1991
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Michael De Luca and Rachel Talalay
By 1991 A Nightmare On Elm Street and its progeny had done their job for New Line Cinema, their success over the previous seven years having built the upstart into something like a real Hollywood studio—but all good things must come to an end. The slasher film—to which the Nightmares belong mostly just by tradition, or so I've argued, but a subgenre that nevertheless gained another few years of life thanks to Wes Craven's 1984 film—was not to outlast the end of the decade. To wit: 1989's The Dream Child, the previous entry in this most lucrative of slasher franchises, had underperformed to a frightening degree. Over at Paramount, they'd suffered such a flop with Jason Takes Manhattan that they sold off the Friday the 13th franchise. There must have remained some ambivalence at New Line, though, since they're the ones who bought it.
Still, there was a general sense that this goopy, grody thing had run its course, and it was decided, by Robert Shaye and the other principals, that it was time to bring some, shall we say, finality to the depredations of their beloved icon, though hopefully reaping one last windfall. This part worked: earning $35 million, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was the third-highest grosser of the series.
It fucking stinks, but let's deal with that in due course. For now, a little bugbear of mine about that title: it's the done thing to sneer "oh, it's final, huh?", and that just isn't very fair. Has it not kept its promise all these years? Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter had its "finality" contravened by A New Beginning before fifty weeks had elapsed. But this truly is the end of the Nightmares, in the sense of its classical canon: New Nightmare doesn't count for obvious reasons; and I'm not eager to count Freddy vs. Jason when that's ultimately a gimmick (plus it didn't come out for over a decade, so not exactly an immediate reversal, in any case); and then they (and not even this "they," but New Line's successor-in-interest, Warner Bros.) remade the first Nightmare, but it was 2010, and it was the law. This really is it, then. Freddy is dead.
If it doesn't live up to the ambitions implied by this, let's concede that it does kind of try to be a capstone to a well-liked horror series, wrestling with its legacy at the same time it wants to end it. But there's something kind of off-putting, immediately, about who made Freddy's Dead, its director and scenarist Rachel Talalay and its screenwriter Michael De Luca, which is to say, this Final Nightmare was spearheaded by New Line's business personnel. It's been made relatively clear that Talalay didn't even want to direct a Nightmare movie, specifically, as much as she just wanted to direct a movie (and was ready to throw Shaye's 1990 directorial debut Book of Love in his face if he hadn't let her). But then, she had been with the series since its inception (even the one without her name on it, The Dream Child, though she actually still got a "thanks," was produced by her husband), so surely it was hers to kill as much as anybody's. If you've seen Freddy's Dead, you wouldn't need to actually hear Talalay tell you that everyone involved had gotten burned out on the Nightmares, but even so, it's hard to dismiss the passion (or at least the personality) of anyone who actually wanted to make Tank Girl. De Luca, for his part, had scabbed on The Dream Master, which is (sort of) a point in his favor, and while his screenwriting career is very compact, he went on to write no less than In the Mouth of Madness, something that you can (again, sort of) even see start to take shape right here. It's also not like New Line hadn't sought any other creative input (tantalizingly, Peter Jackson wrote a treatment); but nothing met Talalay's approval, so she put the mailroom clerk on it.
Even if you didn't recognize any of these names, though, I think the impression you'd get from Freddy's Dead itself would still be one of obligation, to do honor to the thing that made their careers, a duty that its principals have embraced while, on some level, still resenting it. It's a strange, unwelcome vibe for any movie, of a company putting all the chairs on the tables and turning out all the lights at the end of a long day, satisfied with a job (mostly) well done, but still doing it haphazardly, even begrudgingly, in their sheer exhaustion, while also not realizing that this is, like, a metaphor, and "closing the store" wasn't actually required. (If you didn't notice, Freddy did die in all the last three films.) Of the last two "main" Nightmares, then, we can recognize that The Dream Child is a bad movie that could have been good, but wasn't, because it lacked imagination and courage. Freddy's Dead is a bad movie because it doesn't care anymore whether it's good or not.
It doesn't help that Talalay is directing her first movie, and it's the least polished of the series—yet the most expensive, thanks to the unaccountable budget creep of the late Nightmares, so that Freddy's Dead looks like it cost half as much as The Dream Master at nearly twice the price—but while I'm not going to go on about it, and this is not at all the mode of Talalay's movie, and it's still more "professional" than about half the Fridays were, it says something that one of its very first shots involves an actual on-camera error, with a gaffer or somebody only belatedly remembering to turn on a light. But what is the mode of Freddy's Dead is that a lot of the effects are subpar, or were ill-conceived, and Talalay is directing it in a sparer, more documentarian, and less expressionistic style, further abetted by cinematographer Declan Quinn who's effecting some chunky, dingily-overlit photography, such as you could defend, given that the major settings are a beleaguered group home and a dead suburb. But they're already a little overcooked in their grunginess by production designer C.J. Strawn, and altogether it's not the most agreeable departure from Nightmare's slick aesthetic universe. Then again, the plot is all about casting our eyes to new horizons. Kind of like Jason Takes Manhattan.
