Freddy Vs. Jason

Here’s a puzzler for you – this movie takes place after “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.” Which should mean that it’s a sequel to that movie.

The only problem is, it doesn’t really have anything to do with that movie at all. Not the tiniest little bit. There’s no ancient evil, no storyteller. Nothing.

So do we pretend that this movie follows part VI? I mean, I guess we could. Or rather, I guess we have no choice.

As far as the Jason story goes, timeline-wise, this was made AFTER Jason X, but Jason X takes place in “the future” and this movie doesn’t, so I guess we don’t have to worry about that. This one just happens after Jason is killed (again) and his hockey mask is dragged under the earth by Freddy claws.

Which sounds like a cool idea, until you go, “Oh, so Jason died in Springfield, Ohio in that movie? No, wait, Freddy died in some other town. So maybe Jason made it there?”

And who was dreaming of Freddy, in order for that to happen? And if Freddy can suddenly enter the real world again… but wait, he was already brought into the real world and killed there, so WHOSE HAND IS THAT?

Sometimes, doing something that seems “cool” at the time trumps logic.

So here we go:

Here’s the film logo, with a little “Nightmare on Elm Street” music and a bit of kee-kee-kee ma-ma-ma.

And then we’re in the boiler room. A little girl is trying to sneak off somewhere, while Freddy sharpens his claws and gives us a whole lot of voice-over.

“My children. From the very beginning, it was the children who gave me my power. The Springwood Slasher. That’s what they called me.”

The unburned Freddy looks at the little girl, and holds up his claws. But we don’t get to see any actual cutting.

Freddy then takes a picture of the girl and sticks it into a scrapbook. He continues: “My reign of terror was legendary. Dozens of children would fall by my blades. Then the parents of Springwood came for me. Taking justice into their own hands. When I was alive, I might have been a little naughty. But after they killed me, I become something much, much worse. The stuff nightmares are made of.”

While this is all going on, we get shots of people throwing Molotov cocktails into Freddy’s boiler room building, and things going up in flames.

And then shots of Freddy’s “Super Evil Eyes.” They’ve upgraded his makeup a bit.

“The children still feared me, and their fear gave me the power to invade their dreams. And that’s when the fun really began! Until they figured out a way to forget about me. To erase me completely.”

While all this is going on, we get to watch a bunch of Freddy’s greatest hits. I’m going to do you a favor and skip some of the monologue, and pick it up here:

“I can’t come back if nobody remembers me! I can’t come back if nobody’s afraid! I had to search the bowels of hell. But I found someone, someone who’ll make ‘em remember. He may get the blood, but I’ll get the glory. And that fear is my ticket home.”

As Freddy wraps up three solid minutes of telling us his evil scheme, we get a shot of Jason’s hockey mask. We move in on the eye hole, where we can see a teenage girl.

And now we move to a dock, where the girl hears a noise and calls to some dude named Mike. Strangely, she’s not sure if it’s him or not. She removes her shirt in an effort to taunt him. Or enamor him. Or possibly to wake up all the teenage dudes wondering when Freddy is gonna shut up and let the movie roll.

She tells Mike she’s going in the water. Then she strips down and dives in. She hears another noise, and decides that, “It’s not funny any more.” She goes back on the dock, and puts on her shirt.

Without getting dressed the rest of the way, she looks around, until she spots Jason in the woods and figures it would be prudent to run away. Since she’s wearing an almost-buttoned shirt, the censors let this one go. After all, it’s like 42% less exploitative if the naked woman is almost wearing a shirt.

The girl runs, screams, trips, falls. Stands around looking for Jason. Backs up into something. It’s a tree. She walks around the tree, and turns around. There’s Jason, who jams his machete through her AND the tree.

Jason hears a voice. His mother.

The girl, who is mostly dead, but partially alive, says, “I should’ve been watching them, not drinking, not meeting a boy at the lake.” The girl becomes a boy, and the boy becomes another girl. They’re all fairly penitent.

Jason’s mom appears behind him, and she’s got something to say, too: “Jason. My special, special boy. Do you know what your gift is? No matter what they do to you, you cannot die. You can never die. You’ve just been sleeping, honey. But now the time has come to wake up. Mommy has something she wants you to do. I need you to go to Elm Street. The children have been very bad on Elm Street. Rise up, Jason. Your work isn’t finished!”

While mom is babbling, in some place or another, we get to watch Jason’s heart beating.

“Hear my voice and live again!”

Wherever Jason is, he opens his eyes, crawls out of his grave, and starts walking. Maybe to Elm Street. Maybe to a 7-11 to get a slurpee.

“Make them remember me Jason, make them remember what fear tastes like. I’ve been away from my children for far too long.”

On that last line, “mom” morphs into Freddy.

So, that would mean that for six of the last six-and-a-half minutes, Freddy’s been running his mouth. Hoo boy. That’s gonna get tiresome.

Another conundrum. Assuming Jason was buried anywhere remotely related to Crystal lake, he’s either in New Jersey or Connecticut, depending on which Jason movie you’re referencing.

I sincerely hope the next shot is of Jason hailing a taxi. Or standing in line at the airport. That dude’s got a long, long, long walk ahead of him if he’s headed to Ohio.

They throw the title of the movie at us, and we’re onto the next scene.

Which takes place at the Nancy house. Which… has a red door.

It seems that Wes Craven is the only man in the world who believes in the blue door. But you know what? Forget it. This movie already has no real reason to exist, beyond profit. Freddy is dead both in the movie world, and in the real world. And in the real world in the movie world.

Remember how I said we might as well forget “New Nightmare?” While you’re at it, you should probably forget “Freddy’s Dead,” seeing as how Freddy left Springwood in that movie. And was killed. And also got his power from dream demons.

Inside the house are three girls, who are playing a game that pretty much has no bearing on the plot, so forget about it.

The three girls are Kia, Lori, and Gibb. Kia is black, Lori is blonde, and Gibb is smoking and drinking. She opens a window, and tosses her cigarette into the night, where it bounces off Jason’s mask.

I wonder if Jason is tired after his walk?

Gibb gets ready to head out and buy more beer. She opens the door and, “Surprise!” It’s Gibb’s boyfriend, Trey. He brought beer. He also brought a dude named Blake.

Lori isn’t happy about this, but Kia points out that Lori needs a man. Apparently her boyfriend Will moved away, and never calls, or writes, or emails.

Lori looks over at Blake, who is taking a hit off his drink and scratching his man-bits.

Later, Blake compliments Lori on the feng shui of the house. Kia says Blake should check out Lori’s bedroom. Kia might be the worst friend ever.

Blake suggests to Gibb that he has a kink in his neck that needs massaging. Gibb says she needs more drinks before any massaging will happen, and Lori asks what Gibb sees in him. Apparently? Nothing.

Blake reminds Gibb that angering him is a bad idea, the two of them head upstairs.

Lori asks Blake to get them some beers, and then tells Kia that Blake sucks. Also there some exposition about how Lori’s mom is dead, and how her dad “needs” her.

In the kitchen, Blake gets some beers, and then sees that the back door is wide open. A gust of wind shuts it.

Jason-cam heads upstairs and gets ready to do some stabbin’. Gibb and Trey are having a grand time. Which is over about six seconds later. Gibb tries to cuddle, but Trey hates that kind of thing. So she goes to take a shower instead.

Trey grabs a beer, and Jason steps out of the shadows and stabs him a lot. Then he folds the bed, in order to demonstrate that he’s, like, totally still got it.

Gibb gets out of the shower, and steps in a puddle of blood. She touches it, decides not to consider trying to escape out a window, and steps into the next room, where she sees Trey, being all dead-like.

She starts screaming.

Moments later, everyone is out of the house, screaming and yelling and calling for help.

Luckily, a cop car arrives at that moment.

The cops overrun the house, and a young cop and an old cop walk through the house and out the door, while the young one goes, “It’s gotta be Freddy! It’s even the same house!” And the old one says, “Don’t say that name. We’ve got to keep it together!”

All the kids are taken down to the station and questioned.

Old Cop and Young Cop determine that the kids don’t know “anything,” and another cop, Stubbs brings Lori some coffee and says her dad will be there soon and that they don’t have a suspect.

Lori overheard Freddy’s name being said, but can’t think of it. She rests her head on the table and closes her eyes, and then comes up with it.

She opens her eyes, and looks up, and the cop shop is devoid of people. She walks through the empty building, following drops of blood that vanish as they hit the floor. She passes by a punch of signs that say, “MISSING” and have shots of kids on them.

