him” to the town too.

Maggie has the bright idea of the fodder getting back into the van. She decides she and John need to go to the school as the bell tower rang which spooked a lot of the adults. Tracy drives the van to try to get out of town but somehow they drive in a circle and can’t seem to find their way out of Springwood.

In this first act, there really isn’t too much to be pissed about or really call crappy. It’s weird that Tom and Roseanne are in this. It’s uncertain exactly what Freddy’s plan really is. That aside, the van being unable to get out of Springwood is pretty good. The three troubled teens that are the cannon fodder are alright, if not one-note characters. I especially like when Carlos is trying to open the map to help them get out of Springwood but it unfolds into a crazy ass giant map that never actually flattens out into a map and has “You’re Fucked!” scrawled in blood in it only for Carlos to wake up from the dream to tell Tracy that the map told them they’re fucked. That’s a great line and a funny moment.

The not so great stuff is yet to come. I can see how it was okay to think that maybe this movie wasn’t going to be so bad when it first came out and we saw these early scenes. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if I thought that when I first saw this movie back in 1991. I certainly thought Lisa Zane was worth putting my peepers on. So, yeah… Things do get off to a fairly decent start with Freddy’s Dead.

Maggie and John go into the school and it’s in disrepair. One of the teachers welcomes them to Freddy 101 where they learn that in the 60s, Freddy had a kid and it was taken from him. Meanwhile, Tracy, Carlos, and Spencer have been driving into the night and still can’t find a way out. They decide to walk and find a house to squat in. They see one that is up for sale and kick the door in to make it theirs for the night. Once they do, it transforms into the infamous Freddy house.

The house begins playing tricks on folks. In particular, it traps Carlos in a hallway with his abusive mother who threatens to clean out his ears since he can’t hear so good. But after he pleads with her to not do this, Freddy appears and sticks the swab into his ear… All the way in.

He then cuts off the poor kid’s ear and throws him through a wall and into the boiler room. Carlos gets his hearing aid back, but it’s super-enhanced and makes every sound painful to Carlos. So Freddy toys with him by dropping pins and scratching a chalkboard. Freddy really has some fun with this and as he goes to town on the chalkboard it makes Carlos’ head explode.

Okay, Freddy’s Dead… I’ll give you that one. That’s a good Freddy scene. It could rank among the better deaths he’s dealt out.

Maggie and John continue looking around town. They go to a crazy woman’s foster home where she talks about how she remembers every kid who came in through her doors. Maggie finds a drawing done by K. Krueger. John immediately thinks that he has to be Freddy’s kid. Yeah… That’s it. That has to be why Freddy kept him alive earlier. It also has to be why everyone in town is reacting awkwardly to him. I mean… forget about everyone in town acting awkwardly. It HAS to be because John Doe is really K. Krueger.

Things start to slide a bit here. So, it’s said that Breckin Meyer’s Spencer is a stoner. We see him lighting up a doobie in the van earlier when Tracy is trying to get them out of town. He apparently immediately did the drugs when they got inside the Krueger place. This is relatively classic silly drug stuff where he’s tripping but it’s never really said that he’s dropping acid, only smoking pot. Anyway, he’s woken up by the old school off-the-air signal (on a broken TV) and we see Johnny Depp’s big cameo. You see, Depp was a big deal at the time of this movie’s release. However, he was not-so-big of a deal when he played Nancy’s boyfriend in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. His cameo in this was his loving thanks to the series that helped launch him into being a modern-day weirdo.

Oh, for you kids who may have somehow stumbled onto this blog… You see, there used to be these anti-drug PSAs on TV where someone says that your brain is like fried eggs in a skillet if you did drugs. I wouldn’t know because I’m too much of a dork to do drugs, but whatever. That’s what this scene is parodying.

Wait… Did I say I was a dork? No, no, no. I was one of the COOLEST kids in school!

Freddy then gives Spencer some good old fashioned 60s psychedelic funtimes complete with “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and everything. This lands Spencer into a video game world. Well, I should say he ends up in a cartoon world that is meant to be a video game. This scene is fucking stupid and I’m embarrassed for Breckin Meyer for having to do this.

