Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare – A Movie A Day #91
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare – A Movie A Day #91
This movie. Oh man. What do I say about Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare?
Well, for one thing, I’ll be saying a lot about this movie on the podcast I do (called The Last Theater). My best friend Joey and I watched this in preparation for that show. The show will go up sometime in April, and it’s part of a retrospective we’re doing on the entire A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Freddy’s Dead, as the sixth movie in the series, will be episode number six out of ten. So, check though out for some lengthy thoughts, but here are a few brief thoughts that may or may not make it onto the episode.
Joey and I had both seen Freddy’s Dead before, and neither of us had super great thoughts about it. I think Joey thought a lot better of it than I did though. I mostly remembered the cameos, one of the death scenes, and the horrendous 3-D section of the movie. I can usually take or leave 3-D, even in modern movies. It works well for blockbusters like Star Wars or a lot of big comic book movies, but for the most part, I have no preference about watching something in 3-D or not. Thankfully the blu-ray release of Freddy’s Dead that we each have doesn’t have 3-D capability, but unfortunately, the filmmakers decided to be extremely obnoxious about how they incorporated the 3-D effects into the movie. I won’t go into detail here (because this will be a teaser to go listen to The Last Theater), but yeah, I hate the 3-D in this movie. This is the movie I cite as an example every time I talk about terrible uses of the third dimension. This and the yo-yo from Friday the 13th Part 3. But at least Friday 3 had a fun/dumb theme song.
Freddy’s Dead is not very good. There are fun parts to it, and Robert Englund is great as always, but it leans hard into the campiness that had grown throughout the series. It definitely had potential with the basic story, and I think that’s what makes it even more frustrating for me. Freddy’s Dead could have been really scary, but it just lets me down at every turn. But hey, at least it was fun watching it with Joey on his birthday.
Is it my least favorite in the franchise? I don’t know. I guess you’ll have to listen to episode 10 of out Nightmare franchise retrospective over at The Last Theater. That will be our wrap-up episode where we talk about the series as a whole and rank the movies in order of preference.