Friday, October 16, 2009

31 Days of Halloween - Day 16 - Movie











I love the horror genre. I really do. My tolerance for crappy movies is a lot higher in this genre than any other, but there are limits. You can hope for a gem, and be willing to accept a lump of coal instead, but inevitably along comes a movie, such as The Beast of Yucca Flats that you'd rather put out your eyes and ears than ever have to sit through it again. Such a movie was "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare" (1991).

This movie starts out promising with a nightmare aboard a passenger plane, then shifting to inside a house dropping out of the sky with "Wizard of Oz" homages to boot, then immediately becomes an excruciatingly boring film filled with uninspired visuals, characters, dialogue, and story. Ten years after the last movie, every child in Springwood has been killed off by Freddy Krueger, except one lone teenager. His sole excuse for being kept alive is so that he can leave Springwood and bring new blood back for Freddy. It turns out that while Freddy was alive and killing other people's children he had a child of his own, who was taken from him once his crimes were discovered and adopted by another family. Now an adult, Freddy needs his offspring to take him out of the dreamscape of Springwood and into a new arena to continue his killing spree. His offspring, along with Yaphet Kotto, fight back leading to Freddy's uninspired demise.

Everything about this movie feels uninspired, the script, the direction, Freddy's so simplified it's barely there make-up, Robert Englund's performance as Freddy, and the inane nightmare murders that are like rejected ideas from "Road Runner" cartoons, only treated less seriously. Freddy has, by this movie been reduced to a clownish buffoon; a playground bully who crumbles at the first instance anyone dares strike back against him. This movie has no tension, or suspense whatsoever, and was an absolute chore to sit through. The cameo by Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr is lame, pointless and distracting. Alice Cooper also has a cameo as Freddy's adoptive father, and Johnny Depp (billed as Oprah Noodlemantra) plays a teen in a drug awareness commercial playing on a broken television.

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