She finds a young girl lying on the floor, and touches her on the shoulder. The girl turns to her. Her eyes have been clawed out. She tells Lori: “His name is Freddy Krueger, and he loves children, especially little girls. Freddy’s coming back. Soon he’ll be strong enough. It’s OK to be afraid. We were all afraid. Warn your friends. Warn everyone.”

Lori steps back and runs into the wall. The wall becomes the door to the Nancy house. Out on the lawn are a bunch of gravestones. Nearby, little girls do the Freddy chant incorrectly.

Grab your crucifix is replaced with “a,” and gonna stay up late is replaced with “try to.”

Freddy suddenly jumps out and basically yells boo.

Lori wakes up in the cop shop.

Over at Blake’s house, his dad gets up in his grill about how he was supposed to be watching his sister. He retorts that his best friend was just killed. Blake tells the air that he knows some guy named Freddy did this, and Blake is going to take Freddy out himself.

Something moves in the bushes, and Blake goes to investigate. He hears something move, and turns, and there’s a goat. And Freddy is down the street. A shadow Freddy springs out from Freddy-Freddy and tries to slash Blake, but nothing happens.

Blake leaves, as Freddy says, “Not strong enough yet. Well, I will be soon enough. Until then, I’ll let Jason have some fun.”

Man, do I miss the days when Freddy didn’t talk. I miss them so, so much.

Blake wakes up. His dad is sitting next to him. Blake touches his dad on the shoulder, and his head falls off. Blake stands up. Jason carves him up. Trey will not be avenged this night.

At the local mental hospital, a patient asks what his Hypnocil does. Well, well. Continuity. Didn’t see that coming.

Turns out they all have to take it.

The next dude comes up, and sees on the news that someone was killed in Lori’s house. This is, it turns out, the famous Will who Lori is deeply in love with, even though he never calls or writes.

The dude who asks about Hypnocil is Will’s friend, Mark. They discuss some stuff about nightmares, and how Will seems to think that Lori’s dad killed her mom. Which is how he ended up in an institution.

Oookay.

Mark realize that Will really cares about Lori, so he decides to act all crazy so the guard-dude will inject him with sleepy-time drugs. So that Mark can steal the dude’s keys for Will.

Oookay.

Will breaks out. Or rather, I guess he just unlocks the door and walks out, but never mind. He takes his very doped friend with him.

The next day, Lori’s dad gives her drugged orange juice. Or rather, he tries to, and says she should stay home, but she says she wants to see her friends.

So she heads off to school, without her drugged juice. Probably important note: When she falls asleep for a half-second, her dad develops Freddy-face.

At school, the girls convene and everyone learns that Blake and Trey are both dead. It seems people are thinking Blake went crazy. Kia insists that this is “messed up.” She should have insisted on “acting lessons.”

Inside the school, the kid named Linderman tells Lori he’s sorry about what happened, and offers to listen if she wants to talk. Kia tells him to put his hormones back in a box and let this go. This is, of course, the same Kia who insisted Lori should totally nail Blake the night before.

Two dudes in the hall pass out invites to a big party.

Lori chooses now to tell her friends all about Freddy and her bad dreams. Interesting choice, there, Lori.

As she explains, another dude appears in the hallway and sings the Freddy chant. Oh. It’s Mark. It seems he knows all about Freddy. He gives her, and the audience, all the exposition they missed at the beginning when they fell asleep during Freddy’s monologue.

Will appears at the other end of the hall, and tells Mark to stop scaring Lori. Lori is so surprised to see Will that she passes out. Will and Mark run.

Lori naps in the nurse’s office. Kia wants to know why Lori isn’t awake yet.

Kia and Gibb sit in the waiting room. Kia is reading a magazine about plastic surgery. Suddenly, Freddy sticks his claws out of the magazine, says, “Got your nose!” and yanks Kia’s CGI nose off.

Kia wakes up, unharmed.

Mark and Will, still in the hallways of the school, keep on wandering around.

A couple of cops spot them, and they run… to the library.

They check old newspaper records, and discover every mention of Freddy has been wiped out, including Mark’s brother’s suicide.

There’s more discussion, and a location move, so that the boys can explain to the audience yet again that anyone who remembers Freddy is moved to the mental hospital, because if no one fears Freddy then Freddy can’t return.

Which completely abandons all the ideas found in the movies from “Dream Warriors” on, which tout the idea any Elm Street kid being attacked by Freddy must have some sort of connection to a previous Freddy victim.

Remember? Kristy was the last of the Elm Street Kids, and she brought Alice into the fray, and then Alice’s baby started dragging other people in.

Mark tries to convince Will that they should leave before things get bad. Will says he must talk to Lori.

Mark tells Will he gets one night, and gives Will his really easy-to-spot van.

Out in some corn field: Rave! All the kids are there. Including Linderman. A bunch of dudes try to pour beer down his throat. Ah, teenage hijinks.

Linderman finds Lori and offers to get her a drink, and Kia arrives and is mean to Linderman again.

Off in the middle of somewhere-or-other, Jason picks up a rusty metal pipe.

Linderman verbally slaps back at Kia, but it’s sort of lame.

Elsewhere in the party, Freddy is now a topic of conversation. Which makes Gibb mad, so she throws beer on someone.

Will shows up, and reveals to Lori that he’s been writing to her while he was at Westin Hills, the mental hospital. And that he came to find her because he heard about the kid that was killed at her house.

Will wants to know where Lori’s dad was when the killing happened – she tells him he was out of town. She mentions Freddy, and then suddenly Kia shows up and decides they all need to do some dancing, at this random time when it would really be a much better idea to figure things out.

Also, Kia is now being “nice” to Linderman, so the plot doesn’t come to a screeching halt.

I’m searching for even a single reason to like Kia, and I’ve got nothing. Anyone want to jump in here?

Gibb goes wandering drunkenly through the corn field – and there’s Trey. Who is mighty dead, but still bossy as anything. Gibb follows him. She arrives at a silo, and walks on in. Not an awesome plan.

Inside, it looks boiler-room-y. She sees the shadow of Freddy. She tries to leave, but there’s no door.

Out in the real world, she’s passed out on the ground, and a raver is looking at her and thinking raver thoughts.

In the dream, Gibb wanders around the boiler room. And on a scaffolding. She trips and falls down to the first floor.

Outside the dream, raver-boy is kissing up on her. Bleah…

In the dream, Gibb gets up off the floor and hides in a locker. Cutting off all exit options. Genius.

Freddy pulls off the door and goes to strike, and blood suddenly flies out of Gibb and onto Freddy.

In the real world, Jason has just stuck his machete through both raver-boy and Gibb. Which means she died while being drunkenly molested the day after her boyfriend died. You know something? That’s just depressing. European art-film makers would consider filming something like that, and cut it because it was just too sad.

This is followed by Jason tossing raver-boy off his machete so he flies way, way, way off into the cornfield.

In the dream, Freddy is displeased that he lost his victim.

Back at the party, two dudes smoke pot. They turn around, and see Jason. They taunt him. Jason turns one dude’s head around on his neck. The other guy throws booze on Jason and sets fire to him.

Jason doesn’t care. He pulls out his machete and gives stalk.

He leaves a trail of fire in the corn as he walks.

Soon-to-be-dead dude runs back to the party. Nice work. Jason throws his machete and impales the guy. Then he goes into the party area and starts cutting people down. Everyone runs.

Lori and pals find Gibb on the way to running.

Moments later, they’re all in the van driving away. Everyone wants to know if that dude was Freddy, and Lori is all, “No, that’s someone else.”

Kia says they should call the police. Linderman just says he wants to go home.

So they drop off Kia at home. Uh… what?

Also, there’s some pot-smoking dude in the van. No idea who that guy is.

Hey people. Your best friend was just stabbed to death. CALL THE COPS.

After everyone else is dropped off, Will and Lori sit in the van and talk. Will tells Lori that he saw Lori’s dad kill her mom. Lori is all, “No,” but Will is all, “Yes!” and then Lori’s dad taps the window.

Lori and Will get out of the van, and there’s verbal and physical scuffling as Will claims that dad had him committed, and dad claims that Will is endangering Lori.

Finally, Lori stomps into the house, and dad follows. Lori wants a copy of mom’s death certificate or autopsy report. Dad says “this isn’t the time.”

Turns out dad does some consulting at Westin Hills.

Dad tells Lori to take some pills and get some sleep. Lori runs up to her room and locks the door. She escapes out a window. Dad breaks in, but Lori is already gone.

Lori walks away as a reasonable pace, and runs into Will. They get back in the van and go to find Mark.

