Freddy Vs. Jason: Or, Do Undead Killers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Written: Aug 14 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: May provide some trashy fun with your friends.
Cons: Is pretty trashy on its own.
The Bottom Line: The two horror titans finally meet. Much blood is splattered. IQ points are lost.
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| d_fienberg's Full Review: Freddy vs Jason |
If you’re going to see Freddy Vs. Jason, I can only strongly recommend that you see it in its first few days in theatres. If you’re emotionally invested such that you cannot resist your better judgement and you’ve gotta see the movie at all, make sure you see it in a crowded theatre full of passionate fans (and I honestly believe that for at least a day or two, this movie will draw full houses).
Now, sometimes with horror movies the recommendation "Don’t see this alone" means that the movie you’re going to is so darned scary that you need the comfort of fellow warm-blooded human beings.
Freddy Vs. Jason isn’t that kind of horror movie.
It is, however, such a blatantly atrocious movie that there’s great fun to be had in a group situation. This isn’t The Rocky Horror Picture Show just yet, but because the people going to the movie understand the Jason and Freddy formulas so well, it might as well be. And since director Ronny Yu and writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift make no real effort to buck the formula, talking to the screen isn’t just possible, it’s recommended. Otherwise, you may start actually taking the movie seriously and my sense of things is that Freddy Vs. Jason is the rare movie with the capacity to bludgeon IQ points out of the casual viewer.
I went to the premiere of Freddy Vs. Jason, where the crowd of fans filled multiple theatres and where the lines wrapped over and over upon themselves outside the theatre. In that crowd of die-hard fans, I had a fairly decent time at the movie, but I suspect that once the first wave of true believers goes early this week, Freddy Vs. Jason will play to Gigli-sized audiences for the rest of its brief run.
I had to go. The way I figure it, even though I’ve missed at least two of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and the past two Friday the 13th flicks, I’ve still dedicated nearly a day out of my life to watching the ongoing killing exploits of Jason Voorhees and Mr. Fredrick Krueger. So I knew that even if this one wasn’t going to satisfy me in any way, it was something I had to see.
What’s immediately daunting is how few remnants there are of the past glories of either series. Neither Sean Cunningham nor Wes Craven chose to take a hands-on role and Kane Hodder, who has played Jason in the past few movies, is also missing. Heck, even poor Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, mother to the undead killer and a bit of a slaughter-monkey herself, is no longer played by Betsy Palmer. She’s played here by Paula Shaw.
Basically, all purists are left with is Robert Englund as Freddy Kreuger. So fittingly, the film begins with him. We’re reminded, briefly, of Freddy’s reign of terror, both as a child molesting janitor and then (through clips from earlier movies) as the dream-haunting killer. Freddy is now, apparently, in hell. We don’t see his eternal damnation, because the film’s $25 million budget couldn’t contain that possibility, but that’s what he says.
But Freddy isn’t dead, per se. He’s been forgotten. The children of Elm Street no longer fear him, so he no longer has the power to haunt their dreams. For some inexplicable reason, though, Freddy still has to power to bring Jason Voorhees back to life.
Jason, who, like the rest of America, has forgotten the unfortunate events of Jason X, is easy to talk into doing a bit of Freddy’s dirty work. For an undead psycho, Jason is pretty conventionally messed up. In an early scene that appears to be a dream sequence, he dispatches with a large-breasted skinny-dipper and proceeds to watch as her writhing body becomes all of those darned camp counselors who let him die back in the 1950s.
[An aside: Dude, Jason, you may be upset with all those counselors for letting those kids pick on you and for letting you drown, but let’s get real: It’s not like being dead has actually cost you any quality time. And frankly, you were a bit freaky-looking as a kid, so we can kinda understand their motivation.]
Taking the form of Jason’s mother, Freddy taunts the hockey-masked one into doin’ a little quality killing for him. There’s a circuitous logic through which this will allow Freddy to regain power. Don’t look for that logic. There’s just no point.
So Jason goes wanderin’ off to Elm Street, which is just wrong on so many levels, particularly the level on which the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series seem to have taken place within a short drive of each other.
But anyway, Jason wander to the house once occupied by Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and then occupied by Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) and then by other various Freddy-targets who go unmentioned here. The occupants of the house now include Lori Campbell (Monica Keena) a properly nubile, but virginal gal who just seems made for a bloodbath.
Lori’s father isn’t around and so Lori’s hangin’ with a couple friends getting flirty (but lamenting her lost love [from when she was 14], Will). Soon flirting turns to sex for one couple and sex, as we know, leads to murder. Jason is back in business and Freddy is slowly returning as well.
Freddy manifests his power by slowly trying to make people, particularly Lori, remember him. In one of the film’s few evocative scenes, Lori is at the police station and follows a trail of disappearing blood, past a wall of missing children posters (that come to life) and to a little girl who gives Lori direct insight into Freddy’s motivations.
Jason discovers he’s down with the killing. He’s so hungry for carnage, though, that Freddy isn’t getting the fear he desires. Freddy’s close to back, but he’s already getting angry at his vessel of choice.
Meanwhile, that ex-boyfriend Will (John Ritter’s son Jason) is back. He’s been in an asylum for years, a place where the parents put people who remembered Freddy. There, the teens are plied with drugs and therapy until they forget. The towns other kids just appear to be drugged.
So what we’ve got here is Freddy killing teens through Jason. Sorrta. And Freddy getting frustrated and deciding that as the same time as he wants to kill more tasty delicious teens, he wants to kill Jason even more.
