The last traditional entry in the long running slasher series that started with A Nightmare On Elm Street is the worst of the bunch. Comparing it with the original says plenty. In the original, Freddy was an unknown, dark, dangerous, menacing creature that seemed to be able to be wherever you were running. In this movie, Freddy flies by on a broom and cackles, "I'll get you my pretty...and your little soul, too!" Freddy hadn't been scary in many episodes of the series; his popularity as a horror film character undermined that long ago. But now he's beyond "not scary" and well into the territory of "unintentionally funny."

The plot of this episode is also inane. The last teenager in town flees for safety, only to suffer from amnesia and lead more "fresh meat" back to Freddy's clutches. Freddy picks them off, one by one, of course. (One of them becomes a character in a video game, and Freddy, joystick in hand, causes him to get beaten up; during the sequence, Freddy utters lines like "Boing! Boing! Boing!" and "Beat my high score!") He seems to have forgotten the rules of his own existence. Now you don't even have to be asleep for him to cause Random Horror Things to happen.

Does Freddy really die, as the title promises? Yes, but it's not like he hasn't been killed before. The manner of his death is recycled from a previous episode (I won't say which, to guard against spoiling the movie -- if anyone cares), but perhaps that's a good thing -- the original ideas in this movie are terrible. I will say this for it, however: it's one of the least gratuitously bloody and also one of the least painful to watch of all the bad entries in the series. Faint praise, but this movie should take what it can get.