Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) returned in 1991 for the “final” Elm Street movie, a promise unlikely to get anyone’s hopes up that it would really be the end. Like Freddy, slasher audiences had been burned before; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter wasn’t even the final chapter of that financial year.

Rachel Talalay’s Elm Street 6 has an intriguing sci-fi setup about a town whose entire youth population has been wiped out by Krueger, sending the adults into a state of frozen psychosis. The film is surprisingly faithful to the original thematically if not stylistically, including literal depictions of the sins of the fathers; Freddy is shown to have been abused by his adoptive dad, which makes sense – both as a realistic explanation for his brutality, and because the dad is played by Alice Cooper.

As the parents who killed Krueger would later discover, the failure is in the execution. Annoyingly now the title character, the once-fearsome Freddy has been reduced to a pizza-faced prankster who spends more time monologuing than murdering. If Part 4 was an extended music video, this is a cartoon, the tacky dream sequences over-reliant on poor green-screen effects and 3D glasses – which again, Friday the 13th had done 9 years earlier.

Equally distracting are the film’s various cameos, including Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr – ironically one of the few characters in the series not on sleeping pills. Iggy Pop supplies the monotonous theme tune, while Johnny Depp appears in an anti-drug commercial; a role he would later inhabit on a full-time basis. The only people to escape with dignity are Yaphet Kotto (Alien, Across 110th Street) because he can actually act, and the band Fishbone because their song (a mighty cover of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Freddie’s Dead‘) is left on the cutting room floor.

Freddy’s Dead is a forgettable footnote to a flaccid franchise. Although it rights some of the wrongs of its predecessor (turns out Krueger was not a mutant baby), it still insists on making up superfluous parts of his backstory, such as how he was granted dream demon status by floating skeleton sperm. Talk about an anticlimax.