Eventually, the film keeps shifting scenes until a 25-to-30 minute concluding battle where Freddy, now in the real world, faces off with Jason.
"Welcome to my nightmare," Freddy observes several times and no doubt critics will be all ready to agree.
My sense of things watching the movie was that the script had just been written by a random word generator. Or else that the entire cast was given a blueprint and asked to do improv. Sentences rarely build upon each other, which makes for a baffling plot progression. No plots are hatched. No intelligence is provided. And none of the philosophical depth that Wes Craven brought to his script for the original Elm Street movie remains.
Disappointingly, none of the metatextual glee that Craven brought back to the series in New Nightmare remains either. The screenwriters seem to think that they can get away with this bundle of cliches in a post-Scream world. People take off their shirts at random times and die. People do drugs and die. People say, "Don’t worry, I’ll be back" and they die. This material, delivered with neither irony nor skill, is just deadening. And it’s often hilarious.
Ronny Yun, in his better days, directed several nifty Hong Kong movies including The Bride With White Hair and its sequel. Both films featured lovely imagery and careful filmmaking. His American career, though, started with the pseudo-kangaroo flick Warriors of Virtue and progressed to Bride of Chucky and the reviled 51st State.
His work in Freddy Vs. Jason could most kindly be called fast-paced. The movie just races along into oblivious. What’s tragic is how little fun he has with the movie. For a director schooled in cool looking fantasy films to fall on his face so badly with dream sequences is inexcusable.
The best of the Elm Street movies are fueled by the ways in which Krueger insinuated himself into the dreams of the Elm Street teens. He took Freudian forms and did away with the kids in devious ways that played on their subconscious terror. Here, he’s been reduced to what his critics have always insulted him as being: An ugly man in an ugly sweater with scissors on his fingers. The only fleetingly creative Krueger transformation finds him embodying the hooka toking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. It’s a nice moment, but saying more would spoil on of the film’s few pleasures.
Mostly, though, Yu stages the dream sequences in uninspired locations and delineates the gulf between dreams and reality with a heavy use of filters. The two worlds don’t bleed together nearly enough.
****The next few paragraphs discuss details that will give away the gist of the film’s ending. No specifics regarding that ending are given, but many people will be able to connect the dots*****
Many fans decried the decision not to bring back Hodder as Jason, but stuntman Ken Kirzinger was given the part because he, apparently, has sympathetic eyes. You need know no more about the direction that the movie is going to take.
Jason is deconstructed as a mute man-child who’s obsessed by the death of his mother as well as his own untimely demise. He kills to silence the demons in his head. It’s been established repeatedly throughout his films that Jason is a darned difficult guy to kill, but we discover here that he’s a surprisingly easy man to sedate. We also discover that despite no apparent soul and limited creatively, he dreams very lucidly.
Freddy, meanwhile, is just a perve. Englund has fun camping it up in his most recognizable part, but Freddy is presented as a man who kills only for his own appetites and for unjustified revenge. Perhaps, the film somewhat implies, that makes him worse that Jason.
The decision to prioritize on undead killer’s degree of evil over another’s is a mistake. Viewers either root for Freddy and Jason because they’re bad mothers, or they fear them for the same reason. Making us try to care more about one than the other is a miscalculation that causes both to suffer. Neither is a complicated enough character that they could possibly fairly earn our sympathy and certainly neither does here.
All we get instead is a lot of rumbling between two characters with well-established reputations as death-less. At first that immortality is a boon for the filmmaker and produces a couple laughs, but ultimately it’s a liability because it would be near impossible for either killer to win without violating pre-established rules of their respective films. The film does that left and right, finally. Purists will be ether angered, or will be quickly resigned to the trainwreck.
****Back to the review-proper****
None of the human characters justify sympathy either. Keena and Ritter are ostensibly the stars, but they’re both really awful and not just by general acting standards. They’re even bad by genre standards.
Keena has been decent in movies including Ripe and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia and she’s very very easy on the eyes (she also appears to be wearing the mother of all push-up bras for the entire movie). She also refuses to entirely commit to the absurdity of the slasher world. She doesn’t scream convincingly and when the time comes for the inevitable final show-down, she doesn’t even play determination well.
Ritter, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer (despite his family pedigree). He’s good in the new CBS drama Joan of Arcadia, but here he seems to think that this is the right time for Method-style mumbling and shambling about. Ritter replaced Brad Renfro in the film and it’s almost like he’s trying to give the exact same marble-mouthed bland performance Renfro would have given.
The only other actor who makes an impression is Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland. Here fellow child of destiny Beyonce Knowles will next be scene in The Fighting Temptations and while I might have been inclined to say that there is no worse career move than starring in a movie opposite Cuba Gooding Jr., Rowland succeeds here. She’s not awful, but the part is so badly written that I still don’t know if she can act.
While the producers have promised that after testing dozens of endings between the script and the production process, the one they’ve finally chosen is definitive. They promised that there’s nothing wishy-washy and that one monster clearly is victorious. It’s really not. The ending most certainly leaves room for future sequels in either franchise, as well as possible future meetings between the characters, should the situation require.
My guess is that after a solid first week, this one will drop by a massive amount, so catch it fast if you need to. I had enough fun laughing at Freddy Vs. Jason to give it 2 stars out of 5. Its actual quality is probably somewhat less than that.
Recommended:
No
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