Film Plot Summary

The film opened with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:

"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..."

It was followed by a Freddy Krueger quote: "Welcome to Prime Time, bitch."

The time was approximately ten years (circa 1999) after the previous film. In the town of Springwood, Ohio:

"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..."

After years of Freddy killing children and teens in Springwood, only one child of Springwood remained - an unnamed teen (referred to as "John Doe"), who was having a disturbing nightmare:

• One anxious young male passenger was aboard a jetliner flying through a violent thunderstorm, rocked by turbulence. Fearful of his situation, noticed water trickling down his window and a strange bending noise, similar to metal fatigue. His overweight seat partner (Virginia Peters) was suddenly sucked out of a hole in the fuselage above him, and then he was similarly dropped through the floor of the plane for a free-fall through the air into the roof of a suburban house below. He abruptly awoke from a scary dream in his own Springwood bedroom.
• When he opened his window, he saw that the whole house was flying in the sky above the city, as items of furniture crashed to the floor. As he peered out into the windy air, he heard the cackling laugh of caped witch Freddy Krueger riding on a broomstick (similar to the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939)): "I'll get you my pretty, and your little soul, too!" The house crash-landed at 1427 Elm Street where he was thrown out of the window, as the credits began to play.
• He found himself in front of the nearby 1428 Elm Street house, boarded-up and for sale, before he hopped a fence, tumbled down a steep hill, and at the 'dream border' at the outskirts of Springwood, came upon a ticket booth with a Ticket Seller (L.E. Moko, aka producer Robert Shaye) inside (with a razor-fingered right hand), offering him a ticket: "One ticket, round trip. Hurry up, boy. You don't wanna miss the bus."
• As he turned facing a dream road, he was struck by a "SPECIAL" nightmare bus driven by Freddy Krueger and was plastered to its front grill. When the bus suddenly braked and came to an abrupt halt, he flew forward and broke through an invisible barrier - landing in the real-world from the dream world. Freddy approached the hole (an outline of John's body) and when it touched it, the opening sealed itself up and he couldn't cross over (Freddy ordered: "Now be a good little doggy and go fetch").

John woke up on the edge of town (next to the town sign) with a bloodied head after hitting a rock and suffering a concussion, and he was unable to remember who he was or how he got there. He searched in his pockets and found a local Springwood newspaper clipping headlined: KRUEGER WOMAN STILL MISSING. He stumbled down a deserted two-lane road toward a distant town.

In a Recovery House Youth Center for troubled youth, there were a number of teenaged patients, treated and counseled by Dr. Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane):

• juvenile delinquent stoner and video games addict Spencer (Breckin Meyer), who was having a brief meeting with his overbearing, demanding affluent father. He had seriously destructive tendencies (setting cars on fire, creating pipe-bombs, etc.) and was non-conformist.
• sexually-abused, martial-arts and boxing fanatic Tracy (Lezlie Deane) - a butch-like psycho teen who didn't like to be touched and had a fiercely aggressive, survivor-spirit.
• "John Doe" - found in an alleyway by two police officers thinking he might be a junkie, was dropped off at the shelter where he became the newest resident, suffering from amnesia and sleep deprivation.
• hearing-impaired, physically-abused Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan), who had been disabled by rough treatment from his mother.

The trio (Spencer, Tracy, and Carlos) were plotting to run away from the shelter in a pre-dawn escape.

In his littered office with various pieces of high-tech computer equipment and 3-D goggles, middle-aged, hippie dream therapist Doc (Yaphet Kotto) spoke to fellow counselor Maggie about his unconventional technique to reach the teens: "I can reach these kids through their dreams." He even suggested that he could aid Maggie regarding her reoccurring dream. He spoke about his wall poster - a drawing of three "ancient dream demons" who roamed the dreams of the living until finding the "most evil, twisted human imaginable. Then they give him the power to cross the line and turn our nightmares into reality."

