Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1990) - "They saved the best till last!".
No it wasn't and no they didn't.
In the DVD interviews even newly-promoted director Rachel Talalay and franchise producer Robert Shaye struggled vainly to say good things about this ill-conceived turkey. On the upside, we get all-too-brief cameos from Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold, plus Alice Cooper as Freddy's abusive step-dad. However, we also have to step in roughly eighty minutes of quality quicksand around them.
The attempt to satirise Freddy's influence on pop culture means we get Breckin Meyer absorbed into an 8-bit video game and then spat out into imitating gaming moves in the real world. Watching him pogo-ing up the stairs and striding about like a bad Streetfighter graphic is utterly cringeworthy. Krueger, the shadowy nemesis of the first film, has now become a fully-lit (and overexposed in screen time) pantomime baddie with sub-Butlin's one-liners.
And for bad measure, who's idea was it to saddle the production with a climactic ten minutes of clunky 3D footage? Audiences had to guess at when to put the glasses on based on when the final girl did, which then treated them to clumsily thrust items and flying heads that are an unsubtle 'homage' to Evil Dead 2. Only Wes Craven would dare clamp crocodile clips to this series to re-activate it - and fortunately he did...
In the DVD interviews even newly-promoted director Rachel Talalay and franchise producer Robert Shaye struggled vainly to say good things about this ill-conceived turkey. On the upside, we get all-too-brief cameos from Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold, plus Alice Cooper as Freddy's abusive step-dad. However, we also have to step in roughly eighty minutes of quality quicksand around them.
The attempt to satirise Freddy's influence on pop culture means we get Breckin Meyer absorbed into an 8-bit video game and then spat out into imitating gaming moves in the real world. Watching him pogo-ing up the stairs and striding about like a bad Streetfighter graphic is utterly cringeworthy. Krueger, the shadowy nemesis of the first film, has now become a fully-lit (and overexposed in screen time) pantomime baddie with sub-Butlin's one-liners.
And for bad measure, who's idea was it to saddle the production with a climactic ten minutes of clunky 3D footage? Audiences had to guess at when to put the glasses on based on when the final girl did, which then treated them to clumsily thrust items and flying heads that are an unsubtle 'homage' to Evil Dead 2. Only Wes Craven would dare clamp crocodile clips to this series to re-activate it - and fortunately he did...
