A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge is a pretty bad movie that's probably better than it should be. There's some sort of rule at play here that states slasher films that tend to follow the conventions closely can never really be that bad and they can never really be that great. The exceptions on the high end (the original Psycho, its remake, and Freddy vs. Jason) succeed through a very very delicate sense of self-knowledge of their conventions as well as being frankly excellent filmmaking. The failures, like Jason Goes to Hell and Elves, fail in acknowledging their conventions at all. Freddy's Revenge survives, more or less, by playing by the rules.

The film is monster-centric for one. While the protagonists in the Nightmare on Elm Street series seem to be a little more in the center than in the Friday the 13th films, Freddy Krueger is still without a doubt the star. The movie literally sees Freddy Krueger as Satan himself. We learn that it's always hot whenever Freddy is around. He died in his boiler room, of course, and that is where he liked to take his kids when he killed them, so I suppose that there is justification for this plot point. But the film plays up the subtext all the same as pop Satanism. They're getting hot, because Freddy is going to drag them down to Hell where he can have his way with them! There is a scene late in the movie where Freddy is backlit by a bonfire of destruction and cackles, "You are my children now!" This positions him as an anti-Christ figure; when he calls us his children he doesn't mean it in the sense of an omnipotent and protective father figure, but in the sense of an omnipotent and destructive serial-killing pedophile. The defenselessness of the child is not a call to protect for Freddy, but a call to exploit. The film still equates sex with death, and it does so in the right way. The kind of sex that we are talking about I often refer to in terms like "capitalist sex." In capitalist sex there is always somebody on top. Sex is about the gaining of power over others. It's a destructive act; it's about using and throwing away. This differs from the Dworkin feminist perspective where I guess that you have sex sideways, and it's purely an act of creation.

We have a lot of room before I reach my word quota, so let me tell you a story. I've been wanting to tell you this one for a while, but now seems to be the right time. A Broadcast Journalism major (I've become determined to give Social Work another chance and go for a Master's next year, this journalism bullshit is making me depressed), I have to take a Senior Seminar class where we have a group assignment to look at a major issue in journalism from the perspectives of broadcast journalism, print journalism and public relations. We all decided to look at the infamous Britney and Madonna kiss on MTV. I elected to explain the whole message of the kiss and what they were selling by creating a brief four-minute video where I look at Britney's career and how it added up to this, starting with "I'm a Slave 4 U." My video was basically taped off of a VH1 Behind the Music, and I just recorded an audio commentary through selected clips.

And well, I believe that Britney's songs, dances and persona revolve around this idea that she is a really horny virgin. She really wants to have sex, but sees it as destroying her, both spiritually and morally. When that moment of destruction comes, it's bliss however. A lot of Britney's stuff is about big dicks. God help me, I quoted Quentin when I saw that Spears was doing "Like a Virgin." And, of course, she danced with a snake which "isn't only phallic," I explained tongue half-in-cheek, "but the phallus idealized. It's thick, long, and flexible." Big dicks hurt, but the hurt is what it's all about. "I'm a Slave 4 U" is obviously about sexual submissiveness. Britney Spears' whole shtick is sexual submissiveness. With the kiss, she is effectively submitting to the masculine Madonna through her re-enaction of "Like a Virgin," their subsequent kiss where Britney is on her knees and is allowed to rise up for the kiss, and the video that they did together "Me Against the Music" where Madonna tries to seduce Britney into her harem of moneymakers. When we are talking about women being finding ideological and political liberation, I offered that perhaps it would be best to look at Madonna who is now taking a role previously held only by men, namely, possessing Britney Spears. In retrospect I feel regretful that I did not make the connection that in the fiction that they have presented, Madonna is the greatest lover that Britney ever had, having the biggest schlong of all her suitors, embodied by the pimping cane that Madonna brandishes around, and the most authority and experience. The idea that the boyish Justin Timberlake took her virginity doesn't really make sense; the sex is too horizontal and Marxist/Dworkian. Britney wants to be dominated and destroyed, she wants somebody with a bold and powerful sexuality to initiate her.

I think that I have been writing too many reviews of slasher movies and have been thinking of this stuff way too long, as my presentation was met by stunned silence by the rest of my class. The rest of my group promptly disowned my presentation, and finished off our time in front of the class with a bland, superficial and rather thoughtless summation of the kiss and the reasons for its coverage. I was told by the professor (who is usually friendly, but surprisingly stupid and ignorant about current trends in the field of communications; I don't think he had ever heard of Michael Savage and he rarely seems to watch TV or movies except for purposes of entertainment. He lectures on portrayals of race and gender in the media, but there are a lot of wrinkles in his ethical beliefs that need to be ironed out) that two girls left the class, and he was afraid that my presentation had opened his classroom up to sexual harassment charges! He stressed that they were girls, implying in a sense that he still subconsciously holds on to the Victorian ideal of women (especially) being seen in public as being ignorant of sex. The sort of thinking that probably inspires the existence of Britney Spears' schtick. I didn't bring the point up though. He then asked me to write an apology to the entire class, which I promptly did later that day mostly because he got the choke on me and I was convinced that he was right. My apology was forwarded to every member of the class, prefaced with his thoughts on the subject. He said I was disrespectful to the beliefs of the members of the class and my presentation bordered on pornography (!). I explained in my apology that I didn't think that I was creating pornography as much as commenting on it.