But we have our Final Nightmare, and it does start pretty well—or not, depending on how you feel about the franchise's veer towards embodying the belligerent tastelessness of its villain, because the very first thing we get is a pair of epigraphs, the first a Nietzsche quote regarding dreams (I cannot say how disingenuous), while the second comes courtesy Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), namely his immortal declaration upon the subject of sleep, "Welcome to prime time, bitch." Following that, we get a title card over a poorly-drawn map of the United States of America made, I would guess, on Talalay's Macintosh Classic (it's quite worrisome, in that it feels like the beginning of a made-on-a-buck-fifty Mad Max knock-off, and it won't be the last worrisome computer-assisted aspect of this movie), which indicates Freddy's haunts in Springwood, Ohio. We have been thrown forward to the year 2001—"ten years from now," anyway—and in the twelve years between "ten years from now" and The Dream Child, Freddy has returned, and he's won. Every child in Springwood has met their death at his clawed hand. The adults have gone psychotic. What happened to Alice? Don't worry about it. It does not wrestle with the franchise's legacy competently.
But it's something of a cool idea. There is, in fact, one teenaged survivor, a lad we'll only ever know as "John Doe" (Shon Greenblatt). Freddy torments him as per usual, with a rather elaborate and good dream-within-a-dream, which manages, inter alia, that neat riff on the flying house from The Wizard of Oz (it'd be neater still if Englund had not been asked to paraphrase a line from it, but so it goes, and I still approve). However, Freddy's actual goal was always just to send him into headlong flight out of Springwood, essentially as bait. John loses his memory thanks to a convenient head injury, and, slapped with his anonymous name, gets himself shipped off to a group home for wayward youths in what very strongly appears to be "the adjoining muncipality," though since every one of its inhabitants also seems to have barely heard of "Springwood," the town where presumably hundreds or even thousands of children have died in the last decade, I'm not entirely certain he's even still in America. (You see what I mean when I say In the Mouth of Madness represents an improvement on this idea, and while there's some vague implications that this could be the case, just having it so that Springwood fell out of reality completely would sure address this semi-major quibble.)
At the home, we meet three of its residents: Carlos (Ricky Dean Lohan), rendered partially deaf at the hands of his abusive mother; Spencer (Breckin Meyer), a stoner firebug who, annoyingly, never actually burns anything bigger than a spliff; and Tracy (Lezlie Deane), a survivor of incest who has responded by learning the martial arts, though her performer has manifestly not. We also meet two of its employees, therapists Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane) and the mononymic Doc (Yaphet Kotto), the latter of whom specializes in dream lore, the former of whom has a recurring dream about a little girl with red ribbons in her blonde hair, due to what was either indifferent casting or a crude, intentional misdirect. Turns out John has had that same dream, prompting Maggie to take him back to Springwood to get to the bottom of this, and it'll turn out that Carlos, Spencer, and Tracy were hiding in the back of the van being really quiet during the long ride, or possibly a ride so short they could've walked. This, unfortunately, is all to Freddy's design: his seed has gotten away from him, you see—it's one of these six (probably not Doc), and he wants the child he had in life back, so that he can escape the mystical bounds of Springwood and find his new Elm Street. As an aside, I was wrong when I said I thought that the Nightmare sequels didn't have a special attachment to 1428 Elm Street, because, for whatever damned reason, they sure do.
For a while, there's a sense we're always this close to getting on track. It's contrived, and really kind of full-on stupid, but there are likeable features. It'll consistently do something really good (sometimes even ingenious), before retrenching immediately back into something bad, sometimes within the same scene, sometimes even within the same shot. Talalay determined it should be more comedic than before—it's alarming that anybody thought The Dream Child was "too serious"—and that occasionally works, mostly on behalf of Freddy himself. What it means for our teens and our Final Therapist, however, is that we get a whole gaggle of simultaneously glib and stilted anti-performances, where at almost no point do any of them pretend to treat things like "nightmare death" with the gravity those things would seem to demand, and at many points they're barely pretending they don't know they're in a movie. Zane is the last to succumb, but when she gets there, she gets there, and until then, she's unrelentingly flat. Greenblatt has the best of it, I guess, given that John's extensive (if unremembered) experience with Freddy means that it's not wholly inappropriate for him to respond with as much annoyance as animal terror, but nobody here is affirmatively good, or even affirmatively okay.
