Friday, September 25, 2015

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge [MA]


Jesse and his family have moved into a new house, but he hasn’t even finished unpacking and he’s already having strange nightmares about a guy with knifed fingers. Stories run rampant around the schoolyard about how the last owner of Jesse’s house went mad and killed themselves, but then Jesse finds a diary and the nightmares become all too real as he reads Nancy’s accounts of Fred Krueger. Soon Jesse is fighting for his life and his sanity as Freddy starts to take control of his body when he sleeps, killing his friends and loved ones, and threatening to take Jesse down with him. 

Hands down, one of the stupidest movies ever! I don’t think you can even call it a sequel because, aside from the house and the villain, there is literally nothing linking it properly to Craven’s original classic. And it definitely shouldn’t be called Freddy’s Revenge for the simple reason that he has nothing and no one to revenge against! All this movie is, is a return of the vengeful ghost who apparently is now killing because it takes fear to make him stronger. 

Oh there are so many things wrong with this film. For a start, it really shouldn’t exist on principal, just like Psycho II. The brilliance of the first movie was that it left us in complete suspense; really without any sense of closure, just shock. The whole dream-within-a-dream sequence with the striped car was awesome and a perfect way to finish the piece. Whilst I won’t deny that Freddy is a cool villain, it really should have been left there. I think the biggest thing that annoyed me with this flick was the fact that Freddy is now trying to gain strength to enter the real world through a corporeal being, in this case Jesse. What made Freddy so freaky in the first film was the fact that he was free of that mortal coil in the dream-plane, showing off how he could slice himself open and cut off his fingers and stuff. Now he wants to be in the real world? The whole thing makes no sense to me, even if we consider the argument that he would still be immune in reality. The idea behind Freddy was that he was this vengeful ghost that was getting revenge by killing the children of the townsfolk who killed him I their dreams. Bringing him back into a story where there is really no goal for him aside from gaining strength is really piss-weak writing. 
On that subject, the script is really bad, to the point of utmost mind-numbing lobotomy! The idea that Freddy haunts the house and that’s how he can possess Jesse is a really weak idea, which actually never gets explained, and this is where the film really starts to take shape as the giant question mark that it is. Hints as to what’s going on are dropped, but never properly explored, the audience are left to pretty much do all the work, which really just isn’t the point, and by the end of the flick it does seem that the whole reason it’s in existence is to play with special gore effects and nothing else. 
The makeup and special effects are pretty gruesome and impressive to a certain extent I am willing to admit, but that is still no reason why the writers couldn’t have tried a bit harder or the actors actually attempt to act! 
The performances are pretty shocking, either overacted completely or so underdone wooden puppets would have delivered more animated performances. There are absolutely no connections between characters at all, and no chemistry between the two leads, which really shuts the film down as their ‘love’ is meant to be what can save Jesse. 
Starring Mark Patton, Kim Myers, Robert Rustler, Clu Gulager, Hope Lange, Marshall Bell, Melinda O’ Fee, Tom McFadden, Sydney Walsh, Christie Clark, and Robert Englund, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is a pretty piss-weak film all around. Filled with action, some fairly gruesome points of interest, possession, violence, murder, ‘romance’ and ‘drama’, it’s a pretty terrible movie!

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