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Wednesday, October 2, 2013

31 Days of Halloween 2013 - Day 2

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
1985
Jack Sholder

Its five years after the events of A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Walsh family moves into the same home where Nancy battled Freddy Kruger (Robert Englund).  Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) begins to experience nightmares of Freddy directing him to kill.  As Jesse falls further and further under the control of Kruger, his would-be girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers), struggles to grasp what’s happening to Jesse and stop it before it totally ruins her bitchin’ pool party.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 has hands-down the best opening sequence of all the Nightmare films, with the ground falling away under a school bus and leaving it teetering on a single pillar of stone over a vast canyon.  After that point your mileage may vary. It’s certainly the weirdest of the Nightmare sequels; it doesn’t feel like the film that came before it or any of them after it (well… maybe New Nightmare (1994), a bit). It eschews elaborate nightmare set-pieces for a possession story. Much has been made about the homoerotic subtext of the story; the director claims it was unintentional. Either way, it can be read as a clever satire about coming out of the closet being seen as transforming into an uncontrollable monster in the eyes of everyone around you, and only the kiss of a good woman can set it right.  Possibly even more important: It has the only exploding canary in the entire film series.

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