A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Around the 45-minute mark of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, the sequel to Wes Craven's 1984 supernatural slasher hybrid, my previously placid viewing experience was suddenly interrupted by the most frightening of scenarios. While sitting in my basement watching the movie, I heard the front door open, and dashing in was my mother, screaming frantically, the shrill sound of her voice obstructed by the ceiling. It wasn't until then that I could smell the hint of a pungent odor like that of burning chili. Because I was so wrapped up in the movie unfolding before me, the smell didn't immediately register. Maybe I was so immersed in this fictional world that I assumed I was smelling the power plant where the two protagonists were wandering. Concerned, I paused the movie, stood up, and yelled from the basement to find out what was going on. Unbeknown to me, my mom was cooking beets on the stove, and made the nearly fatally misguided decision to go outside, where she struck up a conversation with a neighbor and forgot about having the oven turned on. Now that I was informed, the smell became more prominent and sickening. Fortunately, she came inside just in the nick of time and managed to turn the oven off before a fire could erupt. Our entire house was engulfed in smoke. The beets and the pot in which they were cooking weren't so lucky, the former reduced to inedible charcoal and both in need of being discarded. The burner was on a small flame. Had it been higher, who knows what the consequence would've been. Every window in the house was now open, every fan turned on to blow away the smoke, but that rancid odor was now caked into the walls, permeating our entire house for the rest of the day.
How disturbingly ironic that, while watching a movie whose antagonist is the vengeful spirit of a child murderer burned to death by a mob of vigilante parents, and who now in death possesses the psychic ability to create fires wherever he goes, an actual fire is getting ready to start in my kitchen upstairs. And had it not been for the sufficiently swift action of the person responsible for the memory lapse, our home would potentially resemble the boiler room where Freddy Krueger took his final breath in human form. And my mother and I would potentially bear the scars that now make up his terrifying appearance. Unfortunately, this close call with a house fire elevated my heart rate more than anything presented on the TV screen.
In 1984, Wes Craven made an indelible contribution to the horror genre, combining a couple unpleasant experiences from his childhood to produce a story about a quartet of teenagers who find themselves being hunted by the same sadistic, disfigured madman in the alleged safety of their nightmares, quickly realizing that the injuries they sustain in those dreams carry over into their waking reality. Through a reluctant conversation with her mother, final girl Nancy Thompson learned that the man is named Freddy Krueger, he was a child murderer who was caught and released on a technicality, and fed up with the ineptitude of the law, a mob of parents tracked Krueger down in a boiler room where he murdered 20 local children and set it ablaze, watching him burn to death. Her mother, Marge, and father, lieutenant Donald, were among the participants. Little did they know the nightmare wouldn't end there, as Krueger has now been resurrected as a ghost with the power to invade the subconscious of his victims and create fatal havoc in their nightmares, an ability he utilizes to exact vengeance on his killers. Rather than killing them directly, he's figured out a way to make them suffer tenfold: by visiting their sins on their innocent children. It was a thrillingly creative and terrifying premise that added a supernatural spin to the teen slasher formula running rampant throughout the 1970s and 80s, giving rise to one of the most iconic villains in horror history, supported by one of the greatest protagonists, an early subversion of the stereotypical damsel in distress who set the standard for badass female characters.
Only one year later, a sequel to what was envisioned as a one-and-done, self-contained story went into production. Robert Shaye, the head of New Line Cinema, offered Wes Craven the opportunity to direct, but he declined out of loathing for many of the elements in David Chaskin's screenplay. Jack Sholder, who had previously co-written and directed the 1982 slasher, Alone in the Dark, for New Line, was next in line for the offer. Initially, his instinct was to decline Shaye's offer, as he felt "no interest in making horror films," but after realizing that Freddy's Revenge could put him on the map as a director, he changed his mind and said yes. Oh, how I love the sweet scent of opportunism in the morning.
Although it lacks the subversive final girl, groundbreaking special effects, innovative and variegated kills, and intellectually stimulating climax of the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy's Revenge is a surprisingly entertaining sequel that demarcates itself impressively with a bodily possession plot that doubles as a subtle metaphor for a teenage boy's homosexual awakening.
