Post by Toasted Cheese on Dec 1, 2017 23:34:17 GMT
I think the idea of a teen character fearing that he is gay and having-a-secret-monster-inside-of-him angle could have really been an interesting and thoughtful approach, but interesting and thoughtful are not terms I would use to describe the execution of this film.
They didn't have the conviction to actually go with that, so they skirted around it by not making him literally gay within the text of the movie and just made everything around him not so subtly homoerotic.
I believe the director denies that he was trying to explore gay themes. How he defends the idea that this kid sneaks put of his house at night and can't help but to secretly wander into an s&m leather club, runs into his sadist gym teacher, follows him back to school, ties him up in this showers, strips him naked, and brutally towel whips his bare ass would be beyond me then.
Even setting any sexual connotations completely aside, that sequence is one of the most absolutely ridiculously nonsensical series of events one could possibly come up with.
Ultimately though, the film was just a follow up to a popular original which wasn't without it flaws, but better executed. They wanted to do something to showcase Freddy again and perhaps take a different angle to the nightmare sequences, and rather than do the same thing with Freddy invading the dreams of those he wants to kill, they chose to go with a possession angle.
It does work to some extent, but also being a film made for the mainstream crowd, they couldn't exactly design it as a thoughtful psychological arthouse thriller, where some teenage boy is struggling with his sexuality and creates a monster inside of him because he is afraid of who he really is. It was dressed up as an easy going horror\slasher, with absurdly over-the-top horror sequences to mask the gay angle they wanted to allude too.
For the director to deny what was going on, does that mean the screenwriter was playing tricks on him and he didn't understand his own film? Perhaps then, Jack Sholder was the wrong choice for director if he was easily fooled. He made a better and nifty film a couple of years later with The Hidden. Heck, John Carpenter—a far superior film-maker—was approached to direct Top Gun-86', picked up on the homoeroticism in it's script and didn't want to do it. Tony Scott made it work and look at the popularity and following that film has now, so Carpenter may be homophobic, but at least he had the insight to see and read between the lines. Otherwise, the director is just going through the mechanical motions of what the script sets out, without having any passion or thoughtful perception of what they are really making. Pretty much like most horror film directors today.