Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Nightmare Week: He's inside me, and he wants to take me again


A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE

1985
Directed by Jack Sholder
Written by David Chaskin

Spoilers: high


A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
 is an immensely fraught film, prompting perennial controversy, coming out of the kind of "who was even in charge here?" production that requires one to not merely ask aloud how it could have been made this way without triggering alarm bells at New Line Cinema, but how its open secret could have persisted for so long with only a few fans even noticing what was strangewhy, even a bit queerabout it.  It's so blindingly obvious that the fact that it somehow hasn't been at the forefront of every conversation about the franchise all this time can make you feel like you've gone absolutely insane.  It boils down to this: is it actually called A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge?  Because its title card says, "Part 2."  It's maddening.

I also have something scribbled in my notes here.  It just reads, "gay?"  I have no idea what I meant by asking myself that, I'm always happy.  So about that title card...

Freddy's Revenge (and the title, generally, does bother me, as it is further the case that literally nothing in this movie is about Freddy Krueger's revenge, it's practically the opposite of Freddy Krueger's revenge, and it's even slightly inapposite that it should be "Freddy's" revenge when in this one he is only ever called "Fred") should still, of course, prompt great curiosity.  I'm not sure the story of its production is fully known and understood, though I think the readiest explanation is "the principals were lying their faces off about it to some degree or another until sometime around Obergefell," by which point the truth of the semi-chaotic making of a horror programmer had become mixed up with the whole "don't ask, because I won't tell" approach they'd taken for so long.


The uncontroversial framework for the history goes like this: with 1984's A Nightmare On Elm Street, writer-director Wes Craven had delivered for Robert Shaye's New Line Cinema a huge hitby far the biggest New Line had ever had, long before any of that hobbit stuff (which is a much better candidate for the "gay on accident?" treatment, and to imagine Freddy's Revenge is to imagine a Lord of the Rings where every other line is "it's sticky! what is it?" and every other scene was boys frolicking in a bed)so, of course, Shaye commissioned a sequel.  Craven, at that time, did not have a sequel in him, though having tasted success along with the rest of them, he wasn't entirely opposed to directing one.  Writer Leslie Boehm had an idea for a Rosemary's Baby knockoff, which (again, at that time) nobody wanted much to do with.  So, perhaps a little desperate, Shaye turned to David Chaskin, a guy in his marketing department, who wrote a script that Craven didn't like either, for both Boehm and Chaskin's ideas flew directly in the face of Craven's own conception of his iconic dreamlord villain, each script hinging upon Freddy attempting to return to the waking world.  Taking Craven's objections seriously, Shaye just hired somebody else.

It's at this point that the trail becomes unclear.  Jack Sholder, shrugging, would apparently direct any script pages you handed him, for despite inaugurating New Line's film production efforts in 1982 with the slasher-adjacent thriller Alone In the Dark, he's openly admitted he was a horror filmmaker out of expedience (hence a career almost entirely filled out by horror movies); likewise, his energies here were channeled more towards figuring out the special effects side of things.  (Of course, as I'm basing this on statements made in the 1990s, I don't completely trust them.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that Sholder was gay, given the parts of Freddy's Revenge that aren't so much "gay subtext" as "things a gay director might appreciate," like shirtless, grabassing athletic young men who are, themselves, not so much "athletic" as linear and narrow-shouldered.)


Chaskin, on the other hand (though also straight to my knowledge), having seized upon supernatural possession as the driver of his plot, had by default employed a male protagonist for the male villain to possess, and so what I expect is that, at some point, this really began to recommend to him an explicitly sexually-predatory angle on "possession."  Perhaps out of mere novelty, perhaps due to Freddy's equitable approach to sex murder (the word was "children," not "girls" or "boys"), he avoided the more obvious heterosexual possibilities that had been mined by transformational horror since before The Wolf Man, and zeroed in on that male protagonist, as a victim neither willing nor completely unwilling.  Enter star (or whatever) Mark Patton, whose relationship with this film has been negative, in that he's gay and was very private about it then, and thereby felt misused by Chaskin and/or Sholder.  I can't dismiss that, thanks to Patton's youth and the production history's opacity, but I admit I had the thought, "so, the gay actor already known for gay roles who signed onto the gay film got mad that it made him look gay?"  It does, however, seem to be the case that as production commenced, Chaskin continually made it richer in this subtext"subtext," I say, and I heartily approve of Patton's reaction to the frequent use of the word "subtext" in criticism of this particular film, "did you actually go to a freshman English course?"  Well, they definitely succeeded in the aim, anyway.