Five years after the events of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy Thompson has moved out of her childhood home at 1428 Elm Street, and now taking residence therein is the Walsh family: patriarch Ken (Clu Gulager), matriarch Cheryl (Hope Lange), and their two children, teenager Jesse (Mark Patton) and his little sister, Angie (Christie Clark). Partly due to a seemingly defective air conditioner that renders their home as scorching as an oven, and an increase in nightmares that leave him waking up in the middle of the night screaming at the top of his lungs, Jesse is unable to get much sleep. His relationship with his parents is not the tightest; Ken is a stern disciplinarian who constantly pesters Jesse to unpack the boxes in his bedroom and stubbornly refuses to hire an electrician to fix their air conditioner, while Cheryl is the soft-spoken, compassionate mother who desperately wants to understand what's happening in her troubled son's life and isn't afraid to stand up to her husband when he steps out of line or tries to insert himself in their son's private business.
As his nightmares of a scarred man with clawed fingers on his right hand (Robert Englund) escalate each night, Jesse's only sense of peace manifests in the form of Lisa Webber (Kim Myers), an attractive, redheaded wealthy girl whom he drives to their high school every morning. In gym class, he's frequently hassled by Coach Schneider (Marshall Bell), who takes his job as pathetically seriously as a drill sergeant, focusing the brunt of his rage on both Jesse and fellow classmate Ron Grady (Robert Rusler). One afternoon, while Lisa is helping Jesse clean his room, she comes across the diary of Nancy Thompson, and together they read about her encounters with Freddy Krueger, who murdered her boyfriend across the street as well as her best friend. This time, however, Freddy has plans more nefarious than simply killing those whom Jesse holds dear; he wants to inhabit Jesse's body and force him to commit his wicked crimes on his behalf. And Lisa, with her open mind and loving heart, may be the only answer to saving his soul.
That's about all there is to the plot of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. If you're wondering what the "revenge" of the title is referring to, your guess is as good as mine. At no point is Freddy seeking revenge on anyone in particular. Sure, in general, he kills teenagers for the purpose of exacting revenge on their parents for burning away his mortal flesh, but in that case, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie could be given that subtitle. He doesn't target Jesse Walsh or those within his social orbit for a reason more personal than that for targeting Nancy and her friends. While not exactly bursting with originality, a more thematically accurate subtitle would've been "Freddy's Rebirth," since his primary objective here is to possess Jesse's body and reemerge through him.
Nevertheless, even without the air of inventiveness that characterized Craven's debut installment, fresh screenwriter Chaskin makes the intelligent choice to refrain from tracing over the beats of his forerunner's narrative. He doesn't present his audience with a new batch of teenagers who realize they're all having the same dream about the same monster, that the harm he inflicts on them in the dream world carries over into the real one, that their parents are responsible for their targeting, and the virginal female of the group must strategize without help from anyone to face off and defeat him. In a gender-swapping twist uncommon to the teen slasher or possession subgenre, Chaskin centers the story around a teenage boy, and not insignificantly, one who may be at least bisexual or at most a full-blown closeted homosexual. Beyond his sexuality, Jesse is a normal adolescent like any other. He doesn't get along with his preadolescent sister, he bickers frequently with his controlling father, is reticent to share his feelings with his mother, and allows the sight of a pretty babe to distract him from the baseball flying straight at his head during gym class. He's likable because he's so relatable and unremarkable, and Chaskin maintains his narrative focus intimately on his protagonist's psychological unraveling.
On the flip side, he does lose momentum by cutting to repetitive scenes of Jesse tossing and turning in his bed, waking up shirtless in the middle of the night drenched from head to toe in fake sweat, then wandering (with clothes on) downstairs into the kitchen, into the basement, or outside for no coherent reason beyond "director says." Character motivation is one of Chaskin's most noticeable areas of weakness. Mostly with regard to Jesse, his characters make decisions that yield no benefits apart from moving the story forward, and it's a story about as thin as the razor blades protruding from Freddy's infamous glove. Why does Jesse, following yet another nightmare, leave his home and walk to a S&M gay bar? When he orders a beer from the bartender (played in a leather outfit by producer Robert Shaye), why does the latter give it to him without requesting an ID? Jesse may be gay, but he's much more visibly a minor, and Shaye would've discerned that the second he requested. Here's the most logically incoherent and narratively contrived development: upon discovering Jesse getting ready to drink his first beer, Coach Schneider (who Grady mentioned hangs out at this very bar) grabs his wrist, smiles an evil "I got you," and takes him to the high school, where he forces him to run laps around the gymnasium then take a shower. Two orders with which Jesse inexplicably complies. It makes no sense. Sure, maybe Schneider threatened to report his entrance to a gay bar and illegal purchase of a beer off-screen. But then Schneider would not only be outing himself to his entire student body in the process, but he'd most likely get himself fired for abducting a student and subjecting him to physical punishment after school hours. And why does he make Jesse take a shower? To gaze at his naked body would make sense, but no, he's alone in his office the entire time Jesse is showering. Why, after a steamy sexual encounter with Lisa cut supernaturally short, does Jesse sneak into Grady's bedroom and demand to stay the night there? How does he even know where Grady lives in the first place? While writing the script, clearly Chaskin didn't get the memo that the only holes are meant to be the ones on the left side of the paper.
