FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE
A film review by Ken Johnson
Copyright 1991 Ken Johnson
89 min, R, Horror, 1991 Director: Rachel Talalay Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt, Lezlie Deane, Yaphet Kotto, Roseanne Barr, Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper
Supposedly the last Elm Street film finds Freddy, Englund, in a problem. He has killed off all the kids but one in his hometown of Springfield. This one kid is Freddy's only link to kids everywhere else. The kid escapes the town of Springfield. The kid gets amnesia on the road and when he gets picked up and brought to a children's shelter all he can remember is that his dreams can kill him. All he has with him is some money, some pills to keep him awake, and a newspaper clipping from the town of Springfield. One of the staff at the children's shelter wants to bring the kid to Springfield to see if anything sparks the kid's memory there. The staff member is warned by Kotto, a dream psychologist, that the kid's dreams are dangerous and may, somehow, be linked to the town of Springfield.
FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE is rated R for explicit language and graphic violence. I give the film a three (on a zero to five scale). It has good 3-D effects which were not as good as FRIDAY THE 13TH - PART 3 and CAPTAIN EO (the film that is currently being shown at The Epcot Center building "Journey into Imagination"). FREDDY'S DEAD has reasonably good special effects, but they aren't up to the level of the effects in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD.
The ads for FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE say "See Freddy die in Freddy Vision." These ads should be taken literally, as you find out when you get the 3-D glasses. The 3-D glasses state on them that the glasses should only be put on when the girl in the film puts hers on, so it turns out that only the last fifteen minutes are in 3-D. The 3-D effects, like I said before, are quite good. The one part of the 3-D that I was disappointed in was that the 3-D scheme used was the old red and blue glasses instead of the new polarized technology.
This is the first NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET film not to start the title with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The film is almost a parody of the Elm Street series instead of being a true sequel. Robert Englund puts nice comic touches into the gruesome Freddy, but the film is not nearly as good as the first Nightmare film. Roseanne Barr and her real life husband Tom Arnold have a cameo as a husband and wife team in Springfield and metal rocker Alice Cooper has a cameo as Freddy's father. If you are a fan of the Elm Streets series I urge you to see FREDDY'S DEAD in the theater because the video will probably not be in 3-D. If you are not a fan of the series and are interested in seeing a funny Nightmare movie or you are interested in "Seeing Freddy bite the big one" you might go see it at the theater, or you might wait for it to come to video.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews