Given the 1980s’ penchant for sequels, and the commercial success of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was seemingly inevitable that a follow-up would occur. Sure enough the villainous Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was back within the year, this time courtesy of writer David Chaskin and director Jack Sholder.

Among fans of the Elm Street franchise, Freddy’s Revenge has something of a reputation for being one of the weaker instalments – if not the least popular together. Lacking Craven’s involvement, it takes the set-up of the first film and pushes it in a different direction. For me it is easy to be forgiving of those changes. Faced with every temptation to simply duplicate the original’s formula with a different group of teenage victims, Freddy’s Revenge tries something new. The results may be uneven, but I will always defend uneven and inventive over smooth but conservative. I will defend it every time.

Five years after the events of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy Thompson’s long-vacant house is finally occupied by a new family. Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) moves into Nancy’s old bedroom, and gradually becomes tormented by dreams of child killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Through dreams, Freddy begins to take over Jesse’s body in an attempt to manifest in the waking world.

The core conceit of the first film – the spirit of a dead killer slaughtering young people in their dreams – is largely abandoned in the second, which instead is dominated by a tale of possession and body horror. It also purposefully inverts the common ‘final girl’ trope of the slasher picture: instead of focusing on a teenage girl, Freddy’s Revenge is mostly concerned with a teenage boy instead.

By putting Jesse into the more vulnerable mode of slasher protagonist, the film also opens itself to particularly queer readings. It is clear that the homo-eroticism of Freddy’s Revenge is at least partially intentional: it favours half-naked sweaty men over attractive young women, it presents Jesse as nervous and stressed around his girlfriend Lisa (Kim Myers) and more comfortable around male best friend Grady (Robert Rusler), and even has Jesse being caught in a bar by his leather-wearing, gay-coded gym teacher (Marshall Bell). By the time that teacher is getting towel-whipped to death while naked in the shower, or a penile Freddy erupts Alien-like from Jesse’s chest, it is difficult to describe the queer subtext with a straight face. In recent years the film has been enthusiastically adopted by the queer community as a cult classic, and such a move seems not only understandable but appropriate.

Robert Englund gets an opportunity to be a lot more vocal and sadistic here than in the original film, and that is a welcome trend that continues in subsequent sequels. While the other performances are somewhat limited, they do at least loan a sort of stylistic consistency. In its finer moments, Freddy’s Revenge seems an unexpectedly inventive variation. It its weaker ones, it is more often than not an unexpectedly silly pleasure.