They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.
Prince of Darkness this ain’t:
Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.
It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”
You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.