Hey Leo hi Stephen i was traveling recently and i got a shirt from a crossfit gym and they accidentally did not have any my size anymore they had a medium i took it anyway they gave me a refund for it no big deal so i took it home and i've been figuring out what to do with this medium shirt that doesn't fit me. So what are my friends said something that i think the horror community can appreciate because he said why don't you just cut off the sleeves. And when i cut off the sleeves all i could think of was that i was going to battle Freddy Krueger a very appropriate. Right exactly i kept thinking like i don't think of myself necessarily as Alice from part four but you know that scene in like these horror films or something where somebody's like i got a fight back and then they like put on twisted sister. It's montage and they tear off a sleeve where like a bandana exactly what their spike bracelet like that's going to do anything right exactly it makes them look tough in the mindset yeah i really felt tough for a minute like i really. Then i looked at my skinny ass white arms and feel tough anymore i don't know man you know that's what it is for me to every once in a while i'll look in the mirror go yeah i'm killing it and then i'll look a little lower in the mirror go no i'm not i'm killing the twinkies i'm killing the buffet. That's all i'm killing yep when i look anywhere below my forehead i realize i'm not killing it. All right everybody welcome to spoils of horror my name is steven i am leo and this is episode number one hundred and thirty six a nightmare namestry part two freddy's revenge. But an excellent day for an exercise on it. Look at me Damien it's all for you i'm our number one fan i hope they are watching there see they are seeing they don't know clearly mine's that scared me i'm scared to close my eyes that was scared open up whatever you do don't fall asleep Leo yes this pick impresses me because by the rules of identity politics i'm supposed to pick this movie i say that is joke is in reality of course i was psyched that you picked this film not only did i want to cover it freddy's revenge has been on my short list for a while so this is kind of like a freebie to me but despite the fact that they're afraid of 13 movies you love and there are night when i'm street movies that i love. We had kind of gone with this idea that you would pick more of the nightmare films and i would pick more of the friday thirteenth films eventually will get to both have our have fun with this movie having such a strong presence in horror cinema and having its meaning being so present to people especially now i'm super excited to hear why you want to cover this movie. i am old enough and i have been a fan of this franchise long enough to watch this movie go from being touted as the worst in the series to being reclaimed by a community that now regards it quite highly much like everyone else i've heard all the opinions and arguments about this over the years. i've had a lot of time to think about my own voice in those arguments when deciding to cover this movie it wasn't just because it was another freddy film in the franchise is because i saw a chance to finally give my own opinions about this film that i've had over the years my perception of this movie is. Potentially very different from others i may have some controversial takes there's a lot of new culture around this there might be some that feel like i don't have a voice in that which is fine i want to stress that. For me we're not talking about political agendas or culture shifts or advancement of a group of people we're talking about an elm street movie as such i want to give my voice to this film and not focus so heavily on the stuff that has literally been done by everyone else ever who has ever talked about this movie that's basically why i chose this i'm very excited to actually be able to speak to it for the first time in a far more public way than i have ever done i like the idea that someone who doesn't know. The subtext that is debated around this film is going to think it's about like donald trump or something that are no shootings in this movie i was going to go with make america great again i'm super excited about this and i think that one of the reasons i'm excited about it is because this is a movie that you and i are actually really aligned on i don't think that it's terrible to say this upfront. We both think that there's a there's a diamond in the rough here maybe it's a little rough around the edges and a little bit odd but there is a good movie hidden here and i i'm really glad that you brought up this is thought of as the worst in the series because i always have those bullshit that's freddy's dead you can. hands down hands down you can kiss my ass charlie for me back my action i have heard your thoughts on freddy's dead are you ready to get into a nightmare elm street part two hell yeah. A school bus drives to the town of springwood dropping off students. It slowly empties out leaving jessie Walsh and two other girls alone the bus begins to drive faster going off the road as the girls begin to scream. Suddenly they're suspended over a chasm in a nightmare terrain balancing precariously on a pile of rocks. The bus driver is freddy crueger he laughs walks down the aisle slashing his blades across the bus interior as he makes his way towards his screaming victims. We cut to the Walsh family residence where jessie has just woken up screaming from this nightmare he goes downstairs grabs breakfast and runs outside to meet his new friend Lisa on the front porch they get him his car and drive to school. High school is not easy on jessie he gets into a fight with a baseball player named grady is sentenced to do push ups by a masochist gym teacher and learns that someone went crazy in his house five years earlier. Later that night crueger hunts jessie's dreams telling him they have very special work to do. Part of the fun of watching a nightmare elm street movie is trying to figure out when the character is awake and when they are dreaming. The series is not nearly as good at that later on as it is early on it really has a lot of fun in the first couple of movies making you guess when we're in reality and when we're in a nightmare. But this section really gives it away very quickly the students are all in the bus and jessie's in the back and then the students start piling out one by one and it's just two girls and jessie left in the back and Freddy Krueger drives up to one of the stops and then the parents are all out there waving. And then he drives away and I thought to myself in this moment I thought I know that that's a nightmare because there'd be nothing worse than being a high school student and having your parents pick you up and that's very fair. I gotta say this movie starts off strong with this particular nightmare the school bus driving into the desert which turns into the pyres of hell and the lightning it the cheesy effects a little bit for this time where we look back we go but by God it was really powerful having said that it must have been very difficult to drive that stick shift with the razor glove on his hand. I do yes I have a lot of people said this but did you notice when the bus stopped before the nightmare happened it was actually Robert England driving the bus I did know that and that was a fun little cameo to have Robert England be the bus driver and then of course to transform into Freddy Krueger let me be clear I think that this first five minutes is a total fucking home run. I love this opening it's very well paced it moves at a very lightning speed yeah but it also captures some really nice awkwardness for instance I love when the bus pulls over at one stop and literally every single student gets out other than Jesse and these two random girls and I know that sounds like a really small detail but I remember when I watch this movie is a kid that always made me really uncomfortable. Because I knew something was wrong it's playing into Jesse's adolescent fears because the girls are talking about him nightmare and I'm sure he's always full of like adolescent fears girls are talking about he's trying to open the window but he can't and then when it gets to the dream hellscape I just think this all is awesome. Oh it cooks absolutely and the thing