Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Director: Rachel Talalay Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt 

So just when you thought the series couldn’t sink any lower after the terrible part 4 and 5, this “final chapter” comes along adding a whole new dimension of idiocy, ludicrousness to the proceedings. It makes me almost want to add an extra star to all the previous episodes in retrospect.Let’s just say that best thing in this film is probably the New Line Cinema Logo at the start. I honestly cannot find a single redeeming feature aside from some pointless cameos, including one from Johnny Deep but let’s be honest, this is definite the weakest in the series and possibly the worst film I’ve seen in the last few years (I was almost tempted to give it zero stars!).

It’s badly directed, shoddily paced and edited, lacks of any tension or ideas: it’s not funny (all the laughs are at the film) and definitely not scary: by now Freddy’s become a joke within a joke, except that he’s not even funny, looking more like Wile e Coyote than a scary boogieman. The special effects are pedestrian to say the list and not just for the standards of today. I remember thinking that they were terrible even back then. The story (if we can call it such) is very very weak, giving Freddy some lame backstory which nobody really needed and the ending is so badly conceived and staged that it’s probably not just one of the most embarrassing moments not just in the whole franchise, but in horror films in general. It was supposed to be “death” for which we had been waiting for 6 films, but when it actually happens, it comes across so abruptly and it passes by so quickly that it’s not just embarrassingly bad, but a real insult to all the fans who’ve been there from the start.

To try to make it more interesting they added some badly done 3D to last reel (about 15 minutes or so), which I vividly remember looking just as bad as it looks on the DVD today, even in 1991 on the big screen).

Over the credits they play a montage of some of the best bits from the previous films, which really only contribute to make you wish you were watching any of those instead.