Friday, November 29, 2013

Census Bloodbath: A Wet Dream On Elm Street

Year: 1985
Director: Jack Sholder
Cast: Robert Englund, Mark Patton, Kim Myers
Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

When New Line's breakout hit A Nightmare On Elm Street brought in enough money to wallpaper the Empire State Building in 1984, they knew they had to act fast to capitalize on their newfound franchise. And it's a good thing too, because some of the Nightmare sequels are among the best horror films of the 80's and 90's. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is not one of them.

Released less than a year after the first film, Freddy's Revenge is a hilariously confusing mishmash of garbled mythology, oddball visual effects setpieces, and a veritable mountain of homoerotic tension. Yes, this is the gay Nightmare and it is glorious.

Because of the bizarre, out of character nature of its story and the fact that A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is both awesome and an actual legitimate sequel that follows the story and characters of the original, many fans of the franchise dismiss the second film as a bizarre fluke of rushed studio filmmaking and ignore it in the context of the storyline.

This is a travesty, because Freddy's Revenge is a camp classic.

The 80's are present in every single frame, starting literally from the very first.

Taking place five years after Nancy Thompson's misadventures in 1428 Elm Street (in the newly named Springwood, OH) the Walshes have just moved in and already their teenage son Jesse (Mark Patton) is having terrible nightmares about a mysterious man in a red and green sweater who pursues him with a clawed glove. 

His little sister (Christie Clark) is perturbed by his daily shrill screams but his mother (Hope Lange) insists it's a normal response to the move and his father (Clu Gulager, who performs a Census Bloodbath Hat Trick in this film, 1986's Hunter's Blood, and The Initiation, one of the best slashers of 1984) is more concerned with the fact that Jesse hasn't unpacked yet.

He is given a beautiful teen love interest in Lisa Webber (Kim Myers) but would much rather spend his time with his jock friend Grady (Robert Rusler) pantsing and wrestling in the dirt in that way that straight dudes do all the time. I actually think their butts have more screen time than Freddy himself, who only appears in about 12 minutes of the whole film.

No, time is much better spent on moments like these.

Freddy (Robert Englund)'s endgame this time around is to take over Jesse's body and use it to further his killing range because... I guess he just has a taste for it now. I mean, after getting revenge for your violent death by manifesting as a dream demon and killing the children of your lynch mob, what's there left to do? Take up knitting?

As the people around him start to mysteriously die (and literally everything in his house/the universe spontaneously combusts), Jesse struggles with his sanity and guilt. It's really very similar to A Nightmare on Elm Street in that nobody knows whether it's a dream or reality, only it sucks. 

At the expense of sounding like a massive sourpuss, Freddy's powers over the mind extending into the real universe (including lighting a toaster on fire) and managing to kill other people from the dreams of one person are extremely divergent from the rules of the franchise universe. In fact, they would never be mentioned again because it's really quite stupid.

Freddy's Revenge stomps on and twists the Freddy mythology into obscene contortions.

Much like what Freddy does to Jesse's body (in this fabulous gore scene).

Did that caption sound a little gay to you?

Well this gay thing isn't a passing theory, oh no. Freddy's sole design is to enter Jesse's body. He frequently wakes up sweaty and shirtless and flashdances around the room. In a classroom scene there's a rectum drawn on the board. And then he's wrapped in a giant snake. A sign on his door reads "No Chicks." The board game in his closet? "Probe."

After unsuccessfully trying to make out with Lisa, he runs to Grady's room to "sleep with [him]" and at one point the evil baseball coach (Marshall Bell) and Jesse have a chance meeting at a leather bar (there is no explanation as to why our young buck came here) and the movie smash cuts to Jesse running (presumably post-coitus) laps in the school gym. 

Also everything about this scene.

It all kind of goes nowhere (it so easily could have been a much better film about Freddy manipulating a young man's latent homosexuality for his own purposes), but it's the hysterical result of an openly gay (and mischievous) production designer working with a (later) openly gay star under the nose of a totally unaware director.

If they had all been working together, they could have made a movie with actual impact. But what we get is pretty great anyway with the perfect combination of winking licentiousness and oblivious unintentional hilarity.

You are all my children now.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)
Final Girl: Lisa Webber (Kim Myers), but only incidentally.
Best Kill: The Coach is pelted with balls, tied up naked in the shower, whipped with a towel, and slashed across the back as the shower heads spurt blood. Simultaneously silly and intense, super homo-erotic and kinda cool. A perfect representation of the film.
Sign of the Times: Nobody bats an eye at the kid in the back of the bus blasting tunes on a boom box; Jesse dons lightning bolt sunglasses and dances to synthpop in his room.


Scariest Moment: Jesse opens his little sister's bedroom door to find her jumping rope in slow motion and chanting "1... 2... Freddy's coming for you..."
Weirdest Moment: One of their parakeets goes rogue, dive bombing Jesse and his family in their living room before EXPLODING because this is the 80's.
Champion Dialogue: "Are you mounting her nightly or what?"
Body Count: 6 people give or take; 5 by Freddy's hand (3 in the Pool Party Massacre) and 1 trampled to death. All male, because slasher murder is a metaphor for sexual violence so...
Also 2 parakeets and 2 fish.
  1. Coach Schneider is tied up in the locker room and slashed.
  2. Grady is slashed across the torso after Freddy emerges from Jesse's body.
  3. Party Guest #1 is slashed in the face and throat.
  4. Party Guest #2 is trampled by escaping partiers.
  5. Party Guest #3 is slashed in the stomach.
  6. Party Guest #4 is thrown onto a barbecue. 
Stud Finder: Grady is pretty bomb. I can see why Jesse dug him so much.


TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is a terribly messy film full of misplaced homoerotic subtext and it is so so fun to watch.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1147
Reviews In This Series
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)

3 comments:

  1. Just watched this on Netflix. Yeah this movie is all over the place in terms of Freddy's rules and how he works in and out of the dream world. It's a fun movie that's never boring with a lot of fun 80's elements. The Freddy at the pool party scene is pretty fun.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know if anyone else noticed it, but in this film Freddy's make-up appeared too wet like they either covered it in honey or maple syrup. The look of it was not great ether as Fred's face looked too dark at times.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, you can tell they really struggled with recreating the classic look on this one. They got the hang of it with Part 3, but it all went downhill from there. Ah, the 80's.

      Delete