that I noticed was wrong is that it captured too much what my life was like in high school as girls were laughing at me every time I tried to do anything. It does not help to give Jesse like the worst cow lick. He looks like him at a revenge of the nerds yeah exactly not that way through the rest of the movie but in this dream sequence he's like the biggest dork ever which fits to what you're talking about. In especially early on the um street movies really were trying to tackle what it was like to be a teenager and the struggles there in it is with love struggles with sexuality struggles with identity all of that stuff and leading all the way into the third film where each one of their dream powers was more of an allegory of what their best self be the whole front of the series was filled with this kind of thing. That's sad when you think about that wizard but anyway I mean not like we didn't know those people yeah I was never that person i was cool anyway yeah there's so many great effects in this opening sequence to like for instance i love when the interior the bus becomes much darker and much more than this on the inside i love the cut of the dashboard where it shows the buses dashboard now looks like something that's more of like the furnace robe. In my room street one like everything just looks off the gauges look older everything's covered in dust there's like wires and sparks sticking out it doesn't look ridiculous but it looks wrong and then of course the great miniatures that they show what it shows the bus teetering on this pile of rocks over a giant chasm. I think it speaks to the strength of nightmare elm street as one of the big franchises because it just shows the way that unlike halloween and friday thirteenth they can do different things with these kills they can operate in this really fantastical world that is so much fun. It is one thing i've always held in high regard of the series you're right with michael with Jason chucky the rest of them they can be opportunistic with what's on hand whether it's a kitchen knife or a weed whacker whatever the fuck they pick up they can kill somebody with it with this one we can really put them in any environment or any situation we want to make. This incredible splash of a kill happen but it does lead to when jesse wakes up which i think maybe one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments in freddy's revenge did you notice when jesse finally did go down to breakfast. His little sister was digging through a box of cereal to try and get the prize inside and the cereal was called the man choose which is literally a perfect representation of the nineteen eighties and how they just let flag racism happen. Give a shit that could literally be a russ cereal it was a serial that look like the grinch dressed in a very bad chinese outfit. And it was literally a man choose that i had never noticed it before almost pissed myself you should see the old boxes of fredy is not not stand the test of time no but i do love that when she pulls out the nails this is one of the things that the movie doesn't get credit for i think the movie is intelligent i think it has some really good ideas behind it and one of them is that is subtle in some parts sometimes it's very over the top sometimes. But i love the way that jesse just looks at his sister it's just a blink in this moment as she's sort of playing with these finger nails on her hand because of course he's reminded of freddy kruger they don't call too much attention to but it's a nice moment. Yeah and that is exactly leading into something with this film i agree with a hundred percent where i think they're making a lot of very deliberate choices and this is a pretty obvious one other street films have done shit like this before like. Oh look at this fake finger nails i got on it makes it look like freddy ooh but the subtlety around that of jesse not letting people in on what's happening but he's got it in his head and this could have been a coincidence or it could have been freddy influence early on the film with what's happening in the household and that clever i love when we go to school i think you and i really do. Probably find a diabolical charm in things that are just a little outdated we're supposed to be upset by these things this is why we don't have more listeners like. We defend what koffman films we don't care like you mean different things like that we're supposed to be more upset than we are i love this scene where it shows everybody at jim class and jesse is out in the field and he's in the boys are playing baseball and it cuts to the girls all. In their dresses shooting bows arrows this baseball front i think there's football happening in the back at least people throwing football around and these girls are just wildly shooting arrows around. Like somebody's gonna get fucking skewered and they're all in like eighties dresses like this is the girl sport like you shoot arrows we're doing manly things like baseball. Yeah these girls might as well be doing jazz or size like i thought they're doing pilates or some shit I look at the bigger yoga it's it's just so funny that what it cuts to the boys all playing baseball and it cuts to lisa looking at. You know jesse cuz she's kind of checking out she's kind of attracted to him it's just so unintentionally funny this cut. It is you can tell lisa is really indigestion right away in this movie not from all the little loving looks that she's been throwing at him for the first ten minutes but the realization that a girl who's family owns a house that she owns with a pool that she owns is deliberately choosing to ride to school in jesse's piece of shit car she's in damn. I thought Jesus Christ what is the fucking karate kid like you never see that I live in Beverly else like that's it that's it they go to the pot and golf and there's like a whole scene. Actually I think if I remember correctly the high school that they're in is the same one they use to for the karate kid movie you know what it looks the same if i would love to yeah i will look at up and if that's true i'll put it in the show notes if it's not if it's not i will say nothing. It is one way or the other wink wink wink wink but now but now that i think about it you know those scenes where it shows lisa and jesse walking around and he's telling her about his dreams and what not that does look exactly like the same school we don't do trivia here so i don't really look these things up but over the years i've learned these little things and i think that's true can you imagine if Ralph machio and Elizabeth she walked behind him. i want to do like an a i deep cut now and just have them in the background and so the movies are happening at the same time what a great double feature that would be movies it took place at the same school so there's one group of kids in the school who are going through this karate bullshit is another kids who are having these nightmares. What a fun fun flip with that b but jesse up against those goons and skeletons that's right exactly. Anyway enough about the karate kid it does lead me to talk about jesse from it as an interesting character he's someone that the plot. Sort of just happens to rather than actually actively being a part of it sure is more of a passive protagonist in a side character in his own narrative as they build. Lisa to be the hero of the story she does really a lot of the heavy lifting of the film ultimately being the one to save jesse at the end while i don't feel it takes away from connecting with jesse per se i think it changes how we root for him and i think that makes the movie interesting it does so the original story behind the script was it was far more focused on jesse. And then they really couldn't figure out what to do with lisa and i think they did the right thing by making her more fifty percent involved it does mean that there's an abrupt shift later on when the movie really becomes about her. That is probably one of my few criticisms of this movie we just don't know her well enough i think the actress i think both mark patent and the actress who are playing lisa are. Really good they listen to our sympathies very easily when jesse is no longer really part of the story. Other than the fact that he's trapped inside freddie crueger and when she takes over