Maggie was called to an evaluation room to treat the newest patient, "John Doe," who hadn't slept for three days, and had no memory. His only recollection was that he was "the last...survivor." He wanted to stay awake, knowing that if he fell asleep, he wouldn't wake up: "If I fall asleep, there's gonna be trouble." The newspaper clipping tipped Maggie off to his origination point, Springwood, marked by a water tower.

As she slept at her desk, Maggie (with John) both had dream visions:

• the figure of the 'Krueger Woman' in the newspaper clipping came alive and became three-dimensional.
• Maggie saw herself as a young girl, Little Maggie (Cassandra Rachel Friel) playing tag with her faceless Daddy in a backyard garden (near the water tower) - but was abruptly awakened by a woman's scream.
• At the same time, "John" felt water (and then blood) dripping from a pipe onto his cheek in the youth center's dormitory. After looking up at the bloody ceiling, "John" found himself in a bed in the living room of the Elm Street house where the same little girl from Maggie's dream was asking: "Play with me." When he asked who she was, she replied "I won't tell" and walked off.
• He followed her up the hallway's staircase, but was actually sleep-walking in mid-air in the shelter's real-world hallway. Inside one of the second floor rooms of the house was a brightly-lit padded cell, where a bloodied figure in a strait-jacket was hunched in a corner. As he approached the figure (who had a cut on his head), he whipped around and revealed himself to be another version of "John," demanding: "Free me, you idiot! I'm your f--king memory!"
• "John" screamed, turned, and barreled backwards into one of the shelter's security guards standing behind him, inadvertently crashing him through a window, but not harming him.

The next day, Maggie again evaluated "John" by questioning him about his dream of a room, house, and a little girl (brown-haired with red ribbons) - also "something about the town from my article," and the water tower. She and Doc were both unnerved and uneasy about "some connection" between Maggie's and "John's" dreams: "And his dreams mean bad news." He confronted Maggie, who was sick and tired of hearing about dreams, telling her: "You may not be ready to face what this boy will show you." However, she proposed to amnesiac "John" that they take a van on a two-mile drive to Springwood to revive his memory: "It's gonna trigger something."

During the trip after passing the Springwood town sign, "John" fell asleep - and awoke in another hallucinatory nightmare:

• The little girl from his dream was standing in the middle of the roadway, warning: "Go back!" He grabbed the wheel to avoid striking her, causing the van to spin out of control in the real-world.

When the dust settled, the three stowed-away teens (Tracy, Carlos, and Spencer) in the back of the van tumbled into view. Although Maggie was angered by their dumb stunt, they continued onto Springwood and arrived at the town's Spring Fair, a pathetic attraction with only a few run-down booths (a dilapidated bumper car ring, rotting pies, a cigarette-smoking clown, etc.) - and no children!

A repulsive and slightly weird Childless Woman named Ethel (Roseanne Barr) confronted the three teens near an inoperative payphone, ready to adopt them: "Would you like to come and live with us? It's been so long since we've had children in the house." When her enraged husband, Childless Man (Tom Arnold) dragged his unstable wife away as she protested, "I want my children back!" he argued: "You know they bring him!" A loud town school bell tolled, causing the town's inhabitants to react fearfully - Spencer noted: "We're in Twin Peaks here."

