Making
horror sequels can be a difficult undertaking, and making good ones can
be even more difficult, as countless would-be franchises can attest. The
most taxing thing about a s
equel,
I find, is finding a way to expand the story without corrupting or
screwing up what made the first one great. The makers of A Nightmare on
Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (director Jack Sholder and writer David
Chaskin), were thus in a bit of a bind. The first Nightmare sets up a
few rules pertaining to the Freddy mythos, yet were unmade by the
meddling of producers (for instance, the ending of the first film). So,
without series creator Wes Craven and with no defined objective for the
character other than skulking about in dreams and slashing some teens,
what do you do?
A
new family has moved into the Thompson house on Elm Street. The Walshes
are a fairly typical American family, with Dad Ken (Clu Gulager, fresh
off Return of The Living Dead), mother Cheryl (acclaimed character
actress Hope Lange), son Jesse, and daughter Angela. The Walshes have
just barely moved into their new house when weird things start happening
to Jesse, because it seems that there is a holdover from the previous
family's time at 1428 Elm Street, and that is one Freddy Krueger. And
Freddy's got an interest in Jesse; enough of an interest that our teen
hero wakes screaming and sweaty on a nightly basis.
"Why," little sister Angela asks, "can't Jesse wake up
like everyone else?" 
The
short answer, of course, is that Jesse is teetering on the brink of
madness, haunted in dreams and waking life by Freddy and his murderous
impulses. Unlike any of the other films in the series, we find Freddy
able to physically enter the real world at will, physically inhabiting
Jesse's body and carrying out various nefarious deeds. Even more
perplexing is the fact that once in the real world, Freddy is not
subject to the laws of physics (case in point, his fading in and out of
tangibility during the pool party at Lisa's house).
As
Jesse Walsh, Mark Patton (from Robert Altman's Come Back To The Five and
Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) has a John Amplas kind of thing going on
here. He's got a Kate Bush poster up in his room, and periodically he
likes to dance around while phallically stroking a mini-bat. In other
words, he's a normal American teenager coded for 'queer.' This
was, of course, the eighties. It would be impossible to directly address
the issues a gay
teen might face, especially in a film that a wide audience might see. So
there is never an explicit statement made about Jesse's sexual identity.
He has a
girlfriend whom he carries on with platonically, and (most importantly)
there is the explicitly gay character of Coach Schneider to draw the
attention of anyone looking for signs of homosexuality. Because nothing
explicit happens with Jesse, and Schneider operates as a lightning rod,
what is known in Hollywood as 'the principle of deniability' is upheld.
But more on that later.
Jesse's
'girlfriend' Lisa Webber (played by Meryl Streep lookalike Kim Myers) is
somewhat of a cipher, though her character arc should be familiar to any
girl who has had to make the dreaded discovery that her 'boyfriend' has
some secrets. But she, noble girl that she is, wants communication, and
she really is the most intriguing character in the film. She makes an
effortless transition from sexually frustrated rich girl to good-hearted
supernatural warrioress without missing a beat, and she is both a
resourceful thinker and an active participant in the drama. Any woman
who doesn't balk at being bitten by a Fredd
y-faced
dog that leaves a bloody maggot-infested wound is the kind of badass
that any horror franchise could do well with. If this were a more
conventional horror film, Lisa would be the main character, and Jesse
would be killed off at the beginning of the third act. Fortunately, this
is not the case.
School,
as anyone plodding through the eighties would tell you, is hell. The
makers of Freddy's Revenge decide to take that literally, giving us a
sexually-charged, snake-laden battleground for anyone who doesn't cotton
to traditional notions of authority and social behavior. Is it any
wonder that the school bus is seen as an infernal transport bound for
the shunned pit of the divine? The film's opening and closing sequences
on said bus are strange and surreal tableaux that set up one of the
central differences of this film, in that at no point in the film are we
ever given concrete reassurance that we are within the safeness of
reality, and this is reflected, beautifully, in the way the characters
act.
Everyone
is driven by fear, in almost every aspect of their lives. The
quintessential moment in this film is identical to that in the first, in
which bars on the windows are the path to 'security.' Ken and Cheryl
Walsh seem like good parents, but the keystone of the entire Elm Street
mythos is that Freddy thrives on family stress, and these parents are no
different than the initial group of parents who burned Freddy alive to
begin with. As Jesse's psychotic mesh with Freddy continues and he sinks
deeper into uncertainty and horror, he can depend only on himself- which
is particularly unfortunate
,
as Jesse's insecurity leaves him unable to defend himself or anyone
around him. "My dad thinks I'm
on drugs, my Mom thinks I'm crazy, and I don't know if I don't agree
with them," he tells Lisa, pushed to his limits.
Even
amongst the oft-dodgy Elm Street canon (Freddy's Dead, this means you),
Part Two is often marginalized. There is an excerpt from the film during
the opening montage in Freddy Vs. Jason, which is some kind of
validation, but even most fans seem to treat this effort as the bastard
stepchild of the Elm
Street films. My theory is that it is a combination of three factors
that are the cause of this; 1) the discontinuous nature of the narrative
(i.e. the only character that it shares with any of the other films in
the series is Freddy (and, if you want to get technical, the house at
1428 Elm Street)), 2) the not-even-subtle gay content, and 3) the fact
that there is no clear delineation between reality and dream in how
Freddy operates. The time frame of this film is also very strange, as it
posits itself as taking place five years after the events of the first
Elm Street film. If this is the case, we have two options: 1) That the
events of the first film took place in 1980, or 2) that Freddy's Revenge
is happening in 1989. Either way, it is a very strange timeshift.
