Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare gets off on a very good start. A quotation comes onto the black screen scored by a segment of a pop song a la the start of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation: "Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the toes he is very terrified, because the ground gives the way under him, and the dream begins..." -Friedrich Nietzsche. Then we are given another quote: “Welcome to prime time, bitch.” –Freddy Krueger. I laughed very very hard at that point. It looked like we were going to be in for a treat. The Nietzsche quote is a reference to The Dream Warriors which began with an Edgar Allen Poe quote about how Poe hates dreams. He calls them “little slices of death." The “Welcome to prime time, bitch” line was spoken during the course of The Dream Warriors. On a superficial level we are laughing at the juxtaposition because the filmmakers are placing Freddy Krueger on the level of Friedrich Nietzsche as one of the great quotables. It’s high culture joined with junk culture. (The fact that Poe and Nietzsche are obvious gold mines for Bartlett’s makes their presence in the picture even funnier.) But of course we can detect that just from looking at the sources; what about the quotes themselves?

Both Nietzsche and Poe are scared of falling asleep; with the loss of consciousness comes the introduction into the unknown. They are cast into the wilderness, with no idea of what to expect or how to survive. Obviously, what Nietzsche and Poe should be afraid of is Freddy Krueger coming to get them in their dreams. And Freddy Krueger is such a cheeseball! “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” is his response to their elegant prose, but he is superior to them. Once in dreams they are his playthings. Cheesy as Freddy Krueger is, he has answers and all Nietzsche and Poe have is fear of the unknown.

What Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is really about (at least at this early point) is the nihilism of anti-intellectualism. I once spoke to a theater manager who told me that the greatest film of all time was Spaceballs, and that she hates arty-farty movies. She said that movies should be spoofs. She obviously found spiritual sustenance in Spaceballs then, or she doesn’t believe that art can ever hope to rise above the example of Spaceballs. Intellectualism thrives on ignorance, but stupidity thrives on concrete answers. Krueger argues that Nietzsche and Poe are being eloquent about being meat puppets, and this is ultimately absurd. A well-spoken housefly that questions and philosophizes about the existence of other houseflies is ultimately still nothing more than a housefly. Krueger suggests, I think, that there really is nothing more to the human experience than movies like Spaceballs. There is nothing profound about the human spirit, it’s cheap. The jokey cheesiness of Freddy Krueger is not the end point; the cheesiness is in service to his omnipotence. The cheesier he is, the less seriously he takes himself, the more power and authority he has over his victims. His ironic stance recognizes the cheapness of human life; he is comfortable with death in a way that our best and brightest, Poe and Nietzsche, failed to be.

Now that I can say I have seen them all, I think that I can say that The Dream Master is the best of the series (Freddy vs. Jason notwithstanding). Freddy Krueger is best seen as Satan himself, sadistic and omnipotent, devising tortures to humiliate and degrade his victims. He’s pushing your greatest dreams along with your worst nightmares, you see. I liked the “soul sausage” scene and the “squashed cockroach” scenes of The Dream Master because it makes Krueger into a giant omnipotent demon relative to the puny size of his victims. Both the soul sausage and the squashed cockroach are terrified that they are going to die, and I think somehow acknowledge that it is humiliating to die as either a soul sausage or a squashed cockroach. Freddy Krueger is a Satan figure, ruling over his personal hell, and so it is only natural that he puts a humiliating dosage of humor into his tortures. He’s turned you into a cockroach, what do you think you’re going to do about it? The Dream Master was nauseating and gory, but it understands gross-out gore; it understands the non-appeal, for a lack of a better word, of cannibalism. It’s about the limitations of our bodies. The moralistic sadism of the hells of Bosch and Dante, which The Dream Master mimics, basically hinges around the idea of, “If you’re going to treat your body like a toilet, I’m going to use it like a toilet."

One of the major failures of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is the lack of gore. Without gore, the violence loses both its moralism and its sexual nature. It’s considerably less viscerally disturbing, obviously, but the problem goes beyond that. Freddy Krueger’s omnipotence, his power over his victims, is reduced considerably. Not only is the film weaker in sheer impact, it’s weaker thematically and philosophically as well. The element that director Rachel Talalay and screenwriter Michael De Luca emphasize is that of satirical dehumanization. The film is basically a goof, much like Keenan Ivory Wayans’s Scary Movie.

There are some scenes that work okay. Freddy Krueger kills one of his victims in a video game, a sequence that seems to have made many horror fans’ lists of “worst kill ever." The problem with it is the lack of gore, the fact that it doesn’t exploit any of our fears, and that the filmmakers use it to score a cheap point about the victim’s relationship with his dad: his enemy is basically a large version of his father with a tennis racket who bangs him on the head chirping, “Be like me." I do have to give the film some credit in having Freddy look indulgently idle as he works his game paddle, basically murdering a teenage boy. While it’s not quite the equivalent of the great human sausage scene in The Dream Master, the kill recognizes the comparative size of Freddy with his victim and makes murder seem like almost of an afterthought. It’s not that it’s sadistic, it’s that it is carelessly sadistic, like he just wants to eat away an afternoon by ending somebody’s life.

