La Revanche de Freddy

The original 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is still to me one of the scariest and best horror films there is, as well as a truly great film in its own right and introduced us to one of the genre's most iconic villains in Freddy Krueger. It is always difficult to do a sequel that lives up to a film as good as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' let alone one to be on the same level.

'A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge' is not to me the dreadful film as reputed, but, while its attempts to do something different is admirable, it should have been much better than it turned out to be. It is very difficult to not feel disappointed when you inevitably compare 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' to its first sequel and find that the drop in quality is so significant and hard to ignore. Whether 'Freddy's Revenge' is the worst of the series is debatable, to me and many others it is one of the weaker ones.

'Freddy's Revenge' is not a complete waste of time. It starts off very promisingly, with the bus scene is thrillingly unsettling. Easily the film's scariest moment and the scene one remembers the most. Robert Englund is still very freaky and shows why Freddy is so iconic as a villain, he may not be quite as terrifying but the material isn't as strong here and he is still highly effective.

It's not a bad-looking film, there is a slickness to it and there are some nightmarish effects. There are some eerie moments, though none of the rest of the film lives up to the bus scene, and some amusing dark humour. The music is suitably haunting.

However, there are also a fair share of problems. The scares don't come enough, and while there are effective ones there are also just as many that are perfunctory and pretty tame by 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' series standards. Credit is due for trying to do something different and there are parts that do intrigue. A tighter pace and less pedestrian direction would have made the execution better, as well as trying to do less and focus more on the quality of the scares and how the story is told.

Jesse is such a dull damp squib of a character who lacks a quick-thinking or logical brain let alone any kind of presence. The one-note expressionless acting of Mark Patton accentuates this. The rest of the cast are nowhere near as bad, but when it comes to the acting the only one to properly rise above the material is Englund. Lastly, the ending is a slap in the face and really undoes Freddy's character, he would never do what he does at the end and it doesn't make sense for him to do it.

Overall, not that bad but could have been much better. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Now that Nightmare is up to seven or eight sequels, while Friday The 13th is up to ten (and counting), it must be hard to look back on the days when horror films tried to be vaguely original or even different. With all the Screams and I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summers, making Freddy's Revenge in these "enlightened" days would be just about impossible.

But culture, and particularly youth culture, in the 1980s was considerably different, certainly far less conservative and anti-creative. In those days, The Cure were a big thing, and even the most basic of pop sludge was far more creative than what we have today. Not to mention that it was far easier to make dodgy films and get them released theatrically.

A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2 picks up five years after the original, although it was a rush-job filmed less than a year after said original was out of the theatre. The film company, at that time the independent startup known as New Line, saw a quick and easy meal ticket that only required them to convince Robert Englund to submerge himself in what looks like three tons of multi-coloured latex. So the idea of a decent script, decent actors, or decent photography, went right out the window.

Which is kind of sad, really, when you consider that this is the only Freddy film in which an original premise is used. You might want to skip the rest of this paragraph if you have yet to see it. In it, a young man (whose behaviour is consistent with repressed homosexuality, in one of those hilarious plot coincidences) has just moved into the house from which Nancy originally dealt with Freddy. With the help of the sort of girlfriend any other male (and even some females) of this age would want to climb atop of at every opportunity, our hero attempts to fight off Freddy (and his own gayness), which in turn creates some very interesting plot devices. The moment when our heroine is holding up a carving knife at Freddy, who gives her a graphic and terrifying demonstration of the fact that she'll kill her (confused) lover if she kills Freddy, could have been one of the most horrific moments in the entire series. I am not quite convinced that it isn't, given that the only other episode in the series that was vaugely adult after this point was Part 3.

Unfortunately, the actors hired for these roles cannot act their way out of a wet paper bag. The only cast member with acting skills that even compare to Robert Englund's would be Marshall Bell. I am convinced that his turn here as the (gay) gym teacher was what got him hired to be in Total Recall and StarShip Troopers. Mark Patton (no relation to the Mike Patton who leads Mr. Bungle or the Mike Patton who was an early cast member in You Can't Do That On Television) is terrible - his only talent, as such, is to scream like a seventy-year-old woman. The actors who play his family look as if they belong on a cheap knock-off of Family Ties. The best actor in the whole piece was the budgie, who seemed to decide he would rather explode than be in this idiotic film a second longer.