The scares are mostly tepid and ineffective. One of the reasons Craven turned down Shaye's offer to direct was the "possessed parakeet" set piece that seemed ridiculous to him, and it's hard to argue with that sentiment. While the Walsh family is gathered in the living room, they notice their bird cage, draped in a blanket, is shaking. Jesse carefully approaches and removes the covering to find the bird in distress. Stupidly, he opens the cage and allows the parakeet to fly out, scratching Ken on his cheek and knocking over lamps. Are you shivering at the thought of this? Well, the execution isn't much scarier, save Sholder's decision to film the shaky chaos from the bird's perspective. Combined with composer Christopher Young's screechy violin score, this technical method does increase tension, but can't erase how random and pointless the scene is conceptually. What causes the bird to lose control and burst spontaneously into flames? Clearly Freddy has something to do with it, but what's his motivation for tormenting and killing a bird? To fulfill his love for causing harm to innocent creatures, both human and animal? To freak out the Walsh family and make them feel unsafe in the sanctity of their own home? If the latter, his effort fails because their emotional attachment to the bird wasn't particularly strong. When Jesse falls asleep in biology class, a snake wraps itself around his neck, waking him with another scream. How did that snake get out of its cage and slither its way to Jesse? It's implied to have been a good-natured prank by other students led by Grady, Jesse's foe-turned-friend. But if that's the case, you mean to tell me the teacher, who has been standing at the front of the class the entire time talking about the processes of urination and defecation, didn't notice his students moving from their seats, stealing the snake, and placing it on Jesse? That's flat-out impossible, not to mention unscary because the snake is harmless. It doesn't bite.
When it came to casting for the lead role of final guy Jesse Walsh, the main contenders were Mark Patton and Brad Pitt, the latter of whom was deemed "too nice" by the producers. Michael J. Fox was also in the running, but was unable to pursue the role due to his commitment filming Back to the Future and Teen Wolf. Of those who were considered, it's interesting that the man who landed the role was the only unknown actor of the bunch. Additionally, Patton was in the running to play Glen Lantz, Nancy's ill-fated boyfriend in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, a role that somehow made a movie star out of then-unknown Johnny Depp. This time, Patton managed to book the lead, and he's remarkable more for playing one of the earlier male protagonists in a teen slasher than for the quality of his acting. Nonetheless, he gives a solid performance that keeps you invested in the story and the plight of his gradually deteriorating character.
Later on, it would come out that Patton was in fact a homosexual, a fact made fairly obvious with his tendency toward effeminate, overly dramatic screams that sound more silly and embarrassing than haunting and emotive. In an interview, filmmaker Rob Zombie talked about the distinction between men and women screaming in horror movies. For women, it's socially acceptable; for men, it leaves you annoyed, saying to the screen, "Dude, shut up." Patton confirms that admittedly sexist but no less accurate sentiment. However, that's not to say his is a bad performance by any means. To the contrary, he's very good at portraying Jesse's descent into sleep-deprived paranoia, the feeling of literal and figurative discomfort in your own skin.
