Home Movies: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

 

 

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. The inevitable sequel was rushed into production and in that tradition I will be quick with this little blog. For real this time.

Five years after the first movie Jesse's family moves into Nancy's old house. Jesse dreams of Fred Krueger telling him to kill for him as a human host. Jesse struggles with reality and the emerging darkness of Freddy within him.

This movie has been criticized for many things the main complaint is changing the dynamic of Freddy Krueger. I agree with this complaint since he is no longer is he killing teens creatively through nightmares, he's possessing a conflicted teen boy and using him as an avatar to kill in the waking world. While the Freddy character presence is felt throughout the movie, his screen time is limited.  I admire the risk taking in creating what should have been a more personal and cerebral story but ultimately it missed the mark and the complex nature of the mythology set up in the first movie.

I want to talk about the ineffective parents and the focus of Freddy's attacks as I did in the first movie. We also need to touch on the subject of the movie's "homoerotic subtext". Luckily they are all connected this time. This time around our villain attacks males nearly exclusively. There's only one explicit female death as part of the twist ending. The male adults are incredibly obtuse and domineering. There's a ton of male humiliation, light bondage, and questioning of physical desires. Jesse is depicted in a way where it appears that he's a closeted homosexual. I'll acquiesce and say possibly bisexual, but a lot of his conflict is related to his beard, Lisa. Truth be told I was a little disappointed when he and Lisa started making out, luckily Freddy begins to mess with Jesse at that moment causing him to run away. He ends up hovering over friend Grady's bed. Grady calls him out on it too and well "Freddy" kills him for it. Is there a "gay" story in Freddy's Revenge? Of course. The question is, why does that merit negative criticism?

An interesting note about this male centric story (besides the fact that Freddy took no revenge despite the title) is that secondary character Lisa is the one that defeats Freddy and saves our protagonist. A little disappointing since we spent so much time with Jesse's personal struggle we want him to be the one that wins. The truth of the matter is that Jesse and Lisa's love for each other is what saved them. I'm cool with that, I just hope that we're not given this ending as " a gay man needs a good woman to put him on the right path" message.

 

So there you go. It's not a bad movie but our expectations hurt us going in. We wanted more of the magic from Nightmare 1, and we got conflicting message about a conflicted character.

Watch this space for more scattershot thoughts and mental meanderings from my mutated brain.

-Bobgar

 

 

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is Written by David Chaskin , Directed by Jack Sholder, and stars Mark Patton, Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Clu Gulager, Hope Lange, and Robert Englund.

Home Movies: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

I try, even though there's no way to stop it, I'm getting older.  One of the few upsides to getting older is having been there in a lot of "you had to be there eras".  I was there for A Nightmare on Elm Street and the subsequent Freddy mania.  I did not watch this in the theatres but I watched it in home media, which reports that the movie was released on VHS in "early 1985". The crazy thing was that I didn't need to watch it to know all about Freddy. His glove with the blades, his "Christmas sweater", and that he killed you in your dreams.  Everyone was talking about the movie. Was I eight years old, or nine? I don't know. What I do know is I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street and I LOVED it. Hell, everyone did, and this was before Freddy started cracking wise.  He was just a force of evil at this point.

What was it about this movie that had me so engrossed?  I was a boy, and I know that I liked things that were tough, mean, scary and evil. It seems logical that I would gravitate towards the entity that was Freddy, although the movie only referred to him as Fred Krueger when the characters spoke about him. The jump rope song was where Freddy was coined. We were all kids so that's what we remembered, the silly song.  There's more to it though, the dream imagery?  Was this a precursor to my liking surrealist art?  It's difficult to pin point but having watched this movie again for the first time in years and still enjoying it says a lot about how well the movie is constructed. I'll be brief with my little reminiscence and critique.

A group of teens, Nancy, Tina, Rod, and Glen, are terrorized in their dreams by a dirty, scarred man with a glove that has blades attached to the fingers. Once the teens begin to die horrifically while asleep, the Nancy discovers that he is Fred Krueger, a child killer murdered by the neighborhood parents years ago. He is getting revenge on the children of those that killed him.

