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.

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.

Both their signature weapons are bumped up in size for the sake of spectacle.

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.

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.

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.

Freddy Vs Stayvun!

 Stayvunkino is bacc on the menu:

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Remake!

Connoisseurs of my blogge will know the Nightmare on Elm Street series is particularly close to my heart, and 2020 marks the ten-year anniversary of the profitable but little-loved remake. To its dubious credit, the 2010 film reinstates Freddy's original status as a pedo who molested kids, changed to a child killer in the 1984 classic to avoid accusations of capitalising on a contemporary news story. The writers allude to the true events shamefully covered up as "satanic panic" in the 80s regarding molestation in daycares involving dark rituals and underground tunnels, which was all confirmed true by recent leaks, which is pretty bold for an obligatory horror remake of its time.

Tina is named "Kris" this time. Kris-tina. Nancy is also renamed from Thompson to Holbrook, maybe because they didn't want to bum everyone out by saying the Nancy and Tina we all know and love got fucking raped by a pedophile.

Sadly that is the only praise due the remake, except to say that it perfectly illustrates everything not to do in a remake, thus giving us a whole new appreciation for the original.

OG Freddy actor Robert Englund shares a useful insight about the kids being too downbeat and depressive from the start, lacking any semblance of a dynamic arc. It would be much more frightening to watch a happy, sunny façade slowly crumble as the realisation of their dark past takes over. Showing a happy, normative status quo would also establish stakes - meaningful lives they are afraid to lose, and something to fight for. These kids are emo from the start, reminding of Rob Zombie's misguided conviction in his Halloween remakes that horror fans will relate to edgy losers, which is technically correct but actually wrong because horror movies are a form of escapism that allow us to vicariously experience actually wanting to live.

I felt a whole lot worse for the Breakfast Club up top when they bought it than doomer boi and doomer girl here.

Even the protagonists' relationships with peripheral characters are underdeveloped. Remember how, in the original, Nancy's relationship with her mother becomes increasingly strained - she drinks because of her dark secret, she puts the bars on the windows, and in the end Nancy becomes her carer, putting her to bed in a role reversal (thematically intended, as confirmed by Craven on the commentary). In the remake the mom has no particular character quirks and disappears from the story after dispensing the bare minimum of plot information. A much thinner and weaker character and relationship!

There are other problems too. The filmmakers failed to do anything interesting with the new technology. The original film was limited in many ways but made a virtue of its limitations - compare the very effective practical effect of Freddy leaning through the wall to the horribly ugly and cartoonish looking CGI effect in the remake.

In 26 years we went from the above kinography to this PS1-looking POS.

There are not even interesting vignettes, as the dream sequences simply remix and recycle familiar elements from the original out of context. The knived glove reaching up out of the bathtub - in the original it leads to Freddy pulling her under. In the remake it leads to nothing. Tina in the body bag - in the original Nancy follows her out of class and down into the boiler room, where she burns her arm and discovers an important plot point - that her injuries carry over into her waking life. In the remake it leads to nothing.

Since pre-burn Freddy wasn't even a murderer in the new version, there is no reason at all for him to even have the glove of knives. Maybe he saw the original on TV and copied it.

Even the dialogue follows this pattern, with lines taken from previous films stripped of the context that made them work. Before killing Freddy, ""Nancy"" says  "now you're in my world, bitch!" - a line used by Monica Keena's character in Freddy Vs Jason. But in FvsJ it served a thematic purpose - she was reversing Freddy's "bitch" catchphrase that he had used several times throughout the film. In the remake he has no "bitch" lines so it comes out of nowhere and sounds ridiculous. She might as well have said "now you're in my world, gaylord!"

In seven years we went from a coherent screenplay to Kate Mara's autistic sister breaking out in Xbox Live bantz.

Even Freddy's first appearance is completely uninteresting. Consider how New Nightmare slowly built him up over its first half, showing him only briefly or at a distance, leading to a big moment when he finally appears right in-your-face. In the remake he's just...there, within the first few minutes.

My reaction to this was literally "oh".

There are none of the wonderfully surrealistic dream world sets like the ruined church of part 4 or the Escher-inspired maze of staircases in part 5. The dream world is flat and ordinary. What a wasted opportunity!

