Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week, we begin the second season!  Welcome back to Springwood!

Season 2.1 “Dream Come True”

(Dir by George Kaczender, originally aired on October 8th, 1989)

The second season of Freddy’s Nightmares features Freddy getting involved in the action.

The first story features Freddy haunting the nightmares of teenager Randy Jennings (David Kaufman), who has only recently moved to Springwood with his mother, Cathy (Linda Miller).  Randy is having nightmares about Freddy so his mother buys tickets to attend a talk show hosted by Stan Brooks (Jay Thomas).  Stan’s guest is therapist Dr. Brandon Kefler (Scott Marlowe), who has written a book about nightmares.  Cathy begs Brandon to see Randy and, after being pressured by Stan, Brandon agrees.  Stan arranges for cameraman Garry Heath (Gerard Prendergrast) to film the session.

At the Jennings home, Brandon talks to Randy about his nightmares.  Brandon’s therapy seems to work as, afterwards, Randy is able to sleep peacefully and without having any nightmares.  However, it turns out that Freddy just jumped from Randy’s mind to Brandon’s!  (Hey, didn’t almost the same thing happen in a movie, something about an exorcism….)  Soon, Brandon is the one who is having nightmares and being driven mad by visions….

As for the second story, it deals with Garry the cameraman and his belief that Freddy Kruger is real.  One reason why Garry believes that Freddy is real is because Freddy keeps showing up in footage that he’s filmed.  Unfortunately, no one else can see Freddy, certainly not Garry’s boss (Charles Cyphers).  Even more unfortunately, the body of Garry’s girlfriend is found in a dumpster and the police aren’t buying Garry’s story that Freddy did it….

This episode actually wasn’t that bad, especially compared to some of the episodes that aired during the show’s first season.  Perhaps it’s because this episode was the first of the season and the production budget hadn’t gone dry yet but Dream Come True actually features some adequate production values.  The house looks like a real house.  The television studio looks like a place where something would actually be filmed.  The abandoned warehouse with Garry tries to confront Freddy is actually an atmospheric location and the episode even manages to generate a little suspense, even if neither plot is particularly original.  Both Scott Marlowe and Gerard Pendergrast give decent performances in their stories and, as always, Robert Englund is a properly evil Freddy.

(That said, the show did manage to misspell Charles Cyphers’s name in the opening credits, despite the fact that he was this episode’s big guest star.  I did a double take when I saw “Charles Syphers,” on my screen.  Seriously, the man was Sherriff Brackett!)

Despite getting Charles Cypher’s name wrong, this was still a good start to the final season.  It’ll be interesting to see if the remaining episodes live up to it.