Where I may have been able to enjoy Part 5 due to some effort that was put forth towards it, every single person involved in this movie seems to be on auto-pilot, driving towards a paycheck, starting with the writer. Jettisoning the relative simplicity of what worked before (and even any previous characters), we have a retcon of Freddy’s motive: he’s really killing kids because they took his daughter away. While it may make sense that Freddy had a wife and daughter at some point, wouldn’t the fact that his wife was murdered (or disappeared) put Freddy on the radar for the rash of murders (not counting his father and a hamster years before)?
Never before in a Nightmare film have there been had such a group of worthless characters with no redeeming qualities. Everyone in this movie makes me angry at life for how it disrespected the films before it. As the three punk kids are lost in Springwood, I almost wondered if Freddy did not have anything to do with it and they were just too fucking stupid to get out of a small town. Possibly excluding John (and that is just because we don’t know anything about him), the rest of the kids and Maggie are just horribly drawn caricatures of previous Elm Street residents, stupid decisions and all.
Also, considering that Springwood was supposedly only two miles away from this unnamed metropolis that the opening and closing acts take place in, why does everyone again have to be told about Freddy? I would think that if a few thousand (judging from the new population mark on the sign) kids had died or disappeared, the whole damn state at least would know about it. But no, in order to shove more exposition in the film, we have to bring everyone up to speed. The parts where the adults were all crazy in the town were mildly entertaining and creepy but the presence of Tom Arnold and Rosanne killed that for me.
Even some cool stuff that was tried was so horribly executed. The famous jump-rope song was not spoken but John and Maggie run across it scrawled in various places in Springwood, I suppose to be an ominous warning of some sort. Sad part is, they left out “7-8 Better Stay Up Late!” I understand it was probably filmed and edited out for pacing or whatever but even as a 9-year-old that shit irked me! And for my first 3-D experience in theaters, the finale of this was so boring, you could have developed an additional couple of dimensions and it would not have made any difference. Yeah, it was sort of interesting to see Freddy as a child or teenager but I’ve checked out after the previous seventy-five minutes, not to mention that awkwardly shoving a backstory into the big finale of a series just seems rather lazy.
It seems that despite working on every other Nightmare movie (other than 5), director Rachel Talalay has no clue what to do with Freddy. His make-up here looks more like a rubber mask that I donned for Halloween many moons ago and his already terrible persona is turned into more of a demented cartoon character with the broom riding, video game playing, and many other dumb things. It almost seems as if the filmmakers had no clue of how to make Freddy scary again, nor did they want to, so they went with “humor.” You will notice this movie is not filed under comedy because it was only funny in a sad way. The fact that no one seemed to mind this character assassination is troubling even as New Line President Bob Shaye has the balls to appear in this movie, laughing like a damn fool.
For the record, I thought that Johnny Depp agreed to come back and cameo in this was neat and I loved the continuation of the idiot parent theme from a few films ago as all of the parents in this movie are either abusive or neglectful. There may be a deeper meaning to this in the movie but it was drowned out by all the crap floating around it. At the very least, I am thankful that I have suffered through that now to go onto largely better films in the franchise. Quoth the Vardulon, FUCK THIS MOVIE!
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