she's able to win us over very quickly she's insanely likable but we have been following jesse for so long it is an abrupt shift. Well that's also because of the backstage stuff happening in this film west craven went over the script and he said that the protagonist should have been the girl next door that made more sense and they just said that they want to focus on jesse for it and had they listened to him it probably would have gotten a little smarter in that direction. Yeah that's what's hard because i like the uniqueness of this film i like that it does something different so i like the fact that jesse is the lead for most of the movie and yet at the same time west craven is just an infinitely better director and of course. We're holding off on this right now but we'll get into like the home or on a subtext later but but you you can't really say that. West craven was someone who was you know he didn't like that so he was trying to bring a girl into play that would be like fucking press that you know knowing anything about west craven right now like fucking but but he's just an infinitely better director he's just a better director he's a better writer. And so when he comes in for three and he kind of gets to set the house up the way he wants to it is a better film like it's a better film. But this movie is interesting and unique is the right word for it as you said the first movie for me nancy defeats friday by pulling him out of the dream world in into our world. And in this movie it feels like that's friday's big master plan all along the other thing that makes that interesting if we're following that that path of logic is that. Nancy also wanted her mom and others to know about friday figuring that facing him would be the way to fight him and win. But in this movie Jesse is trying to hide what's going on and repress his problem with the dream demon he's refusing anyone's help he's not actively asking for help he's shutting everyone down is asking him what's going even. Lisa throughout the film is like what's happening just talk to me and he won't and it's like that thing that your parents used to say about if you ignore your bullies will go away which never actually works ever stop telling people to do that. And it's a fascinating dichotomy between the two films about here's somebody who's deliberately actively fighting and we get to see how that happens and how that works and then in this movie somebody is deliberately hiding and running and we can see how that works. You actually probably speak very well just then to why some people see this as a metaphor for coming out of the closet i get that you said that very well but again in the spirit of we want to save that to a certain point in the film. What i will land on is that the metaphor works fine for me the idea that Jesse that Freddy Krueger is trying to use Jesse as a vessel for coming into this world doesn't totally make sense to me and it doesn't totally work for me. What i would actually prefer is that nancy thomas killed Freddy Krueger nancy thomas sorry not nancy thomas so she killed Freddy Krueger fair and square as much as you can kill him in the first one and i've always said that my interpretation is you can drain his batteries but you can't really kill it. Right so this is him coming back but he's coming back in the i would prefer that he was coming back in the way we knew him in the first film so that. The way he can resurrect himself is by taking over jesse's body and by creating the fear of Freddy Krueger again whether it's through jesse whether it's people see jesse committing murders with the freddy grub glove and they know it's jesse committing crimes but they still think of Freddy Krueger. To me him trying to be reborn in spirit as opposed to being reborn and body would have made this film work a little bit better. I understand that i think that's my first actual controversial take on this i think my take on this movie. Is it's an equal and opposite archetype of the standard horror hero and how each movie chooses the opposite path and the other and we get to see results of those choices were freddy's concerned this is a movie that happens five years later. He's just regained enough power to try again and he's taking a different approach and the big controversial take on this i suppose is that this was never meant to be a dream movie this meant to be a possession movie and that's right we're failing is there trying to force it into the dream allegory and it was never meant to be there this is somebody dealing with a possession in the best way possible. And granted i think him being freddy taking a physical form versus just possessing jesse to be sort of a copycat killer wasn't exactly the smartest choice but i get what they were doing and i like the uniqueness and i like the originality of it. Oh me to and that part i think that we are totally aligned on is that this is a possession film you can have some dream sequences in there because that's the way that freddy's powers manifest but. This is a possession film i kept thinking of the bobadook i kept thinking that the bobadook is is a much like a is a modern representation of what this movie at its best was trying to go for. Which is that you have somebody possessing someone you have some creature possessing someone and they're doing terrible things and it's making them lose their fucking mind yes because the threat of them possibly killing or hurting their friends with their family. Is very very real to them and while we haven't really gotten like into that part of the movie yet we're starting to get hints of all these things like. There's you know not to take away from point but just to put this in there there's beautiful imagery in this early scene oh yeah one hundred percent. Gorgeous gorgeous shots of the furnace in the basement i love when jesse wanders around outside and looks down and sees fred kruger fucking. Pulling an arm or something out of the furnace i think that that looks beautiful i think that there are just some great spooky shots of freddy in the distance. It all adds to this feeling like you were talking about of those early scenes in the bobadook where the main character is having her mind literally taken over. Yeah and even if you were to compare this to something like the exorcist where both regan and her mother felt like they were going fucking crazy for everything that was happening. That's what possession movies are that's the whole point of it so you're dead on with that in my opinion i'm curious before we move on to another part. I think that this is probably my favorite freddy makeup you know what i think freddy's makeup has changed every single film but this one. They didn't have the original mask or whatever sick got lost i don't care. They had to do it again but they actually used images of real burn victims to make the look that they made in this film. They did the same thing with the remake they want to use inspiration from actual burn victims to make that look and this right here. Is a perfect example of digital versus practical and how more effective it is you're both going for the same thing you're going for actual real life burn victims what does that look like let's apply it. And the practical one in this film looks fucking amazing i feel like his eyes are the most sunken in that he's ever been so it gives him this very skeletal look. And i really enjoy the flakiness of his skin especially in this early scene where he confronts jessie which i think is maybe a little too on point too quickly. Freddy confronts jessie and he pulls at the skin and pulls up you know and basically exposes a brain saying that jessie you've got the body and i've got the brains. And i just think that this is a perfect example of how you can do a little less like wet as the first one his makeup is very wet and don't give me wrong i think the first one looks amazing too i just actually prefer this one a little bit better i love the sunken this in. I love the gauntness of it it really looks great guys guys we've been doing this thing for a while and i think it's about time we make a trailer. Yeah yeah all right so here we go let's get this thing all right ready all right what's going on everybody we are dissect that film i am Brett i'm damn i'm Angela. And wait wait wait wait guys i have an even