Englund, on the other hand, is only giving his second-worst performance, though he does have more wiggle room; he's better than in The Dream Child, by virtue of nobody holding a gun to his head while he yelled random pun-like phrases into a microphone for later incorporation. (Well... they're not random.) So it's less embarrassing even if the makeup is still below franchise standards, Talalay is lighting him no more thoughtfully, and Freddy still laughs at his own jokes too much. The nightmare sequences themselves, though, are how you know the movie isn't going to get itself on track. They start strong. Towards the middle Talalay even delivers a genuine standout, deploying some clever subjective sound design against poor deaf Carlos, the conceit of it involving Freddy turning his hearing aid into a body horror bug-monster and then using his newfound keen senses to destroy him (though the best part is Englund simply being a cruel jackass behind his victim, while neither we nor Carlos can hear him). Even Quinn's lighting gets properly nasty and shadowed for this sequence.
Thus I was stoked when stoner Spencer gets sucked into televisual psychedelia preceded by a Johnny Depp cameo, for I had forgotten the legend of Freddy's Power Glove, and the many specifically Nintendo-based puns that form the actual meat of Spencer's sequence, a parody of a video game that doesn't resemble anything, formally-speaking, except the cheap cel animation it is. This is what I mean by good and bad sloshing around together: there's good ideas here executed well (the "blood-filled TV" is derivative, but openly so, and great), good ideas executed poorly (hell, is Freddy having a Power Glove funny if Freddy doesn't say "Power Glove"?), and just plain bad ideas, between which we—literally, I suppose—bounce. (To mention it somewhere, I do also like Carlos's "infinite map" dream when they get lost, possibly the most charmingly banal nightmare of the whole series.) At least Talalay and De Luca understand the fantasy horror elements (though considering how small our cast is, maybe not so many of them needed to survive), and I can appreciate their approach to Freddy's villainy; this time, he's really just a Warner Bros.-style cartoon, not even above occasionally breaking the fourth wall, and Freddy's turn to the camera where he exhaustedly pushes a bed of spikes under a falling victim, in more-or-less the same shot scale and the same framing that such a cartoon would use, is, I thought (though reasonable minds may differ), pretty funny.
But bad predominates over the potentially good, and not just in the nightmare setpieces: for instance, we have Springwood, a Children of Men-type deal, if Children of Men sucked, where everyone is crazy in ways you can't take seriously, and which prompt questions about how they manage to feed themselves. Meanwhile, there's a whole mythology backing Freddy now, three dream demons who empower him; I decided to keep an open mind about that because, well, why not? It could've been cosmic. I didn't need to, because despite being heavily foreshadowed as the secret ultimate adversary (indeed, probably even the means to Freddy's end), they don't just don't matter, they're only even in the movie to the extent that Shaye, apparently a madman, had insisted on a climax in 3-D (in 1991?!), and hence the movie needed some shockingly awful CGI fire tadpoles swimming towards the camera.
If you've ever heard Talalay talk about her film, you know she thinks it's lousy, too. But where we do, I'm afraid, reach "worst of the six" is the part that was the most her own creation. So: if you were to recall that I mentioned that Freddy's Dead tries to wrestle with the Nightmare legacy, you would suddenly realize not much of what I've so far described does that—really just the terrible idea of a Krueger offspring. That's not remotely the end of it: Talalay elected, out of some profound misunderstanding of her own franchise, or desperation for some new angle by which to frame her villain, to dive deeply into Fred Krueger, the human man who once lived. She gives him a wife, in addition to a child; she gives him, forgive her, a childhood of his own. She gives him an abusive foster father (Alice Cooper, you fanboy). She gives him peers who teased him for being "[the bastard] son of a hundred maniacs." We understand Freddy now. And I don't want to. There have been some successful domestications of slasher villains (I'm thinking of Rob Zombie's Michael Myers), but let's be clear, this is never a movie "about Fred Krueger," it's a formulaic Nightmare movie re-doing Dream Warriors for the third time. Even if it were, there are few villains ever conceived that have benefited less from backstory than Freddy. Literally every single detail we've ever been given makes him and his movies worse, a process that started even in Craven's own Nightmare, when he couldn't be satisfied with the monster under the bed.
Maybe she thought she was honoring Craven's rotten heart of suburbia, perhaps even correcting for the previous films' various Kruegers, whether that be "the pedophile let off by the liberals," "the gay hobo who lives in the coal plant," or "the concentrated genetic essence of rape"—and let's keep it between ourselves, please, that this series is secretly slightly politically fucked, because there are folks who would just never stop being tedious about it—but the way to correct for that has been to ignore it, permitting Freddy to be nothing but the trickster god of nightmares, and the only film to have completely understood that was, of course, The Dream Master, the one that didn't actually have a screenplay. Funny thing to think about. And then there's the finale: here, our god of nightmares dies in a storage partition in an institutional basement, the victim of quotidian bludgeoning and stabbing, because pulling Freddy into the material plane, the thing that explicitly did not work in A Nightmare On Elm Street, and, retcons aside, the thing that more-or-less explicitly got Nancy Thompson killed? Well, apparently, it works now.