Together with his co-star, Robert Rusler, Patton was permitted to sit in on the casting of Jesse's love interest, Lisa Webber. Based on her physical resemblance to a young Meryl Streep, Kim Myers was selected by Sholder. While the majority of Freddy's Revenge is presented from the perspective of Jesse, a case could be argued that Lisa is the more interesting character. Seemingly realizing this, Craven suggested that Chaskin place more emphasis on her. As a result, once Jesse is fully possessed, his body entirely submerged beneath the burned skin of Krueger, Lisa takes over protagonist duties and sets out to put a stop to his reign of terror once and for all (or at least until the next sequel). What makes Lisa a lovable and underrated final girl is the contrast between her economic status and her personality. She and her family come from a surplus of money. She spends her afternoons swimming in the pool in her backyard, where she regularly throws drinking parties for her friends and classmates. You'd think all this unearned privilege would render Lisa a shallow, spoiled, superficial teenager with no respect for the luxuries handed to her on a silver platter, maybe someone who would punch down on those less fortunate than her. But you'd be wrong. Myers portrays Lisa as a kindhearted, down-to-earth, mature human being who takes neither her possessions nor her parents or friends for granted. She doesn't care that Jesse comes from a more middle-class background than her. She doesn't care that his room is a mess of unpacked boxes. He's nice to her, he treats her with respect, he drives her to school every morning, whether because she doesn't yet have a license or her own car. Jesse likes Lisa for who she is, and her affection for him is mutual, built on both appreciation and sexual attraction.
Once Jesse confides in her about his nightmares of Freddy and belief in his actual existence, Lisa believes him almost outright. When she finds Nancy's diary, she takes it upon herself to take it home and read through it more, developing a personal interest in this slain child murderer. Never at any point does she judge Jesse or question his sanity, even when his father begins to suspect he's using drugs and his mother thinks he's going insane and needs therapy. Instead, Lisa behaves as a true partner and friend, encouraging Jesse to fight Krueger from within, arguing that the monster's power over him stems only from the fear he generously gives him. As Jesse begins to sink lower into the depths of despondency, Lisa grows more desperate to help and frustrated at his rejections to do so, but she steadfastly refuses to give up on him. While a less caring girlfriend would throw her hands up and determine that this guy isn't worth her troubles, Lisa continuously runs after him, not because she's pathetic or suffers from a classic case of low self-esteem, but because she knows in her heart this man is her soul mate, he's in deep trouble, and she's the only one who understands and can save him. In this regard, while Myers may resemble Streep on a physical level, the actress she evokes most powerfully is Geena Davis in her performance as Ronny Quaife in David Cronenberg's sci-fi body horror, The Fly.
When required to come face to face with the monster trying to split them apart, Myers is fearless, confronting Krueger in his own playground -- the power plant where he worked and killed his child victims -- with a headstrong ferocity that would make her more famous 1984 predecessor proud. Shedding tears of fear, defiance, and desperation, Lisa demands the return of her boyfriend, going as far as to kiss Freddy on the lips to free Jesse from his possession, using the power of pure love to combat the nihilistic evil of their mutual nemesis. It's a less empowering and cerebral climactic confrontation than the one shared between Freddy and Nancy, but it's visually audacious and effectively heartfelt because of the believability of Jesse and Lisa's relationship.
The character who undergoes the most significant evolution in Freddy's Revenge is Ron Grady, played with a trifecta of tough-guy machismo, scathing sarcasm, and heartfelt sincerity by Robert Rusler. A masculine jock with a muscular frame and head of neatly brushed jet-black hair who takes his games of gym-class baseball just a smidge too seriously, Grady begins the story as somewhat of a bully to Jesse, mocking him for getting hit in the face by a baseball then attacking him for giving back what he dished out first. Once both men are singled out by their domineering, borderline sadistic coach, they settle quickly into a love/hate friendship, fueled by their mutual disdain for Schneider and his unreasonably strict methods of discipline. Rusler bestows the sequel with a touch of comic relief through his lines and the forthright manner in which he delivers them. While Grady and Jesse are left on the field to do disciplinary push-ups, Grady asks, "Are you mounting [Lisa] nightly or what?" When asked if he has a problem with Jesse, he endearingly replies, "No, bro, just killing time." As the two run around the track, Jesse asks, "Hey, Grady, you remember your dreams?" to which Grady matter-of-factly replies, "Only the wet ones." After breaking into his bedroom through a window, Jesse expresses his fear to Grady that something is trying to get inside his body. "Yeah, and she's female and waiting for you at the cabana, and you wanna sleep with me!"
