A new family moves into 1428 Elm Street after getting a cheap deal on the hot (or very recently on fire) property, only to find its electrical appliances and household pets curiously prone to overheating. It may not be the fiercest revenge but even Freddy Krueger is susceptible to budgie-tary constraints.

Released less than a year after the seminal A Nightmare on Elm Street, this 1985 sequel cashes in on Freddy fever without time to work out the production design, special effects or a second draft. It marks the start of the series’ descent from boiler room horror to boilerplate blather, swapping Wes Craven’s crafty storytelling for a dream-scream-repeat formula that would plague the franchise for a decade.

It does however stand out among the slasher glut for having a male scream queen (Mark Patton) and an almost irrepressibly gay undercurrent, which has made it an LGBTQ+ cult classic. Jesse is frightened by the appetite of his dreams and the monster in the closet, constantly surrounded by innuendo and imagery suggesting the “No Chicks” sign on his bedroom door might become a permanent fixture. He is also dating someone who looks (if not acts) like Meryl Streep (Kim Myers), surely one of the gayest things a man can do.

Sadly this subversive subtext is soured by an execution that’s more John Hughes than John Carpenter. Not only does the film abandon Charles Bernstein’s iconic theme music, it turns the once terrifying Fred Krueger (Robert Englund) into a cartoon villain who spends more time talking than stalking. Apparently tired of disemboweling teenagers in towering torrents of blood, he now seems content to limply fire tennis balls at a gym teacher, whose death goes entirely unnoticed. The police presence that gave the original its grounding in reality has gone, but so has the surrealism of the dream sequences, although the school bus scenes that bookend the movie are a feverish highlight.

Freddy’s Revenge deserves its dues for so brazenly slipping homoerotic themes into a hit franchise, but the stronger allegory is ultimately between the cheapskate father (The Return of the Living Dead‘s Clu Gulager) and New Line Cinema’s Robert Shaye. Both thought they were getting a good deal on the House That Freddy Built, when spending more time and money would have better secured its foundations.