Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

You’ve got to wonder if the whole “let’s put a quote at the head of the movie” thing came down as some sort of, “Let’s class this trash up,” edict, or if the writers just wanted to prove they learned something in college.

Either way, the one that starts The End for Freddy is: “Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, Because the ground gives way under him, And the Dream begins…” Friederich Nietzsche.

All spelling and capitalization courtesy of the dudes who character-generated it for the screen.

They also stick a quote from Freddy at the front of the film, but you know what? Forget it. I’m not taking their bait.

All right, now we’ve got a shot of a white-on-black outline of the United States, and we’re getting even more words. I guess I want to go ahead and give credit to the people who thought that most of the fans of these movies were literate.

(Oh, I kid. You know I kid.)

And we’ve got text: “Springwood, Ohio, Ten Years from Now. Mysterious killings and suicides wipe out entire population of children and teenagers. Remaining adults are experiencing mass psychosis. There is new evidence of one surviving teenager…”

(Whoa! Are we really going to get a post-apocalyptic Freddy film? Huh. I’m confused by the ambition.)

And now we’ve got a plane flying in the rain. Inside the plane, some young dude squirms. He asks the flight attendant for another seat, but she says they’re full up.

His light blows out. He looks at the window, and realizes that the water is on the inside of the window. For those of you who’ve never flown before, that’s bad.

A little girl peeks her head over the seat in front of the dude and says, “He’s going to make you help him. Because you’re the last.”

(Ya know, I suspect this movie is going to give me even more mythology fits.)

Our dude in action presses his Call button and asks to change seats again. He tells the woman next to him he’s afraid of heights.

The woman says something rude, and she gets sucked up through the top of the plane and into the sky.

Then our dude in non-action gets sucked down out of the plane and into a house. Yeah. He’s dreaming.

He gets up, and goes to the window. Which allows him to realize that his house is flying through the air. Like in, you know, “The Wizard of Oz.”

I don’t know want to know where this is going. I don’t. Can it be?

It can.

Here’s Freddy, riding on a broom, wearing a witch’s hat, and yelling, “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little soul, too.”

Hey everyone, remember when Freddy was scary? I’ll be generous, and say, maybe three movies ago? We’re four and a half minutes into this movie and I’m already prepared to hand this write-up over to Pepito, the Movie-Reviewing Bell Pepper.

The house crashes. Dude flies through the window. He’s on Elm Street. He wanders around the outside of the house for a bit, until he sees another house nearby. It’s Nancy’s house. Which still has a red door.

Dude runs. He jumps a fence. He lands on a hill and rolls down it. For like, a whole minute.

Now he’s running through a field. He does this for a while, until he finds a small booth. An evil dude uses his Freddy-clawed hand to push a ticket at the Dude.

“One ticket. Round trip. Hurry up boy. You don’t wanna miss the bus.”

Dude backs away from the ticket-selling booth, into the middle of the road. A bus hits him. Instead of killing him, the Dude sticks to the front of the bus, screaming, while Freddy, who is driving, laughs. Maniacally.

Pepito the Bell Pepper thinks this is stupid.

Freddy stops the bus, Dude flies through the air. He punches through the dark “night” out of the city limits of Springwood. It is light. He lands, and his head clunks on a rock.

Freddy gets out of the bus and walks up to the hole left by the dude, which is like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon. The hole closes.

And Freddy says, “Now be a good little doggy, and go fetch.”

Dude wakes up from being on his rock-pillow. It’s still light out.

He has jeans and a t-shirt on, and that’s it. He checks his pockets, and comes away with some cash, some no-sleep pills, and an article about a missing Krueger woman.

He walks off down the road.

The movie then jumps over to Recovery House Youth Shelter. A dude in a suit is berating his son, Spencer. Dad wants to see changes when Spencer gets home in a week.

Spencer is non-plussed.

Dad gets all mad at someone who, I guess, works there. Her name is Maggie, and she tries to talk to Spencer, only another dude who works there enters the room and shows Maggie a pipe bomb he found in Spencer’s room.

He says he’s going to put it “downstairs, with the rest of the arsenal.” I’m sure we’ll see that bomb again.

Another girl, Tracy, comes running out of somewhere. Apparently, one of the other kids was trying to hit on her, and she freaked.

Outside, the cops find Dude, and figure he’s a junkie. So they decide to take him to the shelter.

Back at the shelter, we get to meet Carlos, who is watching Tracy kickbox a heavy bag. Like in boxing, I mean. You’ve got that, right? Right.

He kind of hits on Tracy, and Tracy gets ready to beat him mercilessly. He says he has a handicap, indicating his ear. Then he pulls off his hearing aid, and suddenly the movie has no sound. At all.

I suppose they’re trying to make a point, but if the dude was that deaf, a hearing aid wouldn’t be all that much help.

Spencer comes over, and makes Carlos put his hearing aid back in, saying, “Don’t tune out. Why don’t you talk back to her for once?”

Ah, but enough relationship nonsense. Time for some plot. Spencer gave some dude some money and the three of them plan to bust out by the end of the week.

Maggie goes to see the group home’s therapist, who has plans to use dream therapy to clean up Tracy’s problems. Maggie is also having a recurring dream, but I guess we’ll get to that later, since she notices a poster on the wall.

The Therapist says the things on the poster are “Dream Demons.” Or rather, an artistic rendering in stone of same-said demons. He expands. “Supposedly they roam the dreams of the living, until they find the most evil, twisted human imaginable. Then they give him the power to cross the line and turn our nightmares into reality.”

Uh-huh.

Other guy who works there says he needs Maggie to talk to Dude.

He’s suffering from amnesia.

She talks to the Dude. He does, indeed, have amnesia, and he knows that he’s staying up nights.

The only thing he remembers is that, wherever he’s from, he’s the last survivor.

He asks for some caffeine.

He feels like if he falls asleep, there’s going to be trouble.

Later that night, Maggie looks at the article Dude had in his pocket, noting the town: Springwood. And the water tower.

Also, Dude keeps himself awake by singing some variation of 100 Bottles of Beer on the wall.

Then we get a dream sequence, with a little girl, and a “Come to Daddy” that sounds pretty ominous.

There’s a scream.

In his bed, Dude is asleep. Water drips in his face from a pipe overhead. Then there’s blood on his face, from a stain overhead.

A little girl, the one we just saw, says, “Play with me!” And also, “I won’t tell.” But that’s in answer to him asking who he is.

Dude gets up from his bed, which now appears to be in… Nancy’s house? Some kind of house, anyway. He follows the little girl.

In the real world, he sleepwalks down the hall. And when he walks up the stairs in his dream, he walks up on thin air in the real world.

In an upstairs hallway, he goes into a white room and finds himself, sitting in a corner in a straightjacket. He tells himself to free himself. Or rather, his memory.

Dude screams and backs up, in what I guess is now the real world, as he knocks a security guard who was following him out a window. This makes the guard mad.

The next day, Maggie asks Dude was he was dreaming about. He says he remembers a water tower and a little girl.

The little girl had brown hair with red ribbons.

Maggie goes to talk to Psychiatrist, who says their dreams are related, and Maggie is afraid to learn what Dude will show her. Maggie gets all, “I don’t have a problem, and you’re a big stupid-head.”

Then she decides to take Dude on a trip back to Springwood, despite the fact that he doesn’t want to go.

They drive. Dude is sleeping in his seat. He wakes up, and sees the little girl in the middle of the road. Which Maggie clearly doesn’t see.

He yanks on the wheel, and they spin out, revealing that Spencer, Tracy, and Carlos have stowed away.

Maggie says they need to locate a phone and call Kelly, who I guess is the guy who keeps ordering Maggie around.

The gang keeps driving into town.

The Springwood Town Fair is on, based on the huge banner.

Whereas, based on the actual fair itself, they didn’t have any money to spend on extras.

Maggie tells the kids to go call Kelly, then get right back in the van and drive back to the shelter.

Which would leave Maggie and Dude just sitting around. I’m not sure I get this plan, exactly.

The kids grumble as they head out to find a phone. They wander along, noticing the single pie, with a cockroach running over it. And the smoking clown. And the one old dude riding the bumper cars by himself.

Dude looks around and goes, hey, there are no kids here…

Around that time, Spencer, Tracy and Carlos learn that the local pay phone doesn’t work. And then some freaky woman, and her freaky husband, accost the kids and ask if they want to come live with them. The freaky woman promises that this time she’ll hide them better so that “he” can’t get them.

The freaky husband reminds the freaky wife that kids bring danger. Some nearby bells ring in a tower, and the man blames the kids.

The kids, in turn, think that leaving would be a good thing. They go back to the van, and Maggie reminds them to get out of town. Dude hopes they make it.

Maggie decides she and Dude should go to the nearby school and ask what’s going on. She wants to know what’s going on with the bells.

I’m not sure how these things all relate.

The kids drive into the town, which appears pretty deserted. They drive by a statue with the inscription: The Children Shall Endure.

I’m thinking that probably won’t be all that important, but the director wanted to point the camera at the plate real hard, so I’m passing that information on to you. You’re welcome.

One of the kids finds a map in the back of the truck. Tracy, who is driving, says she doesn’t need one. She keeps driving. Then she passes by the statue again.

Maggie and Dude keep walking, until they stop to admire a chalk drawing of Freddy in the road. With the words, “One, Two Freddy’s coming for you…” written under it.

Then we go back to the kids, who drive past the statue a bunch more times. Tracy asks for the map. Carlos opens the map. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger in his hands. Isn’t that all freaky? No. Well, it’s all we’re getting. Pepito says, “Deal with it.”

Tracy yells at him again, and he wakes up.

Spencer says that Tracy screwed up twice now, so now he gets a try. By the by, he was smoking pot in an earlier scene. Just in case that’s important later.

Maggie and Dude get to the high school, and find, “3, 4, Better lock your door,” written on the wall.

They go inside, and find a cuh-ray-zay teacher sitting in his desk, teaching no one. Loudly. Maggie says not to disturb him.

He pulls down a chart, and the words, “5, 6, Grab your crucifix” are written on it. Along with the other information that was already there.

Maggie cracks open a scrapbook on a desk and finds a bunch of dead/missing kid stories taped inside. Freddy is mentioned, so I’m guessing that the stories date back to his original kid-killing days. Only the stories aren’t yellow or anything, so I guess they’re really well preserved?

Strange.

Lisa pulls the Krueger story out of her pocket and sticks it into a slot where part of a newspaper article has gone missing. It fits. She calls to Dude (she’s calling him John, which I’m guessing is a John Doe joke) and shows him her discovery.

This causes the crazy teacher to try to teach to Maggie and John. He says, in part: “Welcome to Freddy 101. Fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-three, Freddy sailed across the sea.”

