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Who knew that Freddy Krueger's Elm Street was a short Scooby-Doo van-ride away from Jason Voorhees' Camp Crystal Lake?
What, however, should surprise no one in the gallons-o'-gore steel cage match horror flick known as “Freddy vs. Jason” is that once heads start rolling and blood starts flowing, high school students will immediately seek the safety of a late-night, drunken rave in a corn field.
Ah, yes, it's “Freddy vs. Jason” — the movie that, once and for all, pits crater-faced Freddy Krueger and his steel claws against hockey-masked Jason Voorhees and his big-man machete in the ultimate battle of the horror brands. It's rough. It's rumbly. It's rarely if ever scary. It is, however, frequently funny — sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
For sure, gore fans of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13th” films will lap it up. Directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu, “Freddy vs. Jason” is quite precise in its bloodletting. The blood never looks real, but at times the gushing can seem like a trip down a waterpark slide. The post-slice spurts — and there are many — are as finely timed and as juicy as a similar keen moment in some of Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies.
As modern horror film fans have come to expect, “Freddy vs. Jason” opens with the Hooterific exposure of a young damsel who's about to be toast. In fact, the chest quotient of another fair lady, our distressed heroine, Lori (Monica Keena), is like X to an infinite power. She must have a hidden bicycle pump.
Anyway, somehow Freddy (Robert Englund) is unable to do his terror-town slicing and dicing anymore and needs kids to get scared, which in turn will make him stronger. So he dreams up some phantasmagoric way to resurrect Jason (Ken Kirzinger) on Elm Street. After a couple of Jason's ferociously delicious blade whackings, the high school kids start verbalizing the legend of Monsieur Krueger and, eventually, the film turns into a killer twofer.
Trouble is, Jason actually gets in the way of some of Freddy's fun. Like a wrestler losing the spotlight, Freddy decides its time for the smackdown.
Few movies have been as preposterous as this. One couldn't even begin to hint at the storyline's sheer stupidity. Oh, heck, why not? At one point one bright kid wonders aloud how in the past fire seemed to halt Freddy and water drowned Jason. “How can we use that?” she asks. Later, in the Scooby-Doo-like van, the kids have concocted a scheme to take a tied up and drugged Jason to his home turf to battle Freddy, but, unexpectedly, one girl has to give the big guy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Somehow, it all kind of works.
Yu has made a martial arts Godzilla movie with wrestling moves. He hardly ever wastes time, either. There's not a single sticky plot point that can't get unglued with a bit of outlandish verbal reasoning, hardly a single running high school teen who can't be caught and chopped.
How do you top dozens of previous Freddy and Jason movies? Simple. Jason wades into that corn field rave like Russell Crowe and gladiates the teen-age horde.
Heck, no, it's not pretty. It's not nearly as good or as fun as “Scream.” But if there were ever a movie that could be called a bloody mess as a compliment, this is it. |
