Review #109: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #26- A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

It's been a long time since I'd seen this movie, though I've heard plenty of podcasts and reviews of it in recent years. (I think Mark Patton recently released a documentary about his experience with the fandom surrounding this film?)

The thing that struck me most was how... aggressively mediocre this movie is. Like, it has a lot of the charm and clout that the rest of the series has to keep it afloat, but when it came down to it I just didn't really feel nearly as captivated as I've been with most other movies I've watched this month. (It wasn't bad, so I couldn't even latch on to how angry it made me or whatever, it was just... lackluster.) Part of this might be my prior knowledge of how the rest of the series kind of forgets this one and divorces it from any of the rest of the canon, but aside from a few great effects and some hilarious (unintended?) homoeroticism I felt like this one was squarely in the middle of the spectrum.

I won't speak at length about the homoeroticism in this movie (that's definitely been covered by people far more qualified than myself) but I will say that it feels like, at every opportunity, the writers said, "Hey, we have this line of dialogue, should Mark Patton say it in a way any normal human being would say it, or should we re-write it so it sounds like a metaphor for homosexuality?" and the latter won out every time. I don't buy it for a second when the director insists that it was all unintentional- I think a lot of people were working through some things via this movie, for better and for worse.

There were a few sequences in this film that I really liked- the biggest standout has to be when Freddy tears himself out of Jesse's chest. The effect is top-notch, and I love the subtle difference in Freddy's design afterward (like how he no longer wears the bladed glove, instead having the blades sprouting straight from his gnarled fingers). I like the idea of the curse of Freddy Krueger being passed down by proximity and strengthened by the knowledge gained from Nancy's diary. However, as a whole I don't care for the plot of Freddy trying to take over Jesse's body (it clashes with the dream physics and such of the previous film, and feels ill-conceived at its core).

I feel like this would have been a much better film if it were wholly separate from this franchise, and was just about a teenager who doesn't know if he's becoming a murderer or if there's actually a ghost trying to kill through him (but then it would have been a different movie altogether). I also don't really like Mark Patton's performance- he's a better actor than Nancy was but he screams a lot in this film and it was grating on my ears every time. I know that when this movie was made there wasn't really a "formula" for creating a horror franchise like we have nowadays, so every series kind of threw everything at the wall to see what sticks, and not much from this movie stuck. I'm very glad they continued to make more Elm Street movies after this, but all in all I am not a huge fan of this one.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Fu Man Chews

Worst Bit of Acting: When the coach is in his office right before being killed, he acts completely unimpressed even as the shelves are magically lifting off the walls and equipment is moving towards him, just standing there jawing on some gum