The sort of complaints I was thinking that would be lodged against my commentary were along the lines of it was phallo-centric; all I thought about was dick and I had over-romanticized the organ. I thought that somebody would complain that I was being pseudo-intellectual. Good arguments that I hope I could refute but would be worth mentioning. I was hoping that students would come up with an analysis of my work on the Britney/Madonna kiss that would challenge my previous form of thinking. But it seems to me that the thing that bothered people the most was that I was actually talking about sex. I wasn't really talking about sex to shock people, there was a time where I might have done that, but I'm quite past that. I was talking about it as a phenomenon. I probably wouldn't even be talking about it all if it wasn't for that fact that nobody ever does. I actually wanted our topic to be about Al Gore's planned launch of a liberal-oriented news station, but I'd be damned if they didn't decide to talk about the kiss between Britney and Madonna, dance all around the subject of sex, and then get upset at me for actually addressing it. The best defense that I could ever present against my video is that I read Salon.com and nobody else there seems to.

Anyway, struggling to get back to our regularly scheduled programming, I made a reference to how Britney will eventually learn to stop worrying and love the bomb, but it some how got lost in the shuffle while editing. The connection between sex and death is much simpler than punishing people for sinning. In the slasher film, the two are one in the same. Sex is simply the littler death. Human sexuality is complicated. The fact of the matter is that power is a powerful aphrodisiac. Rape, prostitution, slavery and even murder can be powerfully sexy in the correct context and degree. It's not that they should be, but that they are. My opposition towards Dworkin and other such feminist thinkers and their attack towards pornography that objectifies and glorifies the torture of women, is in the very idea that you should feel real, moral guilt for getting turned on by the wrong thing. They're rallying against the idea as much as the action. This is a lot of setup for the tiny segment that I'm going to describe, but there is a scene in Freddy's Revenge where the heroes are looking at Nancy (from the first film)'s diary. They are reading and mocking the passages where she describes how tempting it is to lust after her boyfriend next door. Then she talks about how she dreamed about him again. She describes how his hand is going underneath her sheets and her blanket and up her leg, and then she begins describing his claws. The readers stop their mocking and get serious. She's describing Freddy. Fucking God bless the filmmakers for putting this scene in.

The premise of Freddy's Revenge doesn't make any real sense. The hero, Jesse Walsh, is having nightmares of Freddy Krueger. Krueger isn't trying to kill him, however; he wants to possess his body. Fairly justifiably this aspect of the plot has grated the nerves of many horror fans. They're not even purists, they just don't want to be sold this nonsense. After all, why would Freddy want to run around in the real world when he has more control in dreams? Nancy defeated him in the first film by dragging him out into the real world where he is vulnerable. I went into the film with their acrid impatience in mind, reminding myself that the Friday the 13th series was nearly ruined with a similar twist in Jason Goes to Hell, which stole ITS premise from Freddy's Revenge director Jack Sholder's The Hidden!

The change in the metaphysics of Freddy won me over, however, in that it continues the subtext of the series. Late in the film, Jesse's girlfriend watches in horror as he transforms into Freddy. The sequence seems to be intended as an homage to An American Werewolf in London particularly in the way that Jesse looks down in horror as his arm changes. The werewolf myth is a puberty myth; it's about boys struggling to keep their destructive sexual impulses under control. Teen Wolf anybody? My Demon Lover? There is a humanity to this myth. You can't pigeonhole the werewolf or the person changing into the werewolf as a bad guy. That seems to the rationale for changing the Nightmare on Elm Street legacy. Unlike Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger can be labeled as pure evil and beyond our compassion. The filmmakers seem to understand this, giving us a sequence where a teenager tries to talk Freddy down, telling him that it's all going to be OK. The teen's strategy doesn't work at all on the black-hearted Krueger and he tears him apart. Having Freddy try and possess Jesse adds a little compassion for the beast into the mix. So while the story is pretty insulting on the surface, there is something going on underneath.