The plan was for the three teens to drive themselves back to the shelter, while Maggie and "John" would walk to the school and have another car sent for them. Tracy drove the van into the town center's square (twice), where a bronze statue of a saluting Boy Scout was engraved: "THE CHILDREN SHALL ENDURE." They appeared to be driving in circles, and had difficulty leaving the town. When Carlos struggled to unfold a map for directions (in a mini-dream nightmare), it kept getting bigger and bigger and soon filled the entire back of the van. One of the pages of the map had a message in blood-red letters: YOU'RE F--KED. When he was startled awake and told them disorientedly, "the map says we're f--ked," Spencer decided to change places with Tracy and take the wheel, although he later admitted how they couldn't escape the town: "There's no way out." As darkness fell, the trio eventually left the van and walked into an abandoned house on Elm Street in the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, on a deserted town street, Maggie and "John" came upon a large colored chalk drawing on the concrete of Freddy Krueger (with his red/green striped sweater, fedora, and clawed right hand), with the words: "One Two Freddys Coming for You." At the high school, a brick wall was covered with graffiti: "3, 4 Better Lock Your Door." In one of the classrooms, an insane teacher (Matthew Faison) lectured to two empty chairs (he called his class "Freddy 101"), and when he unrolled a map, it was inscribed: "Five Six Grab Your Crucifix." A scrapbook on a desk contained clippings of reports of the town's missing children, and told of a search for the alleged killer, Freddy Krueger, who had mutilated or slaughtered them. The article that "John" had carried with him fit perfectly into one of the clippings on the page. Maggie told him: "You were here." A plaque in an "In Memorium" display showed that all the deceased in the town were within a ten-year period, as "John" noted: "Freddy happened here." As the teacher continued his lesson with a Freddy Krueger time-line drawn on the blackboard, he explained how Freddy had a child taken away from him (the reason for his murderous rampage?) that was put in the town orphanage: "Freddy had a kid."

The three teens decided to rest in one of the houses (marked by a For Sale sign), which began to transform itself after they entered. It became the notorious and sinister 1428 Elm Street home, where blood dripped down the front door, walls and windows cracked, and the For Sale sign caught on fire. Carlos went upstairs to look for a place to sleep, while Tracy observed: "This place makes the shelter look like the Ritz." Off the upstairs hallway (similar to the one in "John's" nightmare), Carlos found a bedroom with a dusty bed and fell asleep. [He would become Freddy's first victim, forced back into his own past to relive his traumatic upbringing.]

• He awoke to the sound of his name being called, and the hallway became a corridor in an inner-city tenement building with one end blocked by a brick wall - it was a memory of his own home, with Tracy's voice turning into the voice of his domineering mother (Angelina Estrada). She slapped him on the side of the head and threatened to clean out his ear canal with an extremely long Q-tip - he was recalling the time when he went deaf from abuse: "No, no, Mama, please. I've been a good boy....Please don't make me deaf, Mama."
• Freddy's hand grabbed his face and forced the Q-tip through one ear and out the other, popping out his hearing aid. Freddy then neatly sliced off a portion of Carlos' right ear, quipping: "Oh, Carlos, lend me your ear," and then tossed Carlos through the brick wall, sending him tumbling down a rickety old fire escape. He landed on one of the catwalks in Freddy's boiler room with pipes spewing steam, although most of the sound was muffled.
• In a panic, Carlos wandered through the maze of pipes and along the catwalk, as Freddy snuck up behind him. He called out: "Give me my hearing back!", and the hearing aid was dropped to him, but when applied to his ear, it mutated into a nasty clamp that painfully dug into his flesh with sharp claw-like appendages. Carlos' hearing was restored, but it was super-sensitive with the amplified hearing aid. Freddy tormented Carlos by dropping a single pin that loudly whistled through the air, and then he dropped a full handful of pins that were deafening when they hit the ground.
• To kill Carlos with crushing pain caused by screeching sound vibrations, Freddy joyfully and sadistically scraped his razor-fingered glove against a magical chalkboard until Carlos' nose and ear canals bled when blood vessels burst - and his pulsating, expanded head exploded (# 1 death). Freddy caught the aberrant hearing aid from the blast and joked: "Nice hearing from you, Carlos."

All that was left of Carlos in the bedroom was his hearing aid, found by Tracy.

In the downstairs living room, Spencer was smoking pot and falling asleep on the sofa - and would become Freddy's next prey:

• Spencer watched an image on the broken-down TV set with a smashed screen (of desperate kids' faces, scarred or bloodied inside the tube, one of whom was Carlos who screamed a warning: "Don't fall asleep, man!").

In town, Maggie and "John" visited the Springwood Orphanage, established in 1929, to find out about the "dead killer's kid." John tensely noted: "We might be talking about the same thing." Maggie thought the whole town had become obsessed by the Krueger character, including "John," who suspected that there was a reason why he was alive (when everybody else was dead) - could he be Freddy's child?

