A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

 

It usually takes a few sequels before things go downhill for a horror franchise, but A Nightmare on Elm Street went straight to the bottom with its very first sequel. Wes Craven had no input – he’d intended the first film to be standalone and was against the idea of turning it into a franchise. But since it made money the producers forged ahead regardless, and had a script quickly written up. And what a mess of a script it is. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is bad, one of the worst in the series. It’s a movie that completely misunderstood the appeal of the first film, wilfully squandering and outright ignoring the ‘nightmare killer’ premise of the original film, and removing any fear or threat of Freddy Krueger.

It’s also really, really gay. The film is thick in homo-erotic subtext, but apparently that wasn’t the director’s intention at all. But when you watch the movie it’s almost impossible not to see it. It’s not subtle at all; it’s constant, in your face and ridiculous. I’m not saying that being gay is bad, or that a horror movie about or incorporating homosexuality is awful, but here it’s laughable and unintentionally silly, being handled in the worst way possible and having no place in an ANOES film of all things.

 

Five years after the events of the original film, teenaged Jesse and his family move into a house on Elm Street. Jesse, whose room seems to get sweltering hot at night, starts to have horrible nightmares about a man with a clawed hand. As the nightmares get more threatening and lucid, Jesse finds out that he’s being haunted by child killer Freddy Krueger, with their house being Nancy’s house from the first film. Freddy is terrorising Jesse to wear him down so he can possess him and wreak havoc in the real world. While Jesse struggles with Freddy taking him over night by night, he finds himself being possessed, waking up in the street naked and with Freddy’s clawed glove. He tries to get help from his new girlfriend Lisa and his friend Grady as Freddy takes over.

ANOES2 makes the big mistake of taking us away from the nightmares, instead focusing on a weird possession storyline. There actually aren’t really many nightmare sequences, and Freddy never kills anybody in a nightmare, only using them to torment Jesse. In fact Jesse is the only one to have a nightmare in the entire film. Instead the movie focuses itself on Freddy trying to escape nightmares by possessing Jesse. I guess that since Nancy defeated him in her house in the first film his spirit is stuck there maybe? That might explain why nobody other than Jesse has nightmares, but it’s hard to tell. But why is Freddy haunting the house? He haunted dreams; he was never tied down to one place. He doesn’t try to kill Jesse, instead he’s giving him nightmares to wear him down psychologically so he can possess him and stalk teens in the real world. It’s never actually explained why or how he’s doing this.

 

Jesse sucks. Compared to the quick-thinking, resourceful Nancy, who got things done, Jesse is pretty much useless and whiny. Jesse also does fuck all about stopping Freddy. He knows that he’s getting possessed by Freddy, but doesn’t actually do anything about it. He never actually seems to even try – he doesn’t tell his friends until it’s too late, doesn’t even bother informing his family and never tries to put himself somewhere where he can’t hurt anybody, only getting more and more upset. At the end its Lisa, Jesse’s neglected girlfriend, who saves the day. She confronts Freddy/Jesse at his factory hideout, and uses the power of love to defeat Freddy. I’m serious, she tells him she loves him and forcibly kisses him, and then Freddy catches alight and burns away, leaving Jesse. Not that Lisa is any better, she’s supportive and boring. Grady is barely in the film either, to the point of not really having any defining characteristics. Nobody else has anything going on.

ANOES2 is also thick with homoerotic subtext. Jesse, our main character, is often seen shirtless, in his underwear, covered in sweat. He seems to sleep in almost no clothes, and is always slick and wet. He’s got a hot girlfriend but he doesn’t seem interested in her. Instead he’s more interested in hanging out with his buddy Grady.  At one point he dances in his room, and the camera lingers on things like his thrusting hips, his butt and him doing masturbatory motions. At another point after a nightmare he wanders into a gay bar for a drink. That’s about the least subtle thing ever. Later the mean coach forces Jesse and his friend Grady to do push ups, but they aren’t doing push ups, they’re basically humping the ground. I have no idea what the hell happened here. It’s probably no coincidence that the actor who played Jesse is gay.

