Freddy vs. Jason

Rating

Director

Ronny Yu

Screenplay

Damian Shannon, Mark Swift

Length

97 min.

Starring

Robert Englund, Ken Kirzinger, Monica Keena, Jason Ritter, Kelly Rowland, Katharine Isabelle, Chris Marquette, Brendan Fletcher, Tom Butler, Lochlyn Munro, Kyle Labine, Zack Ward, Paula Shaw

MPAA Rating

R (For pervasive strong horror violence/gore, gruesome images, sexuality, drug use and language)

Review

A cold lake bears the horror of a young boy’s drowning at the hands of lust-filled camp counselors. He awakens, haunted by his mother whose death he has avenged for years. Jason Voorhees sleeps while child-murdering Freddy Krueger uses his beloved mother to begin the killing all over again.

Freddy vs. Jason is the first big screen pairing of any classic slasher villains in film history. Freddy, the killer of Springwood in Wes Craven’s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street pits wits with Jason, the machete-wielding psycho who terrorizes visitors to Camp Crystal Lake in the 1970s teen slasher film Friday the 13th. Each of these characters has appeared collectively in 18 previous films (Freddy in seven and Jason in eleven) scaring teenagers for years.

To get these two legends on the screen, screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift takes great pains to make the transition realistic. While their selection of plot sounds dismal, its execution is virtually flawless. There are certainly aspects that require tolerance on the audience’s part but overall, the film is a true joy for any horror movie fan.

Krueger, played viciously well by Robert Englund, is known for stalking his victims in their dreams. The parents of Springwood removed the last children sought by Krueger and isolated them in a mental institution where they were drugged and prevented from dreaming. This caused Krueger to lose his only source of power, the dreams of those who were terrified by him. He decides to seek assistance from a very unlikely source.

Jason Voorhees, played this time by Ken Kirzinger, was a young boy who drowned while the camp counselors who were supposed to have been watching him were busy having sexual relations. His mother, finding this an immoral and unacceptable excuse for her son’s death takes revenge on them and begins killing all those who engaged in immoral activities. She was thwarted and Jason rose from the dead to seek revenge for her death.

Krueger, able to affect people’s dreams seeks out Jason’s slumbering corpse and plants an image of his mother that tells him to revive and again begin killing but this time in Krueger’s home turf of Springwood. Jason quietly tracks and kills several teens but is never seen giving people the impression that Freddy has returned to kill more inhabitants of Elm Street.

Performances in this movie are predictably weak. No one watching a horror film expects the actors to care about their roles and certainly don’t anticipate anything more than they’ve seen previously. Likewise, the effects are pretty typical for the genre with some kudos to the visual effects team who delivered an amazing set of effects during the pinball and dockside scenes.

The true quality of this film comes in its surprisingly clear screenplay and Ronny Yu’s wonderful job of directing it all into place. The dialogue is definitely conventional but the story itself is one to be celebrated. Not only do the writers deliver a quick, backstory enriched plot but they manage to save every inscrutable detail of the film’s predecessors to blend seamlessly with the combined mythos. Several unmistakable Easter eggs find their way into the film getting fans of the original movies excited, including the KRGR call letters seen on a news program in one scene at the sanitarium.

Freddy vs. Jason is not the kind of film that wins awards and it’s not the kind of movie that people will place on their priority ownership list. It is, however, a film that any horror aficionado would relish and enjoy and may bring fans back to the theaters after being besieged by a slew of unremarkable and unwanted clones. It’s nice to see the slasher kings back on the big screen and maybe the sequel can work in fellow slasher Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise.

Review Written

September 30, 2003