Famously, the film’s climax is in 3-D for the theatrical and DVD release. I rented it, perhaps unwisely, on VHS and everything is just 2-D. There is also a sequence that otherwise goes on way too long and is fairly badly set up, where Freddy removes the hearing aid of a deaf teenager and sneaks up behind him yelling in his ear and looking directly into the camera, almost winking. There are a handful of little throwaway moments throughout the film where Freddy does just that, looks directly into the camera. The idea of submersing us into the movie, of blurring the line between the film and reality, certainly has the potential to be especially frightening. I wouldn’t know for sure, as not only do I think I would have to see the picture in 3-D, I would have to see it in 3-D in the movie theater. That time has passed of course. During the picture’s initial release, I certainly would have been too cowardly to experience it. Seeing it on video though, the cheesiness of the approach sticks out. And again, if the film fails on a gut level, satirical horror can still be frightening on an ideological level.

Not to knock Spaceballs per se, but again Spaceballs has the same message that a film like Friday the 13th does: life is a meaningless, weightless dance and so it is pointless to concern yourself with it. As far as nihilism goes, comedy trumps horror, as it is impossible for comedy to ever be poetic or romantic. They both inhabit a spiritual void, but horror acknowledges it with silence. Comedy fills it with white noise. Mel Brooks himself even stated, "I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy." Irony is the next step to enlightenment, we learn. First we are shocked by atrocity, then saddened by it, and then finally we laugh at it. It is only when we are able to laugh at it are we truly superior to the human beings.

I suppose that I support what Talalay does in this movie up to a point, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. Scary Movie not only proved to be funnier, it was also more dehumanizing and ideologically powerful. Killing a deaf kid with a hearing aid: politically incorrect I’m sure, but the Wayans picture was powerfully racist and misogynistic. Images like the black model with the braided pubic hair, the breast implant sliding on the knife, the quiet sitcomish white home where the Dad deals crack; they are funny the first time but the second time the viral bitterness sticks out. Wayans succeeds in his satirical horror movie because all he injects into it is bile and hatred. That picture has a heat that Freddy’s Dead fails to produce. Freddy’s Dead is ultimately too tame.

There is another element that doesn’t really gel with the film. We really don’t care about the characters, about the victims. This was perfectly fine with the Friday the 13th films, as we cared about Jason really, but it doesn’t really work here, as we acknowledge that Freddy is beyond our sympathy and have been trained to like the characters in the previous outings. The first three movies were goofy, but thinking back, I think I recognize some real warmth. They were essentially pro-teenager and pro-humanity, light and ultimately optimistic, simple enough to resist the post-modernness of this outing. Parts four and five were dark. Whereas in the first three films, the filmmakers seemed to see the teens as children (which is especially disturbing in the highly sexualized first outing), in the last two they have to grow up fast. The heroes of those films deal with alcoholic fathers and teen pregnancy; they are pushed outside of this Lynch-ian “Reagan’s America” wonderland where ugly reality is ‘spose to be bubbling under the surface and into ugly reality itself. It felt like we were growing. Freddy’s Dead just feels like a copy of a copy. When the kid in the video game rebels against his father, we feel like they are only dealing with the idea of youthful rebellion, they aren’t actually selling it. Had the characters been well-developed and we been able to connect with them, AND THEN they are plugged into a jokey gag fest, then the film probably could have worked. As it is, the picture is just static. The filmmakers have joked us into boredom, and have left us with an ultimately unsatisfying insignificant film.

We don’t learn a lot more about Freddy Krueger’s past in this film. The trailer I saw on the Freddy vs. Jason DVD more or less showed everything there is to see. We don’t find out a lot more about his home life, aside from the fact that he was beaten as a teenager and enjoyed it. We don’t figure out why he retained the name Krueger after he was put up for adoption. We don’t learn anything about his adoption, really. The film tries to explain the Freddy Krueger myth a little more. Apparently he lived in the suburbs and had a wife and daughter while he was doing his kiddie killings. The mother discovered the room that he killed his children in, and came out crying to him swearing that she would never tell. For her disobedience, he murdered her in front of the daughter. Whoa, so his wife was so in love with him that she wouldn’t tell the police on him and he killed her anyway. Tell us more; we not only want more, we need more. As he is being burned alive, Freddy sells his soul to the devil, or something, so he can become immortal. There are two completely separate modes of evil to Freddy Krueger, the banal human Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer kind and the Dante/Bosch supernatural Satan kind. These are, of course, in ideological opposition to one another. For lack of a better definition, the latter sort of evil presumes the existence of God and an absolute good (“If there is a Hell then there has to be a Heaven," as Seth Gecko reasoned in From Dusk Till Dawn). In the former we would have to acknowledge that Freddy Krueger is just a man. That he’s one of us. Arguments can be made that the idea of an unimaginably agonizing Hell is actually the more optimistic model.