Mark is sitting in his house, looking through drawers at an old photo of his brother. Suddenly he hears a voice call to him. He opens a door, and across the hall is another door with a light under it. And also mist.

Mark opens the door into the world’s largest bathroom. I swear, it’s the size of the entire second floor of my house.

He realizes that he needs to stay awake, so he opens the medicine cabinet and takes out something called Wake Aid. There’s only one pill. He’s about to take it, but first he closes the medicine cabinet, and there’s Freddy’s face.

He drops the pill. He turns around, and the previously empty bathtub now contains bloody water and Mark’s dead brother, who accuses Mark and everyone else of forgetting him.

Then Mark’s brother develops Freddy voice, so that Freddy can once again explain the plot to everyone. I’d type it all out again, but it’s just so painfully redundant. Essentially he says that he brought Jason back to kill some people so that Freddy would be remembered, only now Jason won’t stop killing people.

Of course, there is something like six billion people in the world. Why can’t Freddy share?

Blood pours across the floor, and little tendrils sprout and stick themselves into Mark’s feet. Then snakes start writhing around on the floor as well. Mark cries out that he wants someone to wake him up.

Outside, in the real world, Lori and Mark speed up to the curb and jump out of the van. Why all the urgency? They were driving at totally normal speeds a couple of minutes ago. What gives? It’s not like they knew Mark was under attack.

They run around the house, trying to find Mark. He’s asleep on his desk.

In the dream world, Freddy tells Mark to pass on a message. Mark says no. Freddy says he’ll have to pass on the message himself then. He throws Mark across the room and sets Mark on fire.

In the real world, Mark starts on fire. Will and Lori freak out. Mark begs for help. Then slashes appear on his face. He falls down. On his back, the words “Freddy’s Back” are burned into Mark’s back.

You get the joke, right? Or perhaps you need Freddy to explain it, via monologue?

At the cop shop, the old cop looks through photos of the rave where everyone got all chopped up and such.

Stubbs comes in and says he knows who did the killing. He’s determined it’s a copycat of Jason. Interesting theory.

Old cop explains that it’s not, that they know who the killer is, and they solved the problem four years ago and they’ll solve it again.

I have no idea what that dude is talking about. None at all.

Walk through this with me.

“Freddy’s Dead” was released in 1991, with the statement that the event in the movie take place “ten years in the future.” That would be 2001, right?

“Freddy Vs. Jason” takes place in 2003.

I guess you could stretch things and say that 2000 is “kinda” ten years in the future and 2003 is “kinda” four years after 2000. With a lot of rounding. And math performed by toddlers.

But wait! There are more problems! All the teens from the van, including the stoner dude, are now back together in some location or another, talking about what they should do. They consider leaving, but they figure Freddy will follow them.

Except established cannon states that he can’t follow them. He can only travel using the mind of his daughter, who I guess is still alive and well somewhere. Of course, by that logic, Freddy shouldn’t be in Springwood any more. Perhaps when he was killed, he was sent back?

Stubbs arrives, and the kids figure they’re in trouble. But no. Stubbs is cool like that.

Stubbs also fills all the kids in on Jason’s backstory, since the screenwriters couldn’t figure out a way to get Freddy to do it. They abbreviate a bit, with Jason drowning at 11, and then saying someone “made the mistake” of killing his mother.

At any rate, Linderman says Jason is the real deal, and not a copycat.

And Lori, who is falling asleep in the corner, says that Freddy died by fire, Jason by water. “How can we use that?” she asks.

While we’re at it, Will once again explains that Freddy must have brought Jason back, but now Freddy can’t control Jason.

Thanks, dude. I didn’t get that the first fourteen times.

Everyone ignores Lori, who is clearly babbling just to hear herself talk. They decide they need to sacrifice a virgin to Freddy, and figure that Lori should be the one sacrificed.

I know the fire/water thing was stupid, but this seems extreme.

Lori’s dad appears, and goes to kiss Lori. Naturally, dad is actually Freddy. Lori fights back, and yanks off his ear.

In the real world, Lori’s friends wake her up, and she looks down at her hand and sees that she’s still holding Freddy’s ear.

She drops it, and the ear dissolves into maggots.

They realize they aren’t safe awake or asleep, and Lori says, “No, no, it’s our dreams.”

(Lori is sort of right and sort of wrong. If a killer is out there with a machete, he can pretty much attack you whether you’re awake or asleep. The ability to invade your dreams isn’t necessary.)

They figure out it’s the Hypnocil that’s been keeping the bad dreams at bay, and they look it up online. It still hasn’t been approved by the FDA. Really? It’s been about 20 years. You would think they would have gotten on that.

They decide to go back to Westin Hills, instead of calling Lori’s dad, who offered her pills less than three hours ago.

Or calling the rest of the cops in, since they would surely be happy to provide the meds as well.

Whatever. They go to Westin hills.

Linderman, Stubbs, and stoner-boy (I’d kill for a name on this guy… also, I want to know when he became friends with the rest of the group) go into the computer room, which is like something out of a 1960s sci-fi film. Stubbs leaves, and Linderman follows, but stoner-boy decides to stop for a j-break.

I’m not even joking.

A security guard goes to check out a door that’s being pounded on. The movie cuts away, and when it cuts back, the guard has been crushed by the door. Sorry about that, day-player-dude.

Will and Lori and Kia go to the D wing, where they find a bunch of people who wouldn’t stop dreaming. They’re all in comas from taking too much Hypnocil.

Lori’s dad’s name is at the bottom of their charts.

Stoner-boy continues to get baked. A freaky CGI caterpillar comes in with a bong, and blows smoke on stoner-boy. So stoner-boy follows the caterpillar. He goes into the next room, and sees all the victims sitting up and asking about Hypnocil.

They tell him where it is, and tell him to pour it down the drain. He says, “nay!” and looks up. The caterpillar falls off the ceiling and shoots down his throat.

By the by, he finally appears to have a name. Freeburg. Which is clearly a “Free Bird” pot-smoking kind of joke. So I’m going to keep calling him stoner-boy, since he’ll be dead soon anyway.

Stubbs and Linderman go to the “computer” room, and from there they can see stoner-boy dumping pills down the drain. They go to stop him, but there’s Jason, who chops into the computers and starts getting electrocuted.

Stubbs tells Linderman to run, but Jason grabs Stubbs and shares the electrocution love. Linderman picks up Stubbs’s gun. He runs.

Will, Kima, and Lori head up to the drug room, where they discover that all the Hypnocil is gone.

Stoner-boy fills up two syringes with a whole lot of tranquilizer.

Jason breaks down the door on Will, Kima, and Lori, and they run away. Past stoner-boy, who doesn’t move, because of course Freddy is in him.

Jason walks up to stoner-boy, who injects Jason. Jason cuts stoner-boy in half. Then falls on the ground, dead asleep.

And now, it’s the dream world, and Jason is in the boiler room, being berated by his mother, who once again explains that Jason didn’t know when to stop killing. In case you missed that.

Then “mom” turns into “Freddy.” Freddy taunts Jason. Jason cuts off Freddy’s arms, which then grow back. Because it’s the dream world. There’s a lot of fighting, while the audience yells out, “Finally! Jason on Freddy action! Only took the movie an hour and five minutes to get there!”

Freddy beats up Jason, but Jason refuses to die. A pipe breaks, and Jason shies away from the water pouring out of it. Freddy realizes that Jason is afraid of water.

(Wow. This plot point really sucks. More than usual. Jason has survived trapped underwater for months. He lives near a lake. Making him afraid of water is super-lame.)

In the real world, all the remaining kids have tied up Jason. They’re driving him to Crystal Lake. It’s nighttime, so they should get there, like, noon the next day or so.

In the dream world, Jason drops his machete, then falls on the floor. He’s a little boy now, still wearing a hockey mask, which makes no sense, since he didn’t have it as a boy. Freddy takes it off of him, then shows him his own mother’s severed head.

(Know what’s lame? The woman who played Jason’s mom in the first “Friday the 13th” is still alive, and she isn’t in this movie. I’m guessing they didn’t offer her enough money. What a waste.)

Freddy sticks a claw into Jason’s head to learn what he’s really scared of.

So now we’re in the dream version of Crystal Lake, and Jason is hauling a dead body through a watery marsh-type thing. There are corpses. Let’s just zip on past that.

In the van, they decide to knock Lori out, so she can pull Freddy into the real world. Never mind that pretty much anyone can do it. They’re going to send Lori. What a great plan.

They knock Lori out, with the instructions to wake her up in exactly 15 minutes. Because you can always time grabbing a dream killer down to the second.

