A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 (1985)

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

October 07, 2008

On Demand, Seattle, WA

** / ****

By Scott Muoio

It isn’t merely an excessively long and dopey title that sinks A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Nor is it the eye-roll inducing ‘gotcha’ skits that bookend the film that make it beyond goofy silliness. Instead, it is the bizarre decision to take the deranged madman antagonist, Freddy Kreuger (Robert Englund) and put him in the body of a less than menacing fruit cake teenager and have him kill seemingly without reason that turns this sequel into a laughing stock.

Where the initial Nightmare was scary, surreal, and built on a clever premise with consistent motivation, Freddy’s Revenge throws all sense and logic out the window in favor of closeted teenagers, absurdly condescending adults, and an S & M obsessed gym teacher (Robert Rusler) that would make Mister Woodcock blush. What!?

The story: a foppish high school lad named Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) moves into a cursed house on Elm Street. Reserved, angsty, and struggling with home and school the boy finds his situation worsen when a scarred rapist appears to him in his dreams taunting him to kill. Reality and fantasy blend when Jesse’s dreams become real and he literally wakes up with blood on his hands.

It is difficult to put into words how silly, unfrightening, and unintentionally homoerotic this first of many A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels manages to be. Between the gay subtext, meandering plot, and director Jack Sholder’s inability to make the dream sequences the highlights they deserve to be the film merely goes through the motions of a horror template without the gusto necessary for cinematic horror success.

At its worst, the film has hope: could this be an honest-to-goodness so-bad-its-good atrocity? If only the movie was more consistently out-of-touch with its goofiness it could have been brilliant ineptitude. Unfortunately, by making Kreuger a random killing machine and relying on far too many stock horror cliches the film dilutes its decent story twist, Freddy’s new ability to posses, and turns it into nonsensical slasher schlock. The result is a sequel good for a few laughs that does absolutely nothing to enhance the Freddy Kreuger legacy.

If there is one entry in the series that looks, feels, and acts on a different plain than all the rest of the Nightmare films it is Freddy’s Revenge. Bumbling, bratty, and wholly blistered with benign buffoonery, if you’re a bad movie connoisseur you’ll definitely appreciate its barrage of unintentional laughs and homoerotic undertones. Otherwise, it’s sadly just another unnecessary, misguided sequel and middling horror cliché. The unintentional laughs will keep your attention but for those seeking anything outside of that you’ll be sadly without.