When the original Nightmare on Elm Street proved to be such a huge success the world over, New Line Cinema naturally decided to get to work on a sequel. While I can't say if the jobs were offered to them, neither Wes Craven, the director of the original, or Heather Langenkamp, the star return. The movie was sub-titled 'Freddy's Revenge', which is something I always found fairly amusing, seeing as Freddy isn't actually taking revenge on anyone in this flick.

The movie follows Jesse (Mark Patton - Anna to the Infinite Power), he and his family have just moved into Elm Street, the house once inhabited by the Thompson family. Jesse hasn't even finished setting his room up when trouble starts for him. He has been suffering Nightmares about a mysterious scarred man with knives for fingers who is constantly down in his boiler room, he quickly makes an enemy in the form of the school coach (Marshall Bell - Total Recall), and his relationship with his father (Clu Gulager - Uninvited) isnt going too well either. On the plus side, after some initial hostilities, he befriends school bad-boy come sport star Ron Grady (Robert Rusler - Weird Science) and school dream girl Lisa (Kim Myers - Hellraiser Bloodline).
But his dreams are getting worse and worse. Every night he wakes up sweating, despite the air conditioning being high, and awakes from a nightmare where the scarred man tries to get him to kill for him. While cleaning his room with him, Lisa discovers the diary of Nancy Thompson. After reading a few pages and chuckling at her for being crazy, the pair decide to get on with life in general. As the days pass, Jesse has more run-ins with the coach, and his Nightmares are getting worse.One night he looks in the boiler and discovers Freddy's glove,during one nightmare, he wanders downtown into a "Queer S+M joint" where the Coach is drinking, and the coach takes him back to school and forces him to run laps. But a mysterious force then bounds the coach with skipping ropes, strips him and procedes to whack his erse with towels. Freddy's claw then slashes him in the back. Jesse awakes in the showers, wearing Freddy's claw before being found wandering around the streets in the nude by the cops and taken home.
The next night, Freddy tries to make him kill his own little sister, but he manages to get control just in time. Lisa does a bit of digging into Freddy, and finds out where the power plant he used to work in is. After taking Jesse there for a look around, the two head off back home.
Lisa has a pool party at her home, but Jesse just can't get into the party mood. He finally comes close when he and Lisa start to get some lovin on, but Freddy's tongue appears out of his mouth and he runs away in horror. He runs to the house of Grady, who has been grounded, and somehow negotiates his way into his bedroom. After asking Grady to help him, Freddy bursts out of his chest and kills Grady. Not knowing what to do, he runs back to Lisa's house, where he transforms again and slaughters a good few party guests before Lisa stops her dad from shooting him, and the part of him that remains Jesse runs away. But Lisa persues him, knowing he is going to the power plant. She thinks her love can save Jesse, but will she save the day? or will she become Freddy's next victim.

The acting in Freddy's Revenge really isn't very good. Mark Patton is ok, but in comparison to Heather Langenkamp he is a pretty poor replacement. The scene in which he starts crying at Lisa's house is terribly acted, and I was embarassed watching it. His incredibly feminine screams would also have been annoying if they werent so funny.
Kim Myers, often pointed out as a lookalike of a young Meryl Streep, does a bit better in her role as the long suffering potential girlfriend. While her name in the credits wouldn't make me rush out and buy a movie, she is watchable.
Robert Englund is once again good as Freddy, with the scarred one still being short on talk in this entry, Englund once again makes him fairly intimidating.
The rest of the cast is pretty disapointing in general, with no one standing out as being particularly terrible, but no one being worthy of mentioned in a positive light either.

Musically, the movie just plain sucks. Gone is Charles Bernstein's haunting synth score, and replaced with generic and boring 'scary' music. In another musical related note, there is a scene in which Jesse dances and mimes to the song 'Touch me' using a mini baseball bat to simulate occasionally his phalus, occasionally a microphone. This scene has scarred me for life.

