By 1990 New Line Cinema’s A Nightmare on Elm Street had seen the profitable release of five feature films and an anthology TV series, not to mention a wave of lucrative merchandising. Internally it was felt that the franchise had effectively run its course. 1989’s The Dream Child had only grossed half the money of 1988’s The Dream Master. At the same time the runaway success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) – distributed in North America by New Line – indicated that it was a much more lucrative option to attract a mainstream teenage audience for the years ahead. Studio founder Bob Shaye made the ultimate decision to end Elm Street. The franchise would bow out with a sixth and final film in 1991.

Sadly Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare concludes the original Elm Street saga with a proverbial whimper: by and large, it represents genuinely poor filmmaking. It seems tonally misjudged, narratively incoherent, and amateurishly put together. Other films in the series have varied in quality and innovation, but have remained broadly entertaining. This is the first time the production team developed a film that was, for all sensible intents and purposes, unwatchable.

The screenplay marks the feature debut of Michael De Luca, a staff writer from the Freddy’s Nightmares series who would go on to be one of Hollywood’s most successful producers and executives. His script incorporates some genuinely bold ideas, but in practice they feel poorly played out or expressed. There is a provocative germ of an idea in the film’s setting: 10 years into the future, when Freddy has successfully murdered every teenager in Springwood, Ohio bar one. Sadly it never quite gets sufficiently exploited or expressed. De Luca’s script also tries to play around with Freddy’s origins and back story, which feels rather clumsy and unwelcome. Far from enabling a climactic finale, it actually weakens the character.

Elm Street producer Rachel Talalay takes the opportunity to make her directing debut. It is severely tonally misjudged, almost entirely abandoning the horror elements and doubling-down on almost slapstick levels of comedy. Occasionally the approach works – there is a sequence involving deaf teenager Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) where Robert Englund’s mime acting is genuinely funny – but more often it falls deeply flat. There has been an inexplicable redesign to the Freddy make-up as well; he looks his least convincing here out of the whole run.

Performances seem particularly weak this time around. Cameos by Alice Cooper, Roseanne Barr, and Tom Arnold feel rather jarring; another by Johnny Depp feels more welcome, given his personal history with the series. Lisa Zane and Lezlie Deane struggle with their material. Shon Greenblatt represents a farrago of weird performance choices. Yaphet Kotto (Alien, Live and Let Die) makes a brief appearance to presumably collect a pay cheque and wait for more interesting offers.

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks seems a visual influence on the film, in much the same way that the fourth and fifth Elm Streets were so influenced by music videos. Curiously, Twin Peaks get name-checked by one of the characters as well; it’s probably unwise to raise a series capable of more disturbing scenes and themes than anything Freddy Krueger ever achieved, particularly in a film as risible as this.

In any long-running horror franchise there is always going to be the instalment where the script and direction fail, or the premise does not align with the audience’s expectations, or the acting seems weak. While this marks the end of the main Elm Street franchise it does get followed by three more related films which we will get to in the coming days. Like all slasher properties, A Nightmare on Elm Street now sits in wait for an inevitable relaunch or reboot. I suspect it’s only a matter of time.