better idea what if we had somebody with an epic voice spell our show in a way that our show actually isn't. What do you say so perfect all right let's go your host parker tan and Angela slice and dice their way through the good. Please we can kill it the bad the devil inside and the ugly movies you love and you can't piss on hospitality i want to allow it hold your favorite films and franchises tight because they aren't safe. In fact it's already too late it's time to dissect that film. I wish our show is what what what that guy just said but you know what if you want to listen to our awesome show dissect that film you can listen to us on YouTube and on your favorite podcast apps every single Friday where we talk about all the wonderful films. Good bad or ugly as that epic dude said back there so until next time i'm Brett i'm Dan Angela and we'll see y'all again next time. After enduring more nightmares Jesse is forced to unpack his room before going on a date with Lisa he plays a cassette throws on sunglasses and starts pumping and grinding to the beat. When Lisa shows up they impact the room together and she finds the diary of Nancy Thompson hidden in the closet the passages inside describe a man with knives on his fingers killing her friends time passes Jesse has more nightmares. He confides in Lisa who is supportive but thinks he's just picking up on psychic signals of bad things that happened in his house. Unfortunately for him things get worse. Dejected and unsure what to do he wanders in the rain to a nearby leather daddy bar and runs into his coach they go back to school where Jesse is forced to run laps before hitting the showers while the coach is still wearing his S&M gear. It turns into chaos as the various sports equipment begins to break free of the shelving and fly around the room attacking coach Snyder to jump ropes wrap around his wrists and drag him into the showers. He's tied to the pipes his clothes are ripped off by an invisible force and his naked ass is whipped with towels Freddy emerges from the steam kills the coach with a slash across the back. Moments later we see it's actually Jesse wearing Freddy's glove standing over the coach's dead body. I thought about adding to the narration the whipping noise of the towel hitting his ass just to see if I could get you to actually say it. Just like added in at the last second when you had an chance to edit it out. I don't know about all of the allegories in the film but I will say at this point we're about 35 minutes in before the first actual death occurs and Jesse has spent most of that time wet and screaming. This movie has a three million dollar budget and I'm pretty convinced that one million of it was spent on spritzer bottles for Jesse's sweat. I've never seen somebody sweaty so sweaty in a movie. This dude wakes up like say what you will about the home of erotic stuff will get to that with the teacher. But this movie is a very good metaphor for puberty and because not to get all like artsy Farti about a Friday the 13th movie. It was Friday the 13th. God damn it again. Nightmare in Elm Street. I'm leaving the other one in. I was going to edit it out. No. Fine. So not to be all artsy Farti about it but just there's like scene after scene after scene where Jesse is like I'm having a nightmare. And he's sweating like he looks like he just looks like it's like a waterfall like he looks like he's standing under Niagara Falls. I thought Jesus Christ this kid better hydrate. Either he's having delusionally bad nightmares or he's constantly doing that ice bucket challenge. Right. I do appreciate this section starts with everybody's favorite moment in a horror film. A scene where the teacher is standing in front of the group talking about something giving some sort of lesson. And this is the first horror film I've ever seen where the lesson that he's giving is not actually a metaphor of the plot until I realize that he was talking about the colon. So it depends on how you really look at it. It seems to me he was describing how shit evacuates the body and if he was saying this movie as shit, that might be a great story to the whole thing. Yeah. It's a good thing he wasn't talking about the anus. Let's just say that. That would have been people are inserting enough into this film without that. Boom. You can't really talk about Nightmare on Elm Street to without talking about one of the most famous scenes of this film, which is when Jesse cannot go on his date with Lisa, because he has to unpack his room, puts on a cassette like kids do, and dances around the room. And not since the great movie Bloody Birthday has there been such a random dance sequence in the middle of a film. I appreciate you. That's not the reference I thought you were going to go for. Good job. First of all, I don't bring it up enough. I fucking loved Bloody Birthday. It's a great movie. And I've never forgotten that sequence. I'm going to make me add that back in. The only thing that I have to say about this dance sequence, there's one thing for me that is truly horrible, disgusting, and extremely offensive in that he's dancing on the bed with his fucking shoes on. And now that entire comforter needs to be washed and it's an immense hassle and he's already having enough bullshit from his parents about cleaning up the room. He should know better. You would think that after you just talked about him being literally a fire hose of sweat that that would be what disgusts you and not his shoes on the bed. Sheets are fine. But you're getting that comforter filthy with whatever you've been stepping on outside. That's just wrong. I think there's one important thing to say about the scene. And then there's a secondary important thing to say about the scene. So number one, the movie Risky Business had only come out about one or two years earlier than that. And I think that that's what this scene is trying to be. It's trying to be this young man who's like right on the edge of becoming an adult and puberty and interested in sex and having fun and all this other stuff. And so they have him literally like bumping and grinding. Like there's literally a part where he opens his drawer, throws his clothes inside and then uses his butt to literally like bump the drawer back into the chest. And he's jumping around and he pulls out this like pop toy and he kind of like sings into it like it's a microphone and sort of plays around with it like it's his dick. But I do think it's important to understand what the movie was trying to do. I do think and correct me if you think I'm wrong Leo, I think it was trying to be Risky Business. 100%. They've actually come out and said that in the Never Sleep again. Now it's super fucking smart. The fact that the directors and the writers and the actors all have differing opinions about this and those opinions have all changed over the years, depending on when they're talking to them and who they're talking to. And I usually, when something like this is controversial and it comes up, I say just whatever the director or writer had put in there is what was true. The directors and writers, everybody's changing their mind every two years. It's hard to tell what's true and what's not. So it's hard to land on this is exactly what they were going for. But the one thing that they did all say was that Risky Business Connection was what inspired the scene. And much like Crispin Glover in Friday the 13th, they were like, Hey, just go out there and dance. And Patton was like, Okay, and he just made the shit up on the fly. And I don't know. I'm not him. I can't speak to it. If it was intended to be any one way or the other, I just know he went in and did a fucking thing for the camera. One thing that does not work for me in the movie is the scene with the parakeets. I've been so anxious to talk about this. I've never cared for this scene because for me, I know that maybe I'm being a stickler for the rules. And as a person who loves Friday the 13th movies where Jason Voorhees is a different foot and a half body type in between films, who am I to talk about continuity. But at the same time, I've always really liked the idea that Freddy Krueger exists within dreams, but has a reach into the real world. The way the movie plays with these rules, I'm not really a fan of in some points. And one is the