I regret the fruitless investigations we've so far undertaken, but it is, after all, probably the most interesting and unique thing about Freddy's Revenge; I'm comfortable saying its uniqueness must be one of the reasons I love it, since it's a deeply flawed work that sort of doesn't even get consistently good until half of its runtime has already passed (after which it can still be, inconsistently, bad).  At least some of it is that Patton's disaffection is, indeed, highly visible, which still isn't a great excuse for the haplessness of his performance.  (It is through no fault of his own that he also resembles J.D. Vance, which might've been a distraction, too.)  Even more importantly, I really don't think it would've have killed Chaskin to have spent some time polishing his movie's text, too.


Nonetheless, things begin reasonably well, and if one of the reasons to adore Craven's Nightmare was its treatment of the dream state as one most often experiences itfor the most part much more like reality and physics simply going "soft," rather than loftily-conceived symbolism or flashily-conceived surrealismthat obviously wasn't going to work at scale.  So it's correct that Freddy's Revenge opens with an ambitious special effects sequence that finds Jesse Walsh (Patton) en route to school, only to discover that his bus driver is a certain burned man of our acquaintance (Robert Englund, reclaiming the role from Sholder's initial impulse to just use some stuntguy, thus firmly establishing that he, alone, was Freddy Krueger), whereupon the landscape falls away and a nightmare ensues.  Jesse wakes, screaming, as he has every night since his family's moved to 1428 Elm Street, empty for five years since the last film; which means that the Nightmares are already as bad, chronologically, as the Fridays, while also demonstrating a strange attachment that I don't think any other Nightmare has to the place-setting cultural shorthand of its own title and the "iconic" address on Elm Street, insofar as all the Nightmares are slashers-by-acclamation-only, but Freddy's Revenge really is a straight-up haunted house movie.  It also makes you wonder how A Nightmare On Elm Street would have played out if, e.g., the Lantzes had moved off to Columbus sometime between 196X and 1984, that is, it rekindles one's irritation with Freddy's whole contrived-ass backstory.

Well, Jesse has a wretched relationship with his parents (Clu Gulager and Hope Lange), and presumably a slightly more affectionate one (albeit only one depicted in the breach) with his little sister (Christie Clark), but he has at least one friend, Kim Webber (Cheryl Marsh, through no merit of her own resembling Meryl Streep), an extremely upper-middle-class young lady who quite unaccountably bums rides to school in Jesse's beat-up jalopy (which also starts to call into question the provenance of that opening dream sequence).  Jesse will soon enough get a new friend, or frenemy, or, more like it, crush object, in his baseball teammate Ron Grady (Robert Rusler), with whom he bonds after a baseball-related, partially-pantsless squabble (I'm just describing here, but honestly, I've been a boy, and we're not quite to the unambiguously gay parts) during their mutual punishment by baseball coach and rumored BDSM/teen enthusiast, Mr. Schneider (Marshall Bell; and now we've gotten to the unambiguously gay parts).  There is also Kerry Hellman (Sydney Walsh), a girl, and for that, the falsest meat ever presented in a slasher movie.


So Jesse is being visited by Freddy in the night, but the dream demon's strategies have shifted since he got his (ahem) revenge back in Craven's Nightmare.  (For the record, Freddy's Revenge offhandedly resolves what I didn't even realize was a question yetwhether Nancy Thompson died at the end of the last filmwith a "no, she just went insane," and I find it surprising that the screenplay bothers when that neither makes sense nor, at this juncture, matters.)  But you see, Freddy's goal now is not to destroy Jesse outright, but to take (control of) him, using Jesse's dreams as a doorway for his power to enter the real world, and his body as a host to retake the flesh.  His tactics are much the same, however, and Freddy will win this mystical contest.  But even then, there's the possibility that what remains of Jesse within him and Jesse's attachment to Kim can at least send Freddy back into nightmare, where he belongs.

So what there's no getting around is that Freddy just doesn't work right here.  Craven's rules have been muddled so thoroughly they basically don't exist anymore, and there aren't really any new rules to replace them, with surrealist "dream?" setpieces being flung at wide-awake victims by way of Freddy/Jesse's apparent psychokinetic powers, on top of the just-plain-weird-shit that doesn't make sense even in the new context of "Freddy is a physically-present ghost who haunts the Walshes' house, and murderously cranks up the heat every night because he's all about boilers."  (Or, in fairness, because "sweaty heat" is vaguely associable with "sex.")  I think, anyway, that the dream-logical link between the most wackadoodle setpiece in the movieone of the Walshes' pet parakeets goes mad, kills its cagemate, attacks the family, and then explodesis "it's muggy in here."