John and Maggie look at the wall, which has a bunch of dead kids listed on it. Maggie is all, “Hey, these all happened in a ten year period.”

The teacher then points at the board and says that, “His kid was taken away from him.” He appears to be pointing at 1966. John and Maggie assume the teacher is talking about Freddy. I’m guessing not.

The kids, meanwhile, are still driving in a circle. And it’s dark now.

Tracy decides to walk. She wants a place to sleep. Carlos and Spencer follow.

Oh look. A street sign. Elm Street.

Tracy walks up to a house with a For Sale sign on it. And what appear to be lights blazing inside. But she still thinks the house is abandoned. Interesting theory.

She kicks the door in, and they all go inside. Then the “covering” rips off the outside of the house, revealing… that it’s Nancy’s house. Which has a red door again. Or still. Or something. I guess I’m supposed to be freaked out by this, but honestly, we’ve already established that Freddy can wipe out anyone in town, right? So what does it matter that they’re in Nancy’s house?

I’m equally intrigued by another issue. Do we assume that “John” is actually Jacob? He was the last of the “my dreams can bring Freddy back” line, right? Or have the rules changed again, so that anyone, at any time, can bring Freddy back?

Probably not, because only “kids” can do it, right? Teenagers?

You know? I give right up. They’re not even trying any more.

Inside, the house is the same old beat up Nancy house it’s always been. Carlos goes upstairs to sleep. He finds a dusty bed, and lies down on it.

Sheldon goes looking for a bathroom. Tracy follows him. Sheldon and Tracy discuss why John told them not to fall asleep.

Upstairs, Carlos wakes up, and walks down the hallway. Only he’s not in the house now. He’s in an apartment building. He meets him mom there. She threatens to clean out his ears. With a swab that’s about two feet long.

Carlos freaks out, asking his “mom” not to make him deaf.

Only now, of course, his mom is Freddy, and Freddy jams the thing in his ear. And then out the other. Carlos pulls the swab out. Then Freddy cuts of his ear, and we lose most of the sound again.

Freddy throws Carlos out on the fire escape, and Carlos rolls down it. He gets up. He keeps walking down. To the boiler room. Freddy runs up behind him, but of course Carlos can’t hear him.

Credit where it’s due – this is freaky.

Carlos screams that he wants his hearing back, and Freddy, from up on a catwalk somewhere, drops the hearing aid to Carlos. Carlos puts it on his remaining ear, and it turns into an instrument of torture, putting little claws into his ear.

Then, water dripping from a spigot becomes real loud. Carlos turns it off.

Freddy drops a pin, and Carlos catches it before it can hit the floor and be all loud.

Freddy drops lots of pins, and they land, and it’s all loud. But not, like, unbearably so. Or maybe the actor is just really good at demonstrating pain using his limited abilities.

Carlos looks around, and finds Freddy again. Freddy has a chalkboard. He drags his claws across the chalkboard. A lot. Until Carlos’s head blows up.

Freddy concludes with, “Nice hearing from you, Carlos.” Which is a really stupid way to end what has so far been the only suspenseful and funny sequence this movie has generated. What a waste.

Back in the real world, Tracy goes looking for Carlos, but he isn’t in bed any more. She does find his hearing aid.

Tracy runs to talk to Spencer, but Spencer is smoking pot and watching TV. Or rather, he’s looking at a TV with a busted picture tube.

Tracy says she’s going to go find Carlos.

But on the TV, in Spencer-vision, is Carlos, and a bunch of other… I’m not sure. I guess they’re probably souls.

Carlos tells Spencer not to fall asleep. Frankly, if Spencer is seeing Carlos, sleep has already occurred.

But it’s not like this movie believes in getting things remotely right, as Spencer closes his eyes and falls asleep. I was not aware that dope allowed you to see the dead.

John and Maggie go to the local orphanage. Strangely, there are lights on. And here comes the explanation. A crazy woman, who used to run the place. She says she remembers John. And Maggie. And a couple of invisible people.

They ask about Freddy, but the woman insists that she can’t share any identifying information.

Maggie finds a crayon drawing that says K. Krueger. John decides that he did the drawing, and that he’s Freddy’s kid, which is why Freddy is keeping him alive. Sure. That’s it.

They go outside. Tracy pulls up in the van. She says she lost Carlos and Spencer is baked. John says they need to get to them before Freddy does. He tells Tracy he’ll fill her in on Freddy on the way.

Back at Nancy’s house, Spencer wakes up and sees Johnny Depp doing a “this is your brain on drugs” commercial. Yes, really. Unless he’s supposed to be Nancy’s boyfriend, all grown up in the spirit world, trying to help Freddy’s next victim improve his life choices.

I guess that’s possible, as one would assume he escaped Freddy’s soul collection three movies back.

Freddy then smacks Depp in the face with a frying pan. He tells Spencer to trip out. The riff from Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida comes up. Trippy colors come out of the TV.

Then Spencer looks around, and he’s in the TV. Which turns off.

Maggie, John, and Tracy arrive at the house and discover that Spencer is missing. They decide to look for him. Good plan.

In some other place, Freddy is using a video game controller to move Spencer around in a video game that looks more like a really, really poorly rendered cartoon. Pepito is angered by this animation abomination.

Only, I guess Freddy isn’t operating Spencer, because Spencer is confronted by a cartoon version of his dad, who beats Spencer down with a racket. Spencer takes the racket and beats his dad to a pulp.

Then a bigger version of “dad” whacks Spencer off the screen and into an apple tree. He eats an apple, and “powers up.” (He yells, “Super Spencer,” for the slow people.)

Then he goes and kills his dad. Freddy intones, “Great graphics.”

Should I mention that at one point he also said, “Now I’m playing with power?” He did. The joke was probably mildly funny at the time, but anyone more than ten years younger than myself has no idea what it means today.

In some version of the real world, Maggie steps out of the cellar through the cellar doors. She looks around outside and sees the water tower from the picture.

Inside the house, Spencer punches his way out of the video game. He flies through the actual wall and into Nancy’s house, where he lands by John. Who says he “found” Spencer.

Of course, since Spencer is still dreaming, he’s still “in” the video game, where Freddy is stomping on his belly.

Tracy, Maggie, and Spencer all try to wake him up, but he’s “too wasted.”

Spencer then proceeds to act like a human cartoon in the real world. Bouncing in the air, punching through walls, walking/gliding around. And yeah, all your standard cartoon noises are playing in the background.

And once again? Not scary. Or funny.

John determines that the only way to get into Spencer’s dream is for Tracy to knock him out. Tracy doesn’t want to do it, so he slaps her in the face. She clocks him with a pipe, and he falls “into” a table and down into the dream world.

(Uh… Spencer is still walking around in the regular world, even as he’s being abused. Why not John?)

John “falls” into something that looks a little like the boiler room, but not really. Then Tracy appears, with the help of a bunch of dazzling Tinkerbell-esque lights. She tells John she used “concentration meditation.”

Too bad she couldn’t use that to get out of the city.

She looks over, and sees Freddy, sitting in his office, controller in hand. So she runs in, kicks the controller out of his hand and takes it from him.

Freddy looks over and laughs, and holds up his glove. Which has electronics attached to it. Why yes, there is a “Power Glove” joke, which, again, has aged about as well as a pound of raw hamburger left in the sun for 20 years.

The office door slams, locking Tracy and John out.

In the game, Spencer gets punched in the face, and then slapped around until he falls into a pit containing several copies of his “dad.”

In the real world, he climbs some stairs, and falls down them, to the floor, which is actually Freddy’s “throat.” Or it’s the umbilical cord again, from part 5. I have no clue. I bet the people who made this movie don’t either.

Freddy grins and declares that he beat his high score.

Remember when these movies used to be entertaining? Me neither.

In the real world, the TV jumps and fills with blood, which spills out onto the floor. No idea why. Spencer wasn’t anywhere near it.

Tracy does a ninja-dream-flip and confronts Freddy, who says, “Daddy’s waiting for you, little girl.”

She kicks him. He goes to slash her, only Maggie wakes her up.

Maggie asks Tracy what they should do, and after some yelling, they decide to take John, stuff him in the van, and get out of town. Because that plan worked awesome before.

They drive. John continues to be unconscious in the back.

John “wakes up.” He’s in a bedroom, in a nice house. He looks outside. It’s a nice day. He goes outside. It’s nice.

Then his house shoots up into outer space, with him still in the doorway.

He wakes up again. This time he says he’s not getting out of bed. The house starts on fire, so he jumps out a window. Since the house is still hanging in space, he starts to fall.

In the real world, the van approaches the town border.

In the dream, John sees this he has a Pull In Case of Emergency tag on his shirt. He pulls it, and the shirt turns into a parachute.

In the real world, John shoots out of the ceiling of the van.

In the dream world, John, shirtless, looks up his parachute. Freddy is inside.

Freddy slides down the straps of the parachute to confront John, and John says he knows why Freddy let him live.

Freddy asks John if John thinks Freddy is his daddy. It seems this is not the case. Freddy left John alive so that John could bring Freddy’s daughter back to him.

I’d register shock on my face if I could stop yawning long enough. Pepito would register shock if he had a face.

Freddy says that his daughter is going to take him to a whole new playground.

Freddy cuts the straps on the parachute, and John starts to plummet.

On the ground, Freddy wheels a bed of nails under the falling John. John lands, impaling himself horribly.

In the real world, John does a whole lot of bleeding. Maggie holds him. Tracy says they need to get out of town.

John dies. And vanishes. So that Maggie can do some really horrible “shocked” acting. I mean this honestly. It’s bad.

Freddy says, “It’s traveling time!” and vanishes from wherever he is.

In the real world, Freddy’s, uh… essence? Floods into Maggie’s head. Yes, folks, Maggie is Freddy’s daughter. I know you care about this. This is the culmination of everything we’ve been wanting to know about Freddy since the first movie.

Oh, no. Wait. I’m sorry. It’s just a bunch of random additional Freddy facts that no one really cares about.

Maggie and Tracy get back into the van, and drive out of Springwood. The “barrier” between Springwood and the rest of the world shatters.

Maggie and Tracy arrive back at the old homestead. Maggie tells Kelly, her boss, about John, Spencer and Carlos vanishing, and Kelly says those people never existed.

(Okay, that’s new. All the previous dead people were still quite dead and quite remembered in the other films. Except all the people who died in Part 2. But we’re pretending none of that ever happened.)

Tracy talks to dream-doc about them as well, and dream-doc says he can remember Carlos, because he can control his dreams. Well, good on you, dude.

Maggie goes to her desk and has a good cry. She remembers John telling her that, “It’s not a boy.” Maggie goes to see her mom.

