Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
(NR, Virgil Films, 99 mins., DVD release date: March 3, 2020)

SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET only feels like it has taken five years to complete to those who were in the know when it was originally conceived as “There Is No Jesse” for its initial crowd-funding campaign. For me, however, it feels like it double that time, a complete beginning-to-end decade.

It all began when I bought Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy on DVD way back in 2010. I was in my mid-twenties and still posting reviews on Epinions, so the review I did write and submit to the IMDb is lost to time now. Daniel Farrands, Thommy Hutson and Andrew Kasch did such a fantastic job in providing a thorough series rundown, yet the big draw for me was hearing about the first official sequel to Wes Craven's legendary slasher film. And the best surprise of all was the participation of the lead actor of Freddy's Revenge himself:

Full disclosure: I got to meet Mark Patton in 2014 at Texas Frightmare Weekend as part of a micro-reunion including himself, Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Marshall Bell, and Jack Sholder. And then there was Crypticon Minnesota 2016, which had just Patton & Myers, but also some real bucket list personalities, among them Jill Schoelen, Suzanne Snyder, Thom Mathews, and Chris Mulkey. That TFW shindig inspired me to write about A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge on my blog in anticipation of the movie's 30th anniversary. If only October 2016, which was when I went to Crypticon, was a time when the pure elation I felt could overpower the madness that had lasted the entire year. But it was mere weeks away from the seismic cultural change that was going to end a merciless calendar year, in which there were so many blows to the gut, with the knockout hook.

And now it's 2020. The spring of the quarantine. Ever since I got to meet Mark Patton, I imagined getting to see the documentary about his quest for peace with the role that made him both a cult hero and an undeserving pariah would coincide with my own picking up of the pieces from what I pray is the end of a four-year shitshow. And I fear the worst is not over. That for as excited as I am to watch Patton relate his real life story, 2016 could last until 2024. I am not ready for that. As much as I adore my signed copies of Jesse's Lost Journal and the Scream, Queen! poster, as deep the well of respect I have had for Patton as speaker and activist ever since Never Sleep Again, for the inspiration I have received in 2014 that I am paying back once again now...

I might be running down the tunnel chasing that light for a just a bit longer.

I hope I don't have to keep writing these anxious preambles every go 'round. We now live in a world where Never Sleep Again co-director Daniel Farrands decided films like The Haunting of Sharon Tate and The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson were what the world needs the most. Point is, though things can get worse than they are, getting to buy Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street on Vudu (alongside Fat City and Moonstruck, no less) is one of the perks of social distancing.

To get across why I was jazzed about Scream, Queen! for so long, I have to transcribe a couple of quotes from Mark Patton that were featured on the second disc of outtakes from Never Sleep Again:

“Hollywood is terribly homophobic, especially the homosexuals inside of Hollywood. They're the first to make fun of, to denigrate, to try to sabotage other gay people, especially gay actors...I think I would have been decimated, and I think the things about my gayness would have come out in the press in a really horrible way.”

The first half of Scream, Queen! elaborates on these statements with biographical detail. The Missouri-born Patton had a dream at age 4 that he was to be wed to a king, growing up comfortable with his sexual orientation even as he knew the dangers of rural prejudice. When he was 17, he left for New York City with little over $100 to his name, boarding in a hotel/brothel and lucking into a couple of national commercials (Big Red, Mountain Dew) before making it to Broadway. In Robert Altman's stage and screen adaptation of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Mark Patton played Joe Qualley, who experiences that all-too-real brand of violent antipathy towards being seen as one of the girls. Swaying and snapping along to the McGuire Sisters' chart-topping cover of the doo-wop stalwart “Sincerely,” Joe is the male Disciple in a band of women who worship James Dean. But he soon disappears from McCarthy to escape from both bullying locals and his unrequited love, only to resurface 20 years later as the transsexual Joanne, the very name his tormentors bestowed upon him.

