“You had another nightmare, didn’t you?”
A Nightmare on Elm Street didn’t need a sequel. It’s such a masterful, self-contained vision of horror that Wes Craven intentionally wrote himself into a corner, not wanting to leave the door open for future installments. So it isn’t a surprise that Craven had nothing to do with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Even Robert Englund was uninvolved at first; Freddy Krueger was played by a stuntman for a few weeks until the filmmakers realized that Englund was basically irreplaceable. In many ways, Freddy’s Revenge is a slapdash cash grab, reviled upon its release, and only now undergoing critical reevaluation. It’s tragically bereft of scares, breaks the rules of the franchise, and characters from the first film are only mentioned in passing. But it’s a hard film to hate. It might not be “good” in the traditional sense, but it is deeply, truly weird. This is what it looks like when a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel is made by people with no interest in making a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel.
That level of disinterest is evident in the film’s main character, Jesse Walsh, a thoroughly uninteresting teenager straight out of the John Hughes playbook. What’s curious about Jesse is that, while he doesn’t have a singly identifying trait, the actor playing him, Mark Patton, turns in an increasingly interesting performance. He brings surprising layers of nuance to an underwritten role, but because of Jesse’s terminal blandness, Patton’s performance exists in some kind of limbo between fascinating and dull. Jesse’s family moves into the house previously occupied by Nancy Thompson, the heroine of the first Nightmare, and shortly thereafter he begins having dreams of Freddy Krueger (who is called “Freddy” in the film’s subtitle, but “Fred” by all the characters, which is a bizarre choice).
The most effective part of Craven’s original Nightmare was the slick way in which he introduced the dream sequences; you could never tell when Nancy was awake or in danger of becoming Freddy’s prey. Freddy’s Revenge does an admirable job of continuing this, and director Jack Sholder introduces some nicely nightmarish imagery, such a bus teetering high over a chasm. Although there’s definitely too much too soon – by the twenty-minute mark, we’ve seen three of Jesse’s nightmares, and the shock wears off. Freddy is only in thirteen of this film’s eighty-seven minutes, but paradoxically it feels like he’s in every other scene. With a cast far less charismatic than the one Craven had, Freddy’s Revenge relies far too heavily on its villain, which serves to eliminate stakes.
This would be more forgivable if Freddy’s plan made any sense. He reveals that he wants Jesse to kill for him. “You’ve got the body,” he croaks, “and I’ve got the brain!” He peels his scalp back to show his brain, in a nice practical effect (to be fair, Freddy’s Revenge is pretty good from an effects standpoint). But why? And also, how? It’s never explained how Freddy returns, or what exactly he’s seeking revenge for. His victims (there’s a low body count here, only two dead) seem only tangentially related to the story, and that’s by way of their connection to Jesse.
Jesse has a very boring relationship with his very boring girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers), in whom the film is never that interested. It’s far more interested in Jesse’s relationship with Grady (Robert Rusler), which starts out as antagonistic before developing into an actual friendship. Patton and Rusler have good chemistry together, and their friendship feels loose and natural. They’re far more believable, and interesting, a pairing than Jesse and Lisa, and Nightmare knows this. It’s the most innovative thing about the movie.
Screenwriter David Chaskin wrote Freddy’s Revenge expressly to contain homoerotic subtext. This was unknown to even the director, but Patton, an openly gay actor, knew, and played Jesse as gay. The film is full of references to homosexuality, and Jesse’s transformation into Freddy is played as an allegory of coming out of the closet. (At one point, Jesse even looks in a mirror and sees Freddy staring back at him.) Jesse talks about Freddy being “inside my body,” and when he’s truly scared, it’s not Lisa he turns to, but Grady. In a gruesome transformation sequence, Freddy – Jesse’s “hidden self” – bursts forth from Jesse’s chest. Jesse sleepwalks to a local S&M bar, and when he comes to, he seems right at home, ordering a beer. Later, the sadistic gym teacher (who was a patron of that bar) is stripped by an invisible force, tied to a beam, and whipped to death with towels. An argument could be made that the film demonizes what was then a subculture, but at times it’s an earnest look at a young man learning about himself, and realizing that people like him are all around. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is not a scary film, but it’s a strangely involving one if you think about it as a story of two young men growing closer to each other.
That doesn’t quite excuse the film’s failings, though. Purists have long written off Freddy’s Revenge as an aberration, because of how fast and loose it plays with the rules of its own universe. The goofy climax has Freddy terrorizing a pool party, which he shouldn’t be able to do, since everyone there is awake. His demise is similarly uninspired: having subsumed Jesse completely, Freddy is weakened every time Lisa says “I love you.” It’s nice in theory – love literally beating fear – and it does include a great, weird shot of Lisa and Freddy kissing, but played out, it’s merely underwhelming. This could have been a knockout ending, if the audience were at all invested in Jesse and Lisa’s relationship. Now if it were Grady who saved Jesse? That’s an ending.
10/1: Hellraiser
10/2: Splice
10/3: Jennifer’s Body
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
10/5: Kill List
10/6: Halloween II
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
10/8: Ginger Snaps
10/9: Cube
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
10/11: Hell House LLC
10/12: Re-Animator
10/13: Beetlejuice
10/14: Idle Hands
10/15: The Ring
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer
10/17: Night of the Living Dead
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone
10/19: Event Horizon
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
10/21: Eyes Without a Face
10/22: The Strangers
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness
10/24: The Amityville Horror
10/25: Gerald’s Game
10/26: The Monster Squad
10/27: Veronica
10/28: High Tension
10/29: The Innkeepers
10/30: The People Under the Stairs
10/31: Saw
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