Haha, hey, remember when I wrote about how bad Elm Street 4 was? I was so naive back then…
From literally the opening frame, Freddy’s Dead signals that it has no idea what it’s doing. We see a computer screen with an outline of the United States, and a message types across the screen that it’s ten years from “now”, all but one of the kids from Freddy’s hometown have been killed, and the adults have all gone crazy. Why the time jump? No idea. Why not continue the story of Alice that you worked so hard to establish over the past two movies? No idea. Why is this exposition delivered on a Commadore 64 versus literally any other way? Again, these are not questions that will ever be answered, but it isn’t a good sign when you are left scratching your head before the first character ever appears on screen.
I won’t attempt to outline the plot here, because I don’t want to put you in the position of having to consider it for longer than the filmmakers obviously did. Needless to say, we get introduced to a group of teenagers and several of them are killed in ways that are ironically related to their single identifiable character trait. Unfortunately, the kills here don’t really land in the way that some of the prior films have managed. This is particularly true for Spencer, the stoner teen of the group. Freddy offs Spencer in a labored video game sequence that was clearly made by people that have never played or even seen an actual video game in action, instead perhaps gleaning their understanding from a vague description of the 1989 Fred Savage vehicle, The Wizard. What the sequence lacks in accuracy or scariness, it more than makes up for in mind-numbing length. In fact all of the elaborate set pieces seem to last forever, leaving precious little time to try and make sense of the plot. The pinnacle of the film’s stupidity, though, has to be the final 3D sequence. Now, bad 3D had long been the last refuge of lame horror films to try and entice kids to cough up their dough in exchange for a ticket, but none of them had yet had the bright idea to give the main character 3D glasses and show the crappy FX through their point of view. You know, even though they already see things in 3D. Because that’s how vision works. You don’t need the glasses if you aren’t the one watching on a movie screen. Anyway, we’re talking Jaws 3D levels of badness here.
Clearly there is no reason for anyone to ever watch this movie, and yet… there’s no real reason not to watch it either. If you are the type of person into “so bad its good” type of entertainment, this can be a fun one to pick apart. The Nightmare series also has a certain floor that makes it more engaging than similarly terrible horror films of other stripes. There is something about the classic iconography (Freddy’s house, the red and green stripes, the red tricycle) and Robert Englund’s fully committed performances that resonate even when everything else is in shambles. You can also count on real effort put into the death sequences, even as the budget shrank in the later years. Nothing puts a damper on a cheesy horror viewing experience like having to settle for a bunch of lame stabbings or off-screen deaths. Sure, Freddy’s Dead doesn’t boast any hall-of-famers like part 5’s motorcycle sequence or part 4’s cockroach transformation, but literally all of the creative effort behind the film went into the handful of deaths. And so, we leave Freddy for another year, but I still have the first two films that I can tackle in the future, plus maybe his eventual encounter with Jason Voorhees. Until then, I’ll just reflect on how even the dregs of the Nightmare franchise hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for the greatest horror icon of all time.
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