Emboldened by the rapturous audience reaction and welcoming professional/social environs of Manhattan, Mark Patton drove to Hollywood seeking equal opportunities. But renewing his five-year plan for the West Coast, what Patton goes through ends his acting career abruptly. In his present-day testimonials, Patton adamantly reminds straight and homosexual audiences that to be a gay performer in the mid-1980s was far from nurturing. You had to consent to a blood test in order to fully pass the audition once AIDS ballooned into a pandemic (Rock Hudson himself died a month before Freddy's Revenge premiered). Agents were telling you which clothes were acceptable with which to pass as a red-blooded American hetero. Religious fanatics and bigots spun an autoimmune virus into a stigma. Nobody was free to embrace their gayness in the public eye and gossip rags like the National Enquirer were invading many people's privacy looking to out them as such. Friends you had could turn up six months later looking like animate corpses, and if you heard nothing about them within a year, you assumed they were dead.

These were the horrors Mark Patton faced firsthand once he was cast as Jesse Walsh in the rushed-into-competion sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street (trivia: Patton screen tested for the role of Glen Lantz, Nancy Thompson's boyfriend, which went to a first-timer named Johnny Depp). Screenwriter David Chaskin's possession-oriented concept was approved by Bob Shaye when he and Wes Craven had their falling out, but despite a two-month refinement period, Patton says Chaskin's script was still being punched-up on the set. And what the writer seized on was an allegory that was close to the bone for the gay male community.

When I reviewed A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 in 2014, I really wanted to do it with fresher eyes. But the film's reputation is inescapable, as comment threads and clickbait articles and that 2010 documentary have branded it upon my psyche. Yes, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge appears to have been tricked out with a LOT of gay themes and codifiers. And though Robert Englund reprised his role (after some initial resistance), this sequel got swept under the rug like it was Halloween III, the source of ironic ribbing ever since it outperformed the original at the box office. We can laugh about the absurdity of it all today, but when the film came out, critics and patrons alike were noticing the exact same peculiarities. And what damaged Mark Patton was the fact that nobody wanted to accept responsibility for the gay subtext, thrusting (erm...) the burden onto the actor at the worst sociopolitical time. His handlers told him upfront that while he could carry a film, he couldn't act “straight” (like the two male leads of The Last American Virgin who basically played the same exact roles throughout the '80s and have since come out of the closet?) Chaskin pussyfooted around the intention of his gay subtext for years, and, inadvertently or not, threw Patton under the bus, claiming his acting completely heightened it. If that weren't enough, Patton's on-and-off partner, Dallas heartthrob Timothy Patrick Murphy, was a casualty of AIDS and passed away on December 6, 1988.

All I can say is that, well...”I Am Jesse.” I opened my article expressing my deepest fears for the future, and though I am now 36, I frequently feel like I am that sullen boy alone on the bus, trying to crack a window as we are heading towards the desert inferno.

Arlene Marechal & Heather Langenkamp's I Am Nancy (2011) was a slick indie documentary that documented a Final Girl as Woman, touring the convention circuit and asking intriguing questions about how we decided to make a creepy child molester in a dirty sweater and fedora an icon. Surely, Langenkamp's Nancy Thompson was the relatable hero who declared autonomy over her fate and vanquished Freddy at the end of Craven's film. We saw something similar in Lisa Wilcox's portrayal of Alice Johnson in the fourth and fifth entries. And say what you will about Freddy's Dead, but Lisa Zane as Maggie Burroughs, psychiatrist and Krueger brood herself, continued such an honorable precedent. Freddy's Revenge had that, too, in Kim Myers as Lisa Webber, but what made Lisa's survival so much more unique and urgent was the plight of Jesse Walsh. Jesse ends up killing his best male buddy, Ron Grady (Robert Rusler), before the cabana massacre and is madly trying to convince Lisa that he is powerless to stop Freddy's continued takeover of his body (“I got blood on my hands!”).

