Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Huffing and puffing, the screenwriters lumberingly arrive at the sixth (!) film of the series, but can’t come up with anything more compelling than completing the Elm Street maniac’s family album, and so, after dragging his mother the nun into it, they opt to trot out his wife and daughter as well.

The result is a shaky, frenzied story populated by poorly written characters and crammed with weird ideas that seem to have been conceived only to confuse the situation. We’ve got Freddy’s new friends in the guise of fiery dream demons (“The dream people, the ones that gave me this job“), along with other incongruous complications that are barely fleshed out (the main one being the fact that some of the boogeyman’s victims get erased from survivors’ memories), and a maze of ridiculous flashbacks. Given all that, making it to the end of a muddled mess like this without getting exasperated – or dropping off to sleep – is a heroic undertaking indeed.

They’re running on storytelling fumes as it were, with every new gimmick leading to inevitable contradictions and plot holes, making it high time to take stock of the fact that every logical foundation of the story has collapsed, and undisciplined, anarchic storytelling has gotten the upper hand over common sense (Krueger basically admits as much himself when he struggles to justify his unprecedented change of venue by declaring: “Every town has an Elm Street” – In other words, “Screw the rules of the game, I’m going to do what I want, where I want, when I want, and how I want!”).

For its theatrical release, the film was promoted by a bombastic ad campaign highlighting the use of 3D (specifically, the special glasses were necessary to fully appreciate the climax), a gimmick as old as the hills that the producers latched onto hoping to sell a few extra tickets. Rachel Talalay – one of the producers of a couple of the franchise’s earlier installments – makes a feeble directing debut with a film that’s the undisputed weakest link of the entire series.

We’ll have to wait three years for Wes Craven’s “New Nightmare” (1994).