[7]
The villainous boogeyman Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) comes back for his first sequel, but this time he’s not trying kill kids in their dreams — he wants to kill them in the real world. And in order to do so, he has to take possession of a high school boy’s body. That boy is played by Mark Patton (Come Back to the 5 and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean), who bucks the slasher genre’s trend of focusing on a ‘final girl’ or a ‘scream queen’ in a film that audiences weren’t ready for in 1985, but one that has enjoyed a more positive reevaluation in recent years.
When New Line Cinema ordered a sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street, I don’t think they had any idea how lucrative the franchise would become, or they might have ventured with more caution. The film blurs dreams and reality even more than the first film. It opens with a compelling nightmare sequence in which Freddy drives Patton’s school bus off the main road and into an abyss. Patton’s character wakes up, but the film never really does. Even the waking moments still feel dreamlike. How else could a parakeet literally explode into flame after attacking Patton and his family?
The film also flirts brazenly with homoeroticism and a subversion of gender roles. Where else are you going to see Freddy trying to get inside a high school boy’s body? And where else are you going to see an evil gym teacher (Marshall Bell) get strung up nude in the shower and spanked to death? New Line’s president, Bob Shaye, even makes a cameo appearance wearing a leather fetish outfit. To say nothing of the fact that Patton is shirtless and dripping in sweat most of the time.
I know a lot of ’80s viewers didn’t want to see a male character being victimized, but must men always be the stoic hero? I find it refreshing to see Patton sobbing through much of this film as he slowly loses his mind (and body) to Freddy. I also like seeing a man get rescued by his girlfriend (Kim Myers) in the third act for a change. The climax is also interesting because it forces Myers’ character to show love to the grotesque Freddy in order to bring Patton’s character back out of him. I can see why serious fans of the series would roll their eyes over Part 2‘s loosey-goosey handling of the lore. Maybe Freddy should be kept in dreamland and maybe there’s a good reason why horror movies tend to have female protagonists. But Part 2 is simply too interesting to dismiss.
Director Jack Sholder (Alone in the Dark) is good at creating palpable atmosphere, especially with extreme heat. The whole film feels like it’s sweltering above Freddy’s roaring furnace. Kevin Yagher’s grizzled-looking Freddy makeup is perhaps my favorite iteration of the character, and Christopher Young’s brooding score is by far my favorite of the franchise. The way he incorporates the sounds of marine mammals to create an otherworldly sense of unease is pure genius. Freddy’s Revenge is also the last time the franchise would maintain a serious tone, before Freddy would lean more into camp and dark comedy.
With Robert Rusler, Clu Gulager, and Hope Lange.