Yeah, Freddy's dead, all right.
Score: 4/10
Musings on 'Freddy's Dead':
ReplyDelete(a) To revisit this is to go back to a time before Star Wars Episode I, when the idea of seeing Freddy Krueger's past actually seemed like a really neat idea, and man isn't it about time they actually, like, *did* something with this character six movies in? We were so innocent.
(b) This movie is a high-concept sci-fi/fantasy comedy because it's the early 90s and horror was completely fucking dead. Everything horror-related was "actually" a psychological thriller, or a gothic thriller, or a horror comedy, or a dark comedy, or a "thrillomedy" (thanks Arachnophobia). If you look at just about any horror-ish movie's press kit video from the time, odds are it starts with one of the filmmakers proclaiming, "This is not a horror movie..."
(c) It's funny that you and I seemed to have taken the end of the first Elm Street in completely opposite ways: for me it was the "I take back the energy I gave you, you are nothing" bit that was proven to be merely a temporary measure, since it looked to have been overruled in the very next scene, and that pulling Freddy into the real world and killing him there only didn't work because Nancy was actually still in a dream when she tried it. I remember being pleasantly surprised that they actually killed Freddy in a way outlined in the original and not with, say, some mystical bullshit dagger or something. (Amusingly, 'Freddy Vs. Jason' double-downs on BOTH of these concepts while simultaneously kind of undermining them, though I don't really mind).
(c) They used to play this a lot on BET for reasons I've never figured out. Somehow the "greatest hits" montage made it through uncensored (the gore at least), I suppose because it's in a context where it's somewhat removed and only "scenes from a movie," or maybe they just forgot to censor the end credits...
(d) I remember the run-up to this movie feeling like an event, and indeed got the impression it was a pretty big hit and never got any hint that there was a fan backlash. I wonder if I just missed it (not internet, etc.) or if people soured on it retroactively. Certainly the next Jason and Michael Myers entries took much inspiration from this one.
(e) While I dislike having Freddy being *this* cartoonish, it does make me want to see an early 90s horror flick starring a "killer cartoon" villain that can come out of and pull people into his animated world via TV or movie screens. A horror Roger Rabbit, basically.
(f) While I hate that John Doe is exclusively a red herring (as far as I recall), I do give them props for giving a character amnesia and never curing them of it, lol!
Adding to point (b), it's sorta nuts how the myth behind 'Scream' (that it was an ironic parody of horror movies distancing itself from the genre) gets it all backwards: it was a refreshingly sincere, genuine horror film going against the contemporary trend of horror meekly disavowing itself.
DeleteRe: Freddy, maybe if there was a serious attempt to demonstrate that his "quotidian" horror is even more nauseating than his jolly cosmic horror, it "works better," but I still don't think it'd have been a good idea. (As for "quotidian," I'm gonna repeat myself that "child predator who kills twenty kids in what would have to be a span of one or two years in the same neighborhood" isn't *actually* quotidian, it would be kind of ridiculous.)
DeleteRe: horror in the 90s, it does sort of vanish, doesn't it? I still think of the early part of the decade as more productive than it seems, because by the same process horror winds up being part of, like, everything--from the blatant like Army of Darkness or Arachnophobia, to the still-pretty-obvious things like Terminator 2 or Batman Returns, to, like, Aladdin. I do kind of think of Bram Stoker's Dracula as "the last 80s horror movie," though by the same token you'd think I'd have to forward that all the way to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But I don't think the impression is wrong, in the 1980s you couldn't go a year without two or three or more really stand-out (and even with something like Ghostbusters, still pretty much balls-out) horror flicks.
Re: fan backlash, I wish there were a way to easily know what the actual fan response to some of these things was. It's fairly clear in a case like Jason Goes To Hell, and New Line personnel are open about Freddy's Revenge not being well-liked at the time, but at what point does the reputation of, e.g., big hits like F13 Part III or The Dream Master curdle into contempt for horror fans? There's certainly no indication in the latter case that New Line believed that their movie was anything besides well-received from their statements from the 90s. (And I've found that New Line people, especially Shaye and Talalay, are unusually straight-shooting. They never say "this was trash" but Talalay will say things akin to "I know I should be saying it was great, but [trails off]" about, for instance, the end of Freddy's Dead.) So I think it has to be the mid-aughts, when 90s kids catch up with them in their contemptuous years.
Re: evil cartoons (and 90s horror), your wish is possibly granted in, well, 1992's Evil Toons. Which I know nothing about besides "horrorfied Roger Rabbit" and that it has maybe the most miserable movie title I've ever seen (under the same template Rambo II would be something like "An American Veteran's Revenge" or Terminator "The Killer Future Robot"), but I intend to check it out someday.