parakeet scene. Basically, the room becomes so hot that as the parents and the daughter are watching these parakeets, in a cage, they explode. They explode into fire. First of all, this scene doesn't make sense to me because why would Freddy Krueger reveal his hand? Why would he show the parents that there's something supernatural happening? And also, why even do this at all? Because it doesn't cause fear in the right people. And for me, there's a clear answer of how this scene should work. But I find it very misplaced. And before I tell what I think it should be, I want to hear your thoughts. I've actually had a theory about this for years that I'm eager to share. First of all, the people making this film cut corners because of budgets and whatever else. They had actually built a parakeet prop that looked like a mutated Freddy thing, like he had possessed the parakeet, you know, demon bird kind of thing. And that's what was supposed to be attacking everybody, but then they scrapped that idea and just went with the normal bird. So one bird kills another one in the cage, then they go in to get it, it flies around the room, and then explodes out of nowhere. That's how the scene goes down. It's been about five years, Freddy's learning to get his powers back, and he's doing this possession thing for the first time. He's trying to, along the lines of Leslie Vernon, figure out what he's doing, and it offers us a unique look into the supernatural slasher starting out and discovering what he's capable of. The first film, we see Freddy just discovering his dream of demon powers and seeking revenge. In this movie, he's learning the limitations, if any, of what he can do by trying something new, vis-a-vis possessing Jesse. Now, this may be why he choose the house that he's in. It's Nancy's house. Perhaps he was trapped there. Perhaps he just, it's all he knew at the time. He came back to it after being killed in the first movie or drained battery or however you want to call it. However many years happened between this movie and the third film, by that time, he had really come into his own. He had really discovered what he was. He realized it was the souls of the kids that were feeding him and the fear that was feeding him and all other stuff. A lot of people obsess about this parakeet scene, and they obsess about the lore of Freddy around, and using this scene as the example of that, and we're only on the second film. I'll get more into this later, but the lore is still being established. It's easy to go back nine movies later and say that this has no connection to the lore of the film, but when it was only the second film and the second film only came out a year after the first one, and it was rushed into production to capitalize on the success of the first one, we're still figuring out what Freddy is doing, and if you take it within the timeline and within the movie itself, we're in that universe, we're part of this thing, it's not out here. Then he's really discovering, "Okay, what can I do? How can I freak these people out? What can I do to just make some chaos happen in the house? I know. I'll fuck with the birds, and I'll see what that does." Now, that's just my theory based on digging into the lore of the character and all that other shit. For the film itself, I agree with you. The scene doesn't make a lot of sense, and it feels unnecessary. This is one of those things that I've talked about forever where they could have left the scene out, and the movie would have gone perfectly without it. If the point was to have Jesse's parents get on his case, there were plenty of other moments to do that, like when he showed up naked with the cops on the front step, for example. If the point was to have Jesse storm out of the house, there are many other ways they could have done that as well. It didn't really fit. I do agree with you on that point. I just think that for this film, it would have been better to have Jesse kill the birds himself. That would have fit right into the narrative of Freddy Krueger taking over his body and slowly ruining his life. I get your point. I actually totally agree with you on the idea of built lore because sometimes it's kind of ridiculous. Again, we'll talk about Friday the 13th, even though you could say the same thing about child's play is actually pretty consistent, but Halloween movies play with the lore. Halloween is probably actually one of the best ones to be like, Jamie Lee Curtis wasn't his fucking sister in the first movie. It wasn't there at all. It wasn't there at all. Then it got added into the second movie and then people are reinterpreting what's happening in the first movie. The first movie was always supposed to be a random act of violence. Then in the second movie, the writers desperately needed some reason to be able to include Laurie Strode in the plot again. And then in the first film, Laurie had a daughter or some shit. No, he's after that kid. They're like, everything I fuck with. Yeah. Right. The third one at Silver Shamrock and Robots at it. And Halloween was on TV. Cats and dogs living together. Racist area. We got to stop acting like these are plotted out by Tolkien. Exactly. So I actually totally agree with you that the lore is still being built. I'm just talking about what's to my preference and to my preference because Freddy Krueger is a dead person. Freddy Krueger is a different kind of killer. I appreciate those differences. I enjoy them. And so for this film, I just would have preferred if Jesse had been the one that had killed the parakeets in some sort of walking in his sleep kind of scene. Oh, legit. If Jesse walked into that front room with everyone in the room and just picked up one of those birds and started eating it or some shit, that would have been amazing. That would have saved the scene, made it so much better. I agree with you. So after this, Jesse is feeling pretty dejected. And he really is trying to come to grips with everything that's happening to him in his life. He has a couple more visions. He has a really cool one when he wanders out into the kitchen and lightning strikes his dishes. Doesn't do jack shit to his window, but for some reason, all the dishes explode. I would have had a stronger reaction to that myself if it had happened, lightning striking literally right next to me in the sink. But Jesse's cool like that. So he wanders out into the rain. And maybe this is the point to reveal the thing that we've been sort of swirling around the drain that we haven't really gotten into, which is that this movie has been reinterpreted over the years as being incredibly homo-erotic. Lee and I had a discussion before we started this episode that we wanted to wait until the right moment to be able to discuss that, the culture around that interpretation of the film, just because I think it does kind of take a lot of oxygen out of the room. Like it does kind of make it so that you never end up talking about the makeup or you never end up talking about lighting or you don't end up talking about other things. And while it's an important topic in its own right, I've said it earlier on, literally every other show that you listen to on a podcast or watch on YouTube or whatever that talks about this movie, they land on this one topic and don't talk about anything else. And I don't want to be those guys. And it's hard not to, already up to this point, I have resisted joke after joke after joke or joke. Let me name a few. This is your platform. In the beginning of the film, Jesse is in a nightmare where he is on the bus and all the kids get out and there's only two girls left and then of course they drive into the pits and whatnot. I thought to myself, you know, this truly is Jesse's nightmare being stuck alone on a bus with women. Number two, I actually, this is less of a joke and just more of a point. When they cut the scene where Jesse is playing baseball with Grady who's going to become his friend and Grady is like the handsome athletic type and then, you know, Lisa was playing archery. The way they cut that scene is odd because it really looks like Jesse is smiling and at Grady and not at Lisa. He's supposed to be looking at Lisa and smiling and flirting with her and noticing that she's flirting with him. And the reason I know this is because Grady hits the baseball and the