When all is said and done, Robert Louis Stevenson said it much better in The Frightening Tale Of Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde (although there are no shortage of adaptations to that work which suck more than this). Normally, I would give this effort a three out of ten, but it gets two bonus points because it is like no other episode in the Nightmare canon, and that is a damned good thing when you put it alongside episodes four through seven.

This has got to be the strangest horror sequel of all time, next to "Exorcist II: The Heretic," which was another brave risk that failed commercially due to it's weirdness and different tone. But the terms "weird and creepy" are not really an insult when describing a horror film. Those dark, sexual overtones in this movie lent it a haunting and sinister feel, and a truly nightmarish tone. I don't think audiences in 1985 were ready for something like this, but no matter; the reason to see this film is for the appearance of Robert Englund as the burnt child killer, Fred Kruger, and before this character was made into a joke in later films, this guy had to be the most horrifying monster of all time. And he is intensely scary in this film, which succeeds in preserving the dark tone of the original. Something the first two films managed to succeed in doing, was making scenes filmed in the bright sunlight, seem as scary and menacing as the night scenes with all the fog and shadows. Of course that locker room scene with the pervy coach was filmed at night, and I found that to be extremely unsettling, and like nothing else I had seen in other movies of the genre. Another good thing about this sequel is how it looks like the first film, with it's sets and lighting and camera work. That is the connection that it needed to connect to the first one, and the inclusion of Nancy's diary was a great way to bring her character into the new movie. The four friends in the sequel brought to mind the dynamics of the original, with the four friends dealing with the menace of Fred Kruger. I also thought the idea of Kruger possessing the body of the main character in order to be able to kill in the real world, was pretty intense. This one is different, and will not please some of the Elm Street fanbase, but the fact that Fred Kruger has never been more creepy and terrifying than in THIS movie, should make it a major selling point for "Freddy's Revenge..."

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, the second installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and probably the worst in the series. I was lucky enough to get the boxed DVD set of A Nightmare on Elm Street series and I got to see all the sequels. I think this is the sequel that I disliked the most, just because it didn't at all add up to what the first film was. It was like watching a cheesy teenager show with a twist of Nightmare on Elm Street. The kid who's the new victim, Jesse, is like Kevin Bacon's character in Footloose where he's not excepted by anyone, now just mix Footloose with Nightmare on Elm Street and you've got A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge. The story had potential, but it just failed.

Jesse is the new kid in town and he has moved into Nancy Thomson's old house. Not too soon is he having the same horrific nightmares that Nancy was having about Freddy Krueger. Jesse confides in his neighbor/crush, Lisa, she doesn't believe him until she starts having the nightmares herself. She researches Freddy and finds out that he is after Jesse's body and wants to take it over. But she may be too late when he does enter Jesse's body and is after her and all the rest of the kids at Jesse's high school.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge isn't bad, just compared to the series, yeah, it's the worst in that category. The story had something, but it wasn't delivered well. But just think about what A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge was compared too with it's first film that was an ultimate classic. So maybe that's why we have such a problem with the film. But I would recommend it if you wanna see the sequels, but if you're watching it without knowing the first story, I don't think you'll enjoy it.

5/10

The opening scenes of this film are very promising. The title music has a very sinister, menacingly calm quality to it and there is an excellently nightmarish sequence in a school bus which is driven by Freddy.

But generally the film is a might-have-been. True, it has its moments, such as the discovery of Nancy's diary and the scene at the party, but things are pretty tame compared to the first film. Jesse is the new teenager living in Nancy's old house and haunted by nightmares, but apart from the opening sequence there are very few dreamlike effects. There are some nightmarish animals but they are too briefly seen and are in such total darkness that they're barely visible. The film is more of a cliched haunted house yarn than a story about nightmares. There are some interesting homosexual undertones but they are never really developed properly. There are also gaping plot-holes. After Freddy tears his way out of Jesse's body, the remains somehow return to life. The next time Freddy appears Jesse seems to be inside him. Can anyone work out what's going on?

What really lets this film down is its weak ending. Freddy and his boiler room suddenly burst into flames because Jesse's girlfriend tells him she loves him. Utterly feeble. Surely the script-writers could have come up with a better ending than this.

Not an unwatchable film by any means, but just not the sequel it should have been.