They were met by an Orphanage Woman (Elinor Donahue), another insane Springwood adult, who was singing "Skip to my Loo" to an imaginary group of children (due to the fact that all the real-world children in the town had been slaughtered by Freddy). She recognized "John" and greeted him: "Oh, you've come back," although she remembered Maggie more clearly: "What a pretty little girl you were!" When "John" asked, the woman wouldn't specifically disclose the "real identity" of Krueger's child.

Maggie picked up a crude, colored-crayon drawing (by a child named K. Krueger) of a Krueger family portrait of three individuals - a mommy, a daddy (wearing a red/green striped sweater) and a child (of unknown gender). "John" was certain that he was Freddy's kid: "It's me. I'm his kid. That's why he's kept me alive. He's trying to play some sick game with me." Maggie tried to reassure "John": "He's dead. And you're not his kid."

When they went outside to leave, Tracy drove up in the van, relieved to have found them. "John" was worried about Freddy getting to Carlos and Spencer before they did - and they hurriedly drove off together. Shortly later, Maggie emerged from the cellar into the backyard of the Elm Street house, similar to the backyard of her nightmarish dream with the nearby water tower, as she realized: "Whoa, I'm here."

• Back at the Elm Street house, Spencer began his nightmare while watching television, as a Teen on TV (Johnny Depp), in a Public Service commercial about the dangers of drug abuse, held up an egg and fried it in a sizzling pan on a stove: "This is your brain - on drugs. Questions?" Freddy Krueger walloped the Guy in the face with the frying pan, and then invited Spence: "Let's trip out."
• The teen was drawn into and surrounded by a cartoonish world of psychedelic colors (to the tune of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly) - and literally grabbed, dragged or sucked into the television world, where a virtual Freddy Krueger was manipulating a joystick to control a Mario Bros. type video game, with Spencer as the character of Mario (Freddy: "Now, I'm playing with power").
• Spencer/Mario was forced to jump off a brick wall, and was confronted by a series of ever-increasing in size, tennis racket-swinging Dads wearing shorts (Freddy: "Father knows best") that whacked at him, and demanded more forcefully: "Be like me!"
• Spencer then began punching through a wall and broke away from the game, crashing into the kitchen window of the Elm Street house, but he was still asleep, and his abdomen was convulsing from foot-stomping delivered to his stomach by a giant, computer-animated Freddy character in the videogame. "John" realized: "He's stuck in a nightmare...It's Freddy."
• Spencer's body suddenly flew up and his head crashed into the ceiling, and then he began bouncing, like a cartoon character (controlled by Freddy's joystick), throughout the house and he was punching holes with his fist into the walls.

To get Spencer out before he was killed, "John" proposed entering his dream - weirdly believing that Freddy wouldn't hurt him ("I'm family"). Tracy deliberately knocked him out with a plank of wood - to enable him to enter into the dream world to help Spencer. Tracy accompanied him - although she used an "easier way...concentration meditation" taught to her by Doc:

• "John" made a hard landing in Freddy's nightmarish boiler room.
• "John" and Tracy followed Freddy's laugh and found him in front of a TV playing the videogame.
• Freddy's razor-glove turned into a remote-controlled "power glove" that he used to further punish Spencer in the video landscape.
• In real-life, Spencer's body bounced like a pogo-stick and tumbled down the stairs, falling through rotten wooden planks at the foot of the stairs into a pit to hell (# 2 death). Freddy was pleased: "I beat my high score," and he absorbed an upsurge of blue light from the pit, feeding off Spencer's soul: "Great to be back in business, thanks to you." The real-world TV in the living room filled with blood.
• Freddy then turned to Tracy and lasciviously threatened her: "Daddy's waitin' for ya, little girl" - and she retaliated with: "Shut the f--k up, man!" and a swift kick to Freddy's crotch.

Maggie shook Tracy and awakened her to the real-world, but when "John" couldn't be brought back, they decided to pick him up and take him with them in the van back to the shelter.

As the camera focused on "John's" face sleeping in the rear of the van, he awoke in his bedroom as he had done at the beginning of the film - had he been dreaming everything?