Tracy beats up a heavy bag while listening to 80s rap. Dream-doc psycho-babbles at her.

Maggie finds her adoption papers. But her mom can’t tell her who she was adopted from. Apparently there are “rules” about contact.

Maggie goes for a walk in the rain. A newspaper headline says, “Nine, Ten, Never Sleep Again.”

Tracy goes to bed. Maggie goes to bed.

We get the little girl dream from the start of the movie again.

There’s a scream. A woman says, “I won’t tell.” She comes out of the cellar. Fred says, “We need to talk, Loretta.”

Fred is, of course, Freddy. Pre-burned and pre-claws and all that.

Oh, and we’re behind Nancy’s house, which I guess was also Freddy’s house.

Fred and Loretta get ready to talk, and Freddy tells the little girl to “go inside.” So she goes to the death cellar, and finds The Freddy Glove, and a bunch of “kid murderer” newspaper clippings.

Suddenly, the little girl is Maggie. Only she’s still in the little-girl dress. I’d say it’s probably the most disturbing thing in the movie, really.

And then, there’s Freddy, as we’ve come to know him. He refers to Maggie as “Katherine,” and holds up a drawing of the family, and says that she was “such a little artist.”

There’s some, “You’re not my father!” “Yes, I am!” back-and-forth, which should be sort of dramatic but comes off as flat. Freddy tells Maggie that “they” took her away from him, but Freddy made them pay.

He leads her out of the cellar, and they can see the shelter. Maggie says that this isn’t Springwood, and Freddy says, “Every town has an Elm Street.” Then an Elm Street sign, looking all creepy and dreamy, appears.

You know, if that was the end of the movie, it’d be a decent twist. But seeing as how the title of the movie is “Freddy’s Dead,” it’s hard to grab onto a sense of terror.

In the bathroom, Tracy washes her face. Only she turns around, and she’s back in her house. And there’s her dad. Her evil, evil, dad. Who’s supposed to be dead, according to Tracy.

Dad says, “Come on. Give daddy some honey. No one has to know.” Tracy turns to face “dad” and says, “You’re not by daddy. Then she grabs a coffee pot and beats him. A lot.

His face is smashed in. He gets up. And he’s Freddy.

Tracy and Freddy verbally and physically spar, and then Tracy sticks her hands on top of the stove to wake herself up.

Maggie runs into her room. Tracy’s hands are blistered. And Tracy needs to talk to “Doc.” That’s right, dream-doc? He’s called Doc. He doesn’t get an actual name, even though he’s a Very Important Character. Because this movie doesn’t care.

Elsewhere, Doc is wandering around looking for Tracy. He’s by the heavy bag. Tracy calls to him, claiming she’s in a locker.

Doc picks up a bat, and hears Tracy behind him. It’s Freddy. Doc beats him with a bat, then does the thing that annoys everyone about horror movies where the dude checks to see if Freddy is dead.

He’s not.

He says, “Stick and stones may break my bones, but nothing will ever kill me.”

And then, so help me, he starts naming off the ways they tried to kill him.

This is going to be awesome. (Note: He cuts off the fingers of his non-gloved hands to keep track as he goes. Ready?)

“First they tried burning me. Then they tried burying me. But this – this is my favorite. They even tried holy water. But I just keep on ticking, because they promised me that.”

Who promised? The dream people. “The ones that gave me this job. In dreams, I am forever.”

I’ll come back to all this in a second.

Doc yanks a portion off of Freddy’s sweater, and then, in the real world, Doc’s alarm clock wakes him up. He’s still got a portion of the sweater in his hand.

Maggie and Tracy arrive. Doc tells Maggie that Maggie can pull Freddy out of the dream. Maggie just has to go to sleep, and when she grabs Freddy, he’ll wake her up so she can yank him out. Then they can kill him in the real world.

(All right, this is what I was waiting for. ‘Cause you know what? Freddy failed to list some of his deaths. He totally forgot about dream control, and his mom capturing him, and about… oh, right. About the time he came into the real world and they killed him with the power of love. Which means the whole “bring him into the real world” thing has been done. And it didn’t kill him. At all. It didn’t even succeed within the confines of the very same movie in which they tried it. And while I’m at it, I should mention that they tried burying him and using holy water at the same time.)

He gives her some 3D glasses to remind everyone in the audience that part of the movie is in 3D, which is why they paid all that money to see a terrible, terrible movie in the theater.

Well, okay, actually he says something about how the glasses don’t mean anything in the world, but in the dream world, they can be whatever she wants them to be. So let’s roll with that.

Maggie lies down, and Doc counts down.

Maggie closes her eyes. She opens them. She’s still in Doc’s office, but she’s in the dream now.

And here we go. She puts on her glasses, they twinkle and vanish, and then she looks at her hand. And around the room. Because things are totally in 3D now, so they better put that to good use.

Since Doc told her to “get inside his brain,” she walks “into” the painting of the dream demons.

How to describe it? Imagine you tried to make a paper mache brain, and then stuck a camera inside it and wiggled it around. After a few seconds, have some 3D stuff pop up so people remember why they’re wearing ridiculous glasses.

And you’re good.

Maggie reappears in a white cement-and-brick hallway with beat-up columns in it. Various cables are strung along the ceiling, purple lighting popping on them. Maggie tries to open a metal door, and it makes an electric pop.

She tries another door. Same deal. She takes off her metal bracelet and throws it at a wire-filled electric box near the ceiling. She hits it dead-center on her first try and kills the deadly current.

She goes in a door.

Inside is a classroom. A little boy pulls a hamster out of a cage and crushes it with a small sledgehammer. The kids behind him start chanting, “Son of a hundred maniacs.”

Maggie tells the audience that we’re “in his memories.” And the audience feels sad that the hamster didn’t get crushed onscreen, in its full 3D glory. Pepito, in particular, was really looking forward to it.

There’s a flash, and now we’re in a basement, where a teenaged Freddy is cutting his tummy with a straight razor and laughing. There’s a drunken “Freddy!” from upstairs, and down comes a sloppy drunken guy carrying a beer and a belt. He says, “You’ve been a waste since I took you in. Now it’s time to take your medicine.”

He starts thrashing Freddy about the shoulders. Freddy says, “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

The drunk tries to beat him harder, but Freddy grabs the belt, tells the guy the secret of pain (If you just stop feeling it, you can start using it!) and then he stabs… I don’t know. It looks like he’s stabbing the air with the razor, because it probably looks awesome in 3D. But maybe he stabbed the dude, because the dude yells.

There’s a flash on the screen, and then we’re in the woods. People are yelling things like, “Child killer!” A Molotov cocktail is thrown.

Freddy stands inside the burning building. Three spirits that probably looked awesome in 3D but look sort of silly not in 3D zip around the Fredster. They look like little skulls with bone tails.

They tell him, “Freddy. We know what you want.” They tell him to “Open up. And you shall be forever.”

Then they zip into his chest.

And we get a little flash, and now we’re in Freddy’s cellar, with little Maggie. She comes out of the cellar, just in time to see Freddy choking the life out of her mother. She starts crying. Fred says mommy had to take her medicine for snooping in daddy’s special work. He asks her not to tell, and she says she won’t.

Older Maggie walks backward, back into the cellar.

(Dang, but Robert Englund is creepy in this scene. Moments like this are why I feel sad when they stick him on a skateboard.)

And now we’re… somewhere. Not really the cellar. Not really the boiler room. Just sort of a generic “scary” place. Freddy appears, and says that Maggie did tell. Maggie declares that Freddy killed her mother. She picks up a pipe and whacks him in the mouth with it, then grabs him from behind in a bear hug.

In the real world, Doc and Tracy see that Maggie is holding something and start waking Maggie up.

In the dream world, Freddy struggles. He grabs some pipes to hold onto. His head develops mysterious lumps. He screams.

Maggie wakes up. Freddy isn’t there.

Maggie figures he’s going to be coming eventually, and so they head downstairs to examine the arsenal that the kids have created. You remember, the one the cops were supposed to come pick up, but didn’t?

Of course you don’t remember. You were too busy being annoyed by the movie.

Maggie and Tracy pick up a couple of weapons and wave them at the camera, so we remember that this thing was shot in 3D.

Tracy and Doc wander off, so Maggie can sense something and walk to another part of the basement. She finds an unburned Freddy lying on the floor, bleeding from the face.

He tries to pass the blame. “You saw what they did to me when I was a kid. You saw.” He tells Maggie he loved her, and her mom, and that he tried to be good. “But when they took you from me, it wasn’t right.”

It almost looks like Maggie buys it, until she hits Freddy with a bat. She knocks his glove off, it flies across the room (3D!). Maggie picks up the glove, and Doc and Tracy come back from wherever they wandered off to.

But too late. Freddy crawls across the ceiling and closes the door, so Maggie can’t get out and Doc and Tracy can’t get in.

Oh, and Freddy has his hat back now. And he’s burned again. So I guess he still has super-powers even in the real world. Which is consistent with Part 2…

At any rate, Freddy tells Maggie that he didn’t need a glove to kill Maggie’s mom. He runs over and wraps his hand around Maggie’s throat, and Maggie appears to toss the bat away in shock, instead of hitting Freddy with it again.

I guess this is supposed to be dramatic or surprising, but it just makes Maggie look really, really, really stupid. Er. Stupid-er.

That’s right. She’s so dumb you want to violate the laws of grammar.

She head butts him to get him to let go. He falls back. Without bothering to put the glove on, she attempts to slash Freddy with it. Twice. He says he wants the glove back. They fall to the floor and tussle.

It’s really lame. I’d do a whole thing about how they both fight like girls, but if they really did, there would be hair-pulling, and there’s none of that. It’s like they ran out of money making everything in 3D, so they opted not to pay a fight choreographer.

Finally, Maggie bites Freddy in the nose. This makes him mad. So they tussle some more. Then Maggie breaks a bunch of Freddy’s fingers, and Freddy says, “I forgot how much it hurts to be human.”

He knocks her away. The glove falls out of her hand. She grabs it. Freddy gets up, stomps on her arm, and takes the glove. He pulls it onto his broken hand.

Tracy slides a bunch of weapons under the door to Maggie. These include ninja stars, ninja knives, a crowbar, and a small crossbow. Maggie throws all the objects into Freddy in a bunch of quick cuts. Not sure when she learned to use various forms of combat weaponry.

She goes over and takes the glove from Freddy, who is pinned to a post and a nearby wooden crate. Because of the knives and throwing stars and crossbow. I know it sounds stupid, but it looks even more stupid.

Freddy yanks some blades out of himself to demonstrate that he’s… I don’t know, really. A slow bleeder? He tells Maggie to put the glove on, because it’s in her blood.

Maggie puts it on.

Freddy says he’ll show her how to use it.