Once Jesse successfully conveys his earnestness, nervousness, and desperation, Rusler reveals a brotherly heart, switching to a less bitingly comical and more compassionate tone as he agrees to help in any way he can. Naturally, Grady doesn't believe Jesse's claim about nightmares coming to life, so he goes back on his promise and goes to sleep once he sees that Jesse is out -- a mistake he won't live very long to regret. Once he comes face to face with pure evil at the opposite end of his own bedroom, Grady loses his cool-guy composure and dissolves into an outburst of emotionally naked panic, screaming at the top of his lungs for his father as he bangs helplessly on his inexplicably locked bedroom door, his face contorted with mind-numbing horror and disbelief, his torso saturated in sweat and rising up and down with hyperventilation. His performance of fear is more grounded than that of Patton, eschewing the slightest scent of theatricality or distracting femininity.
At the commencement of production on Freddy's Revenge, New Line Cinema originally planned to reserve money by recasting the role of Freddy Krueger with an unnamed extra in a rubber mask rather than hiring Robert Englund, a cost-effective decision that would have run the risk of devolving the nightmare ghoul into a carbon copy of fellow mute, masked, impersonal boogeymen like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Leatherface. What distinguishes Freddy from that trio of antecedents is the force of his personality, his ability to taunt his victims verbally, to interact with facial expressions. Remove the voice and hide the face behind a piece of rubber, and the originality and essence of Krueger would be lost, replaced by another generic slasher who could be played by any male stunt actor with an imposing physicality. Fortunately, when the producers realized their chosen "actor" had the gait and posture of "a dime store monster" or "Frankenstein's monster" as opposed to Englund's classically trained physical acting, they promptly reconsidered. (Footage of the original extra as Freddy does appear in the movie during Schneider's death scene in the shower, though obscured by excessive water steam.) Subsequently, Englund was contacted to reprise the role that would make him a star in the horror genre, and he obliged.
However, his rendition of Freddy is distinct from that of one year prior. This is not quite the same dream-teen slayer we were introduced to the first time around, and Kevin Yagher's facial makeup reflects that. Krueger's face appears more demonic, fitting for his objective to possess the body of his latest prey, with a hooked nose contributing to a more witchy and malicious visage. While his legendary weapon of choice is featured throughout, with Jesse finding them wrapped up in his basement's fireplace or mysteriously on his hand after the murders of Schneider and Grady, it's frequently not worn on Englund's right hand. Rather, he spends most of the movie technically ungloved, his right hand exposed and rotted, with four thin, sharp, elongated razor blades protruding from his fingertips in place of nails. Freddy's appearance isn't the only thing about him that's changed. He's no longer content to just slaughter innocents on his own. For a reason never elucidated, he feels he "needs" Jesse to do his bidding, to commit his misdeeds for him, using Jesse's body as a conduit. No longer limited to the subconscious of his victims, Freddy is given free reign to roam in the real world, endowed with the double power of telekinesis (able to shut and lock doors) and pyrokinesis (creating fire even in a pool), which breaks the rule established in Craven's script that Freddy can only be brought out into the world by a courageous dreamer, undermining his irrational fearsomeness in the process. As an actor, Englund reinstates two of his greatest qualities that helped bring Freddy to life in the first place: his low-pitched, gravelly voice and sadistically triumphant laugh, neither of which are undercut by the onslaught of silly one-liners that would soon diminish Freddy into a darkly comedic figure of trash-talking, pun-spewing buffoonery down the road.
To fill the void left by the scares engineered by Craven, returning cinematographer Jacques Haitkin, accompanied by Christopher Tufty, crafts a slew of disquieting visuals to increase the gross-out quotient. After being bitten on the leg by Freddy, Lisa unties her bandage and hallucinates bugs crawling on her wound, remaining in place no matter how fervently she brushes them away. To emphasize the suffocating, unbearable degree of heat infesting the Walsh household, when Jesse wakes up bathed in his own sweat, he witnesses a record melting on his nightstand and his baseball hat burning on his melting lamp. It's so immersive you can practically feel your skin burning to a crisp in every inch of this home. A pair of growling black dogs sporting the faces of deformed babies greets Lisa at the entrance of Freddy's power plant. Freddy's own face melts to signify Jesse's reemergence from his body. The tongue of a snake replaces Jesse's own and slithers out of his mouth before he can commence intercourse with Lisa, her eyes closed in ecstasy. For Jesse's climactic "birthing" of Freddy, the special effects wizards go all out, but the results are only moderately successful. Four razor blades emerge through Patton's fingertips, his forearm tears open, revealing the sleeve of Freddy's red-and-green-striped sweater beneath, his stomach protrudes, forcing him to slice it open to allow Freddy to burst through like a baby in a C-section, but when Freddy's head emerges, the body of Jesse is clearly made of rubber.