• At the window, "John" looked out on a peaceful, sunny street scene. Standing on the Welcome mat on his front porch, the ground suddenly dropped away, and the house was propelled into outer space above planet Earth below.
• Again, he awoke in a startled state in his bedroom, determinedly stating: "Not again. He's not gonna get me again. Nothing is gonna make me get off this bed." But he was compelled to jump off his bed when the entire room was engulfed in flames. He dove through the window, plummeting through the night sky toward the town of Springwood.
• As he sailed through the air, he saw a sign on his T-shirt: "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PULL STRING" - he pulled the string, triggering a parachute that violently yanked him upward - through the roof of the van where he was sleeping.

With Maggie driving, the van screeched to a halt near the Springwood town sign.

• Under the umbrella top of the parachute, "John" looked up and saw Freddy laughing at him, and then he watched as Freddy began sawing through the parachute cords with his bladed hand, while asking: "Do you think I'm your daddy? Wrong!" "John" panicked: "But you let me live," when child-molester/killer Freddy revealed that he had only used him to search for and get to his actual child, his long-lost daughter - Maggie: "Only long enough for you to bring me back my daughter...And now she's gonna take me to a whole new playground."
• "John" was dropped to earth and impaled on a long bed of steel spikesthat Freddy pushed out onto the road, Wile Coyote-style. "John" died in the real-world from his bloody puncture wounds. (# 3 death)
• To feed off the dead teen and further strengthen himself, Freddy sucked in the blue-light of "John's" soul energy.

Freddy told Maggie that Freddy's child was not a male. He then possessed Maggie by flying into her head as their van left Springwood and crossed the town's outer limits, shattering and exploding the invisible or supernatural dream border.

Back at the shelter, Maggie reported to her supervisor Kelly (David Dunard) about how "John Doe," Spencer, and Carlos had disappeared, and then discovered to her amazement that he didn't even remember them as patients or new arrivals: "Those kids were never here." However, Doc remembered them, as he explained to Tracy and Maggie: "Because I can control my dreams. I'm not fooled by this thing you saw." Doc thought that Freddy was "f--king with the line between dreams and reality" and had not only killed them, but "erased" the teens. He knew that Freddy attacked people's minds, capitalizing on their fears.

Distraught in her own office, Maggie remembered that "John" had told her: "It's not a boy." She raced to her mother's home to search for her own Adoption Decree, realizing that she was a young adoptee named "Jane Doe," but her mother (Marilyn Rockafellow) had no knowledge of the identity of her parents. As Maggie wandered in the rain, she passed a newspaper vending machine, where the Springwood newspaper headlines read: "NINE, TEN, NEVER SLEEP AGAIN."

That night as Maggie slept, she encountered a dream world:

• Little Maggie's daddy, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), played tag with her (as a young girl, now named Katherine Krueger) in her Springwood backyard.
• Her fearful mother Loretta Krueger (Lindsey Fields) came up from the cellar, sobbing and claiming: "I won't tell."
• In the cellar of the Krueger home, the little girl entered Freddy's unlocked workroom (just discovered by her mother), decorated with newspapers (SPRINGWOOD KILLER STRIKES AGAIN), prototypes of clawed-gloves, stuffed animals and reptiles in formaldehyde jars, and pictures of young children.
• Maggie - as a pig-tailed adult dressed in the little girl's dress - emerged from the cellar room, where demonic, scorched-faced killer Freddy Krueger stood before her and told his daughter that he had vengefully killed all of Springwood's children:
  
  "You're my blood. Only you could have brought me out in your mind...They took you away from me, but I made 'em pay. I took all their children away from them, and now that's over."
  
  
• From the cellar door, he pointed out Maggie's youth shelter behind him - "Time to start all over again." When she protested that it wasn't Springwood, Freddy chillingly asserted: "Every town has an Elm Street." His goal was to start his killing spree of children and teens in the town where the shelter was located - a twisted ELM STREET sign erupted out of the sidewalk, marking Freddy's new territory.