She jams it in his belly. Tracy throws Maggie the pipe bomb from earlier in the movie. Maggie jams that in his belly, and runs away.

Doc yanks the door out of the frame just in a nick of time, and everyone runs away. Except Freddy, who, despite having two free hands, doesn’t yank the pipe bomb out of his chest and throw it back at his assailants.

Instead, he says, “Kids.” You know. Because it’s funny. Then he explodes, and his head flies towards the screen in the 3D fashion, and then his head blows up, and the three dream demons come out and fly around in a 3D fashion.

Then they laugh and fly away.

(3D!)

In another hallway, Maggie’s 3D glasses do a twinkle thing, and appear again. The Doc takes them off.

And Maggie says: “Freddie’s dead.”

Wow. That was… That was awful, even by the standards of this entry.

The credits roll, with all the credits on the left, and film of the most “killer” moments of Freddy’s on the right. Ending with a shot of Freddy with the R.I.P. burned over him.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

The longer this series goes on, the more I’m convinced there was no one behind the wheel. I realize that the magic of the serial killer movie is that the guy never really dies, and just keeps coming back again and again and again, but really now:

First movie – Freddy is stopped using dream methods. Which didn’t work, so okay.

Second movie – stopped with the power of love. Everyone pretends it never happened.

Third movie – bones buried in consecrated ground.

Fourth movie – saw himself in a mirror.

Now, you CAN argue that Freddy didn’t actually die any of those times. He was just temporarily stopped.

To which I say: Um. Why?

Did he just decide to take a break for a while? Kick back, let people think they had won? Did he need a little vacation?

Ugh.

You know what, let’s just go ahead and find out what ridiculous reason he has for coming back this time.

I’m going to note, for the people that care, that while the title of Nightmare 5 arrives on video boxes as, “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child,” the actual movie makes no reference to the 5 in the title.

Just. You know. FYI.

After we get the title, we get a hand on some sort of moving flesh, but I really couldn’t tell you what flesh it was. A torso? I’ve got nothing.

Then we get a foot over some legs. Hands. Hair. This is all under a blue light, by the way.

Some more unidentified body parts. Creepy music. I guess maybe that was someone’s back?

Oh. Hey. Kissing. That one I know, at least. I think we’re watching Alice and Dan, but seriously, blue light.

Okay, whatever they were doing, they’re done now. So Alice gets out of bed and goes to take a shower. I guess she feels defiled. I have no idea.

As Alice showers, the water from the drain starts bubbling up. Then it starts bubbling up with brown water. Looks like someone upstairs flushed.

Alice tries to clear the drain. The water gets hot. The shower starts filling up. Now it’s just a big rectangle filled with water.

Alice pushes the door open, and leaps out. The water stays in place.

Alice lands on a cement floor. Things are looking boiler-room-area-ish.

No, wait. Now Alice is in a nun’s habit. Instead of naked. She keeps walking.

Ah. It’s an asylum. And there’s the man who would be Freddy, out of Freddy makeup.

Then things happen kind of quick. Two orderlies stand on a platform above all the crazy people. One of them is counting, and not doing a very good job.

Alice looks at her nametag. It says Amanda Krueger.

One orderly turns to another and says, “That’s enough. It’s a hundred.”

They leave. Alice screams, “No!”

But it’s too late. One nun. 100 maniacs. If you’ve been paying attention, you all know where this is going.

Alice screams and wakes up. Dan says something. No, wait. Not Dan. Freddy. Or I guess it would be Freddy’s dad, in the nun scenario. Alice freaks, the dream ends again, and this time, no Daddy-Freddy.

(I would like to point out that this kind of proves my point. Science dictates that Freddy only had one dad…)

Alice goes to take a shower, but it sort of freaks her out.

Then it’s graduation time. Someone is giving a speech. Dan, maybe? Is he the valedictorian? Really? Why do I doubt that?

Well, no. He appears to just be giving some kind of post-graduation speech to whoever wants to listen.

Then the movie tosses a bunch of new meat… no, sorry… uh… characters? Sure. Those. They toss a bunch of new characters at us. Greta, the “model.” Mark, the screw-up. Some other girl, who swims, so she’ll have keys so they can party later.

And there’s Dan and Alice. Alice is sad because her dad didn’t show up. No, wait, he did. He says he watched from under the bleachers, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by his formerly drunken existence.

Everyone gathers together with their family members and takes a photo.

Oh yeah. Somewhere in there Dan and Alice talk for ten seconds about Alice having a bad dream, and about how if Alice doesn’t dream about Freddy, he can’t come back.

Plus, Dan presents Alice with two tickets to Paris. Apparently, it’s going to be a great summer.

Later, Dan and Alice make out in the parking lot, until Alice’s dad shows up. Dan says goodbye all polite-like. He jokes about having Alice back by “August.” Tee-hee.

Alice heads to work. She walks across the park to do so, and as she does, there are some kids jumping rope and (everyone knows where this is going, right?) doing the Freddy chant.

And screwing it up again. “Seven, eight BETTER stay up late?” What, someone couldn’t slip the screenwriter a copy of the last four movies? I mean, clearly they mentioned the whole hundred maniacs thing, you’d think this would be easy enough to remember.

The park gets dark. Alice follows the kids who were doing the chant as they run through the somewhat wooded area.

Alice finally catches up to one of rope-jumpers just as she recites some more revised verse, “Seven, eight, better stay awake. Nine, ten, he’s back again.”

The kid runs off, the camera spins around Alice, and now she’s looking at a large set of stairs, with a nun running up them.

The stairs lead to a massive gothic cathedral-like thing.

Alice heads up the steps, following the nun. She goes into the “castle.” She walks down a long corridor. She’s the only one there.

At the end of the hall, a freaky-looking baby carriage rolls by. Alice goes that way, but passes by the carriage and heads upstairs.

Suddenly she appears to “slip,” and then she’s lying on a gurney as an orderly wheels her down a hall.

A doctor looks at her, and tells her not to be afraid. The camera spins some more, and now Alice is no longer on the table. She’s standing among the various doctors and nurses and nuns, looking at Amanda Krueger, who’s about to give birth.

“We have a breach birth here. It’s backward. We’re going to have to turn it around,” says the doctor.

Amanda is freaking out. But you probably guessed that.

The doctor has Amanda push. There’s an icky noise. The doctor and the nun look at the “baby,” and get all freaky about it. The nun tries to convince Amanda that this is one of God’s creatures. Amanda disagrees.

The baby tumbles to the floor, and we finally get to see that it’s all angry-and-Freddy-looking.

It looks over at Alice, and moves towards her. Alice pushes her way out the door, and then back in. Everyone is gone.

Alice walks through the door. Now she’s in the church where she last fought Freddy.

The Freddy-baby is lying on his pile of clothes he left behind at the end of the last movie. He starts screaming. The church starts to explode and crumble. Freddy-baby crawls into his clothes and the clothes start to twist and expand.

Alice tries to avoid getting smushed by falling church.

A damaged Freddy stands up. Things explode. Freddy goes flying. So does Alice.

Alice gets up and walks through the church.

Freddy reaches down, and slips his glove back onto his hand.

He stands up, looking all backlit, and says, “It’s a boy!”

Alice says she locked Freddy up. Freddy says he found a key. I’d complain that nothing like that even remotely happened, but what’s the use?

The church doors open, and hey! A nun! The nun says, “Your birth was a curse on the whole of humanity.”

I was going to summarize the rest of what she says, but trust me, you’ll just want to read it: “I will not allow it to happen again. You brought me back to give you life. But now, I must take yours.”

Freddy says we’ll see.

She goes on, “I must be released from my earthly prison. Look for me in the tower.”

The doors close. Freddy tells Alice that Alice will never find her.

Alice runs through the doors… and into her old diner.

So… let’s recap for a moment. Alice has friends. Alice is with Dan. Freddy apparently brought his own mother “back” so that he could come back, only I guess his mom can kill him. And Alice has to find mom and release her from her earthly prison.

Oh, I’m sorry. It’s not her old diner. It’s just the diner. Someone taps Alice on the shoulder.

It’s Anne. Who we’re just meeting.

Alice is four hours late, and Anne is mad. Anne leaves. We will never see Anne again.

Alice makes a phone call.

Over at the pool, Yvonne has let everyone in the senior class in, and it’s party central. Yvonne dives while everyone else sits around drinking beer and talking about the fact that Dan’s parents are displeased with his decision to take Alice to Paris for the summer.

Oh, and Mark doesn’t like blood, and Greta is not happy that her mom is trying to run her life.

Some random guy lets Dan know that he has a phone call. Dan takes it. It’s Alice, who says that Freddy is back, that Alice saw him while she was awake, and he “must have dreamed himself up.”

You have got to be kidding me.

Dan gets in his truck and races to help Alice. He turns on the radio. The dude on the radio says he’s taking calls. Dan “blinks,” which I guess indicates he’s falling asleep. Only maybe he doesn’t have to.

Should I presume this is all going to make sense later? Probably not, right?

The person calling in to the station is Dan’s mom, who has some unsavory things to say about Dan and Alice. The other voice on the radio says that if Dan was his son, he’d kill him.

Is the voice Freddy? Naturally.

Dan’s seat belt gets all windy and starts jerking Dan around. His foot is forced down on the pedal, and the truck zips around out of his control. Freddy appears on the other side of the truck. He’s got his own steering wheel.

Freddy pulls off his own arm, attaches it to the truck, and uses it to buckle himself in.

The truck crashes. Dan flies through the windshield, and into… the poolhouse he was just in. Only no one is there.

A phone rings, and Dan runs away from it.

He runs back out to the parking lot, and looks for a vehicle to steal. First he considers a truck, then he changes his mind and takes a motorcycle.

Here’s a question for Dan. If he knows Freddy is around, he should also know he’s asleep. Rather than taking a vehicle to no useful end, why not try to WAKE HIMSELF UP?

Ah well.

Dan drives. He goes fast. Things seem to be going well until every single cable and wire in the motorcycle starts stabbing themselves into Dan.

Except for the mess of cables that form into Freddy’s face. And then start shouting out various one liners that aren’t really all that funny. “Fuel injection! Power drive! Fast lane!”

Really. He uses all of those. And more.

Freddy concludes with, “Better not dream and drive!” as Dan and his stolen motorcycle go hurtling towards an oncoming vehicle.

In the diner, Alice goes to fill up a coffee cup. She turns as she hears Dan screaming, and the area behind her becomes what I guess is a giant throat as Freddy “swallows” Dan.

We get a short real-world shot of Dan, still in his truck, crashing into another vehicle.

Alice runs outside. The crash happened about a block from the diner. Alice runs to the two flaming vehicles. A man in an orange sweater and a hat jumps out and says that Dan came out of nowhere.

