"Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare" is a guilty pleasure for me considering how many people hate it. It's silly, stupid and more self-parodic than it should have been, but it has a looseness and a fast pace that distinguishes it from most horror fare.
This time, pizza-faced, maniacal Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is back in Springwood, Ohio, looking for some fresh blood after killing off all the Elm Street kids and being sent back to his mother's womb by the formidable Alice in "Elm Street 5."
The main plot is about a kid suffering from amnesia who comes to believe that Freddy is his father. How he came to that realization, I am not sure! Enter a teen psychiatrist/counselor (the sullen Lisa Zane), who is the only one that listens to this seemingly creepy kid. She follows him to Springwood to find that the town has turned into a loony bin where parents are all left without any children or teenagers to care for (Freddy wiped them all out). Eventually, this psychiatrist discovers that she is Freddy's daughter, and he uses her to get to the kids at a youth shelter. Only a fellow psychiatrist and dream expert (Yaphet Kotto) can help her with her traumatic emotions.
"Freddy's Dead" is more funny than scary, but there are too many half-hearted attempts at humor (watch for the cumbersome cameos by Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr), and there are mostly bloodless performances by a largely emaciated cast, but it is always watchable. There are also subtle themes of incest, child abuse, neglect, and adoption, which is intriguing, to say the least, for a film of this type. The 3-D finale is well-done, as we are taken on a thrilling trip through Freddy's twisted brain. Be sure to look out for a drooling Alice Cooper as Freddy's father! Worthwile time-filler...but beware Freddy fans, hardly scary!
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