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street threads together tales of Patton's past life in Hollywood with the due resurgence of Freddy's Revenge fandom among young LGBTQ darlings who got their first glimpse of a gay bar the moment Jesse sleepwalked into the wrong place at the wrong time, beginning Freddy's rampage with the outrageous dispatching of Coach Schneider (Marshall Bell, whose bared buttocks was also an anomaly in slasher films). San Francisco drag legend Peaches Christ, fellow hostess Knate Higgins and University of Colorado Denver film studies professor Andrew Scahill provide articulated insight into the legacy of Freddy's Revenge, with Bill Nugent and Jeffrey Marcus helping to flesh out Patton's mid-1980s recollections. And the principal Freddy's Revenge cast/crew who I've mostly met in my own convention adventures, from director Jack Sholder to Robert Englund himself, are all refreshingly candid.

The beating heart of the story belongs to the criminally unsung Mark Patton, and for as generous as he is behind the booth, he is no less beautiful as he is pushing 60. Leaving the industry to become an interior decorator and live “off the grid,” Patton himself would be diagnosed as HIV-positive, and the stories of his troubled treatment (from a tuberculosis-related interference to the AZT regiment that was near fatal) keep the film further harrowing. Having controlled the virus, Patton headed down south to Puerto Vallarta to open up a Prada-esque business, met the Hispanic love of his life in Hector Morales and never looked back, until the makers of Never Sleep Again broke through to him.

The documentary builds to the meeting Patton has been long anticipating as a chance for closure, the one with David Chaskin himself, looking for straight (come on, John!) answers as to why Chaskin denied owning the gay elements he later claimed were intentional and a mea culpa for the hurtful things that were said on record about Patton. Somehow, the revival of Patton's purpose in life and desire to use his platform for the protection and instruction of the newer generation of gays feels resonant to all of us progressive genre nuts. And Chaskin himself, whom Jack Sholder believes Mark may be putting too much of an emotional premium on, does take into account Patton's perspective despite not living up to expectations. It's the ultimate feel-good ending, and it ends with a cute little nod to the famed Bob Shaye coda.

Since 2014, Patton has tipped his toes back into acting sporadically in genre fare, starting with Family Possessions (2016), where he co-starred with Sleepaway Camp cult queen Felissa Rose. Scream, Queen! does create a sense of empathy within the viewer which requires you to understand why Patton's integrity and health were once so painfully at risk. As I said before, the Mark Patton of the 2010s is a delightful, honest and sensitive soul. Credit Scream, Queen! directors Roman Chimenti & Tyler Jensen for molding the footage with emotional consistency, even if the sum of the quilt is less than the feel of the fabric. This duo's doc hits harder than both I Am Nancy and Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films combined, and if you think that's me being tickled a little too pink, understand too that we who have seen Freddy's Revenge know how Mark Patton screams. Now it's our turn.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE
(R, New Line Cinema, 87 mins., theatrical release date: November 1, 1985)


After Hours, Better Off Dead..., Brazil, The Breakfast Club, Fright Night, Heaven Help Us, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Re-Animator, The Return of the Living Dead, The Sure Thing.

These ten films will all be celebrating their 30th anniversary next year. I bring up these titles in particular, deliberately setting aside the blockbusters (Back to the Future, The Goonies, Rocky IV) and the ball-busters (St. Elmo's Fire, A View to a Kill), because I devoutly appreciate every single one of them from past until present. This is not thorough, as I have failed to mention Mr. Vampire, Real Genius, Runaway Train, Lost in America, and several other gems I caught up with. Even trashier stuff like Commando, Death Wish 3 and Red Sonja I can understand getting some love. But 1985 was the year which gave us John Cusack, Stephen Geoffreys and Linda Fiorentino in heavy doses. I'll gladly stick up for 1985 as a good year at the movies for those three reasons alone.