baseball hits Jesse in the head, which if Jesse was looking at Grady, he would have seen. So they cut that scene in a weird way. I agree. And then I, of course, laugh after Jesse has his big dance sequence and Lisa shows up to help him clean the room and she's very sweet and she opens the door and it says no chicks allowed on the door and I thought, "Appropo!" When we get to Jesse wandering around outside, I think that this is the point where there's just no way to not talk about this part of the film. I agree with you. I thought very carefully about this conversation because this is what I said earlier where some people might think that I don't have a voice in this because it has now been appropriated as a film into a culture that I'm not part of. So I want to be respectful of that, but at the same time, I am a fan of this movie and I feel like I have a voice at least to talk about it from that angle. Allow me to jump in here really quick and say, "I actually want you to talk about this, so anybody that gets mad at you for talking about this can come through me first. I am part of this community and I actually really want to have this discussion with you, and I actually want to have it with somebody who is not part of the community and how they see the film. I'm very interested in how you see this movie." Well, and that's actually 100% where I want to take this. I am not a gay person. I am not a queer person. I am about as straight as it gets. The entire time, this movie came out in '85, so I've lived with this movie literally my entire life, and I have never seen this the way that people are saying that it is now. Now, that doesn't mean I'm ignorant to what's going on. I can very clearly put the signs together of certain things. This whole thing about Coach Snyder at the gay bar, Jesse earlier, when they were talking about Coach Snyder being a dickhead teacher, says, "Yeah, he's a weirdo. He hangs out of those S&M bars downtown." So I'm like, "Okay, that's just his fucking character. That's just who this one character in the film is." So it makes sense that this scene would involve him being at the gay bar, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't put the other stuff into it. I saw the no chicks sign on the door. It didn't mean anything to me. I saw the board game in the closet that said probe that everyone likes to talk about. I didn't associate that. You know what I mean? I think it's funny. I'm sorry. I think it's hilarious. Don't get me wrong. It's fucking hilarious. But growing up with this film, I never once put these things together and said, "Oh, that means Jesse's gay." It never occurred to me. Even the weird dance for me was risky business or was something else. It was just some weird fucking thing the kid was doing. I never associated it with a home erotic undertone. And I don't know if that means it's because I'm a heterosexual white male, or if it means anything other thing, I don't know. I'm not assigning anything to it, but I find it fascinating how over the years, a movie that was touted for just being boring and dull and not very Freddy-like quote-unquote, so it was the worst of the batch, has now become the Baba Duke. And everyone has just grabbed it, put its culture onto it, and they're doing that "Paradolia" thing where they're seeking any piece of information from the film that they can assign to this agenda to make it fit that narrative. And I'm not saying that as a negative thing or that they're doing it maliciously or anything else. I just find it fascinating that that's happening now in this culture, when over the last 30 fucking years or whatever, nobody has ever done that. So I have a couple things to say here. First of all, I'm going to rebuke you on one thing. You may say that you are as straight as they come, but your hat collection says otherwise. Leo has quite a few very nice hats. I went through a phase, and then the hats were actually expensive, and I haven't decided to get rid of them because they're good hats. I just don't wear them before. It was in college. It was his day before graduation hat phase. I was wearing the hats before all the fucking neckbeards assigned them to their culture, and then I decided I don't want to be that, so I stopped wearing them. So I'm just saying, there are some reasons to question his ideas. But anyway, there's a moment for '80s horror fan where if you grew up around these movies, and I grew up with this movie, where you watch it, and it has some kind of impression on you. Maybe you're one of the people that thought it was boring and didn't make any sense. For some reason, when I was a kid, I thought this was the scariest of the Friday the 13th movie. God, that's three. Do like a battle every time I do that. There's like a score. I'm going to play that stinger from Friday the 13th. Exactly. I found this to be the scariest of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I don't know why. I think it's because Freddy felt very invincible, and Jesse felt very vulnerable. I identified with him more because I was male. I saw him differently, and that's fine, and that's fine. But there was something I found that was really scary about this movie, but I feel like I have met so many people where I've said, Nightmare on Elm Street, too, and they're like, yeah, and I go, have you seen it as an adult? And they're like, yeah, it's a very different movie. When you see it as an adult than it is when you see it as a kid. And I've said that I've made that same joke about Hellraiser, too. You know, Hellraiser is a very different movie when you see it as an adult than it is as a kid. I remember just as quick as I had having that same association with Three's Company. I watched that when I was younger when it was first out, and I'm like, oh, this is a funny little show. And then I was an adult, and I got all the innuendos and the fucking adult humor that was in it that they hide past the censors, and I went, holy shit, this is a very different show. Come and knock on our door. That's exactly it, yes. But I get that point of view. I absolutely understand where that comes from, yes. And so you get to this sequence where Jesse feels compelled to go to this bar. He goes inside, and I think that what they were intending was for the bar to feel very scary and very seedy. But it comes off less as a seedy, scary bar and looks more like the bar in Gremlins. It's just like one of every character. It's like there's a person in a fedora, there's a woman all in green. Yeah, there's a drag queen, there's a couple of dudes that are kind of licking each other's faces. It was like, Jesus Christ, if they just had one Gremlin hanging from the chandelier, it would look perfect. I never thought about it that way, but you're not wrong. So I don't think this was totally intended to look like a gay bar, or they clearly referenced gay people in the movie, and they also clearly had gay couples that were in the bar. But I think it was actually probably meant to be mean-spirited. I'm not gonna deny that. It was the 80s. Yeah, and it was probably meant to make fun of them a little bit, because they're making fun of the coach. Right, exactly. And when you're talking about a film made in a more homophobic time era, this is a time where it wasn't looked on as openly and fondly as it is today. So I can actually concede, especially with them picking on the coach, as you say, or even the kids saying, "What a dickhead, I hate that fucking guy." They're gonna put him in a bad light. They wanna make him look as bad as possible, and in this era, making him gay made him look bad. And he's referred to as queer, and it's not necessarily meant as like a honorable term, like it is now. Not at all. This sequence is unintentionally hilarious. First and foremost, this pan across the bar, like in my mind, I remembered it being a gay bar. But then when I'm watching the scene, there's a lot of women in this bar. Either this is not a gay bar in the 80s, or this is like a gay bar now, where straight women think that for some reason they're wanted in a gay bar. Right, yeah, yeah. It was ahead of its time. Quick, funny story for you. I have a friend who was talking about this phenomenon of straight women going to gay bars. Now, sometimes women are invited by their friends. I'm not saying it's always bad. But she was