MOVIE REVIEW : ‘NIGHTMARE ON ELM’ AWAKENS ANOTHER SHOCK REACTION

We make one hard request from horror movies: that they scare the daylights out of us. It’s gravy when they offer subsidiary pleasures--humor, color, character.

One recent genuinely frightening movie shocker was Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street�--whose sequel, “A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge,� just opened citywide. If “Nightmare 1� had the meat and potatoes of horror, the sequel is mostly gravy.

The original “Nightmare� was a double surprise. Perhaps the scariest picture of its type in years, it was also a rare good movie from that morally reprehensible genre, the teen-age “slasher� film. It seemed to bypass most of the automatic resistance of today’s gore-saturated audiences--outwitting them, sending up shock waves of spinal shivering.

It boasted a truly eerie and loathsome villain, a dead ex-factory boiler attendant and child-murderer named Freddy Krueger (crawlingly well played by Robert Englund), who began to haunt the dreams of some middle-American teen-agers. Freddy was a rakish chap in a dark-brimmed hat and red-and-green-striped sweater. His face had been burned away into rotting clumps of singed, leprous-looking flesh. His eyes gleamed like embers in a slag pit. He had a queer, lurching walk and wore a long metal-fingernail apparatus that he liked to scrape along walls and plunge into his victims. (The harsh squeak of those nails dragging along as Freddy dogged his dreamers was more horrifying than many a movie bloodbath.) The premise was simple: What happens when nightmares begin to intrude into reality, when dreams cut through their borders. Which is exactly what Freddy did. . . .

“A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2� varies this premise. It’s not cheap and sleazy; the production shows care and talent. In certain aspects (the acting of Englund, Mark Patton, Clu Gulager, Kim Myers and others and the cinematography), it may actually be superior.

But it’s not as good a movie. Director Craven’s artistic instincts may have been sharp when he walked away (though it’s been directed, quite well, by Jack Sholder). Inevitably, it lacks some surprise, and its striving for quality may even undermine it. “Nightmare 1� profited from its variable acting and formula sets; from the fact that it looked so much like an ordinary shocker, one more from the “Friday the 13th� trash heap. In a way, it became a comment on the movies themselves, on the unsavory appetites they may slake or arouse. “Nightmare 2,� which tries to do more (it even has some “Beauty and the Beast� pretensions), accomplishes a bit less.

The basic switch is interesting, but troubling. In the original, the protagonist was a teen-age girl, desperately trying to stay awake as she was stalked by the degenerate dream fiend. In the sequel, it’s a boy Freddy tries to recruit as agent of his murderous will.

So why, you might ask, does the girl dream of being attacked, and the boy of being the attacker? Perhaps it’s a cultural comment: The whole movie is soaked in the idea of horror emerging from everyday “normal� life (divebombing canaries, toasters running amok, a gym teacher assaulted by his own basketballs). But it may be too intellectual. Your worst nightmares aren’t of Jekyll and Hyde, of monsters emerging from your gut, but of avoiding implacable doom--which made “Nightmare 1� easier to relate to, whatever your sex. Craven seemed to have one conscious goal: to keep you on edge, to keep tightening the screws. “Nightmare 2,� with seemingly more conscious intentions, has less of a visceral jolt.

It isn’t a bad show. Rather than the original’s pure line of rising terror, this one tends to have strong sequences. There’s the opening, where a school bus suddenly veers and races off into the desert--the driver (Freddy) cackling madly, the sky reddening and darkening, the desert cracking open and crumbling apart, the bus teetering on one vast stalagmite in a chasm, Freddy’s nails squeaking along the windows. Or the final Wagnerian love-versus-death battle in the fumy, shadowed factory. Or the scenes when Freddy claws his way out of Jesse’s body, or brags about being the brains of the operation and peels off his skull to show them off.

Scenes like this suggest what David Cronenberg or Brian De Palma mean when they insist that horror films are artful because they touch life-and-death issues, and give greater play to the imagination. And during these scenes, “Nightmare 2,� however briefly, seems more than just a fright show that’s well above run-of-the-massacre.