One of the more interesting movies I can see getting the retrospective treatment is A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge. Yes, I'm talking about one of the most infamous horror sequels in history, in the same year, mind you, that spewed out Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. The film drove a wedge between series creator Wes Craven and New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, sparked a deathless debate over its brazenly homosexual allegory and, like Halloween III: Season of the Witch before it, became a cinematic orphan in mewling need of a willing cult of sympathetic adopters. The comprehensive Elm Street series documentary Never Sleep Again is essential viewing in understanding these bones of contention.

The best thing about Daniel Farrands & Andrew Kasch's project was that it marked the welcome public appearance of NoES 2's long-estranged lead actor, Mark Patton. His entertaining, frank comments on the film's legendarily gay subtext are priceless, but the outtakes from his interview were even more revealing. Patton dropped out of professional acting when his integrity was challenged by the still-prevalent Celluloid Closet and the cattily competitive behavior therein, which was maddeningly trivial even without the real life horrors facing the gays of the world. Patton overcame multiple health concerns, including HIV-positive testing, and is currently living a fulfilling life in Puerto Vallarta. He has kept up a solid profile as an artist, activist and writer, with hopes for completing a documentary called There Is No Jesse which may as well prove just as candid and critical as Heather Langenkamp's I Am Nancy, if not more so.

Patton's character of Jesse Walsh is the new kid on Elm Street, freshly relocated to the same white house with bars on the windows wherein Nancy Thompson vanquished Freddy Krueger. Screenwriter David Chaskin and director Jack Sholder burden Jesse with the same all-too-real nightmares of the scissor-fingered psycho, but they've jettisoned one of the more resonant themes of the original Wes Craven film, the inheritance of the parents' sins. Mr. & Mrs. Walsh, played by Clu Gulager and Hope Lange, are interlopers with no understanding of their new house's eerie history, let alone aware of the mass show of vigilantism which loosed Krueger onto his killers' brood. They are your garden variety suburban caricatures, as are all of the other parental units, and serve no consequence on the ensuing teen angst.

Mr. Walsh, stern simpleton he is, is far from Craig T. Nelson's character in Poltergeist, reacting less plausibly to clearly supernatural phenomena and jumping to jokey conclusions at every opportunity. This type of skeptical, oblivious father who may as well be the absentee parent in many a bad teen sex comedy. Mrs. Walsh is stereotypically passive, and kid sister Angela (Christie Clark) has somehow even less of a personality. The crux of the story is specifically Jesse's gradual torment by none other than the goading spirit of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), who makes it his crusade to possess Jesse Walsh and resume killing in a mortal coil.

If only that were Jesse's lone concern. He is simultaneously bullied and befriended by Rod Lane ringer Ron Grady (Robert Rusler), the two of them bonding over phys ed detention sessions under the sadomasochistic thumb of Coach Schneider (Marshall Bell). There's also the matter of pretty Lisa Webber (Kim Myers), who isn't so well-off that she cannot rely on Jesse to get her to school every morning. Their peer-pressured romantic courtship is at risk thanks to Krueger's machinations, which turn dead serious when a supposedly sleepwalking Jesse makes the bizarre choice to catch Coach Schneider's eye in a gay bar and is taken back to the gym for punishment.

The combination of Chaskin's eccentric if hackneyed plot and Sholder's plebian proficiency as director pays dividends in terms of camp. Grady teases Jesse early on that his soft, pretty boy physique is exactly what gets Schneider's rocks off, but then the leather-vested martinet and his lanky prey turn up serendipitously at a watering hole for homosexuals?! When Schneider starts raiding the supply closet and pulls out a jump rope, all the while Jesse is taking a shower nearby, my brain tells me there's going to be some squat thrusts going on that I shouldn't even begin to contemplate. But then you get to Schneider's death, which involves racquets snapping, balls exploding off the shelves, towels becoming sentient and whipping Schneider's bare ass. Chaskin intended this as simple adolescent wish-fulfillment, but I'll be damned if it doesn't exacerbate the queenie absurdity of it all.