Alice looks over at the other truck, and there’s Dan, who’s pretty dead, except for when he sits up and asks, in Freddy’s voice, if Alice wants to make babies.

Elsewhere, Alice wakes up. Yvonne hugs her. He tells Alice that Dan is dead. Alice tells Yvonne that Freddy killed Dan. Alice’s dad arrives, and Alice also tells her dad that Freddy killed Dan.

A doctor in the room says that this kind of shock is very common “in women.” Why just women? Well, here’s the bombshell that was pretty much spoiled in the title of the movie: Alice is pregnant.

(Really, this whole movie is basically an anti-premarital coitus screed, when you think about it. “Don’t get it on young, or your unplanned baby may start entering dream states that end in unseemly deaths for your friends.”)

Alice is in a hospital, by the way. In case the doctor didn’t give it away.

Later, Alice attempts to sleep, which is kind of stupid if you think about it for even a second.

She sits up. There’s a young boy in the hallway. His name is Jacob. He says he’s sorry that Alice’s boyfriend got killed. Alice says she always loved the name Jacob. Jacob wanders off.

You know, I’m not going to say the other movies were intellectual treats, but this one is just insulting. You do realize that later in the movie they’re going to do a big reveal. Whoa, nelly! Jacob is Alice’s son! Freddy is using his dreams! Duuude!

I’m not saying it’s an un-clever premise. I’m just saying that trying to fake us out is sort of a downer. Expect more from us, movie!

And now we move over to Greta “the model,” who is looking at all of her porcelain dolls and crying over the big group photo they all took just a few hours ago. Guess she hit the one-hour photo place, since it’s like 5 hours later.

Greta’s mom tells her to get her beauty sleep, because I guess the death of her good friend shouldn’t weigh on her, like, TOO hard.

Greta puts her doll up on a shelf, and it falls off and the head shatters right on top of the photo.

The next morning, Yvonne walks Alice out of the hospital. Alice mentions Jacob, and asks if Yvonne visited her. Yvonne says that there are no kids on Alice’s floor, and no children’s ward.

That’s so STRANGE, huh? I wonder what THAT’S about?

Yvonne tells Alice to keep the dreaming thing just between the two of them.

One scene later, Alice lays out the history of Freddy to all her friends, including the “he uses my dreams to get his victims” part.

They point out that she wasn’t asleep, and that they’re all here for her. Oh, and they’re semi-congratulatory about the baby.

Later, Alice stands in her kitchen and cries. Her dad arrives home with groceries and says, “Buck up, little soldier.”

Okay, he doesn’t do that. He says he’s not disappointed in Alice about the baby, and that he hopes it’s a boy, because he’d love to hear the sound of boy-feet running around the house again.

It’s kind of Lifetime drama-y, but it may be the most heartfelt and kind-of-beautiful scene in all five of these movies.

I was going to lay out the next scene in a longer form, but I just can’t be bothered, because once again it’s so obviously a dream from the word “go” that you kind of want to claw your eyes out.

Long story short: Greta dreams that she’s at a big dinner party, where her shrew of a mom is insisting that she eat. Freddy traps Greta in a chair and proceeds to force-feed her until her face gets all huge and puffy.

Then there’s a strange intercut that shows that the force-feeding is happening in a “dream” world, but that Greta really is at a dinner party. Oookay.

At Alice’s house, Alice reaches into the fridge and discovers that all the food is rotting at high speed.

Greta pops out of the fridge. Alice tries to pull her all the way out. Freddy pulls Greta in and the door slams shut.

Back at the dinner party, it appears that Greta really was, like, totally at a dinner party. She stands up, coughs, and dies. This appears to make the partygoers upset. Bummer for them.

At her house, Alice opens the fridge again and sees that everything is back to normal.

Alice and Yvonne go to visit Mark at his job. He works at a warehouse. I guess. Actually, that gets pretty unclear. I’ll try to explain.

Here’s what happens, at any rate. Alice tells Yvonne and Mark that Freddy got Greta, again, even though Alice wasn’t asleep. Alice figures Greta fell asleep at the table and Freddy got her.

Yvonne points out that Alice’s only rule, that Alice must be asleep, is being violated, so Alice’s theory holds no water. Matt gets all angry and says that two people have died in the last two days, so he’s ready to listen to theories.

Yvonne heads to work.

And then I get confused, because Matt seems to take Alice into some back room somewhere, where he’s got a drawing board and a bunch of comics that he’s been drawing. So I’m thinking someone in Matt’s family owns the place, and lets Matt draw there, since they’ve got the space.

Except, there’s a place to sleep there. And Matt wanders over to it and falls asleep while Alice is making coffee. Never mind that he already knows that sleep is, like, a really bad thing.

While Mark sleeps, Alice sees that Mark has drawn Nancy’s house. Alice leans over, grabs a red marker, and makes a stick figure with the name “Alice” written over it.

On the page, Mark, who is drawn in pencil, walks into Nancy’s house.

Why Alice doesn’t try to WAKE MARK UP is left a mystery.

Instead, Alice closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she’s in front of Nancy’s house. The real one, not the drawing. Guess the animation was too expensive.

She starts to head up the stairs, but hears Mark calling to her. She runs to another room downstairs, and there’s Mark, in a hole in the floor, hanging in Freddy’s “throat.”

Alice tells Mark to run, and he does, until he sees blood, gets nauseated, passes out, hits the floor, and vanishes into thin air.

Alice looks back into the room behind her, and there’s Jacob. He’s looking away from her. He says hello. He tells Alice he’s been having bad dreams. He says he’s waiting for someone.

Jacob says some stuff, then we get THE BIG REVEAL. Jacob says, “I like you. Why don’t you like me?”

Only Alice doesn’t get it at first, because she is dumb. She asks who told Jacob that she didn’t like him. He says, “My friend with the funny hand.”

Jacob runs away. He heads up the stairs.

Alice follows him up the stairs, opens a door, and there’s Mark. On the floor. And I guess we’re back in the real world, though there isn’t anything that indicates that fact. She wraps Mark’s bleeding hands in cloth.

He tells Alice to go see Yvonne at the hospital, where Yvonne works. He then says he’s going to go find information on Freddy.

Alice goes to the hospital. She talks to Yvonne. Yvonne thinks Alice is nuts, still.

No matter. Yvonne still has the doctor come in and perform an ultrasound, which they attempt to wave away as not totally silly by using poor exposition. I’ll spare you.

The big, important factoid is, of course, that babies spend up to 70% of their day dreaming. There’s a fun fact to share at your next gathering. Fetuses are totally lazy!

Right. So. Alice keeps looking at her ultrasound, while Yvonne gets her file and the doctor wanders away from her. Suddenly, electric fuzziness oozes out of the ultrasound monitor, covering Alice.

Alice “slides” down Freddy’s throat, into… a womb, I guess. A tiny fetus floats around, being all fetus-y. Freddy’s face appears, and then tosses some souls down the kid’s food tube.

Alice wakes up, all freaked out. Or maybe she doesn’t wake up. Becomes self-aware? No idea.

The doctor assures her that the baby is in great shape. Oh, except the baby is “a little big” at this point.

Yvonne comes back, and Alice tells her that Freddy is feeding the baby souls. I don’t even know how that works.

Yvonne takes Alice home, and they keep on arguing about whether or not Freddy is real. Mark shows up, with a massive scrapbook o’ evidence. Yvonne opts to continue not believing, and leaves.

Alice says she knows now that Freddy is using the baby’s dreams. This took her 55 minutes of screen time, which means the audience has now had about 30 minutes of screaming, “Come on! Figure it out and move on!”

You know what would be a great ending, at this point? If Alice just stuck a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Boom. All done. No her, no baby, Freddy goes away forever and ever.

But they don’t talk about that. Nope. They talk about not having the baby. Which would almost work, except ALICE IS THE CONDUIT OF DOOM .

Alice says she can’t terminate her pregnancy. She continues, “He’s part of me and Dan. I want to keep him.”

Mark then takes a shotgun and blows Alice’s head off, thereby saving hundreds of lives, including his own.

No, wait. Sorry. He says, “Okay, then we’ll find another way.”

Mark deserves whatever death comes to him. I’m guessing he’s going to get cut up, a LOT. I’m really okay with that now.

Alice picks up a newspaper clipping that features Amanda Krueger. Alice realizes that she knows that face, but doesn’t bother to remember that she’s supposed to be looking for Amanda in “the tower.” She’s too busy not killing herself, which would end Freddy’s reign of terror.

Alice’s dad calls her downstairs. Dan’s parents are there. They want to adopt the baby and raise it. They think Alice might be too crazy to raise a kid. The doctor called them and said that Alice is talking like a nut.

Alice and Mark leave.

They go back to Mark’s place, wherever THAT is, and start talking about Amanda. It seems she “went crazy” after Freddy’s trial. She went to the asylum (the same one where she was left for a weekend and impregnated? Yeah, that’d make ME crazy, too.) and she hung herself there.

Except there was no body. So I have no idea why everyone assumes she hung herself…

No matter. The grave everyone knows and loves is empty. And Mark thinks that if Amanda did kill herself, then her soul is trapped in torment. He found it in a book called “Christian Mythology.”

Alice figures that Freddy killed her. She decides to go to sleep while Mark watches her.

She gets up on Mark’s bed and lies down, while Mark keeps reading the Mythology book. Yeah. That’ll keep him awake just great.

Yvonne goes to the pool. One of her friends says she missed practice. Yvonne asks if the pool is still open.

Why is Yvonne suited up if she doesn’t even know if the pool is open?

No matter. She gets into the hot tub, and slowly submerges herself.

Alice sleeps while Mark watches. He’s moved to reading comics. Much better plan.

In her dream, Alice runs down a hallway, calling to Amanda. There’s no answer. She climbs a bunch of wooden steps. At the top is a wall with no door.

Yvonne gets out of the hot tub and looks around. Freddy’s claws scratch on a metal pole nearby.

Yvonne gets up on the high board and prepares to dive, only the board rips apart and becomes a bunch of metal claws. Yvonne backs up, then leaps off the board into the pool. Only it’s all dream-logic-y, so she ends up trapped in the bottom of a round metal room with water on the bottom of it.

In Alice’s dream, she leans against the wall, everything tilts, and she rolls along the wall and through a metal door, which takes her wherever Yvonne is.

Yvonne isn’t there. But Freddy is. He does some taunting, and pulls Yvonne out of the water. Alice stabs him in the mouth with a metal pole, and he falls back.

Alice and Yvonne get out of the room, and Freddy won’t come out. He’s afraid of Amanda, so I guess the tower is off-limits. Or something. No clue.

Yvonne finally realizes that Alice isn’t crazy. Way to go, Yvonne.