The
film's weird quasi-existence on the fringes of the franchise can be
explained, somewhat, by the fact that Ken and Cheryl Walsh had nothing
to do with the inciting event in Springwood, nor is Jesse brought into
the razor-sharp grasp of Freddy by friends returning from previous
sequels (as is the case with Alice in Nightmare 4). But given the
desperation that franchise-holders will often seek even the most tenuous
of connections with previous offerings to connect their sequels to, it
see
ms
very strange that there's been no effort to connect any of the
subsequent films with the strange story of Jesse Walsh.
What
Nightmare 2 does better than any of the other films in the series is
play games with physical space. There
are a few weird-assed tracking shots that shift perspectives on (or in)
1428 (most especially the one that goes from the basement/boiler room to
Angela's room during one of Jesse's Freddywalks), and, in keeping with
the lack of geographic specificity of the first film, we are spatially
disoriented on an almost shot-by-shot basis. But Freddy's boiler room is
where the physical world as we know it takes the evening off. A friend
has a theory about how many great horror films could be seen as taking
place in the Twin Peaks universe, and there can certainly be a case made
for Elm Street 2, as we have a secret diary which alerts us to a
monstrous presence, the shifting physical space of Freddy's boiler room
(which feels oddly enough like a variant of that milieu's Black Lodge),
even in the way Freddy conducts himself (in this film) through heat, as
Bob in Twin Peaks does so through electricity. The amorphous horror of
the boiler room is also reminiscent of Italo splatter at its most
creative, with Argento-ish color schemes and the sense of unspeakable
dimensions of horror lurking just beyond human realms of perception (I'm
thinking specifically of Fulci's L'Aldila ). This foreshadows
nicely the nightworld Craven envisions for the omniFreddy in the New
Nightmare.
But
let's get back to the gay, shall we? Nightmare 2 is a Freudian minefield
of gay text. Any of the film's sequences involving gym class elevate
Freddy's Revenge into the pantheon of pioneering gay representation.
Between Coach Schneider ("they say he hangs out in queer S&M
joints downto
wn.
He likes pretty boys like you," as Grady tells Jesse), the baseball
game with no pants and rolling about, and the lingering locker room
tableaux, this feels like it could veer into gay porn at any given
moment. For instance, the
first time that Jesse wakes up sweaty and screaming like a butch bottom,
that's terror. But the second, third, and fourth times it happens, well,
it doesn't take a semiotician to get what's going on.
The
character of Grady is a strange one, as he is first introduced as a
rival for Jesse, an antagonist rooted in the world of school and
reputation, rather than the dreamworld where Freddy rules. The fact that
Grady pantses Jesse in front of most of the school, then rolls around
with him in a brawl, doesn't seem to strike anyone as odd. Of course,
after their shared ritualized abuse at the hands of the sadistic Coach
Schneider, Jesse and Grady warm up to each other. The Grady/Jesse
friendship evolves naturally, and is one of the few ways that the film
tries to evoke realism in its interpersonal dynamics, though there is a
fine line between bullying and flirting, and this film leaps back and
forth across it. The thing to keep in mind when observing the character
of Grady is how he is changed by Jesse. It is because of Jesse that
Grady is accepted at the lunch table with Lisa and her friend Kerry
(played by Sydney Walsh, whom eagle-eyed viewers might recognize from
the sadly underrated where-is-the-DVD-of-this vampire romance To Die
For), and it should be a major klaxon of significance that Grady has
posters for Limahl and Tina Turner in his room. Why does a bad boy like
Grady not have a girlfriend, you might ask. What could bond him with
fellow misfit Jesse so strongly that when Freddy comes a calling, it is
Grady that Jesse seeks out? And, for that matter, what exactly happens
in between when Coach Schneider finds Jesse at Don's Place (which looks
surprisingly diverse and peppy for a horror film's conception of a
'queer S&M joint') and when we see him running laps at school?
"Well,
Mr. Queer Theory," you might be thinking, "why is it that
Jesse gets all sexed up with Lisa at the party? And moreso, why does a
kiss from Lisa prove the means by which Jesse is freed from Freddy?"
First of all, Jesse gets sexed up at the party with Lisa because Freddy
is exerting control over him. It is not Jesse's extended tongue that is
flopping about around her decolletage, it is Freddy's. As for Lisa's
kiss, I see its power coming more from being an unselfish
gesture than from being the spark that reawakens Jesse's passion. Jesse
is defined as a character by his dispassionate nature, so why would this
change just because he is physically imprisoned within the eldritch
flesh of the bastard child of a thousand maniacs? In A Nightmare on Elm
Street 2, Freddy is patriarchy incarnate, and the reason why Jesse is
completely helpless at fighting Freddy is because he is what society
wants. Freddy comes out to kill whenever
Jesse is surrounded by gay stimuli, but Freddy comes out to play (which,
because he is insane and because this is a horror film, usually involves
killing as well)
whenever traditional boy-girl couplings loom. All those heterosexual
pairings at Lisa's party, and we wonder why that's what triggers the
complete shift from Jesse to Freddy?
The
fact that A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is slagged
regularly (even by Freddy himself, Robert Englund) as the weakest in the
series is a disservice to a textually and subtextually rich film. Viewed
on its own, apart from the baggage of the Elm Street series, Nightmare 2
is a stylish and unsettling slice of 80s horror at its best. Viewed in
the context of the series, it is an anomaly, this is true, but it is
certainly better than Nightmares 5 and 6 and Freddy Vs. Jason. I would
call it the best of all the sequels, and a more than worthy follow-up to
the first film, and at the very least, you should check out this weird
touchstone of 80s mores and gore
-- Copyright ©
2004 by Jason Shawhan