What I couldn't understand at eight or nine is how sexual the movie is and how sex aggressive Freddy's taunts are to the women.  The tongue flicks, the glove between the legs in the bathtub scene, and the "I'm your boyfriend now" taunt.  He's such a bastard, and definitely has issues with women. He doesn't play with his male prey, just kills them. The women he delays gratification by drawing out the chase.  Subconsciously I think I gravitated towards this because I love a good heroine in science fiction and horror story.  Two of my favorite protagonists are Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner, both would be victims who faced personifications of death and not only survived but flourished because of it. They became symbols of hope, determination, and discipline. Will Nancy Thompson be added to this list? Too early to tell from this first movie. She survived this encounter with Freddy. Didn't she? Maybe? We'll catch up to her down the road.  Many heroes are defined by their villains, and there is no doubt that Freddy is demonic chaos personified.

Another aspect that I gravitate towards is the parents being oblivious of the dangers or being impotent to help.  There's a major component of the movie that deals with ineffective parents and adult role models.  The teacher, the doctor, the police, the parents.  The parents are actually to blame for unleashing the evil upon the children although just as unforeseen circumstances of their vigilantism.  Nancy and the rest have the added obstacles of the parents trying "to do what's right for the kids" and thereby causing more damage than help.  The parents don't realize that they are killing their children with poor parenting.  Another example of this is the movie Kids. Truth be told my fascination with obfuscated or ineffective parents started with the Peanuts newspaper strip.  Omnipresent parents, yet they are never seen nor heard properly. It's fascinating to have the children in their own worlds and the parents are actually sub-villains or obstacles to their goals, which in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street is survival.

There’s also the questioning of reality and the possible descent into madness that I enjoy. I intended to keep this short and here I am rambling incoherently in a dozen different directions. I like the movie. Sure, some of it is rough and silly, but it retains its charm and horror.  I could go on rambling but I won't. If inclined I'll follow the series by posting more here on the blog.

-Bobgar

A Nightmare on Elm Street  is Written & Directed by: Wes Craven. It stars John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri, Johnny Depp, and Robert Englund.

Boob Toob Supplemental: Toob Raider edition

We got a new cat and named her Indy. Because she likes to explore. We did it as a joke after talking to fellow Boob Toober/Blooger/cat owner Rebecca but the cat seemed to respond to it so we just went with it. But enough of my life story, here's some videos and junk!


Raiding the Lost Ark

Really cool 'filmumentary' by Jamie Benning. This actually came out 2 years ago but just got around to seeing it recently. It's Raiders of the Lost Ark but spliced with supplementary material (in the form of audio, video, transcripts, pictures and even comics) related to the making of the movie. Really fun to watch especially if you like Raiders and/or Indiana Jones in general.

Raiding The Lost Ark: A Filmumentary By Jamie Benning from Jamie Benning on Vimeo.

Staging Raiders

In case the above video wasn't enough for ya, here's Raiders in black and white and with a different score to help emphasise Steven Spielberg's staging techniques. The guy behind all this is director Steven Soderbergh and I guess he thinks very highly about Raiders from a visual staging standpoint.

No embeds but please go to this link for his write up as well as the video. Careful with that thang, Indy!

Korra Book 4 trailer

I can't believe this series is almost over. Just 4 books/52 episodes in total. I thought book (or season) 4 wasn't until next year but it'll be out this month. Maybe Nickelodeon wants it out of the way. Such a good series, one of my all-time fave animated shows. I'm gonna be sad when it's over and I hope they do another show set in the same universe.

Moonlight | Sony A7s ISO test

I'm into photography and I watch a lot of these kinds of tests but I normally don't post them here. This is pretty nice though. Shot using a Sony A7s and lit entirely by moonlight. Good job by Sony creating a sensor that performs really well at the higher ISOs and if I was more of a video guy, I wouldn't hesitate picking one up. (I have the A7 and it does really well with photos.)

Moonlight | Sony A7s ISO test from Carbon Studios on Vimeo.

Japanese GotG trailer

Yeah, I'm not done with the Guardians of the Galaxy love. Check out the Japan trailer. A lot more entertaining than the one we got.

I had a couple more GotG related stuff to post (one was the team's appearance in the Avengers Pokemon-like anime and the other was Chris Pratt's GotG/Marvel parody by SNL) but they seem to have been taken down from Youtube. Oh well. Watashi wa Groot!


Optical illusion

For those of you who like headaches...

I'll see you guys later! (Assuming you're still alive after watching that video.)