Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

 

And so we reach the absolute silliest point in the franchise. Freddy’s Dead is the shortest, silliest ANOES movie in the franchise. It’s more a comedy than a horror movie, turning Freddy from the frightening nightmare stalker into a mugging, fourth-wall breaking jokester, a cartoon character in a movie that seems to enjoy being silly and taking the piss out of itself. The kills are all played as jokes, the ideas tend to be silly, the tone is corny and cheesy and while there are a few good ideas and dark moments it’s too self-conscious and ridiculous to take seriously. It’s a 3-D movie, with a theme song by Iggy Pop and a cameo by Alice Cooper. Freddy’s Dead is too self-aware, not just of the series but of the humour and popularity of Freddy Krueger. They know he’s popular and people like him so they spend the entire film mugging about it, being more a comedy than a horror movie. For a film meant to be the end of the series, they don’t approach it seriously at all, almost gleefully taking the piss out of itself with its comic book styled hijinks.

 

Ten years after the last film, Freddy Kreuger has won – he’s killed every child and teenager in Springwood, his evil spirit looming over the place and cursing the residents with madness. One child was rumoured to have escaped. The mysterious John Doe, a teenager with amnesia, is attacked by Freddy in a nightmare, and ends up ends up at a shelter for troubled, juvenile teens. Lead by two counsellors, the lucid dreamer Doc (played by Yaphet Kotto from Alien) and Maggie, who is having horrible nightmares of her childhood, the teens end up in Springwood to try and piece together John’s memory. It turns out to be a trap, and Freddy has drawn them to Springwood so he can kill them and grow more powerful, and spread his influence outside of Springwood. There’s also a revelation – Freddy had a child, and all the signs point to it being John.

The opening eight minutes are an extended nightmare for our initial main character, the amnesiac John Doe. It opens with him having a nightmare on an aeroplane, where his seat falls out of the plane and he falls through the sky. He wakes up in bed, only to find the entire house is in the sky falling. They do a ‘Wizard of Oz’ parody scene, with a house caught in a tornado and Freddy dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West, riding a broom and cackling maniacally, yelling ‘I’ll get you my pretty, and your little soul too!’. It’s funny, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Freddy isn’t scary anymore, he’s funny, a joke. After landing, rolling down a hill and getting hit by a bus (driven by Freddy), John wakes up with amnesia having hit his head. This entire sequence is pretty much indicative of the rest of the movie. It’s silly, it’s blunt and it’s ridiculous and impossible to take seriously. It’s also not scary, and Freddy is a joke.

They do another main character bait and switch – John isn’t Freddy’s kid, Maggie is. They actually make it pretty evident early on. While John has nightmares of being chased/used by Freddy, Maggie is the one who dreams of a childhood with a twisted father. It also makes no sense in terms of time – John, a teenager, is way too young to have been Freddy’s kid considering he’s been a marauding nightmare monster well for over a decade. Maggie, an adult, makes sense. Her real name is revealed as Catherine Krueger (something she’d forgotten). She gets some creepy memories of Freddy at home, when his wife finds out that Freddy is a child murderer and he kills her. She ends up in his torture room, where he has a whole bunch of different claw gloves. This makes sense actually, Freddy having a daughter, since it makes his child killing (and the constant, recurring use of little girls in dresses as spooky images) work along with criminal psychology. The reason he killed children in Springwood is revealed to be because they took Catherine away from him, so he got revenge. It’s a bit inconsistent, since technically he was a child killer before then.

As for the characters themselves, John is pretty forgettable. Having amnesia will do that, but he’s also not smart. He tries to confront Freddy on his own, and is adamant that he’s Freddy’s son, theorising that Freddy won’t kill him. Well he’s wrong, as Freddy does kill him in a pretty ridiculous way – while John is falling through the sky (after Freddy cuts his parachute off), Freddy pushes a bed of spikes underneath him, impaling him to death. So much for John. That’s when we switch focus more to Maggie. Maggie is surprisingly tough – she isn’t scared of Freddy at all, and is determined to kill him once she gets her memories back. She doesn’t waste time and is never victimised, she’s headstrong and determined. Doc is barely in the movie at all. He’s also overpowered – he has dream powers (he can enter and exit dreams at will) and knows everything about everything. The teens are mostly there to die. There’s the deaf kid, the stoner and the tough girl who lives until the end.

The few kills are played as jokes. The deaf kid gets a lot of ear based horror. Freddy forces a giant stick into his ear, before cutting his hearing aid (and ear) off. He replaces it with a mutated, fleshy hearing aid that makes all sounds thunderously loud, and Freddy makes the kid’s head explode by running his claw down a chalk board. The stoner kid gets high and watches TV, where we get a quick cameo from Johnny Depp! (before Freddy quickly dispatches him with a  frying pan). The tv starts playing psychedelic colours as ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida plays, then the stoner gets sucked into a videogame in the television, where he’s being chased by a 2D cartoon version of his disappointed tennis-playing father and a giant Freddy. Freddy grabs a controller and starts playing the videogame, trying to kill him. As the stoner jumps around the house like a videogame character, his friends grab the controller from Freddy, thinking they can stop him. Nope, because Freddy has the Powerglove! ™, the ill-conceived, ‘radical’, unwieldy Super Nintendo controller glove. Stoner kid ends up dying in the videogame, and falling into a chasm to hell in the real world.