Not to mention, there’s a Nintendo slogan drop in the dialog. Then Spencer is dragged into the dream world and then thrown back to the real world and then Freddy controls him like a video game character by making him jump around and stuff. This shit is very stupid. Again, I’m embarrassed. I know even as a 14 year old idiot, I hated this scene.

It’s like I grew up a little that day. I realized that maybe, after all, I’m not a fan of the Nightmare series. At best, I was an interloper who liked a few of the movies, some of the kills, and some of the stuff that happened from one scene to the next. Generally, I was team Jason all the way. It was this stupid ass Nintendo kill scene that sealed it for me.

Where was I? Oh yeah. So Freddy is fucking with Spencer and John and Tracy decide to try to stop Freddy. John is the first to go into the dreams. He thinks he will be invulnerable because he’s related to Freddy. He has Tracy lay him out with a lead pipe. This does work, but there was a simpler way – Tracy arrives in the dream world by simply just meditating. They try to stop Freddy from killing Spencer but are ultimately unsuccessful when Freddy makes Spencer fall down the stairs and into a pit that leads to hell.

I should mention Maggie witnesses this but says nothing about that abyss in the floor?

Fuck it. Anyway, Maggie wakes Tracy up and they grab John and leave. They are just about to exit Springwood when Freddy attacks John using the series of dreams from earlier. Freddy confronts John and tells him he only let him live long enough to bring his daughter to him. Yeah, no shit… Maggie is Freddy’s daughter and he plans to use her to access all those other kids she counsels. He tells John this while John is floating in the sky with a parachute. Freddy cuts the straps of the chute to let John fall where Freddy wheels a bed of spikes under him like Wile E. Coyote.

This movie had one good kill, but decided it needed to be the fuckin’ Loony Tunes from here on out, I guess.

John falls on the spikes and his body gets the same wounds. He dies in Maggie’s arms. Before Maggie and Tracy leave, Freddy possesses Maggie’s body and uses it to get back to her shelter. Maggie and Tracy are shocked to learn that no one seems to remember Carlos, Spencer, or John. Freddy didn’t just kill them, he erased them from existence, but the other kids in the shelter are dreaming about them. Doc remembers them because he says he can control his dreams. Whatever this Freddy fucker is, he is messing with the line between reality and dreams.

These are new powers that Freddy is showing. Sure, in previous entries, it seems the way he affects the real world and how people die and what their bodies look like or what they do when they being killed in their dreams has been real noodly from one movie to the next. Sure, his ability to possess someone was previously seen, but this seems different. This seems like he can do it willy nilly. The whole erasing people from existence is totally new. The hell did that come from?

Oh, and don’t worry, that whole “possessing Maggie” thing will never come up again. It’s literally forgotten immediately.

Anyway, Maggie goes looking for answers after thinking about John’s last words being that the Krueger kid was not a boy and discovers that she was indeed adopted. Her adoptive mother was not given any information about Maggie’s birth parents. She returns to the shelter where both she and Tracy go to sleep. However, Maggie dreams about the day that her birth mother discovered that her dad was the Springwood Slasher. She was born Katherine Krueger and she was put into the system after her mother went missing.

After Freddy reveals that he’s going to start all over again starting with the kids in the shelter, Maggie wakes up and realizes that Tracy is going to be the next target. He uses Tracy’s father’s sexual abuse against her. She beats the ever-livin’ shit out of her “father” with a coffee pot, but he gets back up to torture her some more.

He turns into Freddy and Tracy lands a few good hits on him with some kung fu. When Freddy regains the upperhand, she uses a stove to burn her hands to wake her up. She immediate wants to see Doc. However, Doc is being confronted by Freddy. It’s a good thing that Doc picked up a baseball bat first. However, Freddy is not one to be beaten up by a baseball bat.

He counts off all the various ways people tried to kill him to Doc. He also tells him about how the “Dream People” who gave him this “job”. Honestly, if my eyes didn’t roll so hard they fell out of my head after either the embarrassing Nintendo thing or the really silly Loony Tunes kill, the Dream People who gave Freddy his job would have done it. One of the things I hate the most is to know every single detail about the past of a character or monster. It’s unnecessary in so many situations, and especially in horror. Nothing drives me nuts more than knowing that the monster is the monster because of some sort of demon possession or witches or radioactive monster spiders or cults… Wait. We’ll come back around to that cult shit before the end of the month.