Maggie woke up in her bedroom and called out for Tracy, who was in her own nightmarish world:

• Tracy found herself in a filthy bathroom with graffiti on all the walls, and then found herself in a perverted memory of her own dingy childhood kitchen where she was frequently abused - her obese, depraved father's (Peter Spellos) voice spoke out as he approached her from behind to put his hands on her: "Tracy, girl. Daddy's home...I'm home, darling...Come on, give Daddy some honey. No one has to know."
• Tense and wincing, Tracy turned and cried out: "You're not my daddy!" She bashed him in the head with an unplugged coffee percolator, and in crazed fashion, kept beating at him and screaming: "Here! Do you love me now? He's dead. My daddy's dead." The man rose with a dented-in face, revealing himself to have Freddy's razor-gloved hand, and joking: "What's with kids today, huh? No respect."
• Tracy resisted and fought against him with her martial arts skills: "You can't scare me anymore...This is my dream, and I do what I want." Freddy thought otherwise: "Might be your dream, but it's my rules!" To escape from his control, she held her forearms over burners on the hot stove, causing herself pain -- and her screaming forced herself to wake up.

Maggie and Tracy both rushed to talk to Doc, who was in the shelter's rec room.

• Doc was in his own dream world when he heard Tracy calling to him from inside one of the lockers. Doc swiveled around when confronted by Freddy who was speaking with Tracy's voice: "You taught her alot" - and then with his own deep voice: "...but there's so much more to learn."
• Doc beat Freddy senseless with a baseball bat - but Freddy remained unharmed: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but nothin' will ever kill me." He had been burned and buried, and he claimed that "they even tried holy water (he held up his middle finger and sliced it off, but it magically regenerated with two other fingers he had cut off) but I just keep on tickin' because they promised me that."
• Freddy described how his power and continually-revived, immortal life came from "the dream people. The ones that gave me this job. In dreams, I am forever." Doc ripped off a piece of Freddy's striped sweater, and then his wristwatch alarm went off.

Doc awoke up in the real-world in his office where his alarm clock was loudly beeping, and where he was hooked up with electrodes to a computerized brain-sensor machine. Tracy and Maggie entered Doc's office, where he held up the torn piece of sweater and proposed a way to get Freddy - "If this can come out, he can come out" - Freddy could be killed if he was brought into the real-world.

Maggie volunteered to confront Freddy, plug herself into Doc's brain-wave computer monitor, and then have Doc pull her out at the right moment: "You've got to be holding him to carry him out." Doc instructed Maggie to wear a pair of 3-D glasses once she was in the dream world, to get inside Freddy's mind: "You get inside of his (head)." Maggie insisted that she go alone, without Tracy: "It's gotta be me and him."

Maggie went to sleep to confront Freddy in the dreamworld, where she encountered various stages of Freddy's life, seen in his memories:

• Maggie awoke in Doc's office, but no one else was there. When she put on the 3-D glasses, they sparkled and dissolved into her face - and she noticed the added depth and realism of the "dream demon" poster - living versions of the drawing. Maggie remembered her instructions: "Get inside his brain" and literally walked into the poster image.
• She found the pathway to Freddy's brain - a maze of surreal colors, structures, and firing and crackling synapses in an electrical hallway.
• She was able to short-circuit one of the electrical boxes with her wrist bracelet in order to enter through a deactivated metal door (a portal into Freddy's memories), and emerged in a grade-school classroom. She watched as young sadistic Freddy (Chason Schirmer) cruelly smashed a pet hamster to death with blows from a hammer, and was then teased by the other kids, chanting: "Son of a hundred maniacs."
• After a flash of light, she then saw Freddy inflicting mutilation upon himself as masochistic Teen Freddy (Tobe Sexton) - slicing his own exposed mid-section with a straight-edged razor. Freddy's mean, alcoholic foster father (Alice Cooper) repeatedly abused the teen by whipping him with a belt.
• After another flash of light, Maggie witnessed an angry mob of parents accusing adult Freddy of being a "child killer," and burning his living quarters by throwing a Molotov cocktail at him. While surrounded by fire and about to be burned alive, the three demons gave Freddy the power "to be forever."
• A final flash of light brought Maggie to the end of her reoccurring dream - in the Elm Street house basement - where she (as a little girl) climbed out of the cellar and witnessed that Freddy was murdering his wife Loretta in the backyard (# 4 death) - strangling her in front of his own pig-tailed daughter.
• Freddy killed his wife "for snooping in Daddy's special work" - and discovering his secret past-time. With tears in her eyes, the little girl promised her father: "I won't tell."
• Maggie contronted Freddy Krueger in the boiler room, screamed: "You killed my mother," and bashed him with a section of metal pipe. After struggling with him and holding onto him, Maggie thought she had pulled Freddy into the real-world of Doc's office, but he vanished.