Lori goes to sleep, and arrives in Crystal Lake. It’s daytime. A bunch of kids are chasing after kid Jason and taunting him with the words, “Freak Show!” There’s more taunting. They stick a bag over his head and push him towards the water.

Lori runs over to the counselors and asks if they’re going to help “The kid.” But they’re busy, having some adult time. Also, the male counselor is actually Freddy, and the female is dead. Well. That’s icky.

In the real world, Linderman injects Jason with more dope.

In the dream world, Jason falls into Crystal Lake, and Lori tries to pull him out of the water. Freddy pops up, and tries to drown kiddo Jason.

In the real world, water starts pouring out of Jason. He’s drowning. So Kia has to give him mouth-to-mouth. Because Will is driving and Linderman has asthma.

Or rather, she’s about to give it to him, but Jason wakes up. Linderman fires the gun he took from Stubbs. Will freaks and hits a something, and the van flies in the air.

Jason goes flying into the woods. He’s awake, so…

In the dream world, kid Jason vanishes, un-drowned. Freddy looks up at Lori and says, “You!” Lori’s watch goes off. She jumps on Freddy and pins him to the dock, yelling to be woken up.

She vanishes, and un-vanishes in front of the Nancy house.

In the real world, the boys try to wake up Lori. They’re right by Crystal Lake, and not dead after that really quite elaborate crash. Convenient.

They carry Lori into the camp.

In the dream, Lori sees Freddy killing her mom. Freddy killed mom? Whoa. What a surprise. Freddy says he always had a thing for the whores who live in this house. Sure. Makes sense.

No, no. Wait just a second here. How did Freddy kill mom? Doesn’t he only attack teenagers? Except for Nancy’s mom? For some reason?

At any rate, Freddy stabs Lori’s mom. I’m puzzled by something, here. Will saw dad kill mom. So I suppose Freddy took over dad, in order to kill mom? Or Will dreamed the whole thing?

Lori runs away, only she gets tripped, smacks into the wall, and falls over. Freddy kneels over and starts scratching her with his claws.

In the real world, Jason breaks into the cabin they’re all hiding in and knocks over a gas can, which ignites. Will gets sliced, but somehow they all manage to lives a minute or two. Though Kia gets knocked into a wall.

In the dream world, Freddy is still kneeling over Lori, saying things like, “I should warn you princess, the first time tends to get a little messy.” While pulling up her nightgown.

I feel deeply uncomfortable.

Linderman stabs Jason with a flag pole. Jason slaps Linderman into a wall, where he’s impaled on a shelf bracket. He goes down.

Will drags Lori out of the shack, only her hand hits some fire.

In the dreams, she grabs Freddy as she wakes up.

Freddy is just about to kill her, but then he realizes this isn’t the dream world any more.

The cabin is on fire and Jason is there.

Throw-down time.

Jason smashes Freddy through some windows, then takes him out the door and throws him on the roof of another building.

Will and Lori run off.

Kia and Linderman also get out, and Linderman tells Kia to go get help. He’ll be fine. Just a scratch. So Kia leaves, and Linderman dies alone.

Well. That was bleak. The nerd dies by himself.

Kia runs to the water, where she sees Lori and Will. Freddy also catches up to Lori and Will, and gets ready to do some damage.

He’s remarkably mobile for a dude who just got thrown through a building.

Kia screams, and Freddy decides to go after Kia instead of Will and Lori.

Kia accuses Freddy of running around in a Christmas sweater, and not being scary. And using the claws to compensate for something.

Freddy points behind Kia. Jason throws her into a tree. She dies.

Will tries to get Lori to leave via boat. Lori insists she isn’t leaving until she sees Freddy die, since he killed her mother.

Yeah. Never mind that there’s also a dude with a machete and no qualms with killing pretty much everyone also on the beach right now.

Jason and Freddy throw down some more. First there’s punching. Then there’s assaulting with construction materials.

Then they both end up on a dock, with Jason cutting Freddy up a lot.

The thing of it is? I’m not sure how Freddy is living through all this. The dude is human, out here in the real world. Most of his body should be mush right now.

No matter. They fight on the dock. Freddy cuts off Jason’s fingers and takes his machete, and starts attacking Jason with it.

Lori and Will find a gas pump and cover the dock with gas. The director sure is attached to Lori and the whole water/fire thing, huh? You can admit you totally forgot about that. It’s okay.

Freddy keeps slashing at Jason, even though he stated at the start of the film that he knows Jason can never actually die. He shoves his claws into Jason’s eyes. Then his guts.

Lori runs out with two pieces of wood that are on fire. She yells to Freddy, and throws the fire on the dock, and the nearby tanks which exist only for the purpose of exploding.

Freddy, distracted, allows Jason to jam a hand inside him, then rip his claw-arm off. Freddy jams Jason’s machete into Jason.

The explode-y tanks go boom. Will and Lori jump into the water to avoid being incinerated.

Freddy and Jason are thrown off the dock and into the water.

Lori and Will climb up on the dock.

They embrace. Then hear a noise and look up. Freddy is on the dock, walking towards them with Jason’s machete in hand. He’s about to start whacking ‘em, when Jason pops out of the water and impales Freddy with his own claw-hand-arm.

Jason falls back into the water.

Freddy falls to his knees.

Lori gets up and chops off Freddy’s head with Jason’s machete.

Freddy’s head and body fall into the water.

Lori gets a from-the-feet-to-the-face heroic woman shot. She watches Jason sink into the water, face-up. She drops his machete and it sinks after him.

Will comes up behind her. They help each other limp off down the beach. Everything is pretty much on fire. That’ll please the developers.

The next morning. Mist on Crystal Lake. Jason pops out of the water. Also bad for developers.

He’s got his machete in one hand, and Freddy’s head in the other. Freddy’s head turns to the camera and winks.

Looks like the only thing that can kill Freddy is a remake.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

Ah, meta. It’s so full of meta-ness, with the… you know what? Let me start over.

So, Freddy was dead as of the last movie. It was, in fact, right there in the title. Which is all well and good, but the “final” chapter of any horror series is usually called that in hopes of getting people amped up for the super-special “return!” movie that comes right after.

In this case, however, it was kind of special, as the original writer and director, Wes Craven, came back to write and direct.

Then things take a weird turn, because of all the meta.

In this case, the gag is that Freddy, who is dead, is now trying to come off the silver screen and into the real world. So you’re watching a movie that is “no, seriously!” supposed to take place in the real world.

As a premise, it’s clever. In execution… well, let’s take a look, shall we?

We start off with a big, fat, callback-only-bigger moment, as a dude in a red and green sweater builds a mechanical hand, then attaches knives to it. Then chops his own hand off.

Then the scene changes a bit, so we can see that we’re on a movie set, being directed by Wes Craven, as a stand-in-Freddy shoves the mechanical hand onto his “stump.”

Nearby, Nancy is sitting around in her pajamas. Only she’s actually Heather, the actress who played Nancy. Because the film is meta. Are you following along?

Wes praises the guys who built the mechanical hand and executed the chop, and Heather’s husband offers to take their son, Dylan, who looks like he’s about six, on a tour to find scary movie props.

Heather, husband, and Dylan walk off the set, and now it’s possible to see all the cast and crew milling around, doing cast and crew-type things. Husband scares Dylan with the old reptile-hidden-in-the-popcorn box trick.

And the two guys who were operating the new Freddy hand get all crabby because the hand stopped working. They think it’s because of the fake blood. Husband gives them some fixin’ advice.

Husband goes to look at the hand, and Heather says she doesn’t like it. Husband says it puts food on their table, and goes to look closer. The hand claws him. One of the tech guys points out that the hand is “warm,” just like a real hand.

Then the hand jumps up and shoves itself into the throat of one of the tech guys. Things everywhere go haywire, with fire effects going off on the set. Husband smashes the radio control for the mechanical hand, but it’s too late. The thing has run off.

It attacks the other tech guy, and stabs him a lot.

Dylan calmly wanders away, and goes to sit on a bed. Two set guys, who for some reason don’t notice the screaming and thrashing going on nearby, walk by carrying a piece of set, and after they pass Dylan is gone.

The claw goes to attack husband. There’s a whole lot of screaming.

Heather wakes up. Yes, the whole thing was a dream about a movie set.

Husband is there, telling Heather to get up. It’s an earthquake, and it’s shaking the house.

They hear Dylan yelling downstairs, and they go to his room, jump on his bed, and hover over him, in an attempt to keep him safe.

The earthquake ends. Dylan sees that his dad has a cut on his hand. Heather wants to know where it came from. He says it came from a picture “or something” when it fell, and that it’s no big deal.