Back at his place, Mark keeps on reading comic books. He opens one up, and it contains a bunch of drawings of different things we’ve seen in the movie. Including Mark, lying on the floor, reading a comic book.

Meta, dude!

Mark realizes this is A Very Bad Thing, and then he converts into a bunch of line drawings and vanishes into the comic.

Inside the comic, a bunch of pages float around. And Mark is just Mark again, with no pencils. Oh, I take it back. Everything is in shades of gray, except Mark. And the occasional object some teamster didn’t finish painting before shooting time.

Mark runs. Freddy chases him. On a skateboard. You know what’s scary? NOT Freddy on a skateboard, I can tell you that much.

(Okay, I need to stop for a second. Here’s the thing. Robert Englund, the man who plays Freddy, seems like the nicest man in the world. Really. The guy put up with a lot to play Freddy across two decades and eight movies. He’s a working actor, appearing in whatever pays the bills. He created the character of Freddy along with Wes Craven, and then watched as one director after another made his character look really, really, really stupid.

And yet, it seems like the man never said no.

Dress him in drag? Sure! Make him ride a skateboard? You bet! Awful one-liners? Okey-dokey doggy daddy!

Quite literally the only person in all the movies, the one who might have exhibited some sort of control over this iconic character, didn’t care that they stuck him in sunglasses and had him walk up the beach like he was in Miami Vice.

Robert, if you’re out there – I love you, man. I do. I hope to work with you some day, in some capacity.

But just once. Once! Couldn’t you have said: “Guys, I’m not going to ride the skateboard. Can’t you think of something scary?”)

Freddy is just about to slash Mark, when I guess he decides not to. Instead he vanishes, leaving Mark looking around, feeling all freaked out.

All the shelving (Is this supposed to be the warehouse?) crumbles to the ground.

Blood drips on his head.

Mark looks up. Freddy is up on some shelves, operating Greta’s dead body (soul?) like a puppet. Mark says to leave her alone.

Greta falls to the floor, where she shatters like a porcelain doll, leaving a smear of blood.

Freddy jumps down. Mark turns around. He’s now dressed up like the comic book character he’s spent most of the movie drawing. He shoots Freddy a bunch of times.

Freddy falls down. Then he laughs, and gets up, and now his sweater has a big old lightning bolt across it. And he looks all buff.

Mark shoots him a bunch more times, but the bullets just fly off of Freddy. Finally, Freddy slashes him, Mark turns into a paper cutout version of himself, and Freddy proceeds to slice him up unto confetti.

In the real world, Mark is all dead and cut up and bloody.

Alice wakes up and gives us a solid, “Mark! Nooo!”

Yvonne wakes up from her nap, which took place underwater in the whirlpool. And she gets out of the whirlpool.

Alice talks to a cop, who says she’s lucky she’s alive, because “nothing in that room was up to code.” Even the drawing board?

Alice says, “He needs me alive,” and the cop is all, “Wha?” and her dad says she’s just upset.

Yvonne arrives and wants to know where Mark went. Alice tells her that Freddy got him, and that they need to find Amanda.

Alice’s dad leads her away.

Alice tells Yvonne to find Amanda in the asylum.

Yvonne heads to the asylum. Which is strange, because the whole thing appears to be closed. Wasn’t it just the one wing that was supposed to be closed? Of course it was. But never mind.

Yvonne heads into the building.

Back home, Alice goes to sleep, which allows her to go to the asylum in, like, her mind. She does some Freddy taunting.

In the real world, Yvonne goes up the real wooden stairs and finds the door that was bricked over. She takes a metal pole she found on the ground and starts breaking in.

In her mind, Alice tricks Freddy into walking down a hallway. She takes the evil baby carriage and rams it into him, which causes various pointy parts to jam through him. She pushes him until he goes through a door and falls into the main crazy-person floor, where the 100 maniacs of legend start pulling parts of him off.

One of them tosses an arm on the floor, which turn into spiders. One of the spiders attacks Alice. Alice freaks.

She tries to stomp on various spiders.

Alice hears something. It’s Freddy. He’s talking to Jacob in the cathedral from the last movie. He takes Jacob’s hand.

Alice tells Jacob to run. He does. The various stairs get all M.C. Escher-y, and part of the floor becomes Alice’s diner. Dan walks out and calls to Jacob, only he’s actually Freddy and no one is fooled.

Finally, Alice and Jacob are reunited.

Alice asks where Freddy is, and Jacob says he’s hiding inside Alice.

You see what I’m saying? One shotgun, one shell, one Alice, problem solved? Yeah.

Alice tells Freddy he needs to get out, and Freddy starts climbing out of her, limb-by-limb. I’d say that it doesn’t really make much sense, but whatever. Who cares at this point?

In the real world, Yvonne breaks through the bricks and gets into the hidden room. There’s a woman in a nun’s habit there, with her back to Yvonne. Also some pigeons, so there was probably an easier way into the room. Like a window.

Yvonne goes to the nun, who is in a really, really, really white habit, which is impossible, since it’s also a rotted-to-the-bones corpse. Amanda turns, her bones get all spirit-like, and she says, “Thank you.” Then her bones turn to dust, I guess, because they just vanish.

Amanda goes to the big Alice/Freddy showdown, which, did I mention, takes place in a room that part M.C. Escher, part boiler room, and part whatever other kinds of freaky architecture they could dig up.

Amanda appears at the top of a set of stairs and calls to Jacob: “Alice will not triumph. Only you can help her now.”

Jacob turns around, looking more like Freddy, complete with some burn-y bits. He asks Freddy to leave Alice alone, concluding with, “Teach me?”

Freddy tosses Alice aside. Amanda tells Jacob to, “Unleash the power he has given you.” Jacob spits something at Freddy. Souls, maybe?

They shoot out, and through Freddy, and we get to watch a bunch of rubber-head-looking things yank on Freddy until… I dunno. He falls apart and turns back into the freaky-looking Freddy-baby thing.

Amanda picks up the Freddy-baby, and it vanishes in a flash of light. Into her womb.

Alice picks up Jacob-baby, and he also vanishes in a flash of light. Into her womb.

Amanda tells Alice to take her baby and leave. She goes up to a heavily backlit door, and a Freddy-arm punches through her belly and screams, “Let me out!” A lot.

Then a bunch of doors in front of Amanda close, and are blown out, and close, and are blown out, until one of them finally stays closed.

And then it’s months later, and Alice, her dad, Jacob Daniel and Yvonne are having a picnic. There some banter about how Jacob is keeping Alice up at night, but who cares. Where’s our final scare?

Ah, here we go. The camera pulls back, and there’s a girl jumping rope and humming the Freddy chant. The end.

Oh boy, more rap! I guess the good news is, Freddy isn’t the one doing it this time.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Let’s pause and consider something that I think is kind of important: These movies don’t make any sense at all.

I recognize that for the last three chapters, I’ve been ragging on just how inaccurate the titles of these movies are, but honestly, the problems with this series go much, much deeper than that.

So let’s talk about some really central problems.

First:

Freddy himself is an issue. He’s was a kid killer, he went to trial, got out on a technicality, and then a bunch of parents lynched him. Okay.

How did he come back? No, really. That’s my question. HOW?

The first film has something of a mystical take, with discussion of Balinese dreaming, and art and music and everything. So that at least gives us a way to get rid of him, but, once again, we don’t know how he came back in the first place.

I guess it could be argued that the Freddy rhyme reminds people of him, which allows kids to dream about a generic boogeyman named Freddy, but the idea hasn’t been addressed in the course of three movies, which takes things from mysterious and into irritating.

Second:

Freddy’s powers. Anyone want to explain those?

He can enter dreams (okay) and kill you in them (okay) and then eventually he can take over your body and enter the real world (though only in one movie, so maybe not).

He can be killed if you insist he’s only a dream (only that doesn’t work) or by telling the person trapped inside him that you love him (only that doesn’t work) or by burying his bones on sacred ground (doesn’t work).

If none of these things stop him, that means he can’t be killed. So why all the “Oh look, we killed him?” drama at the end of each movie?

Third:

Freddy’s goal.

What would that be?

To kill kids? To kill the Elm Street kids? Why is he stuck on Elm Street? He doesn’t actually seem to be stuck there at all, really. He seems to be able to kill anyone who resides in the town Elm Street is in. What’s preventing him from killing kids all over the world?

I suppose it could be revenge, but that means that once all these Elm street kids are gone, so is Freddy, right?

Am I asking too much?

Eh. On with the show.

Hey, they’re trying to be classy again! The quote this time is: “When deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Job IV, 13-14.”

Then we get a few credits, and then a hand cleans dirt off of the sidewalk, and starts drawing on it with chalk.

It’s a little blonde girl. Then an older blonde girl walks up to the little blonde girl, and asks who lives there. She says no one.

And where is there? Nancy’s house. Which still has a red door. Why?! Why?! It’s supposed to be blue. Does no one care?

The older girl asks where Freddy is, and the little girl says Freddy’s not home. The older girl looks at the young girl’s chalk drawing, which features Nancy’s house, and Freddy sticking his gloved hand out of the window.

The girl freaks, a freak storm comes up, and the freaky drawing gets washed away in the freak rain (freaky!).

The front door of Nancy’s house opens, and the older girl walks in. Behind her, a bunch of kids play jump rope and do the Freddy chant.

The door closes behind her. She opens it, and goes “out,” only “out” is back into the house.

She tries to calm herself down, and calls herself Kristen. Ah. New actress. Old role.

She sees the Freddy hand on the wall, as a shadow. She looks outside. Tree branch. The window explodes, and she’s blown through a door. Inside the next room, a bunch of chains are hanging from the ceiling.

Welcome back to the boiler room.

Kristen calls out to Joey and Kincaid. Kincaid and Joey get yanked into her dream, which makes them crabby.

She says she knows Freddy is there, and Joey shows her that the pipes, and the boiler, are cold. She doesn’t seem to believe it.

A dog jumps out of the pipe and bites her arm, and the three of them wake up.

Kristen has a bite on her arm.

The next day, Kristen drives pick up her friends. Well, her boyfriend and his sister. Her boyfriend is named Rick, but the name of his sister is a mystery at this point. Though we do get a whole long thing about how when dad is popping a lot of aspirin, it’s time to avoid all contact.

To this end, Rick jumps off the roof to avoid his dad. But then goes and antagonizes his dad anyway.

They drive to school, where they meet a girl with big hair who didn’t do her trigonometry homework. She drools over some guy, and it’s clear that Rick’s sister has a thing for the dude as well.

The cute guy is Dan. Oh, and the sister is named Alice. Yay for names.

And here comes “smart black girl.” You can tell, because she has glasses. The big-haired girl asks for her trig homework. Big hair is named Deb.