I think that both concepts can be joined successfully, but not without some serious philosophizing on the nature of evil. In any case, the true evil would come from Krueger as a man, and his transformation into super-demon would be a personification of that sort of evil. It’s a task that the Nightmare on Elm Street filmmakers seem to ignore. Freddy is evil because he was born evil; he has evil genes. He’s the son of “a hundred maniacs." But that doesn’t mean that we should feel sympathy for him. Let’s say that Freddy gets off on the gaining of power through sexual violence, and that by becoming a demon he is able to rape and kill in ways that cannot be executed in the flesh. This definition of “evil,” which I have explored in reviews of other movies, places evil as something quite beyond biology. We would have to look at ethics, that we are all essentially rapists and killers but we don’t go through with it. Or we would have to look at sociology, that perhaps because Freddy was abused and humiliated as a child, he would have a greater desire to gain the upper hand over people. Both of these modes of thought bring Freddy back to earth and make him one of us. Basing his evil on genetics distances him from us, makes it so he’s not our problem. It’s cowardly.

Freddy Krueger’s stepdad is played by Alice Cooper. He beats young Freddy with a belt, and Freddy grins like Jake Busey asking for another. Talalay doesn’t seem to want to give Krueger depth with this scene; she wants to show that she is satirizing true crime clichés like Oliver Stone did in Natural Born Killers. The other childhood scene involves a young Krueger smashing the class hamster with a hammer and being taunted as the son of a hundred maniacs. Later, he pleads with his killers that he was just a misunderstood kid. The plead is a con, of course; it’s to show that we aren’t supposed to sympathize with Krueger and that he is not one of us. Of course he was taunted, he was killing the class hamster.

The introduction of Freddy’s past seems to have struck a nerve with me. There is a difference, I think, between celebrating ignorance as an ethical choice, and then just being ignorant. Talalay doesn’t incorporate this satirical style to be dehumanizing and confront us with a nihilistic absurdist vision. Rather, she does it to water down the horror, to make it palatable. The picture may be the most harmless of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and I cannot fathom any harsher criticism than that. I don’t know if I am being too soft, but perhaps the problem is one of too much ambition. Talalay is simply not intellectually, morally or artistically developed enough to pull it off. The subsequent New Nightmare took a deconstructive approach as well, but it wasn’t like this. That movie at least seemed to develop some sort of reality zone where it could go to breathe. It would take a miracle for Freddy’s Dead to work, and it doesn’t.

The picture is inert. The Dream Child was able to transform exhaustion into melancholy. Freddy’s Dead is still exhausted, but the decision to turn it into a spoof kills the picture. Is there anything duller than a spoof void of momentum? While the spoof genre requires some sort of idea of pacing, it also needs wall-to-wall energy. Now that they have eliminated plot, character, meaning and sociological significance, they need to keep things bubbling. The film is instead comparable to a man in a bathrobe yelling at his television from the sofa.

As far as “officially” ending a classic slasher franchise, the film is unquestionably superior to the nutty but lazy-to-the-point-of-narcolepsy Jason Goes to Hell. As Freddy’s grown daughter, Lisa Zane is a find. Zane doesn’t even need to act; she’s interesting enough to just look at. You’re not buying talent when you get her; you aren’t even buying good looks. Struggling to find words to explain it that don’t make me sound like a cheesy talent agent, you’re buying a star presence. She seems to have been cast in the role of the good guy because casting her as the villain seems to be too easy. As the hero, her dark good looks are actually able to entice you into sympathizing with her. Zane seems to be best known for her work on the short-lived (and thus cult) Fox series "Roar” and “Profit." I can’t help but wondering if this is for the best, as overfamiliarity with her work could potentially destroy her geek goddess iconology. An ultimately marginal presence in the picture, she’s something good in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, whereas most of the rest is just wasted opportunity.

I was expecting something better, I was expecting to end things with a bang really. The last thing we see in the picture is a highlight of all Freddy’s previous kills, played in split screen with the credits and a rock song. LAZY AND COWARDLY!! In Friday the 13: The Final Chapter, they did this gag at the very beginning of the picture. It felt like they were throwing some meat to the wolves. In this case, it would have probably been wise to make it a real eulogy and satirize those Oscar memorials, with some cheesy classical music as the Freddy snake gobbles up Patricia Arquette. That’s the horror spoof that I want; I want immorality and cruelty.

Quite honestly, I think I’m actually getting sick of writing about Freddy Krueger. I’ve talked this thing to death, and this new picture doesn’t seem to give me any other direction to go in. This review was very hard to write, it took much longer than I wanted, and I don’t think that it will go down as one of my best. A bad work and computer lab schedule is partially to blame for my waning interest, but I can’t help but think that the mediocrity of the final product is most responsible. If the goal of Freddy’s Dead was one of ironic distance, I have to concede that they have indeed triumphed. I really don’t give a shit anymore.