Nightmare Retrospective: The Final Nightmare

Nightmare Retrospective | #6 | Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

All great franchises have to end someday, and though A Nightmare On Elm Street's longer-than-normal life was supernaturally prolonged by capitalism, it finally came to a close in 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Of course, there were still three more movies in the Nightmare franchise afterwards - one of them even being a direct sequel to this one - but we're going to ignore those for now. The Final Nightmare is the grand conclusion to the franchise - or so it wants to be.

I can't remember the last time I saw a movie this bad. I'm not even sure how to begin talking about it, because every single level of its production is miserably flawed and horrifically misguided at best. At first I kind of liked it in a "so bad it's good" way, but even that wore off about a half hour in, and the film just became obnoxious to watch.

The Final Nightmare, despite seeming to bill itself as a conclusion to the franchise, actually has little to do with the first five in terms of style, tone and story. It seems to take place in the same universe, but so much time has passed that we aren't sure what happened to characters like Alice and Jacob from the previous films. It follows an unnamed protagonist - given the name John Doe, as he cannot remember his true name - who seems to have escaped the town of Springfield some ten years into the future, after all of the other children in town have been murdered by Freddy, leaving the adults in a state of permanent psychosis. Nobody outside of the town seems to know anything about this, which is strange because I feel like if an entire town's population of children went missing and it wasn't because of the government than it would be all over the news.

He finds himself in a facility for at risk youth, with no memory of his past, save for the threat of Freddy who seems to be using him for... something. He meets up with a ragtag group of characters; a trio of troubled youth who are probably the more interesting characters in this story despite being essentially just plot fodder for Freddy to pick off, a bland psychiatrist and an eccentric dream therapist who has no other purpose except to be a conduit through which the plot moves forward in the later acts. All of them except the dream therapist eventually travel back to Springfield in search of answers.

Right away, The Final Nightmare introduces a new element to Freddy's backstory that takes so much of the mystique away; Freddy has a long lost child. There's actually something terrifying about the fact that a man so evil could have once had a normal family life, but that's never explored. Instead, it's there to provide an excuse for the film to try to be somewhat more like the atmospheric mystery story of the original (which it promptly ruins with some of the most ridiculous setpieces of the franchise and a complete 180 turn in tone halfway through) as well as to provide motivation for Freddy; he was actually a family man, but after his child caught him murdering his wife and told other people, they were taken from him, and he went on a murdering rampage in revenge. It's unclear exactly what they were trying to go for here; it's far too shallow of a film to be making any commentary about patriarchal aggression here, but it also doesn't make Freddy any more sympathetic like it seems to be trying to, especially since it's very clear at this point that he's just killing people for fun. It's just more unnecessary layers to bog down an already bloated mythology.

I'm going to stop focusing on the plot, because after that point it just devolves into meaningless nonsense concluding with Freddy getting a pipe bomb stuck in his chest and exploding, then the credits music suggesting that maybe he's not actually dead after all, thus ruining the one saving grace this film had in finally bringing this franchise to a merciful end. The plot seems to start off trying to be a subdued, Twin Peaks style mystery (they even reference Twin Peaks at one point), but it's immediately sabotaged by an opening scene that showcases someone trapped in a house falling out of the sky while Freddy flies by on a broomstick wearing a witch hat yelling "I'll get you my pretty! And your little soul too!" Freddy's one liners get so bad in this film that it feels less like a horror movie and more like a particularly sadistic stand up comedy special. He literally looks into the camera and smirks a few times. Robert Englund seems to be having a blast here, and that's good, because I certainly wasn't.

The kills are poorly paced, being dragged out for far too long, and they're so ridiculous that they stop even being funny and just get annoying - such as the extended scene where Freddy plays a video game in which a character has been trapped, and then we see that character bouncing around the house like a real video game character while everyone just kind of watches. I had to pause the movie at several points such as this one just so I could process what I was seeing.

The plot itself makes no sense, continuously abandoning threads in favor of new twists that do nothing but make it more complicated than it needs to be. The characters are mostly one note and the acting is utterly atrocious, and the whole thing is coated in a layer of primitive, early 90's CGI. The style of the film is so unbearably 90's that it's dated from the moment the film starts; with obnoxious title effects, overly-dynamic camerawork, rapid fire editing that ruins what little atmosphere there is left and a heaping helping of alternative rock music that does not even remotely fit the tone of the series. It would have been one thing for them to take the horror of Freddy Krueger and reimagine him to fit the anxieties of the 90's rather than the 80's, but all they really do to update him here is to smother a character who is otherwise a product of the 80's in an obnoxiously 90's style. It doesn't even slightly work.

The final nail in the coffin comes about an hour into the film. This was New Line Cinema's first foray into primitive early 90's 3D technology, and as such, 3D glasses become an actual plot point. In their final plan to drag Freddy out of the nightmare to kill him in the real world, a character puts on 3D glasses and is allowed to see something special about the dream - though what exactly that is we aren't really told, because this is just a marketing gimmick. The rest of the film is saturated with hamfisted close up shots. If you've seen an older 3D movie before, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The Final Nightmare is such a gigantic trainwreck of a film that I'm not even sure I really did it justice here. I just don't really know how to talk about it without exploding. For all it's ridiculousness it's not even particularly entertaining to watch; it's just embarassing. For a film that was supposed to end the franchise with a bang, it resembles more of a wet fart than anything else.