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

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While I can say that this is probably my least-liked Freddy Flick, one should know that my dislike of it does not come from any of its now-famous subtexts. I'm also not planning on going too deeply into all of that, as I can't really say anything about it that fans don't already know. To keep it short and to the point, this ends up being a story of Freddy attempting to possess someone and that fear of possession being representative of fears of homosexuality and becoming something society wasn't ready to accept.

To add to the pile, this came out in '85, which was an era of a very AIDS-aware America. So Freddy's possessive ways, in this chapter, represent the fear of not being able to control who you are and the fears surrounding that within a society that wouldn't fully understand. We have come a long way since 1985, and this has since become a bit of a cult film for some. But no one gives it a better voice than male scream queen Mark Patton in his documentary 'Scream, Queen!, My Nightmare on Elm Street,' where he talks about how the film affected his life as a now-out gay man. It comes recommended highly by yours truly!

Patton plays a young man named Jesse who, along with his family, moves into Nancy Thompson's house several years after the first film's events. As Jesse starts having terrible nightmares, he soon finds himself up against Freddy (Robert Englund), who wants to use Jesse's body as his vessel for coming back to life and wreaking havoc on the town of Springwood once more. He gets help from his friend Lisa (Kim Myers), who likes him and wants to help him with whatever bothers him. But most, including his family and school jock Ron Grady (Robert Rusler), think he's off his nut. The rest is basically subtext.

With all of the context here, I do have a certain admiration for it just being what it is, and I'm not here to take away anyone's enjoyment of what could be considered a somewhat clever film. But dammit, I have beef with this movie that I cannot deny, and it ends up being the weakest film of the franchise because of it. Put simply, it breaks all the rules of the universe Wes Craven established in the first film; namely, Freddy can only exist in the dream world unless someone happens to pull him out of it. Yet this involves Freddy trying very hard to get out into the real world using possession.

On top of that is just the question of "why?" Why would Freddy want to become real and enter the real world to tear people up when he has the incredible superpower of being able to invade someone's dreams and get them there completely defenceless against their worst fears that he can control? Maybe it's just a me thing, but honestly, I never could wrap my head around that idea. It's like Superman wanting to take away his ability to fly or something. Poor Wes Craven never signed any documentation to make Freddy officially "his," so writer David Chaskin devised an idea of his own for this one, willy-nilly.

While I may not like it for my own reasons, I am glad this film has found some footing as an interesting cult classic among various communities. I just think rearranging rules (that are never revisited, by the way) was a mistake, and it's not what I'd call a good film at all in the context of the entire collection of Freddy flicks. But I can give it a touch of leeway, being only the second film, and no one really knew what would happen with Freddy after that first film. And while I do consider it weak, I can still sit through it as a bad movie and have fun with things like the visual of a cereal called "Fu Man Chews" or Jesse doing his beautifully cringe-worthy "pop star dance" in his room.

However, at the end of the day, I strongly feel that the bad outweighs the good, even if this does have one of the coolest practical effects of the whole series (Freddy ripping his way out of Jesse during a nightmare). It's an interesting balance, to say the least. I can commend it for many things but dislike it for many others. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film take so many steps forward while taking so many steps back, and ultimately, it leads me to conclude that to get the most out of this, one needs to explore behind the scenes once finished. Otherwise, you're just stuck with a weak Freddy flick.

2/5

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