I was going to hold this one off until I watched a Jason film or two, but decided to just go ahead and watch it. This is a movie slasher lovers had been waiting for for a decade (and had been in production hell for even longer) ever since the end scene of Jason Goes to Hell.
Above, Spoilers and the most interesting part of the whole damn movie
While the movie has both antagonists in it, I've always felt that this film had more of a Friday the 13th vibe to it. Perhaps it's all the gratuitous nudity, sex and drug use, which after having just watched all the Nightmare movies back-to-back, wasn't as prevalent in the Elm Street films. Other than that, the film does a good job of combining both series mythologies together in one film. Jason is still lumbering around with his machete, and Freddy emulates the persona he had by, I'd say the 3rd installment: Still scary but with a healthy dose of the sadistic humor he's known for.
The movie starts off with a good introduction. The parents of Springwood have finally gotten their s*%! together and found a way to make Freddy a thing of the past: To quarantine every child that's come in contact with him from the rest of town by shoving them in the looney bin and giving them experimental drugs to prevent dreams (Hypnosil, to all you Elm Street fans. The same drug first introduced in Dream Warriors.)
Freddy is none to pleased about this. His power is based on fear (Established in the 1st Elm Street) and if nobody fears him he's stuck in hellish limbo with no one to torment. Freddy's solution to this dilemma is to use Jason to instill fear back into the populous, knowing that the parents' fear will assure he gets the credit. So Freddy, using the visage of Jason's mother, interrupts Jason's murderous dreams
Mummy?
and resurrects his slumbering corpse, sending him off to Elm Street (I would have preferred it if they had sent him off to
Springwood since who knows how many Elm Streets there are, but I'll get to that in a minute) to wreck some havoc. Of course, Freddy wrongly assumes that Jason will just knock off a couple of teens, presumably enough for Freddy's name to re-enter circulation, and then just lumber home. This of course means that Freddy didn't do his research and nicely sets the scene for a final confrontation between the two.
This brings me back to my previous complaint. Being a slasher fan, I love this movie. I know the back stories and can appreciate it for what it is. Unfortunately it seems somewhere in production the target audience was somehow shifted from Elm Street/Friday fans, to Elm Street/Friday/Everybody Else. Just about every scene that doesn’t feature someone getting hacked to death....
Admit it. You wanted him to die and fast.
...is loaded with exposition. There's enough expository dialogue in this movie to choke a crowded theatre with. I know it had been a while since the last installments for both series were released, but give me a break. The writers seem to be assuming the audience is stupid and completely overlook that most horror fans will know who these two are. The people who are really going to want to watch this don’t need a constant re-cap of what’s going on.
Why is he on fire? Who cares! It's Jason! He doesn't need a reason to be on fire or have a flaming machete!
Another small problem I have with the movie is that Jason is made out to be 'the good guy.' The writers do their best to make him a sympathetic character. Sure, he was tormented at camp, thought drowned when neglectful camp counsellors weren’t watching him, watched his mother get beheaded after she lost it, and grew up in the backwoods alone. But the sympathetic slant strips the character of much of his menace. Forget all the death and destruction he was responsible for in previous films. Here he's a more like a pathetic creature we're supposed to feel sorry for.
Aren't you ashamed of yourself
If it weren't for the fight sequence that I thoroughly enjoyed at the end I wouldn't like this movie so much.
4/5
. And [REC] is arguably the best horror film of the last decade.
and I waited an ETERNITY for this to come out like everyone else did! I also enjoyed the comic book adaptation continuity of this movie w/ Freddy vs Jason vs Ash.
