MY CALL: If you are working your way through the Freddy movies for the first time, this may be the first movie you regret. Sorry. I love NOES 1-5 to varying degrees—but no love remains for this ‘part 6’ offense. MOVIES LIKE Freddy’s Dead: First off, you should first see the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master (1988) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)—parts 3-5 of which form one cohesive story arc.
Franchise Timeline SIDEBAR: After the excellent story arc and mythology-building of NOES 3-5, we seem to have thrown away all that has been edified before as if this was a sequel to the 1984 original with the supposition that more dream demon terror plagued Springwood from 1985-1990.
Where or when did this movie go wrong? My guess is that it started as early as the writing and pre-production. And since this was director Rachel Talalay’s (Ghost in the Machine, Tank Girl, A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting) first film—and she’d go on to direct better projects—I assume she was grateful for the job and just did as she was told. Many times watching this I had the feeling I was watching a stale TV movie, and not the 5th sequel of a tremendously successful franchise. Perhaps a consequence of the video era; or maybe everyone on board just got lazy. Because it’s not just the film quality. The scoring, editing and dialogue likewise feel notably inferior, and our teen protagonists feel randomly thrown in our lap in such a way that we’re far less invested in them (if at all). I never really felt the loss when one of them would die. Sorry to say it, but this reminded me of the quality and main characters of some of the later trash can Children of the Corn sequels… like CotC5 kinda’ bad!
Returning to Springwood with his therapist (Lisa Zane; The Nurse) in hopes of solving his strange case of amnesia, John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) is accompanied by three more troubled teens (incl. Breckin Meyer; Creepshow, Stag Night, The Craft) to the cursed town where it all began. Springwood is literally devoid of children and populated with bizarrely insane adults. Like, weirdly insane. It’s cartoonishly surreal, a bit just plain dumb and, frankly, would make more sense if this distorted perception of reality was in Freddy’s dream world. But it’s not! The journey leads us into an uninteresting investigation into just how John Doe may be tied to Freddy’s past.
The antics we all love in these movies have grown foul and moldy. Seeing Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund; Dead & Buried, Killer Tongue, A Nightmare on Elm Street 1-5, Galaxy of Terror, Hatchet II, The Phantom of the Opera) flying on a broom like the Wicked Witch is the kind of silly we’ve now come to expect from the franchise. But the neat novelty starts and ends there. And what we all showed up for, the death scenes… not good. The Q-tip gag will make you wince, and the monstrous hearing aid death is stupidly funny. But the overall scenes didn’t feel developed enough and certainly not in comparison to the movie’s predecessors. These death scenes didn’t build up—they were brief and squandered and lazy. The “Super Freddy” videogame sequence is just plain weak. It aged very poorly, to be fair. Nowadays it just appears aggravatingly dumb. Even Freddy’s dialogue is so crass… even for Freddy. Even minor roles and cameos by Yaphet Kotto (Alien, The Running Man, The Puppet Masters), Roseanne Barr (She-Devil) and Tom Arnold (Body Bags, True Lies) couldn’t save many scenes.
This sequel reveals a bit about Fred Krueger’s home and family life when he was alive. It’s not so interesting, provocative or exploratory as in the previous sequels, nor does it build to anything satisfying into Freddy’s mythology. The past sequels (NOES 3-5) served audiences thoughtful dives into Freddy’s origins, pathos and dual-world existence. But not this sequel, which has al the cohesiveness of a homework assignment slapped together ten minutes before the homeroom bell.
The feeling I get is that no one ever put any thoughtful work into this and, for what was thrown together, this movie seems to think that it’s clever when it never actually is. And that’s just sad. Basically every scene in this movie is weak. This is truly the only Freddy movie I wouldn’t be excited to see again. But I’m sure my next franchise review will taunt me back one day yet again, as it has now.
I’ll go so far as to call this the one truly bad Freddy movie. It may also be the only franchise installment I seem to like less with each viewing and the more I think about it. Oof!