talking about this phenomenon, and she said, "You know, I understand why it gets gay men really upset. It gets them upset because this is their place to have their space to be able to like express their feelings." And I thought, "That is not the reason at all." You're acting like they are doing like circle sessions and crying. They're doing stuff in circles, but it's different. Yeah, the crying session, that's what the high T-room is all about. That's not this way. Yeah, that's not why they're upset about this at all. But there's this unintentionally funny scene where he runs into the coach and the coach is wearing... I could call it like leather daddy gear, but it's more like leather daddy gear by TJ Maxx. It's more like the cheaper version. Oh, yeah. He went down to Spirit Halloween for this shit. This wasn't the real stuff, clearly. Yeah, black and got a couple of studs. Up your fucking game, dude. No noobs. So then the coach, in response to seeing Jesse, this is where it gets weird. Basically forces Jesse to go back to the school, run one lap in the haziest gym I've ever seen. Theoretically, we presume he ran many laps before this one that we saw, but yes. He does have a sweating problem, so maybe that's why it's so fucking steamy in that gym. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's like there's like a whole like cloud of steam in this gym. He runs around a couple times and then he goes and he hits the showers. And this sequence is just like unbelievable. This segues perfectly into the next thing that I have to say about all of this, the subtext, the scene, the everything, which is every nightmare on Elm Street film tries to trick you so that you're not sure if the character on the screen is dreaming or awake. We talked about this earlier. The earlier films doing a much better job of it than the later films you're dead on about that. I always took this scene as Jesse was having a nightmare that the first half of the scene where he wanders into the gay bar and then he's forced to do laps in the dream was a dream. Because why the fuck would any high school student wandering out of the house late at night, even if you ended up at a gay bar, if your coach grabs you and says, "Come on dirtbag, you're doing laps." You're going to go fuck, you know, and you're going to go home. You're not going to write, cow down and do this. That's weird shit that happens in a dream. Now, being that this is a possession film, we can presume that Jesse is sleepwalking. So he's dreaming this, but he's also actually doing this and the dream and the reality are kind of merging together with one another in his mind. So it's all rather absurd and just a little to the left of reality, the way that a dream would be. And when we snap back into the reality is when coach Snyder is attacked. That was when sleeping Jesse is having his nightmare as Freddy's attacking the coach and all this, he gets dragged in there and all this other shit. And then Freddy utilized the nightmare that Jesse's having as he sleepwalking to make the attack happen to choose his next victim because Jesse's probably having this nightmare about fuck coach Snyder. He's such a dickhead, right? And then he took control of Jesse while he was asleep, went to the school and killed the coach. And this earlier established this coach hangs out at S&M bars downtown. That's why he knew where to go find him. This is how I've always seen this scene. You can't ignore where the coach Snyder is. You can't ignore what's going on and the subtext that exists within this film. I totally relate to that in what it is. But I've had this different interpretation of it over the years. I actually don't totally disagree with you. So often the way that these films work where demon is possessing someone and slowly getting them to kill. The first kill is someone that is morally ambiguous. Usually the first kill is someone who's been bullying or treating the person badly. The lover who's cheating on them, the person who's stealing their money, different things like that. So as far as the possession film goes, yeah, like the coach has been treating him like dog shit. Of course Freddy would have that be the first kill because it's one that Jesse isn't going to totally fight back for. He's going to kind of enjoy it. And one way that you could look at this kill is that Jesse being gay that it has kind of a homoerotic flair to it. But regardless, I mean, just when the kill happens, it's kind of hilarious because you have to really sink your mind into it and be like, well, okay, so I guess Jesse, like if he is gay, then this is how he would interpret this kill and he would do it in this really homoerotic way. But like, I mean, when you're watching it, I mean, after the coach who's still in his S&M gear is watching these basketballs and footballs fly around, these jump ropes like tie around his hands, drag him into the showers, tie him up in front of the showers. And when his clothes rip away, it's fucking hilarious. That's wonderful hilarious. It is like a stripper and you can just hear the velcro go, and it just all is like torn away in an instant. Like, we talk about this with Insta-deaths, you know, like Insta-death is just funny? Yeah, well, well, Insta-instant clothes tear away is also funny. Still funny. Still funny. And I see the comedy of it, absolutely. The writers are the one that chose to have towels fly off the rack and whip his ass. 100%. We didn't choose that. But this furthers my theory a little bit. Freddy, as the series has gone on, had got really good about getting into the kids' heads, finding what fucks with them, and using that to attack them. So, if he's possessing Jesse, and Jesse knows that this guy is an S&M guy, then he can use that against the coach. And I think that this is where I'll get into my feelings about the homo-erotic nature of this film. Because I agree with a quote that I read, which is that I think some of it is there. Some of it is maybe put on after the fact, and some of it is very unclear what the original intention was. Right. The part with the towels is something that you see in a lot of films in the 80s. You see people in a locker room, you know, they get the towel wet, they whip each other's asses, and it doesn't really mean anything to the people that made those films because straight people in a locker room where they're all naked, they're straight. They don't really care about those things. It's not really a big deal. But at the same time, you know, in the 80s, you know, is when we really started recognizing that there were more people that were gay and bisexual. And for someone who is gay and bisexual, that does mean something. It means something different. And I think that sometimes we, even in my youth, could be a little bad about thinking that because it meant something different to me, that must be what it is. And that's not always true. However, one of the places that I want to defend the film for its homo rotting nature, other than the parts that are unintentionally funny, I will defend those. They're funny. They're funny. I don't care. I think it's funny that there's a game called Probe in his closet. I think it's funny. Intentionally otherwise, that is hilarious. What I think people grab onto is that the feeling of what it's like to have those feelings when you're young is very well represented in this movie. I think it's insulting to just assume because Mark Patton is gay, but he's playing a gay character. And I agree with you. People are divided on that. There are going to be some people that agree with me on that and some people that don't. I think it's insulting. And he actually has said something very similar. He didn't like the fact that they made, he felt that they made the character gay and that he felt that actually outed him when he was very young. And when he was at a lot of risk for being outed. Right. I'm familiar with that. Right. Yeah. And I do think that Mark Patton was treated really badly and I don't think he deserved it. I think he's really good in this movie. I'm really glad that the horror community has embraced him in the last five or six years because he deserves it. He didn't have to erase the film again because he stayed away from it. Me too. I'm because of this. And he did a documentary recently called Scream Queen My Personal