Rachel Talalay, producer of parts 3 and 4 of the Nightmare films, proves that it is possible to make a worse Elm Street movie than The Dream Child by directing Freddy's Dead, the poorest entry in the whole series.
In this chapter, we discover that Freddy has a daughter, Maggie (Lisa Zane, who looks like a sexy cross between a young Madonna and Rachel Weisz), who is all grown up and working at a shelter for delinquent children. One of her charges is an amnesiac who has been suffering from nightmares, but it transpires that he is merely being used by Freddy in order to make contact with his long lost offspring.
In Freddy's Dead, no attempt is made to scare the audience; from the outset, the whole film is played like some kind of absurd cartoon (at times, Freddy reminded me of Jim Carrey's mischievous character in The Mask): Freddy appears as the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz; Freddy scrapes his 'fingers' across a blackboard causing a victim's head to explode; Freddy kills someone by turning him into a computer game. The direction is lousy, the script childish and the acting downright bad.
Talaly tries desperately to distract the audience from the extremely amateurish nature of her film by packing it with cameo performances (Rosanne Barr, Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp all make an appearance), and tacking on a gratuitous and very daft 3D ending. But, as the saying goes, 'you can't polish a turd' and the result is an embarrassment for all involved.
In this chapter, we discover that Freddy has a daughter, Maggie (Lisa Zane, who looks like a sexy cross between a young Madonna and Rachel Weisz), who is all grown up and working at a shelter for delinquent children. One of her charges is an amnesiac who has been suffering from nightmares, but it transpires that he is merely being used by Freddy in order to make contact with his long lost offspring.
In Freddy's Dead, no attempt is made to scare the audience; from the outset, the whole film is played like some kind of absurd cartoon (at times, Freddy reminded me of Jim Carrey's mischievous character in The Mask): Freddy appears as the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz; Freddy scrapes his 'fingers' across a blackboard causing a victim's head to explode; Freddy kills someone by turning him into a computer game. The direction is lousy, the script childish and the acting downright bad.
Talaly tries desperately to distract the audience from the extremely amateurish nature of her film by packing it with cameo performances (Rosanne Barr, Tom Arnold, Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp all make an appearance), and tacking on a gratuitous and very daft 3D ending. But, as the saying goes, 'you can't polish a turd' and the result is an embarrassment for all involved.