More effective are the myriad opportunities the cinematographers find to conjure steam and fire as visual motifs. While Jesse is showering in his school locker room, watching Schneider get his comeuppance, he's gradually swallowed by a cascade of water steam, only to be replaced by Freddy, who emerges from the steamy white in silhouette against the ceiling downlight. The power plant is suffused with steam, illuminated in lights of red, green, and blue. To lead the audience into another night of sweat-soaked tossing and turning, editors Brady and Garson repeatedly cut to exterior shots of the Thompsons/Walshes house, with Haitkin and Tufty zooming in slowly on the red-painted door (previously blue). At one point, they execute a fast tracking shot from the top of the basement upstairs into Angie's room, where Jesse is nearly possessed into killing her. When Freddy makes his first official introduction to Jesse outside the basement, they film Englund's face in a shadowy close-up, retaining the aura of mystery and menace captured by Craven's presentation.
Because Freddy's Revenge was made in 1985, the decade characterized by the outbreak of AIDS, there's no mistaking that the homoerotic subtext woven into the fabric of Chaskin's screenplay was coincidental. On the surface, this is the story of an innocent young man realizing his body is being invaded by the demon-like force of a sadistic child murderer. In essence, Freddy's bodily possession functions doubly as a metaphor for an internal struggle faced by countless teenage men coming of age in America: coming to terms with one's sexuality. Sholder presents the metaphor with an impressive degree of restraint, never resorting to pounding viewers over the head with his underlying message or allowing it to take precedence over his story. But one doesn't have to read too carefully between the lines to discern the clues regarding Jesse's sexual orientation. When we first meet Jesse in his opening nightmare, he's sitting at the back of the bus alone, being snickered at by two pretty women, wearing eyeliner. In his fight with Grady, the latter pulls his pants down, and the two wrestle one another over something as embarrassingly petty as a baseball game. When Jesse showers in the locker room, Haitkin and Tufty film his face in close-up as hot water washes over him. Coach Schneider's murder plays out like an allegory for a gay hate crime. While alone in his office, he's pummeled by balls that begin shooting out of their shelves straight at him, forcing him to take cover on the floor, as if Freddy is saying, "So, you like having balls in your face, huh? Well, how do you like this?" A jump rope comes alive and ties itself around Schneider's wrists, dragging him into the gym and binding him to a showerhead in an evocation of bondage. He's stripped naked, towel-whipped raw on his blood-red rear (filmed in unflinching close-ups), and finally slashed twice across the back, the shower water replaced by streams of blood. Let's not forget, of all places for Jesse to wander to in the middle of the night, he chooses a S&M bar, even if it is just to grab a drink to stay awake. Couldn't he have made himself a cup of coffee in his own kitchen and saved himself the trip? By taking residence within Jesse's body, Freddy emerges as a cleverly veiled metaphor for repressed homosexuality, something thought of by many as an ugly, sinful, demonic illness, growing insidiously inside the mind of an otherwise pure-hearted teenage boy who just wants to live a normal, peaceful, happy life.
The only thing that doesn't check out is his clear attraction to Lisa. Maybe he's bisexual, in which case his lust is authentic, or he just wants to deceive himself into believing he's straight. After all, it's when he engages in foreplay with Lisa in her cabana that the snake tongue emerges, scaring him into stopping himself before he has the chance to commence intercourse. Is this a hallucination, or a reminder that he can only repress his true sexual orientation for so long before it materializes into something hideous and otherworldly? To entertain himself while cleaning his room, Jesse puts on a pair of Tom Cruise-like shades and gyrates with a tennis racket to the song, "Touch Me (All Night Long)," by Fonda Rae. Every night and morning when Jesse gets out of bed, he's shirtless and clad only in his underwear, Sholder unhesitant to hold the camera on Patton's bulge. If I didn't know any better, I'd suspect this movie of being the directorial debut of Ryan Murphy, a television writer-director with an affinity for the naked male body, evinced in all three seasons of his serial killer anthology series, Monster.