"Um, don't you think this is a little too cool and fun?" - producer

In fact the remake seems to waste every possible opportunity to do anything interesting with the material. The trailer contained footage that never appeared in the final cut, like a pool party and Freddy in a monk-like robe. Why was this footage excised, when watered-down, lame rehashes of scenes from the original were left intact? And this leads us to the basic problem with remakes in general:

If a remake is too close to the original, then it becomes redundant. If it is too different, it risks alienating fans. A good balance was struck in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre - it used similar scenes and devices at points, but put a twist on them, such as switching the hitchhiker from a villain to a prior victim. This kept it feeling fresh and unpredictable even for fans of the original. The Elm Street remake does not get this balance right at all.

2bh TCM '03 was metal af and better than the original, not even sorry.

It's unlikely that there's an interesting future for this property, but if another remake is ever greenlit I hope they take the plot and characters from one of the weaker sequels or even use elements from the Freddy's Nightmares TV show or spinoff comics. Imagine Freddy's Dead, but serious and good, with Silent Hill vibes. That would have been sweet.

Sweet Dreams: Wes Craven's New Nightmare!!!

RIP based spoopy movie man.

You could be forgiven for tuning out (of life) after Freddy's Dead, and audiences at the time did (the first part), leaving Wes Craven's return to the series he created to underperform at the box office. That's a pity, because against all reasonable expectations the seventh Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the best in the series and a perfect way to wrap things up and go out on a high. Faced with the reality of a series that had devoured itself in an orgy of stupidity, Wes Craven did the only sensible thing you can do: he stepped outside the series.

I for one welcome our new dream demon overlords.

New Nightmare posits the first six films as just that: movies, entertainment that exists in the pop culture of the "real world" in which it's set. Wes Craven is a real person who makes films, Robert Englund is a real actor who plays Freddy Krueger, and Heather Langenkamp is a real actress, wife and mother who is called upon to play Nancy and stop Freddy one last time, but for real this time.

This prop seems to be inspired by a scene in 5. Despite Craven's ambivalence toward the other sequels, New Nightmare is full of these little nods.

Freddy Vs Godzilla still in development hell.

One thing that stands out about this approach is that Craven doesn't go for the cheap and obvious gag of having Freddy slaughter the hacks who made Freddy's Dead. Although that would have been satisfying, it would have been fix fic, and run the risk of verging on Chris Chan tier revenge fantasy bullshit. Instead, the focus is squarely on Heather as protagonist, with the Freddy-demon released from the prison of the film series returned to his roots as a mostly-straight-faced villain. The idea is simply floated that he slipped the bonds of his confinement in the story world because the suits ran the series into the ground, and that's all you need.

Together again.

Heather's husband is named Chase and works as an effects technician on horror movies. Her son is played by the kid from Pet Sematary. She does the chat show circuit and deals with autistic fans, creepy phone calls, and a nurse who thinks she's going crazy and is a bad influence on her son on account of her movie roles. Craven has fun sending up the culture and the perennial moral panic over scary art, but never quite tips over into soapboxing.

Freed from the 80s, she actually has great hair.

Heather humours her spergy driver.

Me on the left.

One night Chase falls asleep at the wheel and is killed by Freddy, leaving Heather alone to protect her son and kill the dream demon once and for all.

"Cut to the Chase FX" - kino foreshadowing.

New Nightmare feels more naturalistic compared to the previous instalments. There's less stylised lighting and surreal imagery, and in some ways that's a shame, but it helps separate the "real world" from the "movie world". Real-life events such as Langenkamp's stalker and a contemporaneous earthquake are rolled into the script too, making the fake-real-world even a little realer. Freddy gets a redesign too, which was probably necessary to distinguish him from the cartoon character he had become by Freddy's Dead. They even recast Freddy with...himself:

Freddy Krueger is a successful actor and you're a NEET.

It doesn't seem like high praise to say this one gets it right, but given everything that's happened in this series, you couldn't expect a better conclusion. It was seven films, a TV show, a game and various comics, novelisations and merchandising that veered erratically from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, packed with effects, jumps, deaths, one-liners, waifus, retardation, darkness, surreality, brilliance and catharsis. Freddy Vs Jason and the r*make would follow, but thematically, New Nightmare was the perfect ending.