The failure of the film doesn't lie as much as the change in the legend, as the redirection of the sexuality of the violence. Freddy must be heterosexual. He has to kill women. No women get killed or really threatened in this film; it seems to shy away from it. Instead they seem to be making Freddy's Revenge into a gay film. Jesse is dealing with his immoral homosexual impulses, not his immoral heterosexual impulses. Let's begin with the fact that Jesse is a pretty sissy name. It's gender-neutral, I know, just like my name Alex. But I'm being honest when I say that it sounds like a girl's name, and the first thing that I think of is Jesse Spano from "Saved By the Bell." It has a natural "e" sound near the end, it's girly. Of all the names to name a character, the filmmakers had to have been sending us some sort of message with the name "Jesse." Whereas Nancy was dreaming about Krueger in the first film, we see that Jesse is dreaming about him in the second film. He is reacting vicariously to her descriptions of Freddy's claw climbing up her leg. That's just the most subtle stuff. Check this out. Jesse is making out with his girlfriend who he hasn't had sex with yet, and suddenly Freddy takes over. He runs over to his hunky friends out and asks to spend the night. The friend thinks that Jesse is crazy for wanting to sleep with him instead of her. Then there's the infamous episode of the track coach who, while dressed in leather (?!), finds Jesse in a bar. He takes him to the school to run laps around the gym, which most agree is highly unusual as it's the middle of the night. Freddy ends up getting to the gym teacher. He ties him up with jump ropes, drags him to the showers, strips off his clothes and snaps a wet towel on his butt! The police later pick up Jesse after seeing him walking around the streets in the nude. When he comes home, he believes that he has killed the coach as Freddy. There's another inexplicable scene in a classroom where Jesse is drifting off during a lecture about the miracle of defecation, and what else but a SNAKE comes and slithers over him.

Freddy's Revenge is an incredibly campy film. You can tell from watching the film that Jack Sholder is a talented filmmaker, but an idiot and very ready to take the lazy way out. There's a sequence where a parakeet goes nuts and chases Jesse's family around before exploding. Sholder actually gives us POV shots from the feral parakeet as the camera swings towards the horrified characters. Along with over-the-top sequences like that, the snake episode and the wet towel scene, Sholder lets Clu Guliger (if it sounds familiar he directed the short film "A Day with the Boys" which inspired David Gordon Green's George Washington), do some criminally hammy overacting as Jesse's father. He seems to be parodying sitcoms from the '50s. Guliger's is typical of the film, which is so abstract and colorful that you distrust every moment as being a dream sequence. A lot of the criticism towards the film seems aimed at the aesthetics of all of this. It's cornball and ridiculous.

The campiness of Freddy's Revenge does however have an important thematic correlation with the gay subtext. Sholder has made a campy horror film about a boy who seems to be afraid that he is homosexual. It's the most pedestrian of gay film clichés, reminding indeed of the pedestrian gay films Poison and But I'm a Cheerleader. They're poking fun and belittling the fear of homosexuality. It's an easy target. The chief attack that I have against Freddy's Revenge is not as much that it's a gay film, as much as its identity as a gay film seems to be the safe way out. I'll be happy to check out a really good gay serial killer film, but I wonder if the subject is still too raw. I fear that heterosexuals will stay away from anything gay that hasn't been sanitized, simply because they're squeamish about gay subjects. And I fear that homosexuals will stay away from anything that might explore the darker sides of their sexuality as they've been picked on so much, and coming out is so difficult, that they don't want any of it to be seen in a negative light. Hell, there's still a stigma attached to films that explore the darker sides of heterosexuality. I'm convinced that the material is there, and I'm even more convinced that the politics of gay sex differs greatly from that of straight sex, and a different form of horror has evolved.

Stickier, and far more fascinating than the simplistically campy "be afraid of your homosexual impulses" in Freddy's Revenge, is the exploration of the joys of patriarchal sexual violence that was illustrated in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy Krueger has been adopted as an anti-hero by the pop culture simply because he is the villain we love to hate, and his sexual attacks towards teenage girls have a creepy sort of fun to them. It's naughty escapism. I would have liked to see the film go more in the direction of having the girls invite the violence, fearing and subconsciously enjoying it. When Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho came out, some feminists rewrote segments of it with the protagonist as a woman talking in great detail about castrating a man and him secretly enjoying it. I've seen this in some slasher movies, like I Spit on Your Grave, Mother's Day and Audition, where the women become serial killers and seduce and destroy the men. Now it's the women who get off on having power over somebody else through violence and sex. I'm misogynistic enough to sometimes get more unnerved by this idea than the other, but I'm also open-minded enough to be fascinated by it and support it. Try this idea for a slasher movie franchise. The killer is kind of like Dracula and he kills and revives a harem of teenage girls. The first film or few films go along these lines. Then in the middle of the series, while the girls have been in bliss, they eventually discover that it is better to own than be owned and they rebel against their master, killing him. Then the series has a girl serial killer as the star, who picks on young boys on the verge of discovering sex!! Remembering fondly of the girl-on-guy rape scenes in Thursday and The Violent Years, you can trust me that this would work well for the guys. Just another direction this material could be taken.

There's a review of Freddy's Revenge in there somewhere. If you want to know the bottom line of this film, it's basically a bad movie that isn't incredibly scary or entertaining. However, it holds on to just enough of the slasher film formula to make an interesting review and its failure is more one of cowardice and possibly laziness than of intelligence. There's something here, but not nearly enough.