A Nightmare on Elm Street was a
classic 1980s horror film about a burnt child killer who came back to haunt
people in their dreams. Filmmakers decided that premise wasn’t insane enough,
so they gave us a sequel filled with horrible gay innuendos and leather bondage
sex, complete with a scene of Freddy whipping a man’s naked flabby ass. Yes,
you read that correctly, and yes, those things are the most disturbing parts of
this film.
Director: Jack Sholder
Starring: Robert Englund, Mark Patton
Freddy’s Revenge isn’t an accurate
title – try Freddy’s Twisted Sex Fantasies.
We start off with a bus ride to high
school in the 80s – which frankly is already
terrifying; I mean there are only so many hairsprayed mullets and loose
pastel-colored tops I can take. Apparently the extras from Society here are not
used to their bus driver driving them into the middle of Mordor:
It turns out that was just a dream.
Then we get a Stepford Wives-esque 80s family having breakfast when they hear
their teenaged son Jesse screaming like a pussy from his room upstairs.
Apparently this is a normal affair for the family – he has horrible nightmares
and wakes up screaming all the time, and the family just kind of shrugs it off.
What a bunch of assholes.
At football practice later, we see
Jesse wrestling with a teammate on the ground after the guy pantses him. You know,
kid; if you really wanted to see the guy’s ass so badly, you could have just
waited until the gym teacher sent you all to the showers and taken a peek then.
I love the focus on the wrestling between these two; what the hell is the
point? Just to show us how, uh, “close” Jesse is to his buddies on the team?
 |
| It's the only way they can get out their "urges"...how tragic that we live in a society that teaches men to repress such things. |
Oh well. Later on we get a dream
sequence where Freddy appears and tells Jesse they have important work to do.
Hmmmm…
Nah.
Jesse screams like a girl again –
seriously, what the hell is up with that? – and then he wakes up. This time his
parents do check on him, though – give em some points for that.
Later, he’s about to go visit his
girlfriend when his dad insists he unpack his room beforehand. Instead of doing
that, he does … well, just look:
I don’t even know. Have I just been
doing this for too long? Have I lost my touch? Or is this scene simply too
fucked up to address properly? Either way, I’m sure lots of perfectly normal, non-sexual-deviant, mentally sound young
men in the 80s put on girly pop music and danced around their bedroom in stupid
looking clothes. It was just the “thing” back then! That’s what I’m going to
tell myself anyway, for fear of my increasingly fragile sanity.
His girlfriend comes over while he’s
doing that and doesn’t immediately break up with him and run screaming out the
door. Well, I thought the movie was unrealistic for focusing on a burn victim
killing teens in their dreams, but NOW the film has lost all credibility! They
talk about stupid things like his dreams, and then the girlfriend finds Nancy’s
diary from the first movie. They figure out Freddy is behind the whole thing
and then we cut to Jesse sleeping later.
Wait, what? How the fuck did that
go? What happened in between those cuts?
“Oh, wow, I can’t believe we figured
out Freddy is behind this weird stuff happening!”
“…”
“Okay, well, I’m going home to paint
my toenails. See ya!”
YOU ARE A FAILURE AT LIFE.
We then get a bizarre sequence in
which Jesse goes to an S&M bar and orders a beer – I guess Freddy
subconsciously just really wanted to
go to this place and had to possess some loser kid to get there. Questionable,
but eh, there are weirder things to come. Jesse meets his gym teacher there,
clad in tight black leather and everything. They go back to the school’s gym,
where the gym teacher makes him run laps. Why? I can kind of understand why
Jesse is doing it – he’s possessed by Freddy. But why is the gym teacher doing
this? Does he really cruise S&M bars just hoping to run into students of his so he can make them run laps?
 |
| "Ohh yeah! Doing my day job in the middle of the night with black leather just TURNS ME ON!" |
What a freak! Fortunately, Freddy
ties him up with a jump rope, strips him naked and then whips his ass with a
towel before finally killing him with his claws.
Uhh – I think there are some
unanswered questions here, mostly about Freddy Krueger and how confused he is
about, well, certain things. But that
would take too long, and he has a private therapist for that. What weirds me out is that the gym teacher for some reason hates what Freddy is doing
to him! Dude, you’re cruising S&M bars! And you can’t stand being tied up
naked and whipped? What, did you think people at those bars were going to ask
you to cuddle and watch a fucking re-run of Dear
John on TV? Ice cream and blankets? Get your head in the game, man!