The teens end up trapped in Springwood, which has become a weird trash town, where the adult residents are all unhinged and crazy, the houses and streets are dirty and dilapidated and the entire place is a trash heap. Freddy’s evil influence controls the place, making its streets a maze and preventing the group from escaping. They end up in his old house, a trashy shack of sorts, where they split up (because of course they do) and two of them fall asleep and get killed. When the survivors manage to escape the town and Freddy’s grasp, they find that nobody but them remembers the dead teens, as though Freddy killing them and stealing their souls somehow erased them from existence. I have to say it’s pretty inconsistent with its nightmares, since Freddy seems to exist both in the real world (at least within Springwood) and the dream world. There’s an inkling of an idea there (that nightmares have seeped into Springwood that you’re drawn into a communal one when you go there) but it gets no traction.

Freddy is basically a cartoon character here. They’ve completely given up on making him scary or threatening, with the entire movie playing out more like a joke than a horror movie. And Freddy is no exception. He mugs for the camera, pantomiming for the audience, making exaggerated gestures and being more of a jokester than a threatening menace. He’s funny, sure, and I like him, but he’s not menacing or terrifying, he’s just silly. He’s seen constantly, always in full light, so he’s never mysterious. We get an explanation for Freddy’s nightmare powers: ancient dream demons, which roam the dreams of the living until they find an evil, twisted host who they give the power to cross over into nightmares (I’m serious). Why do horror movies do this? It’s like when Jason Voorhees had that demonic worm thing or when Halloween got bogged down in the ‘Curse of the Thorn’ stuff (I’ll get to that at a later date). We also go into Freddy’s mind, where we learn about his childhood – he was bullied as a child, and beaten by an abusive father (played by Alice Cooper!). Then we get the dumbest thing ever – Freddy, while being burned by the vengeful Elm Street parents, meets the dream demons who give him their nightmare powers. It’s dumb as hell.

They really sell the ‘Freddy’s Dead’ part of the title, since he’s constantly getting the crap beaten out of him. They pull him into the real world, like Nancy did in the original ANOES (nobody’s done it since then actually, not counting the possession in 2), and then they do everything they can to try and kill him. Doc beats him with a lead pipe, the anger issues chick punches him, and even Maggie lays the smack down on him. He get kicked in the balls as well, which completely deflates any threat he might have had.  So how does Freddy ultimately die? They blow him up with a pipe bomb on of the kids happens to have. He explodes, the dream demons flying out and Freddy's screaming head flying towards the screen (in 3D!). It’s exactly as dumb as it sounds.

The film has a pretty polished look actually, though it’s far too bright. It has a technical polish to it, and a more modern feel to the previous films. The effects are actually pretty great, though most are cartoonish. Since it’s not trying to be a horror film anymore, all the effects and gore are silly and ridiculous. OF course, there are also some completely awful 3D effects to endure. Stuff comes flying at the screen (like Freddy’s glove) but for the most part it’s not too noticeable…unless those stupid dream demons turn up. They’re like giant floating sperms, poorly animated and flitting across the screen. The tone is definitely comedic. At one point John, having continuous nightmares of getting out of bed and then immediately falling through the air, sits firmly on his bed and states “Nothing’s going to get me out of bed”. A second later and the bed has suddenly caught fire, and John exclaims a knowing “Oh, great”. That’s the sort of film it is.

There are some cool ideas. I like the concept of Freddy having won, but needing more teens to draw in more victims and spread himself out of Springwood. It’s a bit strange for him to be tied down to one place, but I like the concept of his influence cursing the town and its inhabitants. Unfortunately the way it’s been shown is silly. There are some really dumb ideas as well (seriously, ancient dream demons is the stupidest thing ever). There’s also occasionally some heavy stuff here, particularly with parents (what is it with ANOES movies and horrible parents?). The stoner is under huge pressure from his successfully dad, the deaf kid is deaf because his overbearing mother jammed cotton tips in his ears. The creepiest is the anger issues girl, whose father molested her. I feel like they could have gone deeper or darker with these aspects and if the movie was more serious then perhaps they might have.

Freddy’s Dead is a strange case where a series’ popularity folds onto itself. The entire movie seems like a weird celebration of what the series, and main villain, had become known for. Gone was the effective scares and chills of the original, or even the darker tone of the previous film, and instead it’s an ode to the silly, jokey weirdness the character and series had devolved into. That’s not to say Freddy isn’t fun, he is, and there are certainly laughs to be had watching Freddy’s Dead (be they intentional or not), but Freddy’s Dead seems too smug and silly, parading its villain and characters around too knowingly. It’s certainly a different way to attempt to end a series, turning to comedy-horror. The film actually did effectively end the series in a fashion. After the death of Freddy the end credits play a montage of scenes from the entire series as we send off Freddy Krueger. While there are a few more films technically in the ANOES franchise, this marks the end of the original run. Up next, Wes Craven returns and takes the series in a strange direction.