But that emphasizes what's "wrong" with Freddy's Revenge: Craven's movie was about obscuring the line between dreams and reality, Sholder's movie isn't aware a line exists.  (Whereas Freddy's goals are confusing, too: when he does take over, Jesse isn't Jesse with Freddy's mind in command, he just... becomes Freddy, which seems suboptimal for Freddy, considering that Freddy is a burned corpse with an awkward walk and, at a minimum, unlikely to blend into a crowd, as, indeed, is amply demonstrated when Freddy crashes Kim's pool party.)  Accordingly, the movie can be quite vibrant, which I very much enjoy, with the unfortunate tradeoff that it's often stupid, though the balance continually tips more towards the former.  It's that whole "it gets better" quality I mentioned, which is partly just the vieweror at least this viewerrecalibrating to this movie's new parameters.

Mostly, though, it's that until it does reach peak vibrancy (there is as clear a boundary of before-and-after demarcation as you'll ever see) it sucks at least half as much as it works.  For one thing, given that Nightmare cinematographer Jacques Haitkin returned, you'd hope it looked like the first film, and it only does sometimes, as Sholder's not really using him as well and there's not-infrequent overlighting.  But while Sholder is no Craven, and so there's some middling filmmaking here, it's mostly what's happening in front of the camera.  A non-trivial vector for the suckage is Patton's blank closeted gay teen and his even blanker friendspseudo-Final Girl Kim's only real contribution, besides having a pool and an unwanted vagina, is to encourage Jesse to develop what she conceives of as "psychic sensitivity," a thread that had potential but goes ill-developed, and was possibly just an excuse to take an early visit out to Freddy's old haunts at the coal plant; Ron barely registers as a semi-funny jerk, so his most distinguishing moment is having a loud conversation while a facefull of food churns in his mouthbut Jesse's family is miserable, every single interaction feeling like Chaskin meant to add something sharp and specific later but never got around to it.  Gulager is just unbearably bad, living completely down to the material or lower, and coming off like the dad in a Nickelodeon sketch comedy show who needs to exist to deliver two situation-defining lines, and somehow fails to recede when his purpose is complete.

But, eventually, this doesn't matter, and once Freddy's Revenge can basically just be a weird supernatural horror film and gay allegory all the time, it finally finds its engine.  I cannot emphasize too many times how blatant it is about the latter, though: whether Chaskin intended it to function an an allegory, I'm not sure, but it's certainly very easy to get a coherent read out of poor Jesse's travails with Freddy, as both his literal sexual mentor and the representation of his own rejected, gruesomely-perceived sexual desires, and maybe even (because the actual plot events of the movie are very difficult to parse sometimes) a rejected real sexual experience.  Hence Jesse's transformations, and the all-male murders that ensue (if I'm flabbergasted by one thing above all, it's that they managed to be rigorous about this), together serving as very tidy symbols for a violent return of the repressed.  Of course, there's also the matter of Kim, the girlfriend he just really can't with (I'm not sure whether the giant gray tongue thing that happens when he tries is a nod to heterosexuality being nauseating generally, or a parody, specifically, of how gross he thinks cunnilingus is, but it's nicely icky).  She's the "normal" he can't get back to, and it's all just a maelstrom of burning (whoa) shame, ending up in a brutal conclusion where he'd rather kill somebody than fuck a boy, but rather die than fuck a girl.  And that's solid, even managing an emotional hook in addition to the intellectual one, irrespective of Patton's general uselessness.  The movie keeps on going for another three superfluous minutes, because, by God, scary movies need stupid false resolutions and nihilistic reversals, but it's pretty much the same difference in the end.

It does still need some interesting horror if it's going to earn the "kinda great?" rating I'm going to give it, and somehow we make do with no greater number of hardcore kill sequences than the original (just two), that are also substantially less hardcore, as far as the onscreen severity goes.  But then, the first, with Schneider, is notable more for what a weird damn passage it is overall, an entire surrealist, faintly-Body Doublish short film about Jesse winding up, with no explanation, at his chickenhawking coach's sex bar before immediately cutting to Jesse running laps in the school gym while the coach goes to, I guess, catch up on paperwork, and Jesse ending up getting home naked; it's the key example of what Freddy's Revenge is doing wrong in relation to Nightmare but doing right on its own terms, a borderline-incomprehensible sequence that climaxes with what might be rape-revenge, or might not, with enough something to the imagery of the coach getting stripped and tortured with towel snapping in the showers that I wish it had elaborated even more on such locker room torments before seeing fit to (rather summarily) kill him off.