Nightmare or some shit like that. And I haven't watched it yet, but I've heard nothing but rave about it. I've heard great things about it too and I haven't watched it yet, but I have read some of his story and I know that, you know, he was stuck in between a rock and a hard place. On one side, you know, this movie was being played in gay bars and it was kind of fun. But then on the other side, he was being told that he was in the worst of the franchise and he was being called names. And, you know, anything you don't like about the movie is not his fault. But I want to go back to that feeling. You actually articulated it really well. That feeling of repressing something is so powerful in you. It's not just the idea of feeling like people are going to hate you even though that's real. Like you're, you know, in the 80s, you know, you're, I grew up in that time. You're really truly worried that you're going to get hurt. It's dangerous time. Yeah. There was a big controversy in my, in my hometown or near my hometown where a bunch of kids beat the shit out of some gay people with baseball bats. Like it was real and it was scary. And that feeling, I think for people who, who aren't, you know, gay or bi, they can, what they can understand is imagine if you had like a sexual feeling inside of you that was really strong and deeply taboo. And I think the movie captures that feeling really well. And I do think that some people are maybe putting some things onto the film, but like it's just in simple scenes too. Like the way that Grady and Mark or Mark Patton's character, Jesse, the way they interact, the idea of the gay character that really just wants to connect with his male best friend and all the male best friend wants to do is talk about girls and like not connect at all. Yeah. I think a lot of people went through that. Yeah, but that's true. Yeah. I think a lot of people went through that. They recognize it. They understand what it's like. I think it captures ostracization really well. So I think it captures the feeling really well. And you and I agreed on something that we said off record because one of the things that also just doesn't help with the film, Jesse and Lisa don't have a lot of chemistry. There's nothing going on between the two of them. It's horrible watching them try to be romantic to each other. It's like watching a brother and sister kiss. And I think that there is a better version of this film that borrows from the book of the first season of Chucky that could just, if it was a different time, just own that Jesse's gay and make Lisa his big sister, who's defended him forever. Make her like Trish in Friday 13th part four. Make her his soldier. She has defended him against like every bully and everybody that's called him a name. And he's going through this struggle. She's the only one that knows and make it their story. And then just have Freddy Krueger just play up on that. Hey, you don't like the fact that that, you know, that that coach called you a queer. I've got a great answer for that. Let's kill him. I've actually thought before giving Freddy that sort of Audrey to vibe in this movie. The devil on Jesse shoulder being, Hey, you know what? Yes. This guy actually kind of deserves it. Let's just fucking kill him. And then Jesse struggling with the whole thing about, am I a killer or not? And just be like, Hey, now I'm struggling about my morality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think that would be a good angle. I agree with you. And I also think just because, you know, I want to defend it a little bit because people to get mad that this movie is like home erotic. Dude, there's 300 fucking movies made in the 80s that have like zero gay characters in it. Get over it. I mean, if this was meant to be a gay character in this film, then God bless them for fucking doing it because they needed more of that in this time era to normalize this shit. I'll celebrate it. If it's true, we'll never going to know if it's fully intended or not because so many people who made the fucking thing are divided on it. And I'm going to towards the recap, get more into this kind of shit. But I mean, I think it's a double edged sword where the community has now embraced this film and are piling on evidence that it's always been gay. I don't think it's always been gay. I think it's great that you're claiming it. I think that's the right word to say that. But I don't think it's always, always been there. I think this for me as a straight person watching this film growing up with this film literally my entire life is more about what every other Elm Street film is about. About teenagers discovering who they are, whether that's sexuality, whether that's identity, whether it's relationships in general. How am I going to get through the fucking next three days when I have a test? All this shit is what these films have always explored. The struggles of being a teen. And this is part of it. This is part of that struggle. And for those who have found this as their first gay film, that's pretty huge. And I don't want to take that away from anybody. I don't want to diminish that. Just because my point of view is different on it and I didn't see it that way, doesn't mean that you're disallowed to see it that way. I think that both sides can do a better job at understanding how other people see things. Completely. And you're talking about wanting this film to have more of a knock at the door approach where it's like, or knock on the cabin. Sorry. You know, the recent M night movie where you have like a gay character, but they're kind of telling a different story. It's not a story about him being gay. It's just he's gay. It's a big deal. But at the same time, I think you, you know, as much as sometimes people get aggravated with identity policies, like sometimes it's totally okay for a movie to be about those things. For sure. With this one, I get it. I get what's happening for people. I get how we look back on it and see very, very different movie. I just want to also talk about it in so many other ways. And I think that there is a slightly better movie that has those kinds of like home erotic undertones to it, which is Rope. Rope is a very good Hitchcock movie where it is about a murder being committed by two men that can't wait to go out to their summer home together. Right, right, right. [laughter] Hi, me bags. Leo here. I realize this is going to be a little unorthodox right at the end of the show. But when I was editing this episode together, I realized if we let it be the way it normally is, the runtime is going to be about two and a half hours. That's a lot. The feedback that we get for such things usually indicates a shorter episode is a more desirable episode. So rather than subject everyone to endless hours of my droning on and bullshit, we're going to cut this episode in half. Normally, Steven and I plan which episodes are two-parters, then we get proper recaps at the end, so forth and so on. Obviously, this time, it's not happening that way. It's just an executive decision by the editor, which is me. As such, I've also decided we're not going to make you wait an extra week for the next part of this. We're going to release them both on the same day or one day apart or something. We'll figure it out. So you won't have to wait to get to the end of this episode. We're just going to make them in more bite-sized chunks and make them more digestible for everybody. I really hope that you have enjoyed the show so far. I've enjoyed doing it. I've enjoyed putting this together. This episode is interesting. It's something I didn't realize either one of us was going to be quite so passionate about, but it was really fun that we were and that we found something we could really resonate with and have a really deep conversation around. It means a lot to me to be able to talk about the movies I love, and I know Steven feels the same way, and I really hope you guys are digging what we're putting down. He seemed to be, but who can tell from an algorithm alone? You know what I mean? We're going to put part two out for you pretty soon. I'll jump in at the beginning of that one with more of this just to catch everyone up on what's going on, and I hope you guys are enjoying the show. See you soon. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