Later, the three of them semi-watch the news, which tells the audience that they had an “aftershock” of 5.3 on the Richter scale. Heather sees that Dylan has made a “face” in his oatmeal, though she doesn’t suss out that it looks like Freddy’s face.

Heather says she has to go, but that Julie will be staying with Dylan.

Heather talks to husband, whose name turns out to be Chase. Chase really does work in special effects. Heather uses this time to give us exposition explaining that there have been five earthquakes, plus she was getting harassing phone calls up until two weeks ago.

Chase asks if she’s still having nightmares, and Heather tells him an abbreviated version of all the things we just watched five minutes ago. Chase says that she was probably half-asleep, and saw Chase cut his fingers on the mirror, which she then “added” to her dream. In some way.

Chase says that if it will make her happy, he’ll skip his next job: Two days making soap bubbles for a detergent commercial. She sort of says, “No, okay, go” and then they kiss, and for a second there it looks like Dylan is going to get a sibling.

But no, the kiss ends and Chase heads off for 48 hours. In his words.

As Chase leaves, a series of cracks appear in the walls. Do they look like claw marks? Indeed they do.

Heather runs downstairs, and finds Dylan watching the original “Nightmare.” It’s the bit with Tina in the body bag, calling to Nancy. Heather says she doesn’t want Dylan watching that.

She unplugs the TV, and Dylan starts screaming. He stops when the phone rings.

Heather picks it up, and a voice says, “One, two.” Heather hangs up. The phone rings, she picks it up again, and the voice says, “Freddy’s coming for you.”

Heather hangs up the phone, runs to the front door, and tries to catch Chase before he leaves. But he’s already driving away in his truck.

Dylan says someone is coming, and there’s another aftershock.

There’s a knock at the door. It’s Julie, the nanny/babysitter-person. I know! How exciting is that?

Then the phone rings again, and Heather answers in a not-nice way, and of course it’s the limo guy. So Heather hangs up, goes to the door, and yells out to him that she’ll be there in just a minute.

Uh – he was on the phone. Why not just tell him then? I guess you could argue that she wanted to verify there was a guy actually there, but for all she knows her stalker is driving the limo.

Didn’t think of that, did you Heather?

Heather says she has a bad feeling, and her son tells her to stay home. But who listens to kids? Not desperate-for-work movie not-stars, I’ll tell you that.

Dylan walks off, and Julie and Heather talk about Heather’s “nerves,” and the phone calls, and the earthquakes, and then the phone rings again. Julie tells her not to answer it, but doesn’t offer to get the phone herself.

Heather picks up the phone. It’s the limo guy again, telling Heather they’re going to be late.

Dylan comes back. Heather says, “Dylan, I gotta go. Forgive me?” Dylan says bye, and gives Heather a hug.

Heather heads out, apologizing to Julie for her so-called nerves.

Heather goes to the limo. The driver lets her in, and they take off. Turns out he’s a fan, who recognizes Heather. Strangely, he doesn’t use the actual name of the movies. Or mention Freddy by name. Though he does say the first one is the best.

And of course, there’s the ever-popular meta-moment, when he calls her a star and she says she’s “hardly a star.” Tee-hee.

Heather gets there, almost late, and a PA races her into the studio, where a terrible, terrible, interviewer peppers her with questions about whether or not she’d let her son watch horror movies, and, “Is there going to be another sequel, and what’s more, is Freddy really dead?”

I realize this scene kinda-sorta has to happen in the movie, but honestly now, is there a reason she’s being interviewed? There doesn’t seem to be one. Why would some random interviewer just call her up and be all, “Hey, want to talk about those movies you haven’t been in for several years?”

Then things get strange. The interviewer asks if Heather would let her “co-star” baby-sit Dylan. Sadly, he doesn’t mean Johnny Depp. Though how awesome would that be?

Of course, the guy means Robert Englund, who then comes out onstage in full Freddy makeup while a bunch of people in the audience applaud and get super-excited over the whole thing. Strange, really, that everyone is dressed up for this “surprise” visitor. Maybe that’s the point.

Backstage after the show, Robert, no longer in full makeup, signs some autographs and has a lovely conversation with Heather where they joke about making a romantic comedy together. Possibly with a decapitation in it.

As Heather gets ready to go pretty much nowhere, unless there’s another limo that we can’t see, a PA hands her a phone and says it’s for her. It’s someone named Sara, from New Line Cinema. They have a “proposal” for Heather, but they have to tell her about it in person.

So the limo takes her over to New Line.

Heather goes to see Sara, who immediately hands her off to Bob. Bob is the producer of the Freddy movies. No, really. You can tell because he’s a really awful actor, even though he’s playing himself.

Bob tells Heather that Wes Craven (the writer and director of the movie we’re watching RIGHT NOW) called and said he had an idea to bring Freddy back, and that Heather is the star of the movie.

Heather says she’s flattered, but that she has a kid now. She’s not sure about doing horror. Bob says that kids love horror. It seems that if “Bob” has kids, Bob doesn’t like them very much.

Heather suddenly realizes something. She asks how long Wes has been working on the script. Bob says a couple months. Heather says, essentially, “Say, has anything strange been happening the last couple of months? Like strange phone calls?”

At which point, the phone starts to ring. Bob refuses to answer it, stating that they pay people to do that. Then he wonders why no one is picking up the phone. Maybe because you and Heather are the only people in your office, Bob. Just a thought.

Heather takes the limo home. As she steps out of the limo, she hears Dylan yelling from inside the house.

Dylan is lying on his bed, screaming. Julie is standing over him. Heather lifts up Dylan and he says, “Never sleep again.” In a freaky Donald Duck-type voice. Heather holds him, he wakes up, and Heather asks if he’s all right.

He says yes, “Rex saved me.” Rex is Dylan’s stuffed Tyrannosaurus Rex, which has a bunch of claw marks on it. It’s as if… well… you know, right? Meta!

Dylan asks if Rex is going to die, despite the fact that Rex is a stuffed animal. Heather promises that Rex won’t die. Something tells me that duct tape is going to get involved in this story.

Heather asks Julie to get the sewing kit. Julie and Dylan head off to do “surgery.” This is going to be bad.

Heather calls Chase, and says Dylan had an episode, and that he was “talking like Freddy.” She asks why Chase didn’t tell her he was working on a new Freddy glove, which is sitting in the foreground of the shot. And she tells Chase to come home.

Chase says okay and heads home. The camera, having moved around a bit, reveals that the glove has gone missing.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that Chase’s friends, who were murdered in Heather’s dream? They didn’t show up for work today.

Later than night, Heather reads the story of Hansel and Gretel to Dylan. As a bedtime story. Which, as we all know, is exactly the kind of thing you want to read to a child who’s losing it.

Heather also seems to think this is a problem, as she stops reading and asks why Dylan wants to hear it, and warns him that it’s going to give him nightmares. Dylan, all smiles, says, “I like this story.”

Honestly, this kid freaks me out.

Heather gets to the part where Gretel pushes the witch into the fire, and then says she’s going to stop reading. So Dylan finishes the passage from memory, then demands that Heather finish the story by telling how the kids got home.

Heather claims that they got home by following bread crumbs, and that their father was so happy to see them he gave them a bunch of kisses. Which doesn’t make any sense, because if I remember the story right, the reason they got lost was that birds ate their crumbs. And that their stepmother was the reason they had to go into the woods in the first place.

Sooo… we’re missing a few details there, Wes.

Anyhow, Heather sees that Dylan has something under the covers, making a big lump. Turns out it’s Rex, who keeps “him” away from Dylan. Who?

“The mean old man with the claws.”

Rex, by the way, was sewn up with some really thick red thread. Or yarn. Or something. There’s going to be scarring, assuming the wound is not already horribly infected and Rex doesn’t die from blood poisoning.

Heather says, “There’s nothing down there,” and they slide to the end of the bed, revealing the floor. Dylan says, “It’s different when you’re gone.”

Heather tucks him in, revealing Dylan’s dinosaur lamp and dinosaur sheets. Dylan asks if dad is coming home. Heather says yes, and Dylan says that dad can follow the bread crumbs. If the birds don’t eat them first.

Er…

Out on the highway somewhere, Chase is driving home. He’s falling asleep, and swerves into the wrong lane for a second. So he opens the window. He tries to turn up the music, but his station fades out.

He searches for a new station, but no luck. So he starts singing “Losing My Religion” to himself.

Freddy 2.0 claws push up out of the car seat, and a single claw pokes Chase softly in the groin. Which is just strange. Chase scratches himself, and the claws vanish, with no trace of damage to the car seat.

