Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Undoubtedly the nadir of the Elm Street series, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare follows a therapist (Lisa Zane’s Maggie) as she and several troubled teens head into Freddy’s domain to disprove his existence. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare opens with a series of aggressively dull dream sequences and just gets worse and worse from there, as filmmaker Rachel Talalay places an all-too-prominent emphasis on increasingly surreal (and hopelessly uninvolving) set pieces – with the decidedly underwhelming nature of such moments exacerbated by an unreasonably deliberate pace (ie the first kill doesn’t come until about the 35-minute mark!) and the presence of characters that are uniformly bland and underdeveloped. Talalay’s ill-fated efforts at trying something different within the context of the series’ well-established formula are admirable, certainly, but the filmmaker is simply unable to give the viewer a good reason to care about any of this – which is a shame, really, as Michael De Luca’s screenplay posits the intriguing idea that Freddy’s hometown has essentially banned children (yet the concept, like everything else within the proceedings, inevitably goes nowhere and is left frustratingly unexplored). The larger-than-life, 3D-enhanced finale is as anticlimactic as one might’ve anticipated, and it’s ultimately impossible to label Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare as anything more than a desperate, relentlessly tedious cashgrab that bears little in common with its comparatively masterful progenitor.

* out of ****