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

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

      After the original film in the series was released in November of 1984 and became a huge success, grossing $25.5 million dollars on a budget of less than two million, Bob Shaye, head of New Line Cinema and producer of the first film, immediately wanted a sequel.  Now, Wes Craven wanted nothing to do with a sequel.  In fact, the original ending for the first film was Nancy turning her back on Freddy and we find out the whole movie was actually a nightmare.  Her friends (no longer dead) drive off to school on a beautiful morning.  That was supposed to be the end of the story.  However, Bob Shaye wanted a hook at the end of the movie, and since he got the whole project going, Wes Craven decided to humor him.  That gave us the ending that is actually present in the first film where Nancy turns her back on Freddy, he disappears, she walks out and it's morning.  Her friends (not dead after all) come to drive her to school, the convertable top slams shut, the car drives itself away with the teens screaming inside, and then Nancy's mom gets sucked into the house via the front door window.  The end.  Now, that ending actually makes no sense whatsoever.  Is she still dreaming?  Was the whole movie a dream within a dream within a dream?  Freddy's not defeated?  Did he even really exist?  Who knows...  This is one of the reasons Craven was against this ending.  But still, when he learned that a sequel was in the works, he wanted nothing to do with it, but read over the script that was selected anyway... and he thought it was horrible.  Also, him and Bob Shaye had some real headbutting going on during the making of the first one.  So he left the project and Bob Shaye brought in Jack Sholder, director of New Line's first feature, Alone In The Dark, which was a slasher film set in an asylum starring Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and Donald Pleasance.  Jack Sholder was also the man who edited all of New Line's movie trailers.

     The writer of Freddy's Revenge was a guy named David Chaskin.   This was his first script (he hasn't wrote many more, either) and in the hopes of getting a sequel made as quickly (and cheaply) as possible, New Line accepted it.  It had Freddy in it, people got killed, and it was weird...  It had all they wanted.   Now, Jack Sholder was not a huge fan of the original film.  He understood why people liked it, but he felt no need to stick to the rules of the original, which with the new script was probably for the best, as it broke some pretty bold rules set forth in the first film anyway.  The only cast member from the original film to come back was Robert Englund, and even he almost didn't come back.  He held out for more money and the studio tried having a stunt man to play Freddy.  It went horribly, so they agreed to pay Robert Englund more money.  (Which he totally deserved.  This isn't just a hulking mongoloid like Jason or Michael Myers.)  Fresh faces were brought in for the new set of teenagers.  Unlike the first film, none of these actors got to be well known though.  No Johnny Depps here.  However, the acting is quite a bit better in this one.

    So Jesse (Mark Patton) is this geeky, outcast kid that's just moved onto Elm Street five years after the events in the first film.  And guess which house his dad (Clu Gulager) decided to buy?  Yep, Nancy's house from the first movie.  The bars are even still on the windows.  He's crushing on this girl Lisa (Kim Myers), who comes from a rich family, but you'd never know it.  She's very girl next doorish, and she has a crush on Jesse.  Well, since moving into the new house, Jesse's been having really bad nightmares about this guy in a striped sweater with finger knives trying to kill him.  But soon the dreams change.  Now Freddy tries to get Jesse to kill for him.  Also, Jesse is attempting to fit in at his new school.  The resident jock, Grady (Robert Rusler) is a pain in Jesse's ass at first, but later on Grady becomes a... slight friend I guess?  He's not a bad guy, just the regular jock type.  There's also the sadistic coach Schneider (Marshall Bell) who likes to torment Jesse and hangs around in S&M bars...More on that in a bit.  To make a long story short, Jesse gets possessed by Freddy for longer and longer intervals and he and the people around him start to think he's going crazy as the body count starts rising and weird things start to happen on Elm Street.

