In a bizarrely misguided twist, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge failed Freddy Krueger with the movie's bland real-world-set finale. The point of Freddy Krueger, the monstrous dream demon of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, is that he can invade the subconscious of sleeping teenagers. This makes his victims uniquely vulnerable, stranded in a dream world where they are at the mercy of Freddy’s powers. The Nightmare on Elm Street villain isn’t particularly scary in the real world, yet the first sequel in the horror movie franchise made the early mistake of bringing Freddy into this realm.
Where the likes of Halloween’s Michael Myers and Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees have hulking strength and an un-killable supernatural aura on their side, Freddy Krueger is simply a scrawny janitor when stripped of his dreamworld setting. As such, the ending of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge made a huge mistake when the sequel opted to take Freddy out of the dream world and into reality.
The climax of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge features Freddy attacking teens at a real-world pool party, completely disregarding the whole “nightmare killer" shtick that is theoretically what makes him unique and scary. As a smaller, slighter villain, Freddy can’t take on Jason’s Friday the 13th modus operandi of stabbing, beating, and choking teens to death as the bizarre finale proved. Instead, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 showed Freddy using some hitherto-unmentioned fire powers in the real world, throwing fireballs and boiling the pool’s water before party goers can escape. However, it is unclear what powers Freddy has in the real world and why the teens can’t overpower him in this scene, making the finale more confusing than effective.
Why Nightmare On Elm Street 2’s Ending Failed
Although Freddy racks up quite a body count in the finale of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, his kills don’t work the way that they do in later sequels. Where the best Nightmare on Elm Street sequels saw Freddy take on the form of other people to sneakily attack his victims, in the second installment he just started boiling the pool, burning and slashing random party goers, and stabbing teens at random. Without the killer picking off his prey one by one on his home turf, there is nothing particularly effective about this attack as it disregards the slasher formula in favor of cramming most of the movie’s kills into a few minutes of screen time.
The reason A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge’s finale fails is one that later sequels in the series would learn from. Viewers came to the franchise to see Freddy come up with inventive new ways to manipulate the reality of dreams and turn them into nightmares, forcing each teen victim to confront and sometimes even escape him one by one. While this led to later Nightmare on Elm Street sequels making Freddy Krueger too funny and cartoony, the approach also allowed him to pull off some of slasher cinema’s most spectacular and creative kills. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge instead dragged Freddy into the real world and made him a bizarre sort of fire-powered super villain in the process, losing what made the character uniquely scary in the process.