Happy Halloween: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Director: Jack Sholder
Cast: Mark Patton, Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Robert Englund, Marshall Bell
★★½ (out of ★★★★)
I’ve always had a soft spot for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, even though I know good and well that the movie isn’t very good. The majority of the characters are one-dimensional, and the dialogue is awkward and hokey most of the time. I’ve never understood why the main character keeps having dreams of him riding the school bus, since it’s clearly established that he owns his own car, and even gives the cute girl next door a ride to school. And if someone could explain the scene involving the snake during the science class, then I’m all ears.
What intrigues me about the movie is the one element the filmmakers swear they didn’t intentionally add: The gay subtext. I don’t see how it was in any way accidental. The main character Jesse (Mark Patton) has just moved into the house where Nancy and her mother lived in the last movie. Freddy (Robert Englund) is back, only this time he wants to wreck some havoc in the real world by taking over Jesse’s body. The first time he takes over Jesse is when the young man goes out one rainy night and ventures into a gay S&M bar. Maybe the filmmakers thought that was a “happy” bar owned by a Sally and Michael.
It gets even better. The cute girl next door Jesse drives to school is Lisa (Kim Myers), who claims that Jesse is just his ride to school, but is soon helping him clean his room and kissing him on the cheek before we even know she’s attracted to him. Never mind. During a nighttime pool party she throws during the film’s climax, she makes out with Jesse in a cabana, but he runs off scared after a six-foot demon tongue pops out of his mouth. Where does he go? To spend the night with his muscular jock best bud Grady (Robert Rusler).
Grady himself is quite the weird character. When Jesse gets him out during a baseball game during P.E., Grady retaliates by jumping up and pulling Jesse’s pants down. During one scene in the school cafeteria, he sees Jesse is clearly upset and says they should hang out over this weekend. When a cute girl asks him if he would want to hang out with her, he says that he can’t because he’s grounded. Either the film is hinting at something with him, or screenwriter David Chaskin just has severe short term memory loss.
It seems this time Freddy is a metaphor for the main character’s closeted sexuality. When Freddy comes alive and attacks a perverted P.E. coach (Marshall Bell), who saw Jesse at the gay bar and decided to bring him back to the school for obviously sinister reasons, Freddy’s first move is to attack the coach with balls. Yeah, they were sports balls, but you get the metaphor. He then ties up the coach with jump rope, drags him into the shower, strips him naked, and starts whipping his butt with towels (I’m not kidding).
The climax has a few ideas that I actually did like. Eventually Freddy completely takes over Jesse’s body, but there are still fragments of Jesse’s humanity that eventually break through (hearing Freddy say “I love you, Lisa” is oddly unsettling). Lisa fights Freddy by acknowledging that she knows Jesse is still in there somewhere and kissing Freddy on the lips. That frees Jesse from Freddy’s grasp, although the final jump scare seems to suggest that those urges Freddy represented here would never go away.
There are other things about the film that I admire. I liked the quietly sinister musical score by Christopher Young. I thought the make-up artists made Freddy look a lot darker and scarier here. The cinematography by Jacques Haitkin and Christopher Tufty is eye-catching and atmospheric, especially the tracking shot that begins in the basement with the furnace flaming on and moving all the way upstairs to the bedroom of Jesse’s kid sister (Christie Clark). There’s even a great shot during the scene with the P.E. coach in the shower room that was quite chilling (it involves Jesse disappearing in the mist and Freddy emerging in his place).
With a tighter script, one with a little more focus and coherence (seriously, what was up with that scene with the snake?), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge could have been one of those rare sequels that equaled the original. You can at least give it credit for trying to do something different (no one could ever call this a rehash). It’s certainly a well-made movie with interesting ideas. It just doesn’t come together as well as you would hope.
Rated R for graphic violence, profanity, brief nudity, sexual content.
This content reflects the personal opinions of the author. It is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and should not be substituted for impartial fact or advice in legal, political, or personal matters.
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