    I think it's best to tell everyone that this is one of the two films considered the black sheep of the Elm Street films.  Some people forget this film ever happened or don't consider it canon.  Others of us, like me, find the film endlessly amusing or even quite good in some ways.  Now, I do recognize why people would hate it.  Those that really loved the ideas presented in the first film, and the characters too, would be very disappointed here.  One of the rules in the first film is that Freddy's powers are linked to people being asleep and dreaming.  Well, no one actually dies in their dreams in this movie.  Freddy is more like a specter here.  As long as Jesse, whom Freddy possesses, is near someone, Freddy can use his powers to manipulate objects and can use Jesse to kill with the glove.  At least, that's what I think is happening here.  It's actually not a good script.  It doesn't make much sense.  The movie has a friggin' demonic parakeet that attacks Jesse's family and then explodes for no reason, for cryin' out loud.  It's like Freddy is a demon fighting for Jesse's soul.  But at least Freddy looks a whole lot more gross than he did in the first one.  (Different makeup guy here who wanted Freddy to look more like a male witch.)  He has more of a melted appearance here than burned, and he's more skeletal in the face.  It actually makes Freddy look more menacing (as much as that's possible since the first film kept shadows on him for the most part and this one has more bright lights on him) and ugly.

Now, that picture above is from a scene that people really, really hate.  There's a pool party towards the end of the film and after Freddy literally rips himself out of Jesse's body, he now can appear in the real world... and he attacks the pool party while making the pool boil, fires start, and making the gate electrified...  He then goes around slicing and dicing... Too bad the teenagers are bigger than he is.  I actually don't mind the scene, because at least I'm getting some carnage, which by this point is all I care about, seeing as the plot doesn't make much sense anyway.  Speaking of that scene where Freddy rips himself out of Jesse, it's so friggin' cool.  It's almost like the American Werewolf in London transformation scene.  Very good special effects, unlike the demon parakeet.

   Okay, here's the part everyone who's seen the film has been waiting for.  This movie is very, very gay.  And I don't mean that in a mean way or anything.  It's just that there's this gay (I can't really call it subtext, because it's too bold for that)... theme... in the movie.  And there's some debate as to whether it was on purpose or not.  The director says no, the writer says yes, and the main actor (who is actually gay) says... maybe.  Want proof?   Besides the game of Probe prominently displayed in Jesse's closet and the sign of No Chicks Allowed on his door?

    Okay, so maybe that's not really gay, but it is really embarrassing.  Especially twerking to close your drawer.  Then there's the scene where after Jesse runs away after trying to make out with his girlfriend, he goes to jock Grady's house, sneaks in his bedroom, wakes him up and says he wants to stay there the night and that something's trying to get inside of him.  Jesse also is a great scream queen... and by that I mean he has a high pitched scream that's even better than Jamie Lee Curtis', as shown at the end of this scene.

   Oh, and there's also the scene where he stumbles out of his house in his pajamas, walks into town into an S&M bar only to see his coach there.  His coach takes him to the school gym (which is...kind of a creepy thing to do at 2 AM with one of your students) and makes him run laps and then shower.  The coach is stripped naked in the showers and spanked with a towel by invisible Freddy and then slashed across the back until naked.  We then see that it was Jesse possessed that did it.)  Yes indeed folks, the most homoerotic horror film I've ever seen... and I've seen a lot of horror films.

   Based on the good reviews and box office gross of the first film, when this one opened 51 weeks after the first film did on November 1, 1985, it actually did better financially than the first one did.  That's very rare when it comes to sequels.  Shot for $3 million dollars, this one made $30 million just in the US and Canada.  Only ten times the budget this time, but $5 million more than the first one made.  The reviews this time, alas, were not great.  They weren't horrible, mind you, but there were more negative ones than good ones.  And I say again, I can understand that.  The first one's a classic despite the bad acting.  It had an original idea.  One that hadn't really been done yet.  This one was your routine possession/ghost film with some slasher side effects.  I'd compare it to Amityville II and Amityville 3D.  They both were not great films, but they were at least interesting.  Sort of in the so bad it's good way.  In fact, I even like the direction on this film better than Wes Craven's on the first film, which seemed kind of sloppy to me.  If you care more for story comprehension than visuals, you probably won't like this much.  If you can overlook such things to have fun sometimes, you may get a kick out of it.   I do find it remarkable that sometimes a sequel, and one that's considered inferior by most, can actually do better than its classic predecessor.  This actually happened quite a bit in the 1980s, but not as much now.  People would go to films or get albums from a band based on the greatness of the last one, so the second one would get more box office or higher billboard rankings and the third film or album would do worse, no matter if it was better or not, based on the disappointment of the second one.  However, this was not the case with Elm Street 3...   Stay tuned, and pleasant dreams...