It’s so ridiculous it overtakes the movie, and is so blunt it’s almost impossible to have not been intentional. You can read it as Freddy being Jesse’s gay side. When kissing Lisa for the first time Jesse freaks out and starts to transform into Freddy, and runs off to Grady’s house. He then gets possessed with a weird ‘there’s a man inside me!’ thing (Freddy cuts his way out of Jesse’s chest) and kills Grady. Hell, Freddy/Jesse’s homosexuality is defeated at the end when Lisa tells him she loves him and kisses him, melting Freddy away. It’s all gay. It’s super gay. It’s absurdly gay. You could read the entire movie as being about Jesse’s personal struggle with coming out of the closet – he’s gay but doesn’t want to admit it. But it’s handled so silly, with no tact or care, that it takes any fear out of things. It colours the rest of the movie, which already had plenty of problems, in a big way.

There are more kill than the original but far less gore and they’re far less interesting to the point of being garbage. Compared to the gory and elaborate nightmare deaths in the first film, the real-world kills are weak. They all occur in the real world and mostly just involve Freddy stabbing somebody with his claw hand. The problem is, with the exception of Grady and the coach, the kills all happen to extras during the pool party massacre – characters with no names that we’ve never seen before are stabbed or set on fire. It’s all underwhelming and none of the kills have any impact, both because they’re happening to people we don’t know or care about, and because the kills aren’t gory or creative at all. It does have the most homoerotic kill in any horror movie I’ve ever seen. After a nightmare, Jesse ends up at a gay night club where he accidentally walks into the school’s coach. The coach takes Jesse to the school and makes him run laps, then makes him have a shower (because this isn’t creepy enough already). While Jesse has a shower, the coach finds himself under attack by Freddy, who makes gym equipment fly across the room and hit him. The coach is then stripped naked by invisible forces, dragged to the shower, tied up and then has his ass spanked by towels, before Freddy appears and stabs him to death. This entire sequence is absurdly homoerotic and ridiculous.  

Some of the Freddy gore is cool though. At one point he peels the skin on his forehead off exposing his brain, and when he cuts himself out of Jess’s chest it’s cheap looking but a cool way of showing possession. Other effects are crap. A budgie suddenly catching fire is dumb. The dumbest thing is when Lisa heads to the Freddy’s boiler room to find Jesse and finds two dogs with people’s faces. It has nothing to do with anything and the dogs don’t attack or do anything. It’s also silly because they’ve just put cheap masks on the dogs, which are obviously uncomfortable. Speaking of which, we get to see Freddy’s hideout, the factory and boiler room he took children to kill them when he was alive (and the apparent basis for his nightmare territory). It’s just a factory. The other movies will ignore this, and retcon Freddy’s lair as being his house, with a furnace in the basement where he killed his victims.

 

Freddy outside of the dreams isn’t scary. When he’s not in his domain he’s really just a guy with a razor hand. And pyrokinesis? Apparently Freddy has fire based powers (because he killed kids in a boiler room?). He makes Jesse’s room exceptionally hot so he can possess him, and then does a bunch of flame-based nonsense, like setting fire to a budgie. The biggest amount of nonsense comes at his barbeque pool party massacre where Freddy (possessing Jesse) attacks a pool party and kills a handful of people. Most die due to his fire powers, which include boiling the pool water and summoning jets of fire seemingly everywhere. This is absurdly stupid and never explained, since he’s not in a dream so why the hell does he have powers?

It does start and end with nightmare sequences. At the beginning a school bus full of teenagers (including Jesse) is hijacked by Freddy and driven into the desert, where the ground opens up. It ends up suspended on a rock pillar and Freddy attacks them. It’s a big, ridiculous set piece compared to the low-key beginnings of the original. In the end we have yet another shock scare scene. Jesse and Lisa are together, thinking they’ve defeated Freddy. They board a bus with eerie similarity to the beginning, and then Freddy’s claw bursts through Lisa’s chest before the bus drives off into the desert just like in the beginning. It’s dumb.  

Freddy’s Revenge is bad. It’s an awful ANOES movie and a really weird, weak horror movie overall, though its weird homoerotic undercurrent does make it something of an oddity. It’s almost impossible for it to have not been intentional. It completely missed the point of the first film, and taking things away from the nightmares was a bad decision. I will give them props for attempting something different, rather than doing the same thing over again (which is what Friday the 13^th did for a few sequels), but what they chose to do just wasn’t good at all.