Chase falls asleep again, the new Freddy hand shoots out of the seat, and stabs Chase in the chest.

Chase’s truck careens towards a wall.

Heather wakes up. She fell asleep on the couch. Dylan is in the living room, asking if mommy is scared. Heather says, “Mommy’s fine,” and that it was just a bad dream.

Heather tells Dylan to go back to sleep, and he says he’s not sleepy.

The doorbell rings, and Heather goes to answer it. The police are there. They ask if Chase is her husband. There was “an accident.” Chase is dead.

Dylan wanders off in the middle of this conversation.

Heather says she wants to see Chase’s body, even thought he cops don’t recommend it.

She heads to the morgue, and wanders the hallways with the dead bodies sitting on gurneys. Somewhere, a woman is freaking out and screaming.

As she walks past a room, she hears someone operating something noisy and mechanical. It sounds like a saw.

She goes into that room, and asks for Chase. One of the men on duty takes her to him. The dude lifts the sheet, and she sees his face. And also the scratches on his chest. She throws up on the floor.

She asks what made those scratches. She says it looks like he was clawed. The dude says that’s why they usually don’t show anything past the face. Heather leaves without signing her paperwork.

There’s a funeral. Everyone is there, including Robert Englund, and the “Nightmare” producers. Odd. Must be one of them dream sequences.

There’s an earthquake, and the coffin opens up. Heather looks around, and Dylan is gone. She looks in the casket, and Freddy is in the bottom of it, along with Dylan. He pulls Dylan down.

Heather goes into the coffin and reaches through the “hole” at the foot of the casket. She reaches down, and grabs Dylan, and pulls him back up, while “Freddy” vanishes down the silk-covered hole.

Heather pokes her head into the hole, and pulls Dylan out. Then the corpse of Chase wakes up, and asks Heather to stay with him.

At which point, the dude who played Nancy’s dad in the original “Nightmare” wakes Heather up and points to Dylan, who is just fine. He’s sitting next to Julie. It seems that Heather passed out.

The priest wraps up the ceremony by hoping that Chase rests in peace, and that they all get home safely.

Robert stops Heather and says he’ll do anything he can to help. Heather says thanks, then walks off just as Wes Craven walks up.

Later that night, Heather wakes up from sleeping, and sees her son is watching TV downstairs. He’s watching the original “Nightmare…” on an unplugged TV. It’s Nancy’s first encounter with Freddy.

Heather waves a hand in front of Dylan’s face, but he doesn’t see it. He starts sleepwalking instead. Heather follows him, and he wakes up, screaming.

She tells him he needs to go back to bed, and he says he can’t sleep. Then he starts doing the Freddy chant. Heather asks where Dylan heard the song, and he says he heard it under the covers. “Way down there, with The Man. The Mean Man.”

The Man is always trying to drag you down, eh Dylan?

Dylan says that the mean man is trying to get into “our world.” Then his nose starts bleeding.

Heather takes him into the bathroom and cleans him up, while the camera shows us that the TV is off and like, totally unplugged.

Later, in bed, Dylan asks where daddy is, and Heather says daddy is in Heaven with God. Dylan asks why God lets there be bad things, and Heather says she doesn’t know.

Dylan then asks if Heather can come with him in his dreams. Heather says that only happens in movies (ha-ha!) but that she’ll be here when he gets back, and she won’t let anyone get his toes.

Dylan goes to sleep. Heather lies in bed with him and drinks coffee.

The next day, Dylan and Heather go to the park, and she talks to “John,” the dude who played her dad in the first “Nightmare.” She’s worried she’s crazy, and he tells her that she isn’t. She’s just had six weeks of stalker-calls, and that’s making her see Freddy in her dreams.

While those two yammer on, not at all concerned for the safety of the children around them, Dylan climbs to the very tippy-top of a metal rocket. He’s like thirty or forty feet in the air, and reaching for the sky. He falls.

Heather and John see him and run for him at the last minute, and Heather catches him. She asks if he’s all right, and he says, “God wouldn’t take me.”

John says, “It’s unbelievable.” No idea what that’s in reference to. That Dylan didn’t kill himself? That God didn’t take Dylan?

The next day, Heather checks her mail. She has a mysterious letter, which, inside the envelope, has a mysterious… um… letter. It’s a letter E, seared onto a piece of newsprint. She throws it in a drawer with a bunch of other letters that she didn’t turn over to the cops.

Heather calls Robert. They chat about her stalker. And about Heather’s Freddy dreams. Heather says that this Freddy isn’t Robert. He’s darker, and more evil. Robert guesses this before Nancy says anything about it.

Heather asks if Wes has talked to him about the script. Robert says Wes won’t show it to anyone until it’s done. Robert says he asked Wes about it, and Wes said he had reached the part where “Dylan is trying to reach God.”

Freaky, eh? Eh?

Heather’s freaked, anyway.

She tells Robert that they need to talk, but not over the phone. She asks if she can go to Robert’s house. Robert, who has been painting this entire time, says there’s something he has to finish.

We get to see his painting, which looks like the screaming souls from the “Nightmare” movies.

He agrees to meet Heather early the next morning, and they hang up. At Robert’s place, the camera pans up and there’s someone standing over the souls – Super Evil Freddy.

That night, Heather tries to sleep while her lamps tip back and forth, back and forth.

Downstairs, Dylan paces in the kitchen.

The house groans.

Then it all stops, and Nancy sleeps. The camera pans to the foot of the bed. Freddy claws pop up, and slide up towards Nancy. The new Freddy arm comes out of the bed. Nancy stirs in her sleep.

Downstairs, a bunch of cutlery falls to the floor. Heather wakes up, and sees the slashed sheets.

Downstairs, she hears Dylan doing the Freddy chant. Heather goes down to see him. She walks towards him. His hand is behind his back. There are knives taped to it, in a rather Freddy-like fashion.

Dylan slashes at Heather. She stumbles and tries to avoid being hit.

Then she wakes up. It’s morning. Or daylight. It’s a little unclear.

She hears Dylan chanting “Never Sleep Again” downstairs. He keeps saying it, over and over. Heather walks to him, and sees the letter from before on the floor. They spell out, “Answer The Phone.”

The phone rings. Heather picks it up. The mouthpiece sprouts a tongue and licks her, and says, “I touched him.” Dylan foams at the mouth.

Then he falls down screaming.

Heather takes Dylan to a doctor. He’s going to stay at the hospital overnight, and they’re going to run a bunch of tests. As Heather gets ready to leave, the doctor asks if there’s anything else they should know. Anything Dylan said while he was still lucid. Any kind of trigger event.

Heather just goes right ahead and lies, and says no. I mean, why mention Rex, the torn-up dino? Or “Never sleep again?” Or the foaming at the mouth, or anything really. I mean, who would do that? Not good parents, or anything like that, right?

Surely not.

Heather goes to talk to a semi-catatonic Dylan, and the doctor tells another doctor that the early symptoms point to childhood schizophrenia.

Heather does a whole monologue about how Dylan needs to get better, and fight whatever is after him. In a series where I’ve frequently complained there’s no real drama, and family dynamics are often for poo, it’s a decent shot at making a family connection, if Dylan wasn’t staring ahead blankly and Heather was a slightly better actress and Wes was a slightly better writer.

Instead, it mostly serves as a way to let everyone know that Heather’s house is right across the freeway. Which I’m sure is going to be important. Points for trying Wes, though. I mean that. I think you’re an awesomely talented fellow when it comes to creeping people out, but your dialogue has always been pretty weak.

A nurse comes in and gives Dylan a pill to help him sleep. He takes it.

Dylan prepares to take a nap, and Heather heads out. Only Dylan didn’t actually swallow the pill. He takes it out of his mouth, and then closes his eyes as though he was going to sleep. I’m perplexed. He decided not to take the pill and then went to sleep anyway? Or maybe he’s faking sleep? How can you tell?

Nancy gets in her car and starts to drive away. She almost hits someone, and he yells at her to wake up. She admonishes herself not to lose it now.

Nancy drinks coffee, drives, and uses her car phone to call Robert. His answering machine says he’s out of town and will be gone for some time.

So much for that meeting, I guess.

Heather goes to see Wes instead. She asks where the script is going, and Wes says he’s just having the nightmare(s) and then putting them into the script as they come to him.

She asks for some kind of explanation, and he says:

“It’s about this entity. Whatever you want to call it. It’s old. It’s very old. It’s existed in different forms in different times. About the only thing that stays the same is what it lives for. The murder of innocents.”

Heather asks if the thing in the nightmare has any weaknesses. Wes says it can be captured sometimes. By storytellers, who “catch its essence.” Then it’s a prisoner in the story.

