I’ve been writing about “Friday the 13th” since 2014. Every year, I’d write about another installment in my favorite horror series, missing only “Part 1,” written by a former associate. Sometimes I’d regret I hadn’t covered them all; but then I remember “Friday the 13th: Part 2” was my first entry into the series, my brother and I pulling an all-nighter Jason marathon discovering the series in our early and middle teens so many years ago. I wrote my review of “Part 2” on October 9th, 2014, and every Halloween I’d write another one. Last year, covering “Jason X” (and already having covered the 2009 “FT13” reboot), I couldn’t believe 9 years had passed that quickly. I also smiled, furtively, that this passion project—The Movie Buff dot net—which I started all those years ago just before heading to grad school, like Jason, had refused to die.
So all this bring me to “Freddy vs. Jason,” the 2003 Ronny Yu film that reeks of fan service inspiration as my 11th—and final—“FT13” review. Of course, at its heart, the film is not purely one franchise or the other; but if push comes to shove, is clearly more of a Freddy film than a Jason one. But in fairness, it’s still very much a chance to see our beloved baddy Voorhees one last time, played this time by Ken Kirzinger, stuntman Kane Hodder having had enough of the hockey mask by the time this film rolled around.
Freddy vs. Jason—an epic match
“Freddy vs. Jason” never should have worked. Of the million scripts the production team doubtless threw away, they found the one that kind of did, a meta-aware, kitschy film that makes Freddy so endlessly evil that Jason, by comparison, seems almost heroic. Sure, he goes through teens like churning butter, but his catatonic quality—and the fact that he’s basically a giant in this film—almost divorces him from the actions he’s causing. He truly doesn’t know any better, and writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift don’t give him a single scene that answers for characters development—and that’s okay. I was decidedly team Jason, and wouldn’t have been able to figure out the team Freddy crowd or what made them tick even if I’d tried.
But in the process of setting up this epic grudge match, Shannon and Swift stumbled upon the accidental finding of this film, that it’s the scariest “Nightmare on Elm Street” entry we’ve seen since the original. It’s no secret that series lost its luster with me. I always enjoyed Parts 1 and 2, but after that Freddy turned into a jokester, sucking the fear and horror out of these films, trying to get us to root for a psychotic child murderer who was suddenly funny. It was no surprise, then, that I kind of loved the 2010 “Nightmare” reboot—a film that was dumped on by most every fan and critic, hated almost as much as last year’s “Halloween Ends.” But to me it was a Freddy film again: scary, vicious, and disturbing.
Playing second fiddle to movie monsters
Here, though, in “Freddy vs. Jason,” Robert Englund donning the burns and knives one last time, the film unearths genuine chills. First, there’s the film’s heroes recovering from a long-forgotten memory on different terms. Teen Kia (Kelly Rowland) attempts to help her friend, Lori (Monica Keena) get over her ex-boyfriend, who ran away, abandoning her.
Across the isle, we see that this boyfriend, Will (Jason Ritter) and another friend, Mark (an excellent Brendan Fletcher) are held in a psychiatric facility, being force-fed pills that stop dreaming. The town of Springfield, in an attempt to squash Freddy once and for all, quarantined everyone who knew about him, drugging them to the point of amnesia. But Mark and Will break out of the facility, reconnect with Lori, and in the process re-awaken dead giants. We last saw the hint of this movie in 1993’s “Jason Goes to Hell,” with Freddy pulling Jason’s mask into hell with him. In “FvJ,” he awakens him to help scare the kids and give him strength, and has to take on Jason personally when the mute killer won’t stop killing and give him the glory.
Don’t take it too seriously
What works about this film is that it never takes itself seriously, and in the process somehow becomes scary. Freddy is the worst, of course. Jason is just a runaway truck racing down a hill. A scene where Freddy stalks Fletcher’s character in his dreams—using his dead brother as bait—reminded me how sinister this series can be, and worked by letting us know when a character was dreaming and when they weren’t. The motley crew of actors works, and while they’re not wholly engaging on their own, their research into what’s happening to their friends who are dying at Freddy and Jason’s hands works to propel the plot forward.
The movie is filmed slickly, with CGI the makers of both series could have only dreamed of. It includes some of the hallmark scenes from both franchises (Jason slicing people with a machete; Freddy turning into bugs and other weird things to trick his prey), but for my money there’s not more defining moment than that scene in the cornfield, where Jason kills a victim Freddy is sadistically stalking with the nonchalance of accidentally stepping on an insect. And the ensuing scene, with Jason hacking teens to death at a cornfield party, kegs and bodies flying, is what “Jason Takes Manhattan” should have been all along, and not the product we did get. It sets up a battle for Freddy to kill Jason and reclaim the glory.
The actors add something, you’ve got to say
Let’s be honest. “Freddy vs. Jason” is not a film that begs to be taken seriously, and not one that people who weren’t fans of the franchises to begin with would bother seeking out. This movie is all about seeing the monsters fight, like we’ve seen in a dozen “Godzilla” movies before. Did you want Mothra to win? Or Rodan? Tell me whatever you like, but don’t tell me you watched the films for deep plots or sociological takeaways (p.s., my friend Mike Ross will likely have my head for this).
But here, the filmmakers set up two situations—one in the dreamworld and one in reality—where Jason and Freddy beat the living tar out of each other. The 3rd act, when Jason confronts Freddy in the real world is so rewarding—scored by the band Machine Head—that it will have fans clapping in glee. The amount of blood and gore the film dredges up coming off the two horror icons (despite the illogical fact that they’re both dead and shouldn’t bleed) is just a straight up laugh fest. The film’s winning argument is that it uses its character development between the teens wisely so that when they go (I’m thinking of you, Christopher Marquette), it feels sadder then is customary in films like this.
Remnants of a bygone era
This movie received a 50% (rotten) user score on Rotten Tomatoes. It deserves better than that. It’s not a film to take seriously, or even a film to wrap up its two franchises. That has already been done in other, less interesting films. “Freddy vs. Jason” was simply a chance to bask in two film series and their iconic villains one last time. And in that, it works.
These franchises are remnants of a simpler time: a time where movie killers were forces of nature, immovable, rather than the flesh and blood sadism offered up today. Maybe there will be a time, many years from now, when people will look back at “Saw,” “The Human Centipede,” and “Hostel” and remark how tame they are in comparison to modern cinema, but I doubt it. Freddy and Jason are hallmarks of the ‘80s. Here, we get to watch them one last time, until one day—which I’ll keep crossing my fingers for—when litigation ceases and maybe, just maybe, another “Friday” film comes our way.
“Freddy vs. Jason” is available to watch or rent on streaming.
