ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, SEPT. 19, 1991
By Steve Newton
The last time I saw a 3-D movie—Friday the 13th Part 3—slasher-king Jason squeezed a teenage victim’s head so hard between his two hands that one of the unfortunate guy’s eyes popped out and came right at you, trailing veins and all. That was pretty scary stuff for 1982, but judging by the last 10 minutes of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, 3-D technology hasn’t advanced much in the past nine years. American pop icon Freddy Krueger’s 3-D death is about as lame as the rest of this crummy flick, the sixth and supposedly last in the often imaginative but ultimately numbing Nightmare on Elm Street series.
For the first time on Elm Street, the object of Freddy the K’s cruel affections is a grown-up—a 28-year-old child psychologist played by Lisa (Bad Influence) Zane. To get to her, Krueger invades the dreams of a number of troubled teens in the shrink’s care, cackling his famous one-liners while dispatching the snoozing youths via Nintendo and the old dropping-on-a-bed-of-nails trick.
Cameo appearances by the likes of Roseanne Barr and Alice Cooper (as Freddy’s equally nasty dad) are the only respite from a plethora of bad acting, especially from Zane, who should have studied scream queen Heather Langenkamp in the original Nightmare so she’d at least know how to act like she was acting.
While none of the Nightmare sequels matches the original—parts three (directed by The Blob remake’s Chuck Russell) and five (Predator II’s Stephen Hopkins) were way better than this. First-time director Rachel Talalay (who also wrote the story) came up flat here, although she did leave open the slim possibility of a new female villain.
But can anyone out there bear the thought of a Freda Krueger?