The audience had already gotten an eyeful of the Risky Business rip wherein Jesse dances around his bedroom to club diva synth-pop wearing gold lame sunglasses and closing drawers with his tuches. The production design is so shameless, that Nancy's journal is placed conveniently next to a board game named "Probe" and a "No Out of Town Checks" sign outside Jesse's door has an I pasted over the E. And in a twist on the original scene where Nancy asked her boyfriend Glen to watch over her as she slept, the frightened Jesse, foiled in an intimate moment with Lisa, begs Grady to protect him in much the same way, complete with wake-up call warnings and stoic recitation of "Don't fall asleep."

Objectively speaking, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 is simultaneously derivative and defiant of its immediate progenitor. Krueger is still a shadow demon whose favored tropical climes involve boiler rooms and power plants. The bravura opening sequence in which Jesse's school bus teeters over an infernal pit packs the same kind of sweaty, sleazy dread as Tina's inaugural nightmare the last time. The teenagers are elevated to nobility through investigation and open-mindedness, not just their sympathetic supernatural anxieties. And Jesse Walsh is every bit a solid central character as Nancy Thompson or Alice Johnson, relatable even as Krueger eats at both his will and his sanity.

The main problem is in reducing the Freddy mythos to just another slab of Amityville Horror/Poltergeist hokum. The worst offender is the famous scene where a spooked lovebird is loosed from its cage and flies around the living room dive-bombing Mr. Walsh, only to explode in flight. The ludicrousness of the scenario is hardly deflated by dad's dopey rationale for the bird's errant behavior: "It's that cheap seed you've been buying." Furthermore, dream logic matters little in the overall goal of Freddy Krueger being reborn in Jesse's place, especially when a pool party populated by hardly narcoleptic teens are beset by Krueger, who surrounds them in flames, turns the water to boiling and cavorts around, sticking his razors into the panicking herd. It's an equally embarrassing turn of events given the grim urgency of the original, which blurred fantasy/reality and life/death with resolute tragedy. Krueger feels strangely emasculated, saddled with a plan that saps him of his primal fear potential and makes him frightening only in mere context.

Whatever genuine pain this sequel conjures depends largely on Mark Patton's internalized, anguished central performance. The young man looks distressingly fragile, more so than a lot of female survivors in past slasher movies, and there's a glistening, grim pathos that is hard to deny. Whatever psychosexuality and gay repression themes rise up to the top of this milkshake are tempered by Patton's earnest, personal commitment to the role. There is a case to be made for Jesse Walsh as a more effeminate version of the Everyboy persona, and in the film's universe of adolescent confusion and foiled romantic desire, Walsh is well-rounded enough as a character to make the madness sting. The fortitude he lacks is ably compensated by Kim Myers as the concerned, brave female friend Lisa, and there is an innate tenderness to their scenes which is a welcome touch in a youth-driven market fueled by leery sexism.

Kevin Yagher, taking over the FX work begun by David Miller in the original, gives Krueger some distinctly gothic touches, especially in the amber-colored eyes which Sholder locks onto in one memorable close-up. And the film's coup turns out to be Jesse's on-screen rebirth of Freddy, impeccably crafted by Mark Shostrom and filmed with the utmost dread by Sholder. The eye peeking out of Jesse's mouth, the head indenting itself in Jesse's abdomen, the razors tearing out from Jesse's fingers...every shot counts.

The trouble with A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 is that not everyone appears to be on the same wavelength, so the earnest qualities of Jesse's body horror/sexual orientation predicament and the micro-budget inanity fail to mesh together in a proper way. It's formless, jarring quickie product which doesn't quite bastardize Freddy in the same way later sequels did, but it doesn't really add much to the Gloved One even as it subtracts. It's not fully deserving of its disreputable rep, and I'll take this over Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare any day, every day. But there's a reason Wes Craven was allowed some input on the subsequent Dream Warriors. A lot of NoES 2's legacy appears purely incidental, as strange and senseless as any nightmare. But at least they spare us the parakeet's lucid dreaming.

Here's the rare red band theatrical trailer I can recall seeing on my old special edition VHS of A Nightmare on Elm Street.