Review: Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

I do not think that A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was a good movie. Popcorn Frights did a screening of it right after they showed this, and there were some moments that I liked more than I did the last time I saw it; specifically, I don't think I gave lead actor Mark Patton enough credit for a handful of good scenes he had, even if his performance overall was still a mixed bag. There's a reason why this film is polarizing as opposed to universally despised. Overall, however, I still found it to be a fairly clunky movie riddled through with plot holes, and I'm not surprised to know that it almost killed the franchise before Chuck Russell's pitch for Dream Warriors, one that involved using Freddy's supernatural dream-demon nature to go wild with the dream sequences, convinced New Line to give it another shot. I'm also not surprised that a lot of its issues came down to trouble behind the scenes. Which is where Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street comes in. This film takes the viewer through Patton's life, particularly how his brush with fame and ensuing downfall came amidst the height of the real-life horror of the AIDS epidemic, juxtaposed with both the history of the horror genre (especially in the '80s) and his conflicted relationship with Freddy's Revenge, the film that destroyed his career only to go on to become a cult classic of queer cinema. It is both an enlightening film and a very human one, and while parts of it were fairly slow and its assessment of '80s slashers as a backlash against Reagan-era conservatism didn't really convince me (just as good a case can be made that the genre was a perfect reflection of the decade's sexual politics), it was still a very interesting journey through a moment in history and how both a man and the film he did were affected by it.

The film shines the spotlight on Patton, the star of the film whose career wound up destroyed once it caused people to start asking questions about his sexuality, causing the fresh-faced hunk from suburban Kansas City to quit acting and drop off the face of the Earth. When the makers of the retrospective documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy went to find him, they had to hire a private investigator, who eventually found him living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico working as an artist. The film is at its best when it's diving into a part of the '80s that typically doesn't get mentioned on Stranger Things: what it was like to be gay during that time. Being neither gay nor a child of the '80s, I can't vouch, but watching the nightmarish way in which this film portrayed what it was like to live amidst the AIDS crisis, I saw the form that the gay rights movement would take as it came into its own in later decades. AIDS caused a seismic shift in gay culture, as the libertine social mores and passive acceptance that characterized the '70s were replaced by an environment where all of your friends were dying of a mysterious wasting disease that turned out to be spread through unprotected sex, and the rest of society either didn't care or was calling it divine retribution for your sinful lifestyle. In light of this, I think it's no surprise that, after the worst of the AIDS epidemic, marriage rights became the cause celebre for gay activists that they did, with the generation that survived that crisis and the one that came up afterwards embracing monogamy as both a safety measure (especially for gay men; lesbian transmission was much rarer) and to align themselves with the social mores of mainstream society (and to be sure, to this day there are dissident activists who believe that marriage destroyed and assimilated the LGBTQ+ community).

This film goes into specific detail on the impact that AIDS had in Hollywood in particular and the entertainment industry more broadly. There, it hit especially hard, and the reaction by many throughout the industry was as shamefully homophobic as anyone else's; male actors suspected of being gay were feared by actresses worried that they might get sick from shooting a kissing scene, and after Rock Hudson died, there was a drive by the tabloids to "out" as many gay male actors as they could. It is really no wonder that Patton, who pushed to tone down some of the more homoerotic scenes in the film, was so furious with the way that screenwriter David Chaskin "coded" his character Jesse as gay, not only for the damage it did to his career but also for how Chaskin said that he wrote the film to appeal to homophobic teenage boys -- and spent years denying it and claiming that Jesse coming off as gay or effeminate was all Patton's doing. I wouldn't blame him for hating Freddy's Revenge and Hollywood in general after that.

But in the years to come, something funny happened. Hand-in-hand with the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, Freddy's Revenge got rediscovered by a younger generation, one that recognized that, even if some of its metaphors were questionable, this was still undeniably one of the gayest films to come out of the '80s, a decade remembered as a time of mainstream homophobia but one whose flamboyant popular culture, shall we say, easily lent itself to a queer refashioning. A lot of young gay men saw something of Jesse in them, and for those whose parents might not have been so accepting if they came out, a cheesy horror movie from the '80s would have been far less objectionable sitting on their shelf than an overtly queer film. It was through this lens that Freddy's Revenge was reevaluated, as while you could easily debate its merits as a horror film, there's no denying that it's an interesting film even for someone like me who didn't think it was all that good. It is also here where the film comes to Mark Patton today, replaying his interview with Chaskin from Never Sleep Again where he confronts Chaskin over the themes in Freddy's Revenge, and eventually coming to embrace his role as one of horror's first "male scream queens". This is where the core of the film lies, tracking the evolution of Patton's conflicted relationship with Freddy's Revenge from a film he fled the country to escape to one that he now happily discusses at fandom conventions, and it is at once enlightening and heartwarming to see how he came to terms with it. The film's portrait of Patton is a deeply human one, charting his journey from a rising star who, like many aspiring actors on the edge of success, got a bit too full of himself to somebody who was left understandably bitter by the raw deal he got from Hollywood, only to lead the way on the rediscovery of Freddy's Revenge as a cult classic.

The Bottom Line

Some light history of both slashers and the gay rights movement serve as the hooks to bring the viewer into the story of an unusual film and the man whose life was forever changed by it. Nightmare on Elm Street fans and fans of queer cinema alike should definitely check this one out.