September 09, 2004
Movie Review- Freddy Vs. Jason
I’ve been thinking long and hard on how to start this review. I figured out the best way to do that is to ask, “When did horror movies stop being scary?”
Ok, maybe that question isn’t entirely fair because you get the sense that Freddy Vs. Jason wasn’t supposed to be scary. You get the idea that is more of a parody of itself and its genre. But you would think that a movie with Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees would be just a tiny bit scary.
Now, granted, Freddy Krueger never really scared me. I’ve always found the Nightmare on Elm Street movies to be gory and lots of fun to watch, but I was never really scared. Jason, on the other hand, scared me shitless. There were times in my youth when I couldn’t even look out the window in fear there would be some machete-wielding maniac standing outside. But it was a good kind of scared, the fun kind, so when I got the chance to watch Freddy and Jason in the same movie, I was all for it.
The premise of the movie is this… Freddy (Played once again by the wonderful Robert Englund) is in Hell and still filled with bloodlust. However, he has no power, he can’t enter dreams anymore because no one’s afraid of him. See, the parents of Springwood have erased all memory of Freddy- no one speaks his name and everyone who has had any kind of contact with him is sent to a mental hospital where they are given drugs that keep them from dreaming. Without that fear, Freddy can’t enter dreams. So, Freddy devises a way to bring fear back into the lives of the Springwood kids. He does so by resurrecting Jason (played this time around by Kevin Kerzinger), appearing as Jason’s mother, telling him that the kids on Elm St. have been very, very bad. So, off Jason goes, to the home of Lori Campbell, whose parents are predictably absent (Mom is dead, Dad is on a business trip). We meet Lori and her friends, hear a very brief, almost throw-away mention of a boyfriend who suddenly disappeared, and soon, the bloody hijinks begin. Eventually, after Jason does away with a few of Freddy’s victims before he can get to them, Freddy gets a little pissed with Jason. So, Lori and her friends devise a way to pit Freddy and Jason against each other.
The movie does have a few redeeming qualities. There are a couple funny moments, such as the scene in which the heroes have just survived a massacre in a cornfield (complements of Jason) and one of the teenagers says, “Man, that goalie was pissed off about something!” This same teen is one of my gripes about the movie. We’ve never met this kid, he just seems to have sprung up out of nowhere… we’re not introduced to this kid at all, but suddenly he’s one of the main characters halfway through the movie.
As for the actors, well, they’re most a forgettable bunch, with a couple expections. Jason Ritter (Joan of Arcadia, also John Ritter’s son) is decent as Lori’s long lost boyfriend, Will and Monica Keena (Dawson’s Creek), who portrayed Lori, was likeable. The rest of the gang- Kelly Rowland (of Destiny’s Child), Chris Marquette, Mark Davis, Katharine Isabelle, and Lochlyn Munro (as a very naïve cop) are just what you would expect from a horror movie cast- bland and not very memorable.
I'm there with you on the non-scariness of Freddy vs. Jason.
I watched the majority of it on fast forward (with the subtitles so I could still read what they were saying).