Deb reaches into her bag o’ snacks, and pulls out… a thing… with a bug on it. She freaks, drops the food, and squishes the bug.

Kristen goes to her locker, and Joey and Kincaid meet her there. They tell her to stay out of the boiler room when she gets to dreaming. Kristen shows them her dog bite, and Kincaid (it’s his dog who did the biting) says that his dog gets riled up when Kristen drags him into her dreams.

Is it wrong to find the dog-dragged-into-the-dreams thing kind of hilarious?

Rick shows up, and Joey and Kincaid take off. Rick thinks Joey and Kincaid are “kind of spooky.”

As the camera passes by Kristen and Rick, we get to see some lockers that have Freddy-slashes through them. With a glowing red light seeping through the slashes. Um… what?

Later than night, we’re treated to Rick doing a bunch of karate in his garage. Oh, and also he plays with nunchucks. Alice does the dishes.

Dad pulls up in his car, and Rick and daddy go into the house. Daddy asks for dinner, and Rick says they gave up on waiting. So he gets a bowl of what I guess is salad. Daddy freaks out at Alice and Alice smashes his dishes and tells him off.

Only it’s a fantasy sequence.

There’s some more dialogue, but feh.

Later that night, Kincaid plays darts, then falls asleep on his bed. His door opens, and there’s an ominous shadow. Turns out it’s Kincaid’s dog. Who’s named Jason.

Kincaid then goes to sleep. And “wakes up again.” He’s inside trunk of one of the dead cars from part 3. His dog is digging something up. Could it be?

Yeah Kincaid is in the junkyard. He hops out of the car, and confronts his dog. His dog gets all mad and barks. Then he pees fire, and a line of flames shoots along the ground.

The ground opens up, and various and sundry bones assemble themselves into a skeleton. Flesh oozes onto the bones, and hey! Freddy is back!

Uh. Somehow.

Kincaid runs.

Freddy says, “You shouldn’t have buried me. I’m not dead.” Or maybe he says it with his brain, because I don’t see his mouth moving.

Kincaid looks around.

Freddy walks around. He looks up. Kincaid pushes a car off the top of the car pile and onto Freddy. He celebrates his victory.

Then cars start blowing up, and sliding around, and generally making things really, really dangerous for Kinciad. Who yells out, “Kristen! Freddy’s back!”

Then Freddy, out of nowhere, grabs him by the collar and gives him a good stabbing. Kincaid dies, as Freddy says, “One down. Two to go.”

In his room, Kincaid real-world dies.

In her room, Kristen has a smoke.

In Joey’s room, Joey listens to music, watches MTV, and looks at the bikini-clad picture of some chick.

He falls asleep, his waterbed starts moving, and he pulls the covers away.

He’s now sitting on top of his water-filled mattress, with is see-through.

On the underside of his “mattress” is the bikini-clad female, who seems to have misplaced her swimsuit. She pushes away, vanishing under the water… and out pops Freddy, who grabs Joey and pulls him under.

There’s a struggle. Joey calls to Kristen. Freddy stabs Joey, the water fills with blood, and both Freddy and Joey vanish under the liquid.

In her room, Alice arranges her photos, taking a moment to look at a shot of her mom. Rick enters her room, and they talk about how dad kind of sucks, and how Alice needs to fight back. Rick tries to show her some ninja-type moves.

She accidentally kicks her shoe off, it flies into her fish tank.

The next morning, Joey’s mom goes into Joey’s room, being all crabby. Until she pulls aside the sheets and sees Joey trapped inside his mattress, being all dead.

Kristen, sitting at school, has a smoke. Alice shows up, and tells her that Rick is looking for her. They talk nightmares. It seems, when Alice was little and her mom was alive, mom taught her about the rhyme called, “The Dream Master.”

(Seriously, folks. I’m about ready to club a baby seal for a consistent mythology.)

We don’t actually get to learn what the rhyme is, or anything. I mean, who wants that?

At any rate, the bell rings, and Kristen heads to class. She discovers that Kincaid and Joey, who I guess are both in this class with her, aren’t there. So she flips out, saying, “He killed them!”

Despite the fact that they could both just have the flu. I mean, I know they don’t, but still. They COULD, is what I’m saying.

Kristen runs at Rick, Rick accidentally pushes her too hard, and Kristen bangs her head against a wall and knocks herself out.

She wakes up in the nurse’s office, looking up into the face of a really mannish-looking female nurse. Or a dude in drag.

(You know what must suck? Being the top-billed actor in a movie, only you’re always wearing makeup so no one can see your face. And when they say, “Hey, no prosthetics today!” you get all excited, and then they stick you in drag.)

(What I’m saying is, the nurse is Freddy.)

The nurse turns away from Kristen, you can see blood appearing in a slash-like way under her shirt, and then Freddy turns around holding a bunch of vials of blood. He takes a syringe of blood and squirts it at Kristen.

And then Kristen wakes up, to a much less mannish-looking nurse.

Dan, the random good-looking dude, goes into a diner. Alice works there. Dan asks Alice about Rick, and she says he stayed after school because Kristen wasn’t feeling very good, which I guess is code for, “He knocked her unconscious.” Dan asks Alice to tell Rick that Dan is looking for him.

Alice goes to waitress to Dan and pal, but it looks like her shift is over, so Deb goes to serve them. And then there’s nerdy black chick, who still doesn’t have a name. Oh, good, someone finally called her Sheila.

Sheila tells Alice that Alice needs to study more and work at the diner less, or she’ll end up there for the rest of her life. Alice says that’s her worst fear. Yeah. We all see where this is going.

Deb and Sheila banter about how Dan is hot and how Sheila doesn’t care about hot guys right now. Then Sheila leaves.

Rick and Kristen arrive, and ask if Alice can go. They now know for sure that Joey and Kincaid died.

Dan calls Rick over to talk to him about something-or-other.

Kristen mopes about the fact that she and Joey and Kincaid were a team.

Then Rick, Kristen, and Alice leave. And Dan follows. For some reason.

The foursome (no, really, why is Dan there? Why?) head to Nancy’s house, and Kristen does her whole “I’ll be dead soon,” thing, and Dan says he doesn’t understand, so Rick tells the whole “Freddy killed children, and now he kills you in your dreams,” story to Dan.

And then: Voice-over!

“Now I lay me down to sleep. The master of dreams, my soul I’ll keep.” Then the camera goes over to Alice, and she says she “thinks she remembers” the rhyme.

A horn honks. It’s Kristen’s mom, telling her to get away from Nancy’s house.

Rick says Kristen can stay if she wants to, but no. Kristen leaves.

Alice looks at the ground – and there’s the chalk drawing from Kristen’s dream. She looks away, she looks back, and the drawing is gone.

Then Rick, Alice and Dan leave. Though the shot of them leaving is from the inside of Nancy’s house. Which is stupid, because there’s no one in there.

Kristen goes home and has dinner with her mom, but she’s not eating much. Mom notes that Kristen hasn’t been sleeping lately, and suddenly Kristen realizes that she feels funny. Mom put sleeping pills in Kristen’s drink.

Kristen gets all angry, pointing out that her mom was one of the people who killed Freddy. (Did she? Really? I guess that sort of makes sense, but I don’t recall anyone mentioning it in the last movie. I guess I could point out once again that nothing in this movie jibes with what all happened in Part 2, but what would be the point of that?)

She goes on to tell her mom that mom has just murdered her. Then she stumbles up the stairs to her room, and starts pawing around, looking for something. She dials the phone, saying Alice’s name.

As she passes out, she says, “Dream someplace fun.” Which was a suggestion of sorts given by Alice earlier.

Kristen wakes up on the beach. She sees a little girl, whose name, it seems, is Alice.

Out in the water, a shark’s-fin-looking-thing zips through the water. Then the sand. Then a sand castle, which explodes. And there’s Freddy.

Kristen runs.

I guess no one remembered that scary things are usually only scary in the dark. This is pretty much no exception.

It gets worse. Kristen falls into quicksand. Freddy puts on some sunglasses, then steps on Kristen’s head, pushing her deeper into the quicksand. She vanishes into the sand while Freddy laughs.

Kristen, now in clothing instead of a swimsuit, explodes through the ceiling of Nancy’s house. She climbs down to the floor, then down the stairs to the boiler room, where she encounters Freddy again.

Freddy says, “Elm Street’s last brat. Farewell.”

Freddy then suggests that Kristen call on someone to help her out. Kristen says no, then pulls Alice into the dream anyway. Way to go, Kristen. If you held out for one more minute, Freddy would have killed you, and the nightmare would have been over forever and ever. But instead, to brought more victims to the party.

(Er… I guess all that’s true as long as we continue to ignore part 2 some more.)

Kristen tells Alice to wake up.

Freddy grabs Kristen and throws her into the furnace.

Freddy rips open his sweater, showing off “the souls of my children.” Which is the say, the faces on his chest.

Kristen calls out to Alice and says that Alice will need her power. Then a green light shoots out of the fire and hits Freddy. So I guess that’s Kristen’s soul.

A light shoots out of Freddy and hits Alice.

Alice wakes up, goes to her collection of pictures on her mirror, and sees a postcard from Freddy.

It bursts into flame, and Alice drops it and pats it out.

Rick goes to Alice’s room, and Alice says they have to go to Kristen’s house. So they run there. There’s a fire in Kristen’s window.

They go into the house.

Alice, Rick, and Kristen’s mom go into Kristen’s room. Kristen is on fire.

And then we’re graveside, and Kristen is dead. And in a grave.

Later, Alice sits and watches old videos of Kristen and their various other friends being silly. Rick sits down next to Alice, and they talk about whether or not Freddy, like, totally killed Kristen.

Alice believes. Rick doesn’t. There’s some conflict.

Alice says that something happened in the dream, and now it’s like part of Kristen is with her.

Then it’s the next day, and Alice is in the bathroom at school. She talks to Sheila, who didn’t get any sleep the night before. Because she was cramming for a physics test. Also, she made some gadget for Deb that uses ultra-high frequencies to scare bugs away.

Sure. All right. I’m sure that’s not going to come back to haunt this story.

Sheila leaves, and Alice lights up a cigarette. Then she remembers that she doesn’t smoke. Foreshadowing, folks. That’s what THAT’S about.

In physics class, Sheila coughs. Tests are handed out. And then, everyone begins writing.

Sheila looks at her paper, focuses on a formula, and suddenly it starts moving around the page. It turns into the words, “Learning is fun with Freddy.”

Blood drips on the paper. Nope, it’s red ink, from Sheila’s pen.

Alice appears to go to sleep, then wakes up, and sees what’s going on. It seems they’re trapped in the nightmare together.

