A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) 1/2

One thing is assured when a horror film does big money at the box office- it will get a sequel (or a dozen) and that sequel will be a cheap imitation of the original. Typically they're made cheaply and bank on name recognition. It's the same formula to make a buck. Friday the 13th built an '80's franchise on this idea.

Which brings us to Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, which takes Wes Craven's concept and sticks a firecracker up it's wazoo. The film takes place five years after the original film with Jesse (Mark Patton) who now resides in Nancy's old room. He starts having nightmares about our favorite child murderer eventually becoming the body for Freddy's brain, allowing the Fredster to escape into the real world of S&M loving gym teachers and exploding parakeets.

This movie just flat out sucks. It's a thrown together piece of shit that really has nothing in common with the original other than Freddy Krueger. Wes Craven's brilliant concept becomes a side line that's eventually flushed down the toilet in this film. The brilliance is that Krueger could get you in the one thing that no one can run away from- your unconscious. In this film people are getting ripped apart left and right during waking hours because he has Jessie's body? Yet there's supernatural stuff allowing Krueger the ease of slicing the gym teacher like a ham. This film is a mess.

And the acting doesn't help either. Englund is still creepy as Freddy in this one, but the rest of the cast is strictly D grade cheap actors (excluding Clu Gallagher) that haven't been heard from since unless it's crap on TV. Directed by Jack Sholder, who would gives us a much better film called The Hidden a couple years after this, really doesn't wow us in any directorial skill. It's like an after school special. We also have to lay blame on writer David Chaskin, who must have written this in an outhouse because it is a foul piece of work. Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is basically gravy train trash that banked on the name and the character and little else.

(as I side note I have to add that Wes Craven refused to do a sequel because of the manipulation storyline and the fact he didn't want the film to spawn sequels. Ironically, this same year he directed a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that is just as bad as this film)