PLOT: After the events of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a new family moves into Nancy Thompson’s house, and Freddy seeks his revenge by possessing the body of teen Jesse.

I’ve seen the much-maligned first sequel to the classic A Nightmare on Elm Street before, but this is the first time I’ve ever played a drinking game while watching it. The drinking game (which you can find here) centers on the obvious homoeroticism of this film, so suffice it to say, I got nicely drunk while sitting on my couch with my sister.

People hate this movie. I don’t. I’m fascinated by it. It’s such an odd choice of a sequel. To me, this film is a bigger oddity that Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I’m not even talking about the decision to make this film a thinly-veiled allegory for homosexuality; I’m talking about the choices the filmmakers made to throw essentially all the rules from the first film out the window in favor of making a movie with such little blood and a disappointing body count. I could see if they bent the rules for a bigger gore payoff, but this one never delivers.

The first film never lays out any reason why Freddy Krueger would have the ability to possess someone, let alone manipulate the environment around him to the point that birds explode in balls of fire for no particular reason. They don’t even give you a reason why this shit happens in this movie. On top of that, he spends very little time in anybody’s dreams; that’s literally the point of the original film. There’s even some man-faced dogs in this, which I guess is an homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that didn’t even make sense in that movie.

For the amount of gore that the series is known for, it’s shockingly low how tame this movie is in every aspect, especially in the gore department. The kills are subtle and there are maybe four of them, only two of which are truly confirmed. (Editor’s Note: a majority of Freddy movies actually only have four deaths, but only two of the deaths in this one are of any sort of consequence. Two random people eat in at the pool party, so these stats are padded.)

GORE RATING: 0.5 out of 5

Honestly, this is just too goofy to be scary. It’s the easily the least scary of all the Freddy movies. Even as cartoony as Freddy gets in this series, there’s nothing in this one that registers on the fright scale.

SCARES RATING: 0 out of 5

You get to see the ass of a male gym teacher, so there’s that, but in terms of nudity that you actually want to see, we’re lacking. You get some heavy makeout sessions at the pool party and girls in 80s style bikinis, but we’re still one movie away from Dream Warriors and that kid that can’t help but dream about big breasted women trying to kill him.

SEX/NUDITY RATING: 1 out of 5

OVERALL

This is a bad movie, but it’s at least entertaining, albeit for the wrong reasons. It’s by no means boring, though, so I put this one above A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. This one has an oddball flavor to it, so I respect it in that sense.

OVERALL RATING: 4 out of 10