Just… My point is I hate when horror characters have to have backstories. Either you watch the monster be created or the monster already exists. You don’t need both.

Anyway, Doc was able to wake up thanks to his alarm going off. He woke up holding a piece of Freddy’s sweater. So, much like Nancy realized in the first movie, he can be brought out of the dream. He sends Maggie into a dream and uses some machinery to track her. He also gives her some 3D glasses so the audience knows when to put on their 3D glasses in the theater to see really fucking bad 3D. He tells her that the glasses in the real world mean one thing, but the glasses in the dream world, they can be anything she wants them to be – up to and including being fairly pointless in terms of the plot.

She travels into the mind of Freddy. It’s a jumbled mess of goop and fleshy shit. Oh, and there are three demon monsters that look like sperm with faces flying around. She finds a bunch of doors to rooms that represent memories. She witnesses him kill a classroom’s hamster with a hammer. Then, she sees him a little older cutting himself and getting whipped by his drunk dad, Alice Cooper (no shit, Alice Cooper plays old man Krueger). She then sees the event of the parents of Springwood doling out some vigilante justice. It was while his place burned around him that the, sigh, Dream People came to him to turn him into the dream monster he is.

Who asked for this? Who sat there after binging all five previous entries for the 47th time and said, “I really want to know what Freddy was aside from that stuff I already learned from these other movies. I think he should be a literal agent of demons. Oh, and can those demons look like skull-headed sperm monsters? In bad 3D?”

Maggie then sees a repressed memory of Freddy killing her mother for learning he was killing kids. She said she wouldn’t tell anyone but she did. She grabs him and Tracy and Doc try to pull her out of her dream so they can finally kill him, but it doesn’t work. She says she can still see things like she did in her dream so it’s not over. They go to a cabinet full of crazy ass weapons they confiscated from the patients at the shelter and arm up.

She finds Freddy and he tries to to trick her by appealing to her in his regular old Robert Englund disguise, but she knows he’s fucking with her. She uses a baseball back to knock his glove off his hand so he tries strangling her. She overpowers him and uses his glove against him. She even bites his nose. Maggie then breaks Freddy’s hand, but he is able to fix it enough to put the glove back on, but before he can, Maggie uses knives and ninja stars and a crossbow to pin him against the wall. She stabs him with his own glove. Tracy tosses Maggie Spencer’s pipe bomb.

That’s when I lost faith in all that is good about film.

Good fucking god… How does that even work? Okay, kudos for blowing Freddy up. I’m always up for a massive chunkplosion of bits and stuff that should be on the inside of a person. However, the heads inside the heads thing is dumb. It doesn’t make sense whatsoever. Heads don’t have smaller heads inside them. That’s not how heads work.

Anyway, the camera zooms in on Lisa Zane who smiles at Yaphet Kotto and Lezlie Deane and says, “Freddy’s Dead.” Smash-cut to credits with highlights from all the movies in the series. I do like that the movie decided to literally blow its load and then immediately did a title drop and got the fuck out of there before it dared to even sniff the 90-minute mark.

This is a very bad movie. Like, very bad. It’s not that bad for very obvious reasons. It’s not like Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which, admittedly, is far worse than this movie, where it swings so wildly to re-invent something, anything, about the Friday franchise that it makes Jason some sort of possessed thing that can then transfer to other people. This movie just doesn’t do much of anything. It comes in hot with Freddy on a broomstick. Then it tries to do a thing with Springwood being a hellscape, but also, it seems like everything is a hellscape? So… so was everything a hellscape? It has a few (only three total) kills, one very good one, and then wraps up…

But not before committing my cardinal sin when it comes to horror – explaining the backstory of the killer/monster/thing that makes the franchise thing go.

Freddy is already a horror character that I don’t particularly care much for in a franchise that seemed to progressively get worse and worse. The background is unnecessary. We knew he was a child murderer. We knew he was the son of a hundred psychos. What more did we need? I think no one’s answer was “A trio of skull-headed sperm monsters.”

Next week, we march into Halloween weekend with a double dip of spooky fun. As per the tradition of Halloween around these parts, I will give you the usual Friday review as well as a special release on Halloween itself! That also happens to be reviews #399 and #400! So there’s a whole lot to celebrate and it all kicks off in seven days with Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers! See you right here for that… bitch!