Tracy, Maggie, and Doc raided the shelter's locked arsenal of confiscated weapons to use in hand-to-hand combat against Freddy. Maggie, with a spiked baseball bat in her hands, found Freddy cowering and bleeding on the floor in the basement behind some boxes (Maggie: "You're real here"). He tried to gain her sympathy:

"It wasn't my fault...You saw what they did to me when I was a kid. You saw. I loved you and your mother. I tried so hard to be good...But when they took you from me, it wasn't right."

But Maggie was enraged and continued to battle him. She disarmed him of his clawed glove with one violent swing of her bat, and it sparked to a stop on the floor. Freddy, now with a burned face, was still menacing Maggie: "I didn't need the glove to kill your bitch of a mother and I don't need one now." He grabbed her by the neck, and threatened: "Give Daddy the glove back, princess," although she fought back and wrestled him, and pinned him with knives and other sharp implements to a support beam.

When he tempted her with wearing the clawed glove ("Go ahead, put it on, it's in your blood...That's it, put it on. Feels good, doesn't it? Yeah, come on. Let your Daddy show you how to use it"), she obliged and then stabbed him deeply in the stomach with it. After Tracy threw her a lighted pipe bomb, she also impaled it into his chest, adding: "Happy Father's Day" with a quick kiss on his cheek. Just before a massive dynamite explosion that killed him (# 5 death), Freddy spoke directly into the camera: "Oh, kids." The three dream demons inside of him were freed and seen flying out of Freddy, unable to revive him in the real-world.

Maggie, Doc, and Tracy evaded the deadly blast, and Maggie's 3-D glasses magically reappeared on her face (and were removed by Doc). She smiled at her friends with glee: "Freddy's dead."

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

With a production budget of $5 million, and box-office gross receipts of $35 million (domestic).

Although this was intended to be the final (sixth) film in the series, it was followed by Wes Craven's New Nightmare in 1994, and by the hybrid film Freddy vs. Jason (2003). The film was severely criticized for its general offensiveness, gimmickyness and cartoonish approach, and for irresponsibly disregarding much of the previous films' rules and events.

The film's poster displayed Freddy's birth and death dates: BORN November 2, 1984, DIED September 13, 1991, with the tagline: "They saved the best...for last."

The last approximately fifteen minutes towards the conclusion of the film, a journey into Freddy's brain taken by Dr. Maggie Burroughs (when she donned 3-D glasses) was originally theatrically shown in 3-D.

There were brief cameos from Roseanne Barr (as a desperate childless mother), Barr’s then real-life husband Tom Arnold (as a childless husband), Alice Cooper (as Freddy's alcoholic foster father) and Johnny Depp (as a Teen on TV in an anti-drug public service announcement, credited as Oprah Noodlemantra).

During the end credits, excerpts or clips were featured from other A Nightmare on Elm Street films, to the tune of Iggy Pop’s Why Was I Born? (Freddy's Dead). The last scene displayed a picture of Freddy inscribed with R.I.P.

Body Count: 5 (4 killed by Freddy). The fourth was a memory of Freddy murdering his wife Loretta. Freddy's death was the 5th, killed by his "daughter" - Dr. Maggie Burroughs (Katherine Krueger).

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