Even the special effects in the movie are pretty poor. Freddy looks different in this movie to all the others, his skin is less scarred, and looks more like wrinkly skin from being in the bath too long. During the production of the movie, the glove was stolen, so for his rampage at the end, he sports a new claw hand, which is just a rubbery hand with the knives coming out of the fingers. It looks rubbish. Wes Craven's New Nightmare took the bio-organic claw thing and done it in a far better manner.
Other special effects lowlights include the child-faced dogs, which were not only an idiotic idea in the first place, but have been realised terribly, and the scene in which Freddy busts through Jesse's chest, and we see the most unrealistic Mark Patton head ever created.

The whole movie is just disapointing. It makes the occasional reference to Nancy, everyone says she went crazy, but it doesnt make clear where she went to. It does say that her mother killed herself in the living room, which actually makes the ending of the original make even less sense. These few sentences, the house and Freddy himself are the only links between this and the original movie.
Personally, I think the idea of Freddy trying to gain control of someone to be a good one, but it is executed so horribly that any though of it working is almost entirely flushed out of my head. Did they even watch the original movie? Jesse is chosen, mainly because he moves into Nancy's house, but Nancy's house had absolutely no significance to anything in the first movie. It wasn't Freddy's house, why would he try to become someone who moved into Nancy's house? Nancy beat him, surely he would want to stay as far away from references to her as possible.
Also, Freddy can only hurt people in their dreams. In their dreams. While the deaths of all the characters could be chalked down to Jesse , the scenes such as the toaster catching fire, and the infamous scene where a budgie blows up, along with the sports equipment going crazy, couldn't have happened unless someone was asleep.
Speaking of the budgie scene, if you want an indication of the level of story we have here, Jesse's dad blames him. Yes, he thinks he blew up the budgie. And they wonder why people hated this entry?
Nancy's diary also claims that Freddy tried to take her down to the boiler room. He did not. At no point in the original movie did he try and take her down to the boiler.
That brings up another thing they tried to add to Freddy. In this movie, everywhere he goes things heat up.The pool starts to boil being a prime example. Why would he make things hot? he was killed in a boiler, surely he should be anti-heat if anything.

The movie also suffers from a lack of Freddy. We only actually see him kill Grady and go a bit mental at the party, as well as his constant appearances in Jesse's dreams where he does nothing. While in the original he didnt exactly clog up the screen, he at least stalked and scared his victims first. Here he walks up to Grady and claws him.
With that said, I actually thought that scene was quite well done. For probably the last time in the series up until the spin-off New Nightmare, a killing actually shows a bit of reality about it. Grady's screams bring his parents to his door, where they try hopelessly to get in, screaming all the time. This actually makes you feel a lot less positive towards Freddy. Naturally, no other killing is treated with this degree of seriousness.
The movie also suffers from an ending that puts the original to shame. That is both endings, both the first 'false' ending and the proper one. In this entry, Freddy dies by being kissed. I almost turned it off, until I realised there was 10 minutes left, and thought that those couldn't possibly be any worse.
At the start of the movie, Jesse suffers a nightmare where he is taking the school bus and it turns out Freddy is the driver. Throughout the movie, he takes his car to school. At the end, the minute you see him get the bus, you know exactly what will happen.

Of course, because no Freddy's Revenge review is complete without mentioning it, there is the whole Gay theme going on. Im sure you read the Coach's death scene part with a slightly different reaction to every other death scene, and it, along with the way in which he goes to Grady for protection and a few other themes, is often seen as representing a teenage battle with homosexuality. While I never realised just how many of these there were in the movie until after I read reviews on it, but the Coach scene did definitely make me go 'eh'. People seem split down the middle on this subject, but personally, I don't really care for it, seeing as the movie is poor, regardless of if it is gay or not.

Sequels to classic movies rarely turn out to be anywhere near the quality of the original, but Freddy's Revenge takes this far too far and actually becomes a terrible movie.
The only people this can be recommended to, are those who really, really must see every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Everyone else should pass on it. Its boring, stupid, poorly made and worst of all, just plain not scary, or even funny.

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Nightmare on Elm Street

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age