Note: This post is about horrors/thrillers with an emphasis on the LGBTQIA community for June’s Pride Month.
There are some movies that you can tell were just rushed into production to strike while the iron is hot. The first Nightmare on Elm Street had been produced on a very thin shoe-string budget for New Line Cinema, at that time mostly handling distribution for low-budget movies. The movie had been a great success especially considering it premiered during the same time as the backlash over Silent Night, Deadly Night was highly controversial and the movie had been pulled from theaters.
So, since it was the 1980s, the sequels were the way things happened. Pre-production began in the spring of 1985 and by mid-fall of that year, a sequel with the subtitle Freddy’s Revenge was in theaters. However, it seemed whoever had wrote the script really hadn’t seen Wes Craven’s original. David Chaskin is credited as the writer and he doesn’t have many credits. I can see why. And even Robert Shaye, producer for New Line, was willing to stiff Robert Englund on the classic role he has become known for by using a stunt man. It’s bad and can tell. It’s not as bad as Dr. Tom Mason pretending to be Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 From Outer Space, but you can tell it’s not Englund.
Set five years after the events of the first movie, a new family has moved into the same house where Nancy Thompson lived on Elm Street. Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) is the new kid in town who’s plagued by nightmares. Their house seems uncomfortably warm but his parents, Ken (Clu Gulager) and Cheryl (Hope Lange), don’t think much of it. However, things turn weirder when one of their pet parakeets kills the other one and in a wild rage flies around the living room attacking the family before it bursts into flames. (This was one of the things that kept Craven from returning).
Jesse talks with his love interest, Lisa Webber (Kim Myers), and classmate, Ron Grady (Robert Rusler), who tell him about the dark history of the house. Lisa finds a diary/journal in Jesse’s closet that Nancy wrote while helping him unpack. But things get weirder as Jesse begins to sleepwalk and becomes possessed by the spirit of Freddy Krueger who manifests in Jesse to do his murderous bidding. Craven was also opposed to this notion.
But where the movie has gained the most notoriety is all the homoerotic overtones in the movie. Jesse and Ron initially get off on the wrong foot by getting into a scuffle where they roll around on the baseball field during P.E. class after Ron pulls down his shorts. Their coach, Schneider (Marshall Bell), is implied to be a gay sexual predator who hangs out in gay leather bars. During one scene where Jesse sleepwalks to a leather bar, where Schneider takes him back to the gym where he makes him run laps around the basketball court and then tells him to “hit the showers.” I guess the implication is Schneider is going to sexually assault Jesse.
But in a scene that seems more common to find in Scary Movie or one of its sequels, Schneider is assaulted with basketballs, baseballs and soccer balls. Then, he is dragged by an invisible force and tied up by jumping ropes. His clothes are torn off by the same invisible force and towels whack his naked bottom until it bleeds. Also during this scene as the steam from the showers fills the room, you see the Freddy stand-in.
There’s another scene where Jesse dances around suggestively in a homoerotic way while he cleans up his room. There is the board game Probe in his closet. When he is making out with Lisa at a party, he leaves and goes to check on Ron, who notes why he came there. There’s also the movie’s tagline “The Man of Your Dreams is Back.” And the whole idea of Freddy getting into the body of a young man sounds suggestive as well.
For the most part, the movie seems to never fit into what Craven had intended. Having Freddy in the real world seems to go against the idea of people being unprotected in their dreams. It’s also the only movie in the franchise not to have a central female character as the protagonist battling Freddy. However, some people have argued since Patton is gay in real life, he is the pseudo-Final Girl. It’s like they decided in the last 15-20 minutes to make Lisa the heroic figure. Gulager and Lange are wasted in their roles as Jesse’s parents. However, Gulager saw his career during this period get a renaissance thanks to horror movies like this and The Return of the Living Dead.
Part of the terror of the first movie and the third movie is lost here. Jack Sholder, who would go on to direct the better The Hidden after this, seems to be struggling finding his style. During a scene where Freddy attacks teenagers at a pool house during a cookout is memorable but Sholder reportedly had to pass directing duties to his assistant because he couldn’t stop laughing at the way it was set up.
Freddy is still presented as a menacing villain unlike the wise-cracking character he was turned into later in movies. Englund also has another scene without the make-up as a bus driver during a dream sequence. It’s not the best of the franchise but it’s not the worse. Thankfully, Craven was brought back for the third movie as a writer, which also brought back Heather Lagenkamp as Nancy and John Saxon as her father, Donald. I believe it was intended to end the franchise once and for all but the success of that movie led to more movies. They even refer to New Line Cinema as the “studio Freddy built.”
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 