The sequence with Ron is, at least, far clearer in its intentions, and it's that "demarcation" I mentioned: this is pure "destroy the source of my desire" sex murder horror, and if the murder itself is nasty but "tasteful" (so far as slasher cinema goes), the lead-up is the best thing Freddy's Revenge ever does, a long and hugely disgusting special effects transformation by artist Mark Shostrom, in which Freddy emerges from Jesse's body, blessed with the perfect grace note composite insert shot through Jesse's mouth, where we can see Freddy's eye staring back at us.  (Englund is still good here, incidentally, though more-or-less just rerunning Nightmare at a lower level: the exceptions are a swell proto-Freddy-the-clown pun about "brains" and the "subtextual" opportunity he takes to stroke Jesse's lips, though even these are in the same scene back-to-back.)

But sometimes Freddy's Revenge is just wonderfully wacky and horror flick lurid.  The finale atop the coal plant where Freddy died, now arrayed in gaudy Freddy-themed red-and-green lights that aren't remotely "subtle" but (miraculously) also don't feel forced, encompasses the strongest gestures of Haitkin's photography here (in fairness, the red-and-green is subtle at the club); the pool party should obviously be a full-on massacre, but the use of Freddy's "heat" motif with the bubbling swimming pool gives it a hellish oomph; there's a highly-memorable beat where Freddy bites Kim, on the leg, for no really evident reason besides Freddy's mean; and, weaknesses of his performance aside, any of the several shots where Patton stares slackly at how incongruously goofy he looks with Freddy's clawed glove on his hand now are terrific horror, no notes.  Don't get me wrong: this 87 minute movie takes forever to drag itself up to speedand somehow a film that cost twice as much as the first feels, outside of that one bravado effects sequence, twice as cheapbut once it gets there, man, it's a ride.

Score: 8/10

8 comments:

  1. ((I wrote a REALLY long comment that was either too long or got stuck in a spam que or something. It's been a couple days so giving it another go (luckily I saved a copy-paste in notepad!), splitting in two.

    This also gives me a chance to add a preface that I'm more using your review a jump-off point rather than doing a direct response, in case it at all feels like I'm trying to put you on the defensive - that's not my intention at all!))

    In the past I've enjoyed the conversation around this movie's "gay subtext" along with everyone else, but now that it's been more or less canonized it's taken all the fun out and now I actually find it a little infuriating, for two reasons:

    (1) The "gay thing" is NOT the most obvious nor most apt read of the film. The actual allegory being made is rather plainly late-blooming puberty: Jesse is a boy terrified of becoming a man because he's being pumped with hormones and a sex drive that makes him feel serious, aggressive and violent; whereas he wants to remain a child where he's allowed (or at least excused) to be a dorky silly wimp, free of responsibility and commitment (and gross stuff like sex, eww). Pretty much all the gay subtext amounts to the movie making its own mean-spirited "Ambiguously Gay Duo"-style fun at Jesse's expense because being childish looks a lot like being a wuss which looks a lot like being a sissy which looks a lot like being feminine which looks a lot like being gay, amirite?

    I've also come to disagree that the gay read is "not subtext, just text." Nothing in the story suggests Jesse's gay. Jesse doesn't want to have sex with his coach; Jesse-Freddy seeks him out for bloody "turning the tables" revenge. Jesse also shows zero interest in having sex with his male friend (I forget his name) and the notion that he does is based entirely around all the "lol this looks gay" comic relief at Jesse's expense I mentioned - seriously, make that character a girl and nobody would be talking about how much Jesse is obviously in denial about wanting to bone her. Jesse-Freddy kills the friend because their rapport has been based on being competitive with each other, and Jesse-Freddy wants to kill his male competitors (also killing people is just kinda what Freddy does).

    Jesse really DOES have the most chemistry with Kim and is genuinely getting into it when they finally start getting a little physical. The massive grotesque tongue is a stand-in for Jesse's erection and how he feels like he's losing control of himself and his body. He avoids sex because he's terrified he's going to become a monster who ends up a raping or otherwise hurting Kim. The resolution is that his love for Kim is strong enough to tame his violent male urges.

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    1. (2) If we're going to actually take the "gay thing" seriously, then we do have to *actually take it seriously*, and when you do that the movie becomes abhorrent. The gay read of the movie is that Jesse is *becoming* gay due to his cowardice (because at heart being a gay man IS being so cowardly you need the comfort of another man), that being physically comfortable around a close personal male friend is embarrassing and means you're gay, that if you don't want to immediately bone a girl that expresses interest you're pathetic and probably gay, that being gay leads to a life of preying on teens and subjecting them to your fetishes (and might even make you a straight-up serial killer), and that Jesse eventually overcomes the gay by embracing the love of a woman (and you can, too!).