The body count of Freddy's Revenge is relatively low for a slasher sequel produced in the 80s, the decade infamous for racking up piles of corpses as numerous as the sequels in which they appeared. Aside from the strange homoerotic slaughter of Coach Schneider in the shower, the only other major character to receive a death scene is Grady. Instead of zeroing in on the physical violence and gore, Sholder places the emphasis on the psychological suffering of Grady and his father, played with authority and desperation by Lyman Ward. Inside the bedroom, Grady is screaming for help, sweating bullets, unable to comprehend the supernatural monstrosity materializing in front of him, smiling the most devilish grin. On the opposite side of the door is a father responding to his son's screams, asking what the problem is, demanding he open the door, smashing his shoulder against it in a vain attempt to save Grady, even though it's too late. Not insignificantly, Rusler is shirtless and clad only in underwear, while Patton never bothers to button up his shirt, letting his torso be exposed. When the moment of penetration occurs, Sholder opts for implication, Haitkin and Tufty filming Grady's stabbing from the exterior of his bedroom. While Mr. Grady pounds on the door, a quartet of knives suddenly burst through, leaving a trail of blood to drip below. Editors Brady and Garson then cut to a close-up of Rusler's face, eyes widening, blood pouring out of his mouth, before he sinks slowly to the floor, a quadruple claw wound glimpsed across his stomach on the way down. The kills written by Chaskin and executed by Sholder lack the variety and ingenuity of those conceived by Craven. All they come up with are generic slashings and impalements, with none of the creativity of someone being dragged across a ceiling, or hanged with a bed sheet to create the appearance of a guilt-ridden suicide, or dragged beneath their bed followed by a fountain of blood erupting onto the ceiling.
The pool party massacre, in which Freddy materializes in Lisa's backyard and terrorizes scores of partying teenagers, is intended to be the show-stopping set piece of Freddy's Revenge, but fizzles out quickly because of a near complete lack of logical sense. The buildup consists of Freddy telekinetically locking the gate, burning hot dogs on the grill, turning up the heat in the pool, and causing beer to shoot out of their bottles. It's silly-looking more than dread-inducing. All the partygoers, who are witnessing this paranormal phenomena, are given plenty of time to escape, yet many choose to remain in the pool, a reflection of sloppy direction on Sholder's part. Once Freddy, as fed up with their stupidity as I was, makes his grand appearance, all we're given is one little man angrily tossing chairs and chasing and stabbing nondescript extras all at once in a flurry of carnage, a sight far less scary than him pursuing his victims in the vulnerability of their nightmares one at a time. The reaction shots of the background actors are flat. Whether watching the confrontation between Freddy and Lisa from behind her locked glass door, or huddled together and staring at Freddy as he declares, "You are all my children now," with his arms outstretched, their blank faces convey curiosity and vague discomfort more than legitimate, mind-blown, heart-stopping terror. In terms of the actual bloodletting, Sholder's execution is uninspired. Freddy slashes one guy across the face and stabs another in the stomach, one gets trampled by his own friends frantically climbing a fence, someone else falls to the ground which spontaneously combusts. One brave partygoer actually attempts to communicate with Freddy and placate him with a sincere offer to help, a kind gesture Freddy responds to not with a kill, but by merely grabbing his arm and throwing him aside over a grill.
In place of Charles Bernstein's ethereal, somber theme from the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Christopher Young complements the sequences of intense action with an effective, albeit more generic, horror score composed of penetrating violin strings, and percussion to build a sense of anticipation for Freddy's impending appearances. The ending recaptures the air of ambiguity that viewers were left with during the end credits of the original, circling back to the opening nightmare sequence and leaving the fates of the remaining characters unknown. Even though Freddy has apparently been thwarted by the unkillable force of love between Jesse and Lisa, is this one last trauma-fueled nightmare of Jesse's, or an accurate depiction of reality? Sholder withholds the answer. Craven's ending, as unsatisfying as it is by design, at least provides memorably surreal imagery -- Nancy banging on the passenger window of Glen's car, screaming for her mother, who smiles and waves goodbye as the car drives itself down the street, three little girls playing jump rope while singing, "One, Two, Freddy's Coming for You," Freddy's arm bursting through a door window and pulling a screaming Marge through it. The only noteworthy visual in this ending is Freddy's arm bursting through the chest of Lisa's best friend, Kerry (Sydney Walsh), after she insists, "Jesse, it's okay, it's all over." It's more of a cheap attempt to jolt the viewer out of their tranquility than a truly haunting assurance that there are more nightmares to come.
5.6/10
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