But when the story dies, because it gets watered down, or people forget about it, the evil is set free again.

Then the genie is out of the bottle and the evil is set free.

Heather wants to know what form the evil is going to take, and Wes says that the evil has decided that it likes being Freddy, and that it plans to cross over into our world. But first he has to get past a gatekeeper.

The gatekeeper? Heather.

Heather does the whole, “That was Nancy, not me.” And Wes does the whole, “You gave Nancy her strength.” And Heather does the whole, “You knew this was going on,” and Wes is all, “I didn’t know.” And Heather is all, “But then you did, you big jerk-face.”

Wes thinks the only way to stop “Freddy” is to make another movie. Heather is going to have to make a choice – whether or not she’s willing to play Nancy one last time.

CUT TO: Wes’s computer screen, with the dialogue: “Whether or not you’re willing to play Nancy one last time.”

I’m going to grant Wes something here:

We’re an hour in, we’re just getting what we’re really up against here, and he alllmost makes it plausible.

There’s just one problem – assuming all this storytelling hokum is true, they don’t just have to make one movie. They have to keep making them, pretty much forever. And they’ve got to keep Freddy scary in every single one of them.

But never mind. We’re too far into the series to talk about logic any more.

At any rate, the script also says, “Fad to Black,” which the screen does, and then it comes back up on a bunch of legal pads covered in notes, and books like “Chilton on Childhood Diseases.”

Just how long has Heather been working on all these notes, exactly?

Heather reads a passage, or we’re getting voiceover, I’m not sure, that says, essentially, that kids who appear to be suffering from schizophrenia are actually suffering from (duh-duh-duuuh) sleep deprivation. I know! Who saw that coming?

But wait – Heather wasn’t actually around for the schizophrenia conversation. The doctor was talking to another doctor. So what are we watching here, exactly? Just a happy coincidence?

We get some more voiceover, cut together with earlier scenes from the movie as Heather totally starts to put together the fact that her kid keeps talking about Freddy, and also Wes is writing about Freddy, and Robert Englund is having dreams about Freddy.

I really don’t know who this sequence is for. Did someone from the movie studio call up Wes and say, “Well, we think there are some people who just might not get it. People with that memory problem, where they can’t create new memories? That’s our target audience. We want to make sure those people can figure out what’s going on.”

Heather snaps out of flashback mode as the TV comes on by itself. She takes a remote and turns it off, and it turns itself back on again, just in time for Heather to see someone on the news announce the death of her husband’s special effects partners.

By “brutal slashing.”

There’s another earthquake. Heather gets up and runs to the doorway. The earthquake stops. Heather discovers that her coffee pot has been destroyed.

She hears a creaking, and looks up at the closet. Her clothes are there. Suddenly, Freddy pushes through them. He says, “Miss me?”

They sort of tussle, with Heather trying to keep away from his claw hand. Finally, he pushes her down and pins her to the bed. He calls her Nancy.

An aftershock starts, and Heather pushes him off of her, and he falls away, reaching out and scratching her arm with his new, updated claws.

The aftershock ends, Heather rolls off the bed and looks around, and then says, “Ow.” Because her arm is slashed.

Heather realizes that she needs to make sure Dylan is okay. So she goes to the hospital. Julie is there, because she had a bad dream and she’s also worried about Dylan. But they won’t let her in, because she’s not family.

Heather and Julie talk for a minute, and Dylan’s doctor, who I guess works 24 hours a day, says that he’s in an oxygen tent, but that he’s otherwise fine. She sees that Heather has some bad cuts, and guides Heather away to talk to her.

The doctor patches up Heather. Which is kind of remarkable, if you think about it. Didn’t ask for a Co-Pay, or an insurance card, or anything. Just stuck some gauze on her.

The doctor asks when Heather got the cuts, and Heather says she got them 15 minutes ago in the earthquake. The doctor says the wounds seem too fresh for that. It seems that the hospital didn’t experience an earthquake. The doctor also asks about Dylan, as a nurse overheard that he was afraid of “a man.”

Heather remembers that she was supposed to bring Rex to Dylan, and she lets slip that he’s afraid of Freddy.

The doctor accuses Heather of letting Dylan watch her movies, and Heather retorts that EVERY kid knows who Freddy is.

Heather leaves.

She goes to sit next to Dylan’s bed, and sure enough, there he is in an oxygen tent. Heather tries to shake off sleep, and manages to do it long enough for two nurses to come in and fiddle with his settings. One nurse asks the other how Dylan is doing, and the other one basically goes, “Eh.”

The nurses leave, and Heather continues to struggle to remain not-asleep.

She fails, then hears Dylan’s beep-beep-beep machine go beeeeeeeeeep and wakes up. Dylan is also awake. He opens the oxygen tent and tells Heather, in an increasingly deep voice, that he’s “almost there.”

So he either being taken over by Freddy, or puberty. Not much of a twist either way, y’know?

Then he spews black bile on Heather and goes into a seizure-type thing. So I’m going to guess we’re looking at puberty.

A truckload of nurses and the doctor come in, and the doctor says to give the kid anesthesia. A nurse says they don’t have any, and the doctor says she’s going in anyway. She raises her hand into frame, and of course it’s been modified with various surgical instruments to look like the Freddy glove.

Then the doctor “becomes” Freddy.

Nancy leaps from her chair onto the bed, and wakes up. The bed is empty. A few nurses and the doctor come in, and there’s hysterical babbling and “no, your son is fine, we took him for tests while you were asleep,” and then the doctor says Heather should go home, everything is fine.

Heather insists everything is NOT fine. Not sure if she’s talking about her kid or her career.

Heather limps down the hall, and they announce a “code yellow.” It looks like things are going to get exciting, but no. The doctor just catches up to her and asks some other staff member what’s up with Dylan.

The staff member says that Dylan is suffering from intense sleep deprivation, and stage-whispers to the doctor that she thinks Heather never lets the kid get a good night’s sleep. Sure. It’s Hollywood. They’re up all night doing coke.

Heather demands to see Dylan, and it almost gets tense, but Julie pops out of a door and says that someone wants to see Heather. That someone is Dylan, who wants to know if they can go get Rex now, because the bad man is getting closer.

Heather says that they can go get Rex right now. The doctor pops her head in and “insists” that Dylan stay in the hospital until they figure out what’s causing his episodes.

I have to concur, considering the fact that Rex has been just as useful as a crucifix when it comes to keeping Freddy away.

Also, somewhere along the line, Heather picked up the grey streak she had in the original “Nightmare.”

Heather sets Dylan back down on a bed and says she’s going to get Rex right now. Dylan asks her to hurry, because he’s sleepy.

Heather tells Julie not to let Dylan out of her sight, and keep him awake. Julie tells Heather that her hair is turning grey.

Heather walks out into the hallway, and three security men drag her into a room. The doctor prepares to lay into her.

Back with Dylan, Julie looks on as two nurses give Dylan a shot to knock him out. Julie punches one nurse out, and threatens the other one with a hypodermic full of who-knows what.

The other nurse runs away.

Back in the other room, the doctor asks Heather if there has been any recreational drug use in her family. Uh, duh? This is Hollywood, right? That’s like asking if someone who grew up in the 60s tried dope.

The doctor goes on to ask about mental disturbance in the family. Heather tries to storm out, but the security dude stops her.

Julie keeps on trying to keep Dylan awake.

Doc asks if Heather has been seeing Freddy. She starts talking about “treatments” and putting Dylan in foster care for a while.

Dylan closes his eyes, opens them, and sees Freddy standing behind Julie. He tells Julie to look behind her, but she doesn’t see anything. Which doesn’t stop Freddy from stabbing her with his claws and lifting her in the air.

Heather demands to be allowed to leave.

In Dylan’s room, the nurses break in just as Julie is dangled in the air, then dragged across the floor, up the wall, and onto the ceiling. There’s blood everywhere. Julie asks Dylan to help her.

Then she falls from the ceiling to the floor.

Dylan yells for his mom, and then for Rex. He runs away.

Heather sucker-elbows a nurse and finds a dead Julie on the floor. The doctor assures Heather that Dylan can’t get out of the hospital, because he’s been sedated. Heather reminds the doctor, loudly, that Dylan sleepwalks.

And she knows where he’s going. Freeway time!

Heather escapes to the parking garage, and goes driving after Dylan. She sees him climbing up onto the freeway. He starts to cross the freeway, but there are cars everywhere, so a massive Freddy in the sky uses his claws to hook Dylan into the air so he can dangle just about the high-speed traffic.