      All that could be handwaved away when this was all some big jokey "you know this all looks pretty gay when you think about it lol" conversation piece with at least a sliver of plausible deniability, but when made official - and writer David Chaskin has gone on record that he had exactly that uncharitable of a theme in mind and straight-up said it was "homophobic" - this is some NASTY shit. I mean the coach's death scene is a *hate crime* for crying out loud (and that one is actually still there even without reading the gay into the rest).

      I know there's a cult of gay fans who've embraced A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as a bona fide "gay movie" and I definitely won't tell people what they should be offended by, but I think we should be honest about what this stuff actually means. 'Cause even if we're at our most charitable and give the movie as much benefit of the doubt as we can, the best we can say is that it's a movie that treats struggling with your sexual identity as something inherently hilarious and pathetic.

      Also while we're at it there's nothing actually gay about Top Gun, either, if we're being real. I shudder to think if we eventually decide to retroactively confirm Batman & Robin and Kirk & Spock. Yeeesh!

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    2. There's definitely a possible read that it's a whole movie based on a homophobic "it's just a phase" argument, which feels like a bonkers (and mean) thing to want to make a horror movie about, in a way that my preferred interpretation, "repression is a nightmare and Freddy is my internalized homophobia" isn't. The finale, which does blatantly feed into this, feels complicated to me by the epilogue, inasmuch as my assumption is Jesse dies (which itself can be problematized, but it's still a horror movie and complete failure should be an option for our protagonist), but then again, I thought that Nancy died in the first movie, yet she's perfectly fine and doing real well in grad school.

      There is, too--and this is way beyond the ambit of any review and not my field of expertise--a feel to Freddy's Revenge that I might be imposing upon it but I still like, of an older-fashioned current in gay art of being genuinely transgressive, in rather jagged ways such as are largely frowned upon today. Rocky Horror is about a trans rapist pseudo-incestuous psuedo-pedophile, for instance. But then, Rocky Horror's also a coming from, I'm comfortably conceding, a more authentic and indeed more fun-loving place than Freddy's Revenge. And Freddy's Revenge has no musical numbers.

      For the record, there is something gay about Top Gun, albeit indirectly, Tony Scott being heavily inspired by Bruce Weber's erotic photography of men. (Don't look up Bruce Weber--if I recall it's not a pleasant story.) Batman and Robin, not so much. *Batman & Robin*, on the other hand...

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    3. You know, I'm not sure I've ever taken one of those "actually the killer isn't dead and is totally about to kill the main characters now, have a nice day lol" things literally, I've always just chalked 'em up to being a sequel hook or generic "the evil is still out there!" coda. I'm trying to think of a sequel that actually didn't ignore or outright override one of those, and I can only come up with a non-horror example in Mortal Kombat Annihilation, heh.

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    4. That's entirely true as far as any given horror flick goes (I have no problem absorbing, for instance, the ending of Deadly Friend or F13 Part 2, and never strictly needed the "just a dream" explanations of F13 or F13 Part III), but it runs headlong into the peculiarities of Nightmare On Elm Street movies specifically: it's hard not to take it as something that literally happened when almost nothing in the film *has* literally happened, except in our protagonists' heads--but then it had deadly, horrifying consequences anyway.

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  2. Coming back to this, your review mentions you had the misapprehension that director Sholder was himself gay due to his camera's gaze, and I think it's this more than anything that fuels the popular gay read of this movie. I don't buy that Jesse is attracted to his buddy... but I'll concede it sure seems like that camera is.

    I'm increasingly of the opinion that Sholder was intentionally playing this up and he is still trying to bullshit everyone about it. In the 'Scream Queens' doc we see Sholder implore Mark Patton to let go of his grudge against writer David Chaskin (who had publicly blamed Patton's casting for making the movie too obviously gay), which comes off a bit heartless since Patton had made it clear all he's looking for is a "hey sorry about that." This moment suddenly makes a lot of sense to me if Sholder's being motivated here because he really *did* cast Patton for his credibility as a young gay man.

    (Yes I'm aware I'm finding "subtext" in real life and I'm not totally comfortable with that myself, but it's a definite hunch I have).

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    1. Sorry I missed this. The levels of consciousness (and conscious deception) that went into this are, I guess, one of things that makes it interesting, but frustrating too.

      If Chaskin's said that, he's objectively wrong, anyway, Patton isn't a good enough or engaged enough performer here for it to come off obviously anything by virtue of him alone.

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  3. No sweat on the timing, I'm always impressed you're able to keep up with comments at all!

    One more note on the film: it has a great orchestral score, one that's rather unique for the series and raises the production value even when nothing on screen is helping any in that regard.

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