Theme: Fields of Regret - Alice Cooper
Sunday 15 January 2023
Thursday 12 January 2023
Freddy Vs Jason!
If there was one good thing about 1992's Jason Goes To Hell (there was), it was the very final scene. After sitting out most of his own finale before being dragged under the ground by rock monsters, all that remains of Jason is his famous hockey mask, which is then grabbed and dragged down by Freddy's equally famous knived glove. More than a decade of blue balls later, Freddy Vs Jason finally dropped.
Freddy Vs Jason is the best Freddy Vs Jason movie anyone could reasonably have hoped for. If you doubt this, check out some of the absolutely awful script ideas that were floated in the development process, including Fred and Jay fighting as gladiators in Hell and looking for the Holy Grail (????). Every one of these scripts was basically Jason Goes To Hell Part 2: unnecessary convoluted plotting with a false sense of its own importance filled with hurr hurr humour and what the fucc moments that would have been a total disaster.
Instead we got exactly what we needed: an action movie with horror characteristics featuring pro wrestling style exaggerations of the classic characters beating the hell out of each other and slaughtering any 25-year-old teenager that got in their way.
The plot is simple: Freddy has been wiped from the collective memory of Springwood by its cops and doctors. If nobody knows about him, nobody's afraid of him, and without their fear powering him, he can't come back to fuck with them in their dreams. To reignite belief in him, he poses as Jason's mother and sends him on a mission to Springwood to drop some bodies. The plan works but Jason keeps killstealing like a neccbeard so Freddy hatches a new plan to get him asleep so he can take him out on his own terms. We understand that this is all just a setup for a big climactic fight scene, so this covers everything we need logistically to get there.
Objections to this absolute masterpiece abound among the Reddit population: it breaks continuuuuity! It doesn't make sense in the uuuuuniverse! Such whining can be dismissed with extreme prejudice. There is no real internal logic in these movies and internal logic doesn't even make sense as a concept in the context of A Nightmare on Elm Street films because they are examples of surrealism. "But Jason wasn't afraid of water in the other films!" Yeah, but he also turned into a little boy in Jason Takes Manhattan and a possessing Mini Boglin in The Final Friday, and I don't hear you bringing that up. Maybe the fear existed at a deeper level of his unconscious mind waiting to be triggered, or some other gay psychobabble explanation, but it doesn't matter because the real purpose of that scene is to hammer home the fact that Jason is the babyface and Freddy is the heel. Only big-brained redditeurs don't seem to get this.
With that said there are a few things you could reasonably nitpick about the film. Freddy dominates the fight a little too much while Jason has nearly all the kills, even toward the end. This could have been evened out a little. It would also have been nice to have a bit of a suspenseful stalking sequence once they get to Crystal Lake, as very little use is made of the woods and it would be fun to see the protagonists trying to escape not knowing where either of the killers was hiding.
But this isn't really a horror movie anyway, it's gory actionkino and it has a deliberate accelerating pace to keep up. The fight is varied and inventive and the buildup has momentum and never feels too much like filler. The characters are all pretty stock and given just enough definition that we remember them and kinda-sorta care but not really because we're really here for the main event, but the fluff adds context to it and is satisfying in itself. Some people (who don't bathe) insist they wanted the whole thing to be Jason and Freddy with no mortal characters at all, and I just don't know what to do with people like that.
The idea of the town using drugs and censorship to keep the memory of Freddy under wraps, and their inevitable and disastrous failure, is fun and creative and not so pointed as to be didactic, and setpieces like Jason's cornfield massacre are gr8 too. The soundtrack, poised just between the ebb of numetal and the ascendancy of metalcore, is gr8 time capsule stuff, like an update of the Dokken and Alice Cooper songs that graced the 80s films. The celebrity casting of Kelly Rowland, slick production values and pop culture nods to shit like Scooby Doo and Jay and Silent Bob also ties in neatly and makes this sort of the last gasp of the late 90s/early 2000s slasher wave and, along with New Nightmare, kind of bookends that era nicely as well.
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| Colour coded for your convenience. |
Freddy Vs Jason is the best Freddy Vs Jason movie anyone could reasonably have hoped for. If you doubt this, check out some of the absolutely awful script ideas that were floated in the development process, including Fred and Jay fighting as gladiators in Hell and looking for the Holy Grail (????). Every one of these scripts was basically Jason Goes To Hell Part 2: unnecessary convoluted plotting with a false sense of its own importance filled with hurr hurr humour and what the fucc moments that would have been a total disaster.
 |
| One of the least bad ideas had a young Freddy being one of the bullies who fucked with Jason at camp, just because that seems like something Freddy would do. |
Instead we got exactly what we needed: an action movie with horror characteristics featuring pro wrestling style exaggerations of the classic characters beating the hell out of each other and slaughtering any 25-year-old teenager that got in their way.
The plot is simple: Freddy has been wiped from the collective memory of Springwood by its cops and doctors. If nobody knows about him, nobody's afraid of him, and without their fear powering him, he can't come back to fuck with them in their dreams. To reignite belief in him, he poses as Jason's mother and sends him on a mission to Springwood to drop some bodies. The plan works but Jason keeps killstealing like a neccbeard so Freddy hatches a new plan to get him asleep so he can take him out on his own terms. We understand that this is all just a setup for a big climactic fight scene, so this covers everything we need logistically to get there.
 |
| Jason gets a powerup numetal theme song at this point, just in case you didn't get that this is WWE. |
 |
| Something about this image is really unsettling and beautiful. I think it has something to do with the background receding into nothing. |
With that said there are a few things you could reasonably nitpick about the film. Freddy dominates the fight a little too much while Jason has nearly all the kills, even toward the end. This could have been evened out a little. It would also have been nice to have a bit of a suspenseful stalking sequence once they get to Crystal Lake, as very little use is made of the woods and it would be fun to see the protagonists trying to escape not knowing where either of the killers was hiding.
 |
| More of this would have been nice. |
But this isn't really a horror movie anyway, it's gory actionkino and it has a deliberate accelerating pace to keep up. The fight is varied and inventive and the buildup has momentum and never feels too much like filler. The characters are all pretty stock and given just enough definition that we remember them and kinda-sorta care but not really because we're really here for the main event, but the fluff adds context to it and is satisfying in itself. Some people (who don't bathe) insist they wanted the whole thing to be Jason and Freddy with no mortal characters at all, and I just don't know what to do with people like that.
 |
| "Ew, less of this" - someone |
The idea of the town using drugs and censorship to keep the memory of Freddy under wraps, and their inevitable and disastrous failure, is fun and creative and not so pointed as to be didactic, and setpieces like Jason's cornfield massacre are gr8 too. The soundtrack, poised just between the ebb of numetal and the ascendancy of metalcore, is gr8 time capsule stuff, like an update of the Dokken and Alice Cooper songs that graced the 80s films. The celebrity casting of Kelly Rowland, slick production values and pop culture nods to shit like Scooby Doo and Jay and Silent Bob also ties in neatly and makes this sort of the last gasp of the late 90s/early 2000s slasher wave and, along with New Nightmare, kind of bookends that era nicely as well.
 |
| Now we just need Ghostface Vs Parka. |
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