Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
The sixth entry in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street series promises in the title that this would be the final one, at least of those story threads that have stemmed throughout the first five. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare was released into theaters with 3D glasses to put on, New Line Cinema’s first effort in this realm, though viewers would not enjoy the gimmick until the final fifteen minutes, as we enter into the realm of Freddy Krueger’s psychotic mind. By that point, many likely grew too impatient with the substandard dare and walked out without experience the “Freddy Vision” promised from the marketing.
Set ten years in the from the last entry (1999), Springwood, Ohio, where Elm Street resides, no longer has any more young souls for Freddy Krueger to reap. That is, except one, as we come to find out that one surviving teen remains that hasn’t been snuffed out, and Freddy plans to use him as a plan to haunt the dreams beyond Springwood, because, “Every town has an Elm Street.” Enter Dr. Maggie Burroughs, a therapist who specializes in experimental methods for analyzing dreams, who is out to help troubled teenagers. As the teens can be killed in the real world if they die in their dreams, Maggie has a hunch that Freddy can be conversely killed off from the dream realms for good if he can somehow die in the real world. What Maggie doesn’t know is that she has much more of a connection to Krueger than she ever realized.
Freddy’s Dead explores a bit more back story to the character of Freddy Krueger, revealing that he was married at the time he started to kill the children of his neighborhood and had a child of his own, shown in a series of flashbacks in which we see Robert Englund, without makeup, terrorize his family while he makes tragedy strike for others. We also learn how he got the demonic powers that bestow his life beyond death, making a pact with some serpent-like Dream Demons (who make an appearance for the first time in this film), inhabiting the dream-scapes of others. The teenagers continue the tradition of coming from homes where the parents treat them with either abuse or neglect, though they did not end up fostering the kind of malevolence that manifested within Freddy, which he exploits to further abuse them before trying to kill them off altogether.
New Line commissioned several people to try to come up with ideas on what to do with the sixth entry. Their primary attempt resulted in Peter Jackson, coming off of the low-budget cult films Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles, to write a script with co-writer Danny Mulheron, and to try to right the ship to bring interest back to the series after the dismal performance of The Dream Child. He came up with a plot, involving Freddy, in a weakened state due to no longer being taken as a serious threat to Springwood, having teens intentionally entering the dream realm just to beat up on the disgraced and mostly powerless bad guy — at least until Freddy turns the tables by finding the strength to kill again. The title of the film was slated to be A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Dream Lover, but it wasn’t the direction New Line wanted to go, but they did like Jackson and would end up collaborating with him a decade later for the wildly successful Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Where New Line eventually went was close to home. Comic book nerd and student of series director Robert Shaye, Michael De Luca (who would soon become President of Production at New Line Cinema), gets his turn to provide the screenplay (his first, after writing several episodes of “Freddy’s Nightmares” for television, as well as touching up the script for the Nightmare 5), directed by Dream Warriors and The Dream Master producer Rachel Talalay (her first), who also has been with the series a long time. In the prior front-runner script from Michael Almereyda, the heroine from the prior two entries, Alice, would continue in this film as a supporting character, with the male lead being the son we learned about in The Dream Child, Jacob, as the teenager, and the return of the “Dream Warriors” from Part 3, as the “Dream Police”. But when Lisa Wilcox was unavailable to return, plans were scrapped, and they moved on to the De Luca’s script, which had Rachel Talalay’s preferred version anyway.
Talalay had worked previously with John Waters as a producer for his films Hairspray and Cry Baby, and used most of the crew from the latter film to make Freddy’s Dead, including bringing Johnny Depp, who makes his return to the series that gave him his first big break in the first entry, onboard for a short cameo (Waters mainstay, Divine, was also slated to make a cameo, but passed away prior to filming). Although the series has strayed a variety of ways in terms of tone and content, Freddy’s Dead emerges as the most cartoonish in how it handles the role of Freddy Krueger, who is seen putting his prey into the realm of video games, or flying around on a broom in the manner of the Wicked Witch of the West. There’s another scene involving Freddy cutting the straps to a parachute and then placing a bed of nails on the ground where the intended victim is sure to land, a la Wile R. Coyote. Some have speculated that John Waters’s influence, as well as the popularity of David Lynch’s TV show “Twin Peaks” at the time, led to the offbeat humor infecting the production. Even if it seems more adolescent, certainly much more willing to entertain teenagers after going for more mature audiences with The Dream Child, it is still quite graphic and gruesome in its delivery of the gore.
The film features some cameos, including Roseanne Barr, her husband (now ex) Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper (who appears as Freddy’s abusive foster father), and a few seconds of Johnny Depp, The Hollywood connection would come out in full force to promote the film, as, in an odd twist, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley would proclaim the day of the film’s release, September 13, 1991, as “Freddy Krueger Day”. As the character is a sadistic psychopath who maims and murders innocent children, Bradley received his share of blowback from citizens’ groups, especially given that the city was seen as having a severe issue with gang violence at the time.
Although the final film in the series, it would prove to be lucrative for New Line Cinema, dominating the box office in its first two weeks of release (albeit in weak competition during September in 1991), and pulling in nearly $35 million on a budget of about $11 million (the 3D gimmick likely helped — it was why I went at the time.) Oddly, New Line gutted the film in home video releases from about 100 minutes to 88 minutes, with a restored version still unavailable, though international releases do have a few of the scenes that were chopped out of the American version.
There’s something to be said when even Robert Englund’s feelings on Freddy’s Dead is that it was the one where the series clearly “jumped the shark.” The film would be the last in the official series, but Freddy would return, albeit in a meta, out-of-this-universe fashion, three years later, with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Despite the title suggesting this was the “Final Nightmare”, Freddy would reappear in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason.
Qwipster’s rating: D-
MPAA Rated: R for horror violence, and language and drug content
Running Time: 89 min.
Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt, Lezlie Deane, Ricky Dean Logan, Breckin Meyer, Yaphet Kotto
Cameo: Tom Arnold, Roseanne Barr, Johnny Depp, Robert Shaye, Alice Cooper
Director: Rachel Talalay
Screenplay: Michael De Luca