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.