Spooktober II Review #28 - A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Jack Sholder

"Help yourself, fucker!"

Last night I had the opportunity to see Rear Window on the big screen, presented by a local movie group here in Grand Rapids called Cinema Lab. It was great to see it in a theater, and the discussion afterward was pleasantly illuminating, but I don't think I can stretch enough to call it a horror movie. 

With only 4 more reviews to go, I needed to come up with something to watch, and since it was late, I thought it should be goofy. Since I haven't watched any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies yet this year, I asked an online random number generator to pick one for me, and it decided on #2 in its infinite digital wisdom. So here we are.

If you've never seen Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street, that's an easy recommend. It's a little sloppy at times, but the idea of a murderer who attacks you in your sleep is brilliant, and the dreamlike quality to the film really adds to the experience. Freddy became one of the all-time great movie monsters in just one film, and you can't beat the practical effects on the brutal kills:

Wes Craven had no intention of turning A Nightmare on Elm Street into a series, and wanted the original to have a happy ending (the scene at the end with Nancy's mom being sucked back in through the door was suggested by a producer as sequel bait), so there wasn't a lot of guidance on what to do with the sequels, and it shows with Part 2.

Freddy as a character has had an interesting progression. In the first movie, he's a genuinely terrifying psychopath who attacks children in their dreams. In Part 3 and beyond, he's a bit like a cartoonish supervillain, who kills teens in increasingly goofy ways while dropping one-liners. But in Part 2, I don't think the filmmakers knew what they had with Freddy, and he's almost completely wasted. I mean, he's barely in the movie until the very end, and that part is borderline embarrassing.

The basic story of Part 2 is that a new family has moved into 1428 Elm Street, and Freddy begins haunting the dreams of the teenage boy (Jesse, played by Mark Patton) who is now sleeping in Nancy's old bedroom. When Freddy comes to Jesse in his dreams, it's not to kill him, but to recruit him to help kill teens in the real world. Why? Who fucking knows, because it's never explained why Freddy suddenly needs a conduit.

Jesse resists Freddy for as long as he can, but eventually lets his guard down, and starts hacking and slashing his way through the school. Initially he kills his gym teacher, but moves on to his friend, and some other kids at a party. Well, maybe it's Jesse...

During each kill, his victims see him as Freddy, not Jesse, and by the end, it turns out that Jesse is living physically inside of Freddy (and vice versa). The story might have been more successful if Freddy was just controlling his mind, but I guess why bother paying Robert Englund all that money if you're not going to use Freddy, right?

The story culminates in Freddy attacking a bunch of teens at a pool party, in one of the most embarrassing scenes in any slasher film ever:

How is it that every single extra is the worst actor ever? I've never seen anything quite like it.

Eventually, Jesse's girlfriend leads Freddy to the factory where he worked when he was alive, and she kisses him. This is evidently Freddy's weakness, because he bursts into flame and Jesse climbs out of the crispy husk. They look like they'll happily ever after (despite his fingerprints being all over several murder scenes), but Freddy comes back at the end to provide more sequel bait in a scene that mirrors the end of the first one. It's super dumb.

Luckily there are a few bizarre things that I loved about Part 2, and I think make it worth watching. A lot of it stems from the lack of communication between the director and the writer, which resulted in some hilarious weirdness. You can tell the screenplay was a lot more cheeky and humorous than the direction.

Right off the bat, we have one of the best fake products in any movie:

Fu Man Chews! The greatest movie cereal box since Mr. T Cereal in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The only reason it's here is because the free toy inside are red "Fu Man Fingers" which look like Freddy's claws when the little girl puts them on. It's a long way to go for a dumb gag, and that box is impossibly distracting. I mean, just look at it! I want it on a poster.

Next is the infamous bird attack scene:

Why does this happen? Did Freddy take over one of the parakeets? Why does it explode at the end? I think this is supposed to be scary, but it doesn't play as scary. It plays as laughably ridiculous.

The very ending is also completely absurd:

A day or two after a pool party where a hellish demon murdered like five children and maimed several others, this is all the dramatic gravitas we can muster:

"I can't believe it's all over."

"Let's not talk about it."

"K."

The thing I love most about Part 2, and probably the only reason people still talk about it, is the gay subtext of Jesse's character. Mark Patton, an openly gay actor, proudly calls himself the first "scream queen" in a slasher film. He read the screenplay and understood the not-so-nuanced homosexual undertones, and embraced it with his character. The director clearly did not. He blocked and shot this scene (which was in the screenplay, in detail) and still treated Jesse like he was straight:

But that's not all:

• Jesse/Freddy's first kill of the film, the murder of his gym teacher, involves naked male bondage in a steamy shower, complete with welt-leaving towel snapping on some bare buttocks. 

• The "Scream Queen" moniker comes from Jesse's high-pitched shrieks throughout the film. 

• Jesse's one potential sexual encounter with his girlfriend ends before it begins, and he runs out of the room.

None of this is meant as a slight on Jesse's character, or the homosexual subtext of the film. In fact, I wish Jack Sholder had been on the same page as screenwriter David Chaskin, because it would have been a more interesting film to have Freddy represent Jesse's repressed homosexuality. Instead, it's just a lot of confused filmmaking and unrealized potential that adds to the amateur cheesiness of it all.

Summary:

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (which is an annoyingly long title) is a bad movie. It's not the worst movie ever, and it's under 90 minutes, so it might be worth watching if you're interested in what a movie looks like when the director never has a conversation with the screenwriter. It's not a great movie to watch if you love Freddy, however. He's only in it briefly, and he hasn't yet evolved into the gory Looney Tunes character he'd become in Part 3 and beyond.

Still, there's enough here to keep you laughing with a friend over a few beers on a cold October night.