A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2

Special to PollyStaffle.com

Directed by Jack Sholder (who also gave us the second Wishmaster) A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge is a weird one from 1985. I’m not the biggest fan of the whole Nightmare series, but there is something worth noting here.

While lots, if not all, slasher films have a whole lot of messed up sexual shit about teenage girls in them, Nightmare on Elm Street 2 actually has more weird sexual shit about teenage boys in it. There’s a lot of shots of the young male stars in the underwear, a lot of crotch and ass footage, much the way there’s a lot of teenage breast shots in say Halloween 4. It’s all about how Freddy Kruger wants this teenage boy’s body. Yeah, okay Freddy Kruger is an undead entity that enters people’s dreams, so that means he wants to posses the kid, but still, the thing is about how Freddy Krueger wants this kid’s body.

Actually, that’s not the only older man in the movie who has the hots for the hero of the film Jessie. His baseball coach is fond of disciplining the strapping young lad, and hangs out at gay S&M clubs. There’s some line where Jessie and his friend are in the locker room talking about how the coach “has a stick up his ass.” They actually have the scene with the young man going into the S&M bar that just happens to be right down the street, and good old coach takes Jessie back to the gym for some discipline (still in his leather outfit). Freddy enters the boy’s body and kills the coach naked in the showers. I’m not making this up; they have the coach hanging bloody and naked in the showers. It looks more or less like some gay bondage porn. There’s even some towel whipping in there.

After that the police are at the door of his house with Jessie because he’s been found wondering around naked. His dad wants to know what he’s on. That’s not the issue, the issue is Freddy Kruger wants his body. His girlfriend reaches out to him, to try and connect and understand what’s wrong with him, but he grows distant - that’s also because Freddy Kruger wants his body. Frightened and confused by his interaction with Freddy Kruger, he goes to his male friend Brady’s house while Brady is naked in bed. Freddy Kruger enters Jessie’s body again, and kills Brady. Freddy Kruger loves entering Jessie’s body just as much as that baseball coach always had a stick up his ass and was big on disciplining young boys.

Freddy Kruger just wants this teenage boy’s body!

In a way, all the slasher movies are pretty much like that, teenagers are having sex, a little nudity, the incidental music gets dissonant and then the teenage girl is hacked apart. Is it a sexual kick, does the killer enjoy hacking the girl up, killing her boyfriend, both? Prom Night, Halloween 4 - there’s a lot of films that are that way. Nightmare on Elm St 2 is like that, but more in the direction of homosexual innuendo, or even in the coach character, just straight out homosexual content.

Not all the deviant sexual content in Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is homoerotic, when Jessie engages in foreplay with his girlfriend, that big foot long Freddie Kruger tongue just pops right on her stomach. The whole Freddy Kruger character always had the element of being a pedophilic sadist - remember, he initially died because he was murdering children and set on fire by the children’s parents. I’d say Nightmare on Elm Street 2 plays up the homoerotic angle of that. Weird.

Sleepaway Camp from the 80s has the little gender reversal trick ending where the Angela character that goes around killing is actually a boy and they show the penis just as the credits roll. The slasher genre is full of all kinds of fucked up sexual/gender content. Its kind of a bottomless pit of fucked up sexual/gender content, if you think about it. That interests me, I’m not sure it constitutes an obsession of mine. There is a temptation sometimes to over analyze all that. When we find twisted ass jerk off material like that around here, we generally have a policy of posting it.

The Nightmare on Elm Street series is not my favorite, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is no exception. I prefer other horror films, although I must admit the Dokken theme song to the third of the series was seriously rocking.

- William Wheaton, June 2010

For more from Wheaton, visit The Wacky World of William Wheaton on Facebook.