Chapter Two:
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge
By Brett Beach
December 8, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Confession: As blatantly obvious and simplistic (but catchy!) as the above quote is, it just now hit me how it does have a second level relevant to this week's discussion of the further adventures of Freddy Krueger. There will be more on that later. Also, some of this material appears in shorter form, in slightly different context, elsewhere on Box Office Prophets. If you are already familiar with those parts, feel free to skip around to find new and more unsettling terrains.
Setting the stage: Time - Summer 1988. Place - My cramped upstairs bedroom (more like an extended slightly long-ish attic if you want to be specific) in a house resting mere feet back from the world famous Metolius River.
I was 12 and I had two life-size cardboard standees - both movie-related and passed along to me by my connections at the local video store - taking up the lion's share of available space in said cramped dwelling. The first was for Adventures in Babysitting. Why? Simple. Because I was a pre-adolescent male and Elisabeth Shue was the face of womanhood to me. I can picture her singing along to "Then He Kissed Me" right now. And me singing along to her singing along and, sighhh... Um, where was I?
Oh yes. The other featured a pair of cruel, cold eyes narrowed under a dirty fedora peering out over a trio of bad-ass teens, ready to rumble, who lay perched on the blades of a steel-knifed hand. All of this was accompanied by the incredibly awesome tagline, "If you think you'll get out alive, you must be dreaming." That's right. For those playing along at home, it was the standee for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The one with the best tag lines ("Welcome to prime time, bitch!") the coolest cameos (honestly, I am sure there were times Dick Cavett wished he could have skewered his interviewees) and the riff-tastic title song by Dokken.
I couldn't tell you anything about them then or now except that the song rocked so hard, it gave Freddy Krueger himself nightmares – that is, if the accompanying video was accurate. While I maintain that The Dream Master is the best of the sequels (thanks to Renny Harlin's direction), Dream Warriors cemented Elm Street's status as a pop-culture touchstone and has become a reference point of sorts, much like Electric Boogaloo. So there you have it: Kris Parker and Freddy Krueger face to face for the majority of my junior-high years. I like to think of it as the angel and the devil on my respective shoulders, whispering into my ears.
Fast-forward two decades later and both Babysitting and Elm Street are up for (re)boot/launch/jigger-ing. I think it's no longer even a case of "what's old is new again" but to paraphrase a Bloc Party lyric, of "things replacing things." There's nothing definitive about the whys and wherefores on the former, but the latter has had a slot staked out for a while now just prior to the start of the 2010 summer movie season. Surprisingly, I am not all up in arms about it, either. I have a strong affinity for the slasher films of the 1980s and denying this part of me would be as ridiculous and false as over professing a love that doesn't exist, for say, the majority of Godard's work. At the same time, I don't consider it an affront to my childhood that Rob Zombie has traded in his Dragula for Michael Myers.
The original Elm Street remains both fairly un-campy and somewhat disturbing. This is because time hasn't diminished the genius conceit that Craven came up with: What if your dreams could kill you? What if sleeping wasn't something to be enjoyed but something to be feared? What if the Boogeyman wore an ugly sweater and could slice you open with his knife hands? The first Elm Street still feels like a waking dream/nightmare. It's very visceral, played fairly straight and even the moments of sunlight and (relative) happiness feel as if they're reflected off of impending clouds. The violence, particularly the brutal slaying of Tina, doesn't come with any jokey relief.
Of course, the key difference between Freddy and his slasher movie brethren is that he talked while they remained decidedly silent. And while the series became campy quite quickly beginning with the first sequel, consideration must be given for the fine line that Robert Englund walks with his performances. The lines may be campy, the circumstances may be campy, but Freddy never is. He is confident, quite smart and exceedingly cruel. In a way, I think there is a hint of Freddy in Heath Ledger's Joker – the delight in the chaos he brings to the world around him and his utter control of the situations he calls to life. Englund deserves all the praise he has gotten and continues to get for making Freddy such a diabolical and fascinating villain.
Interesting fact: In 1984, Wes Craven was against turning A Nightmare on Elm Street into a franchise and wanted nothing to do with the proposed sequel once the first film's popularity dictated that one would get made.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was a hit the way a lot of low-budget horror films of its era were. It never played in more than several hundred theaters at one time but moved around the country slowly and was in theaters from November of 1984 through the spring of 1985, grossing just over $25 million against a budget of under $2 million. This was the first breakout commercial success for independent studio New Line Cinema (R.I.P.) and led to the oft-repeated maxim that New Line was "The House that Freddy Built."
Freddy's Revenge followed this pattern explicitly, opening almost a year to the day after the first film in the fall of 1985. It debuted in twice as many theaters (almost 300!) and thus had an opening weekend about twice as large as the first Nightmare (nearly $3 million!). It went on to play well into the New Year and accomplished something that a lot of its horror ilk has never done: it grossed more than the first film did, finishing at just shy of $30 million. In real unadjusted dollars, it also out-grossed Friday the 13th Part 2 and Halloween II. Both of these feats are quite surprising given that: Freddy's Revenge doesn't feel like that much of a sequel to the first film; is generally considered to be one of the lesser installments in the long-running series; maintains a predominantly campy tone on several levels; and breaks a lot of the rules about how horror sequels are supposed to function. Oh, and then there's the part where the film functions primarily as an allegory for a young gay male's attempts to come to terms with his homosexuality. But I wouldn't want to get ahead of myself. Let's consider each of these angles in slightly more detail.