Either that or the script was just
written by someone who was half asleep. I can’t really tell. Either way, it’s
pretty tough to watch. It’s up there with the most ridiculous scenes from
Society or The Stuff for 80s cheese so stale it’s actually difficult to sit
through. You sit there and you think, oh, how silly, but then you also feel the
tingle of shame in your gut, like food poisoning starting to take effect after
a three-course buffet at Chipotle. Then you know you’ve crawled too far into
the anus of the 80s.
After this scene is over, Jesse ends
up naked sleepwalking on the highway. The cops return him home and make stupid
cracks about keeping him on a short leash – yes, why bother recommending
psychological help for a kid with obvious problems when you can just be insensitive
douchenozzles? Truly you guys are the best
cops ever. His parents think he’s on drugs. Why? Didn’t they ever have a “supernatural serial
killer tried to take over their body” phase as teens? Pfft. Old fogies.
I guess that IS what’s happening, by
the way. Somehow, it’s never really explained, Freddy is trying to come back
into the real world by killing people through Jesse. Since this never happened
in the first film and never happens in subsequent films, I’m gonna guess this
is happening because Jesse’s brain is a weak flabby pile of Silly Putty that
can be manipulated into doing anything, incredibly easily. Tune in next week
when he joins an alternative religion!
We get a party scene later on
celebrating something or other – the fact that these idiots haven’t managed to
kill themselves blow-drying their overly egregious 80s poofter hairstyles every
morning, I’m gonna guess. Jesse goes into a private room with his girlfriend
and they start to have sex. In the middle of that, Jesse's tongue turns into a grey slug, so he fears he’ll kill his girlfriend in the middle of sex – which would
be an original method of foreplay, I’ll give him that.
He runs away from her and goes to
his guy friend’s house – you know, the guy who pantsed him in front of everyone
and wrestled with him on the ground earlier. He says he needs to stay in that guy’s
room for the night to make sure he doesn’t kill anybody.
… Now wait a second. We have a story
here about a young man who has disturbing dreams he doesn’t understand.
Everything is confusing to him and he feels as if there’s another being inside
him, waiting to come out. He has a girlfriend but in the middle of sex with
her, has an uncontrollable urge to leave and go to the house of another man,
whose room he wants to stay in all night.
Well gee. If I were to be a bit
insightful here in this review, I’d suggest this was actually just a big ole
metaphor for Jesse coming out of the closet! Though I don’t think most coming
out of the closet stories end up with the main character covered in blood after
Freddy Krueger rips out of his body like a demented butterfly botching up
hatching from a cocoon:
 |
| I guess people in the 80s were made out of papier mache! That affirms my incredibly specific, weird-ass suspicions better than I ever thought! |
Newsflash, girls – if your boyfriend
ever comes home covered in blood muttering insanely about how he killed someone
… run. Run far away. Run to your nearest cab and go somewhere else, preferably
a romantic comedy movie with no serial killers.
 |
| You'd think she would have more questions about him being covered in blood, especially after just randomly leaving in the middle of sex earlier, but I guess those are dumb questions. |
So Jesse pretty much completely
turns into Freddy, letting him loose at the party and sending everyone running
for the hills. The girlfriend confronts Freddy in the old boiler room and tries
to stab him a few times, though really her “stabs” are more like trying to get
a pen to squeeze out ink on a high school math question – really not very
violent. Try harder than that; come
on!
Fortunately she doesn’t really need
knife-wielding skills to beat Freddy at all. Instead she beats him and turns
him back into Jesse by saying she loves him. Kinda like a really gory episode
of Captain Planet.
 |
| Even mass-murdering psychopaths with questionable sexual fantasies deserve a little lovin ... when they're actually your 80s-mullet boyfriend underneath, anyway. Relationships are complicated. |
So what’s the message? The struggle
to come out of the closet is null and void when a hot chick says she loves you?
Being gay is cool until you have a serial killer inside you, in which case you
need to be turned back straight again? WHAT?!
This whole thing is just so goofy.
Yes, the homoerotic subtext was completely intentional – the writer slipped it
past the director, who didn’t even have a clue and just filmed the movie
anyway. Oh the blissful ignorance. I make jokes about the whole thing because,
frankly, the movie treats it as a joke.
It would actually be really cool if this were seriously attempting to portray
coming out as gay through an over the top horror film, but no, we get silly
BDSM nonsense and girly screaming and of course, he ends up with his girlfriend
at the end. So it’s mostly just stupid.
Not that I didn’t have fun watching
this. It’s complete 80s silliness, and there are so many things to make fun of,
I really didn’t cover even half of it. If you love Freddy or just 80s horror in
general, this is a safe bet. It’s not very good, but then again, how much 80s
horror really was, anyway?
Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.
the where playing baseball
ReplyDelete