Sheila tries to wipe the ink away, and her hand is pulled into her desk. She pulls her hand out, and a robot hand pops out of the top of the desk, and tries to hurt her.

Alice and Sheila are yelling, “Wake up!”

Suddenly, everything stops. Alice and Sheila look at the front desk. They see an apple. Freddy, who is sitting at the desk, picks the apple up. He uses a claw to skin part of the apple.

Then he gets up, and approaches Sheila. He takes her glasses. He shows her his claws. Then he sticks his lips on hers and sucks the life out of her.

Except then she wakes up, mid-asthma attack. Alice asks if anyone saw Freddy. They all look at her like she’s crazy.

As Sheila is whisked away by people with a stretcher, Alice freaks out with the realization that she pulled Sheila into her dreams. Her friends are all, “What?” And Rick is all, “Maybe it IS true.”

Later, at the diner, Alice cleans. Dan comes in, and asks for a pack of gum. Dan asks where she’s been. She says she’s been working double shifts, to avoid sleeping.

Dan asks a pointless question so that Alice can explain to the slow people in the audience that Kristen was the last of the Elm Street kids, and now that Kristen is gone, Freddy needs someone new to pull kids “in” for him.

Dan is kind of like, “Oookay” but then his date opens the door and says they’re going to be late for the drive-in. I think his date was Deb, but maybe not. Right hair, anyway.

The next day, some random dude comments to Dan that they’re all dropping off like flies, and expresses pity over Rick, who has a dead girlfriend and a crazy sister.

Dan angry. Dan push day player into locker.

Dan would probably smash, but instead he goes to talk to Rick, who looks wasted. He too, is not sleeping, opting to stay up with Alice.

Rick talks about how if you look into the town’s history, teenagers kind of get the short end of the stick, death-wise.

Then Rick heads into the potty.

(I will not talk about part 2 again here. I will NOT! No! I will not mention how Rick must have found the news story about Freddy appearing years after his death and killing a bunch of kids at a party, because it clearly didn’t happen.)

And then we’re in class with Alice. Her teacher is teaching about – ready? Dreams. Yes indeed. Apparently, Aristotle thought that skilled dreamers could control what they see. Your soul roams free, and you can enter the “positive gate” or the “not-so-positive” gate.

Alice starts to fall asleep.

Meanwhile, while sitting on the john, Rick falls asleep. The stall door opens, and a bunch of cheerleaders wander in. I leave it to you to guess whether this is the positive gate, or the non-positive gate.

Oh, and Alice is also there, watching Rick poop. Non-positive gate, I guess.

Alice and the cheerleaders leave, Rick stands up, fails to wipe (talk about a nightmare!) and sees Kristen in the bathroom mirror. She turns around, and her face is burned.

Rick steps back, and the toilet stall has become an elevator. The door slams shut, and Freddy’s voice says, “Going down!”

Rick starts to panic. The elevator stops, and Rick wakes up.

He’s in what I guess is a dojo. An invisible Freddy gives him a solid thrashing.

Rick fights back, and gets a few punches in. Somehow, he manages to kick Freddy’s glove off.

The glove flies in the air, zooming over into Rick’s belly.

Alice wakes up, screaming, “No!”

And then Alice and Deb are at Rick’s funeral. Rick flips open the coffin, and steps out. He says the whole thing was a joke to fool Freddy. Alice says, “No more daydreams.”

So Rick gets back in his coffin.

Dan walks over to Deb and Alice, and asks if there’s anything they can do for Alice. Alice, Dan and Deb plan to meet up at Deb’s to figure out some kind of plan.

Deb gives Alice her studded bracelet as a good-luck charm.

Oh, and Alice mentions “Mind over matter,” which used to be Sheila’s saying. I realize it’s supposed to be, like, a screenplay runner, and to make us feel empowered, or awesome, or like Alice has a plan to kick Freddy tail, but really it just makes you feel the lameness of the screenplay.

Alice goes home, gets Rick’s nunchucks, and starts practicing with them. She’s really good, for no reason. She says, “What’s happening to me?”

Alice tells her dad that she’s leaving, and that she’s going to see Deb. Dad doesn’t want her to go. He says he doesn’t want to lose her. It would be a nice emotional moment if dad wasn’t pretty much a mean ol’ drunken cipher up to this point.

Dan stands outside the diner, waiting for Alice.

Deb prepares to work out.

Alice sneaks out of her house, and goes to the diner. Dan is gone.

She walks to a nearby movie theater and buys a ticket. She goes into the theater. She even has snacks.

She starts watching the movie, which slowly changes to show a kind of nightmare-ish ghost town. The wind kicks up on the screen.

Then it kicks up in the theater, though Alice is the only one affected. Her popcorn and drink blow away, and then Alice is blown out of her seat and into the movie screen.

The people in the audience applaud.

Alice is now inside a long-abandoned version of the diner. There’s dust and cobwebs everywhere. And a cook. Female. Grey hair. It’s an old version of Alice. Good thing we knew this was her nightmare before, right?

Sure.

Freddy is sitting next to Alice now. Old Alice brings out a pizza with lots of toppings. Including souls, which are pretty much just faces yelling at/to Alice. Freddy stabs Rick’s soul in the face, pulls him off the pizza, and pops him into his mouth.

Freddy tells Alice: Bring me more.

Alice looks over, and there’s Deb, in workout gear. Freddy tells Alice her shift is over.

In her workout room, Deb goes to lift her barbell.

Alice wakes up, and runs out of her house. She finds Dan at the diner, and says she needs to stop Freddy. Dan says he and Alice are in this together.

Deb keeps on working out, paying no heed to Freddy’s place reflecting in her barbell. (Hey, here’s a question. I don’t remember seeing Deb fall asleep at any point. When did that happen? DID that happen?)

Alice and Dan arrive at Deb’s house, Alice runs to the house, and…

She’s suddenly back at the diner again, and telling Dan they need to get to Deb’s house.

At Deb’s place, Freddy is now in spotting position behind Deb’s barbell. She lifts the weight, he pushes it down. Her arms snap.

The ends of Deb’s arms flop off, and insect arms now protrude from Deb’s stumps.

That make sense to everyone? Basically, Deb’s arms are normal up until about the elbow, and then after that she’s got insect arms. Big ones.

Deb runs, screaming, down a long hallway.

Alice arrives at Deb’s house, runs towards the house, and then…

Yessir, she’s at the diner again. This time, as they drive to Deb’s house, Dan says he has the feeling they’ve done this before.

In her nightmare, Deb looks down and sees a yellow sticky substance on the floor. She falls over, and her face sticks to the ground. She tries to pull herself up, and she yanks off her skin, revealing the bug underneath.

Back at the diner, Rick and Alice finally suss out that they’re going in circles. But they decide to drive to Deb’s house again anyway.

Deb, meanwhile, is now a cockroach. And it’s finally revealed that she was in a roach motel. Which Freddy squishes, causing yellow goo to shoot out of the box.

Alice jerks. She knows Deb is gone now.

She looks up. She’s driving Dan’s truck in her dream, Dan by her side, and she sees Freddy on the road. So she rams him. The front of the truck crumples.

Alice looks over at Dan, who is unconscious, and apologizes. An ambulance comes and picks him up. Alice is in the ambulance. A paramedic goes to give Dan an injection, and Alice says no.

So… they really were driving in the van while they were asleep? I guess?

I’m confused.

Alice tells Dan that he shouldn’t let them put him to sleep. They have to get ready for Freddy.

Alice’s dad is at the hospital. Alice runs away from him, and takes his car.

Oh, and I guess it’s important, because they showed the clock: It’s 10:15, and Dan goes into surgery in 15 minutes.

Alice drives home. She runs up to her room.

They give Dan gas, and he passes out.

Alice takes a couple of pills, and then we get a whole montage of her getting dressed up in gear that I guess is supposed to make her look tough.

In his room, Dan “wakes up,” and sees that Freddy is operating on him.

Alice looks through her mirror and sees Dan’s surgery room. She jump-kicks through the mirror, frees Dan from his surgery table, and they head out the door.

Then end up in a big metal tube. It’s one of those funhouse things where it spins around, and you try to walk through it.

They walk through a stained-glass window at the end of the tube and fall to the floor of a church. Dan realizes he’s bleeding.

He’s bleeding in real life as well, so the surgeons give Dan some other kind of gas and he wakes up. Then he asks to be put back under.

Dan vanishes in Alice’s dream world, and she looks around as the Freddy chant floats through the air. The front door of the church opens up, and there’s Freddy, who says, “Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.”

(I’d just like you to know that I skipped over a WHOLE lot of Freddy one-liners as I was writing this. You’re welcome.)

Freddy walks in, and the doors swing shut behind him.

Alice’s stunt double does a whole ton of flips, ending with a kick to Freddy’s face. And then a bunch of punches.

Freddy isn’t impressed.

There’s more kicking and some flipping. Freddy falls down, then appears behind Alice and says he’s been, “guarding his gate” for a long time. Whatever that means.

Alice yanks a power cable out of the wall, shoves it against the bug zapper Sheila made, and then shoots Freddy with a stream of current. A hole appears in his chest. Freddy waves his hand over the hole, and it vanishes.

Freddy says, “I am eternal.”

Clearly.

He smacks her in the face, she falls over, and then she hears chanting. She looks up. On a little balcony, a bunch of young girls says, “Now I lay me down to sleep. The master of dreams, my soul I’ll keep. In the reflection of my mind’s eye, Evil will see itself, and it shall die.”

Alice says that last line too. By the way.

She also picks up a bit of shattered stained glass with reflective properties, and shows Freddy his reflection. Freddy screams, and we get a long shot of… I don’t even know. Let’s call it the inside of an artery, with a bunch of souls all screaming from the inside of Freddy.

Alice yells, “Let them out!”

Tiny arms pop out of Freddy, shredding his sweater and yanking on his limbs.

Alice goes on: “You’re dead, Krueger.”

Various souls start shoving their way out of Freddy. They rip off the top of his head, and souls, in the form of light, shoot out of his throat.

The souls thank Alice, and float out of the church.

Freddy’s clothes fall to the ground, empty. His glove does the same. Alice kicks the glove away, and walks out the doors of the church and into the light.

A day or three or five later, Alice and Dan walk by a large fountain. Dan says he’s sleeping well, Alice says she only gets two or three hours a night.

Dan pulls out a coin and tells Alice to make a wish. She says she doesn’t believe in that stuff. Dan says they both do. Just before the coin hits, Alice sees Freddy reflected in the water of the fountain.

Dan asks what she wished for. Alice considers for a second, then says, “If I tell you, it won’t come true.”

They join hands, and walk away from the fountain.

But is the nightmare over? No. The credits feature Freddy rapping. Now that’s what I call horror.