While Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is far from the strongest sequel in the slasher series, the movie does feature the most underrated opening scene of any movie in the franchise. The Nightmare On Elm Street series took a pretty quick critical downturn after director Wes Craven’s classic original slasher. Soon after 1984’s A Nightmare On Elm Street proved a huge hit, the studio hastily released Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge only one year later to a critical drubbing.
As proven by its twist ending, the original Nightmare On Elm Street isn’t perfect. However, Craven’s movie is a relentlessly efficient and endlessly influential scare machine, which made the failings of Freddy’s Revenge all the more obvious. Frequently unintentionally funny, burdened with very obvious subtext, and tonally inconsistent, Freddy’s Revenge failed as both a Nightmare On Elm Street sequel and as a standalone horror movie.
Despite this, the 1985 slasher movie has one thing going for it. Although Freddy’s Revenge is written off as one of the weakest installments in the series and there’s no denying that the sequel has got major problems, the movie’s opening scene is stellar. Leaving the hero stranded on a school bus that he soon realizes is driven by villain Freddy Krueger himself, the sequence ramps up the tension slowly while transitioning from reality into dreamworld with more visual invention than most of the franchise. Where later sequels saved their effect budget for gory kills, Freddy’s Revenge uses some ambitious model work to render a memorably creepy vision of hell that nothing in the proceeding movie can match.
In a creepy but surprisingly subtle nightmare sequence, the opening of Freddy’s Revenge starts when only the hero Jesse seems to notice that his almost empty school bus is going dangerously fast and heading off-road. This then transitions into a cartoony, surreal scene as Nightmare On Elm Street 2 introduces Freddy. The Springwood slasher leaves the bus atop a jagged rocky outcrop above the pits of hell, stalking the hero and his doomed pair of classmates as the bus tilts toward the pit of magma below.
As a standalone scene, the opening of Freddy’s Revenge is colorful, dramatic, inventive, and, thanks to the blackly comic punchline of the hero’s family listening to him screaming and writing it off as his normal wake up routine, tonally perfect for the series. It is full of exactly the sort of fantasy imagery that competing slasher franchises couldn’t indulge in since their monsters were more grounded and served to remind viewers of how much weirder Freddy’s attacks can be than those of Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees. Unfortunately, nothing else in Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge lives up to the potential of this opening scene, making it an impressive standalone sequence but far from enough to salvage one of the weakest entries in the franchise.