Absolutely cathartic.

The final scene even suggests a sort of looping back to the beginning, an infinite recursion as of a classic story being endlessly retold. Based Nancy always keeping Freddy down in the boiler room so we can all sleep soundly in our beds.

Sweet Dreams: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare!!!

Nominal series endings generally at least try to go out on a high note. Friday the 13th had two (The Final Chapter and The Final Friday), one of which was good and the other tried, bless it. A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, approached its death in an advanced state of dementia, drooling and shitting all over itself. Fortunately, this wasn't the last movie, because nothing with "final" in the title ever is. Without further ado, let's delve into the heart of retardation.

The glasses do nothing! I'm still watching Freddy's Dead!

Freddy's Dead opens with a guy on a plane. He's obviously having a nightmare. His seat flies out of the plane and he wakes up in bed. He goes over to the window and finds Freddy flying on a broomstick dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West. You know those Comics Code approved Joker stories from Silver Age comics where instead of killing people he played pranks and stole that kid's report card? This is the equivalent of that for horror movies. Jesus Christ.

There's jumping the shark and then there's this bullshit.

So the kid makes his way to a delinquents' centre run by Maggie Burroughs and her shoulder pads. Breckin Myer (Road Trip) is there, along with Tracy, who likes violence but dislikes being touched, and Carlos, who has a hearing aid. As lame as this is, it's still more characterisation than most movies these days have, so whatever. Maggie takes the nameless kid back to Springwood to find out all about him, and the others stow away in the van because this is a wacky comedy (Road Trip).

A fun game is to pause at any second of this joint and see whose expression matches your own.

Springwood is a ghost town in this movie because Freddy killed everyone offscreen between movies. Why they thought that would be less interesting to show us than Freddy playing Nintendo and stealing a deaf kid's hearing aid for 90 minutes, I have no idea. The town with no children could have been a fantastically creepy setting, but instead it sucked.

The Twin Peaks nod is nice and all, but imagine if this flick had half the atmosphere of that show.

So Freddy offs the kids in increasingly stupid ways, stopping only to shill for Nintendo, and then somehow follows Maggie and Tracy back to wherever they come from. I guess the rules for this instalment are that Freddy can't leave Springwood without someone to carry him, so he sent out the John Doe character to bring someone back for him to hitch a ride on. So why didn't he just hitch a ride with the John Doe? Anyway, Maggie learns that she's Freddy's daughter (dumb) and that he got his powers from three floating skull things (gay) and that he lived in the famous Elm Street house, meaning that Nancy's mom moved into the house of the guy she torched (Road Trip).

A twist of some potential fascination teased, then instantly abandoned for more dumb shlock.

Freddy still has powers in the waking world, he just stops using them immediately after this for no reason at all.

Look, you've read my part 5 writeup. You know I'll defend practically anything with the Elm Street name attached to it. This piece of shit is on its own.

You know you're looking at a classy production when all the newspaper articles are copypasted from the sports page and World War 2 history books.

The once feared dream demon kills time by taunting a deaf kid.

Finally Maggie defeats Freddy with the power of 3D glasses, probably because they realised Friday the 13th had a 3D instalment and didn't want to miss out on the trendwhoring, even though 3D wasn't even trendy in the early 90s. Is there anything good about this movie? Well, I liked the fact that Alice Cooper is Freddy's stepdad. I liked the gag where he cuts off his fingers while counting down the ways people have killed him in the past. Maggie was pretty hot. Oh, and Iggy Pop wrote a song for the credits in like two minutes for it, which I thought was funny.

Just close your eyes and think of Dream Warriors.

What did Rachel Talalay mean by this?

The best way to view this one is not even as part of the series but as a parody of it, but even that doesn't work too well because it doesn't even have enough jokes per minute to work as a Hot Shots style parody. But if the intention was to kill off any interest in the series, they succeeded. Killing off Freddy gave it a small box office bump but by the time of Wes Craven's New Nightmare a few years later, nobody cared about Freddy anymore. That's a shame because New Nightmare is one of the best in the series, and almost certainly the best seventh instalment in any film series.