Point A: Aside from Englund and a few marked references to the events of the first film via a diary from one of the original characters, Freddy's Revenge doesn't have a lot of ties to the first film. What's interesting is that for much of the new talent involved here, this marks the high point of their career, relatively speaking. Since Craven - who had written and directed the first film - opted not to return, a new writer and director were both hired. Jack Holder had directed an earlier film for the studio and would go on to make a charming little sci-fi actioner entitled The Hidden in 1987 before sticking mostly to TV movies and episodes over the next two decades. David Chaskin's IMDb resume only lists a handful of writing credits before and after Freddy's Revenge.
What's interesting to me is how Chaskin's screenplay seems like it must have existed prior to the first Elm Street and was quickly adapted to retrofit it for the Krueger character. It doesn't have the feel of a horror film except in fits and starts, although it does follow the time-honored template of beginning with a nightmarish opening that turns out to be a dream and ending with an "are we still in reality or back in a dream" kicker that is not so-subtle code for "we're leaving that there sequel door open again." In the Elm Street universe, Freddy's Revenge has had its bastard child status enhanced by virtue of the fact that subsequent installments (specifically parts three, four and five) all take place in quick succession and with one or more recurring characters and that the events of Freddy's Revenge are never referenced again. If Chaskin was hired to quickly crank out this in '85, it's doubly intriguing that both he and New Line decided this was the direction to take the Krueger character. The revenge that the title promises isn't there except in theory and Freddy functions more as a doppelganger of protagonist Jesse (see Point D)
Point B: In terms of popularity and critical marks (from both professionals and fans alike), Freddy's Revenge ranks somewhere in the middle, and after reviewing the first seven installments earlier this year, I would have to agree with that. What falls under part two? Five and six both. The Dream Master aims to be gothic and tragic but misses its mark on both counts and Freddy's Dead comes across as nothing more than an early ‘90s time capsule back when 3-D (remember that wacky gimmick?) was making one of its cyclical returns. There is a quite funny Johnny Depp cameo, a young Breckin Meyer, an out of place Yapphet Kotto, and not much else.
Point C: After the fleeting but extreme violence in the first Nightmare and its scores of unsettling images (the thought of insects falling out of dead Tina's mouth still gives me the heebie jeebies), the natural presumption would be that Freddy's Revenge would accept the challenge and give us double the violence; new, even more creative dream kills; and a much, much higher body count. Recall that Friday the 13th Part Two had oodles of nastiness (much of it inspired by the seminal Italian horror film/slasher progenitor Twitch of the Death Nerve), including couple impaled by spear while lovemaking and ice pick to brain. Halloween II featured death by scalding in ultra-hot hospital whirlpool and - my personal favorite - young intern slipping on blood dripping from a shunt and hitting his head on the floor.
With Freddy's Revenge, we get a gym coach murdered in the showers, a best friend impaled on a door, Freddy crashing a backyard barbeque and heating up the swimming pool and, uh, well there's not much more than that, folks. The special effects are consistently good throughout and though the body count is negligible, there are any number of gory moments (such as Freddy slicing open his brain to cap off a one-liner) to make up for it. These tend to be overshadowed and forgotten however in the shadow of . . .
Point D: The camp. And I ain't talking about summer, sleepaway, or band. He may have been a loathsome and evil child killer on the other side of the grave, but here Freddy starts tossing off the bon mots that make him that much more agreeable and charming, even if they are all puns of the sort that would have gotten a veteran of the Catskills circuit nothing but groans. As mentioned at the beginning, Englund brings more to the part over the run of the series than some of the installments deserved. That Freddy remained even marginally scary as he became more of a jokester is thanks to Englund's performance.
The campy jokiness is even more noticeable in the context of a film where, to wit, a sadistic gym coach who frequents S&M bars gets slashed to death while tied up with jump ropes in the shower and the shower heads orgasmically erupt in geysers of hot red water; where the hunky best friend/antagonist of the male lead (Jesse) doesn't know how to react when told by Jesse that there's "something inside of me" trying to get out and is later attacked by Jesse; where this concern of Jesse's is explicitly visualized by the sublime coitus interruptus of Freddy's tongue coming out of Jesse's mouth as Jesse attempts to get beyond second base with sweet/hot/deeply concerned girlfriend Lisa; and that the finale features the all mighty power of true (straight?) love allowing Jesse to be reborn out of the fiery ashes of Krueger's clutches.
Even as a ten-year-old watching this for the first time with my male best friend, oblivious to camp (remember how Libby Gelman-Waxner flew over my head?), I knew that there was something unusual about the plot of Freddy's Revenge. Googling the film and checking out film fan's reactions to this mirrors my own confusion. Is it very weird unintentional anti-gay propaganda? How real is anything that happens in the film? (i.e. the part where Jesse storms out of the house and later winds up at the gay club after walking in the rain is dramatically schizoid). What I still find most puzzling is the ending of the film: the "return" of Freddy via a gloved hand bursting through the chest of one of Jesse and Lisa's friends (a minor, minor character) on the school bus. It made no sense at the time and it still seems like a gyp.
A glance at a copy of what I take to be Chaskin's original script provides an alternate compelling ending. Instead of the friend on the bus, it is just Jesse and Lisa. They go to kiss and as they do...Freddy's tongue comes out of her mouth and attacks him. Nice ironic reversal, good use of "The Return of the Repressed" motif and it offers a not-so-subtle- dig at the tragic implications of being unable to accept yourself as you are. Or is that all too much to pull out of a little tongue action?
Next week: Part One of a two-part holiday year-end spectacular. My Christmas present to you: my take on one of the most loathed films at BOP. The catch: I like it.