Not quite sure what Freddy’s end-game is here.

Heather runs across the freeway, and lots and lots of vehicles go screaming around, crashing into each other. Heather is hit by a car and goes flying. People pick her up and ask if she’s okay.

Meanwhile, Dylan has been set down by Freddy. He looks one way, and sees many, many, many Freddys (Freddies?) coming towards him, so he goes the opposite direction.

Heather sees that Dylan is gone and runs away from all the people who want to know if she has internal bleeding, and if Johnny Depp is just as nice a guy as he seems to be.

She gets to her house, and the door is open. She calls to Dylan, then gets a false-scare from her Nancy-dad, who is in the house.

So is Dylan. Heather hugs him, and tells her surrogate father that she knows who killed Chase. She tells him it was Freddy, and he doesn’t believe her.

John asks Heather to step outside for a moment, without Dylan.

They leave. Dylan hears a noise. In his bedroom, the bed starts to shake and smoke. Something grows under the sheets. A claw comes out.

I mean, obviously it’s Freddy under there. But wouldn’t it have been interesting if it wasn’t? If, say, Wes Craven suddenly popped out of the corner and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, The Rolling Stones!” and then the band kicked into “Satisfaction?”

Non-linear thinking like this may be why I’m not famous.

Outside, Heather talks to John, only he keeps calling her Nancy, and he doesn’t know who Robert Englund is, and he insists that Freddy is dead and that “Nancy” doesn’t want to “end up like her mother.”

Also, he’s got a badge and a gun.

Heather tells “not-John” “I love you too, Daddy,” and Freddy steps into Dylan’s bedroom and goes into prowl mode.

Outside, not-John turns on his flashing police light and drives away. The “Nightmare on Elm Street” music starts up. Nancy/Heather turns out, and her house has turned into the Nancy house, complete with (I simply cannot believe it) a blue door. Yes, really. Only took them six movies to get it right again.

Nancy/Heather runs into the house, while on the soundtrack, someone (sounds like it could be Dylan) does the Freddy chant.

Inside the Nancy/Heather house, Nancy/Heather is now dressed in her pajamas. She hears a voice, and grabs a knife from the kitchen. She watches the (still unplugged) TV as it shows the scene from part one wherein Nancy tells her dad to be ready to arrest Freddy once Nancy goes and gets him.

The TV fuzzes out.

Nancy/Heather spots a yellow pill on the floor. She picks it up. She looks at it. She says, for the audience’s benefit, that they’re Dylan’s sleeping pills, and we get a voiceover thing about Hansel and Gretel and the breadcrumbs. For the people who were making out during that part of the movie.

Heather goes into Dylan’s bedroom, where she finds Rex with his sides re-slashed, with stuffing all over the floor.

She goes to Dylan’s bed, and finds another pill. She moves the sheets around. Then she says, “Join you. You’ve given me a way to join you.”

She takes two sleeping pills, lifts up the bed sheet, and crawls under the sheets towards the foot of the bed.

Under the bed, there’s a long passage made of sheet. She slides down it. It becomes a long passage made of metal and ugly windows. Nancy/Heather keeps on sliding.

Eventually, she falls into a huge, cavernous room that looks an awful lot like the one from the start of the movie.

Dylan calls to her. She calls back. She moves around the set that probably cost about 1/5 of the budget of the movie, while we get little glimpses of Freddy, who says things like, “Almost there.”

She looks around, and spots a collection of pages on the ground. It’s a screenplay. She picks it up and starts reading. From the screenplay. Which says:

Heather (OS) (reading) The more she read, the more she realized what she had in her hands was nothing more or less than her life itself. That everything she had experienced and thought was bound within these pages. There was no movie. There was only… her… life…

Someone grabs Nancy/Heather. It’s Dylan. Who says, “It’s just me.”

Hey Dylan – if you want to grow up, you might want to consider not startling a hungry actress carrying a large knife.

Dylan and Nancy/Heather hug. She asks where Freddy is. Dylan said, “He had me, but then he let me go.”

Freddy grabs Nancy/Heather from behind. She drops Dylan. Freddy holds her over a puddle filled with snakes. Or eels. I really have no idea. Nancy/Heather grabs a snake and jams it into Freddy’s eye.

Freddy lets go of Nancy/Heather. He pulls the snake out of his eye. Nancy/Heather punches Freddy in the face, and he falls over.

More fighting ensues. Freddy holds Nancy/Heather against the wall and is about to start slashin’, except Dylan picks up the forgotten knife on the floor and stabs him in the back of the knee with it.

Freddy pulls it out, and gets ready to attack Dylan. But no, Nancy jumps on Freddy’s back. He throws her into a shallow pool of water.

Freddy runs after Dylan. Dylan runs away.

Nancy, who appeared unconscious but I guess wasn’t, drags herself up out of the pool. Off-camera. So we have no idea how she did it, since I thought she was unconscious.

Dylan runs from Freddy. This next part is annoying to explain, but I’m going to do it because I know it’s important to you.

Throughout the cavern are a bunch of what look like little fireplaces, with metal doors. What they really are, are square rooms with some flame in the middle of them from some source we can’t see. But there’s a metal door on the front of them.

Dylan goes into one of the rooms, and Freddy tries to reach him, only he can’t get his shoulders through the tiny doorway to the room.

So he starts stretching his arm. Slowly. To build tension. Because if he did it quick, how bleak would that ending be?

Nancy/Heather finally wakes up and grabs the knife off the floor, and goes running. She’s almost there, but she gets stuck on the stairs, which turn into goo, just like in the original “Nightmare.”

Freddy finally grabs Dylan, and instead of stabbing him to death, he says he’s going to eat Dylan up, and his head and mouth start expanding, like he’s a snake or something. Dylan screams.

Freddy stuffs Dylan’s head into his mouth.

But right in the nick of time, Nancy/Heather gets up the stairs and stabs Freddy. Dylan escapes. Nancy/Heather tells Dylan to get out of there, and lucky for him, the only thing blocking his path is a boa constrictor on a branch covering a little window-hole.

Meanwhile, Freddy, whose lower half is stuck outside the little square room, turns his upper half around and sticks his tongue out at Nancy/Heather. The tongue gets longer and longer, and wraps around Nancy/Heather. A lot.

Dylan comes around the corner, and grab’s the end of Freddy’s tongue, and tries to stab it with Nancy/Heather’s knife. He keeps missing. Freddy, in turn, sort of mugs. I’m not sure what they were going for, here. Is it supposed to be funny? Because it’s completely draining the tension out of the scene. Freddy is about one quip away from being a buffoon again, here.

Finally, Dylan succeeds in stabbing Freddy’s tongue. He yanks it back, which causes Freddy to end up with a forked tongue.

Freddy falls into the square room he previously couldn’t get into. Nancy/Heather and Dylan slam the door shut and pull some kind of lever, which causes the flames to shoot up in the air and consume Freddy.

Who starts on fire, and sprouts horns, so he looks like, you know, the devil. Then he explodes, and fire shoots up in the various ovens.

Not sure why Freddy didn’t just fry Dylan before. Also not sure why Freddy didn’t just run out the exact same hole Dylan just used to escape.

Nancy/Heather tells Dylan to run. They run. A series of things that are supposed to be ruins but are clearly models blow up real good. Fire ‘splodes everywhere.

Nancy/Heather and Dylan jump into the shallow pool, which is suddenly a lot deeper.

Everything goes BOOM!

Heather and Dylan fall out of the foot of Dylan’s bed.

There’s lots of smoke everywhere but nothing is on fire. They both recite part of Hansel and Gretel for the people who stopped caring about the metaphor over an hour ago.

Nancy looks down at the floor, and sees a screenplay there. There’s a note on it from Wes. “Heather – Thanks for having the guts to play Nancy one last time. At last Freddy’s back where he belongs. Regards, Wes.”

There is no P.S. like, “Sorry I killed your husband in the process. That was my bad.”

Or, “There are a bunch of cops at the door. Good luck trying to explain what happened without getting locked up for a good long while.”

Or, “Sorry the ending didn’t make a truckload of sense. I said I could write a movie around this concept without actually realizing that there would be, like, logistics and stuff to think about.”

Heather turns to the last page of the script, which has Dylan asking “Is it a story?” and her saying that it’s a story. Dylan asks her to read some of it.

So Heather turns to the first page and starts reading the start of the movie to us, with the whole Freddy claws being built thing.

The screen goes to black, and we get a strange little dance remix of the “Nightmare” theme. The nightmare is finally ov – oh, what was that? There’s another movie? That pretty much ignores this one?

Awesome.

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.