Freddy vs. Jason: Movie & DVD Review (2003)

(Originally published 2003)

For pure box office draw, it’s tough to beat a title like “Freddy vs. Jason.” For some, the idea alone carries as much weight as, say, “Dracula vs. Frankenstein,” “King Kong vs. Godzilla,” “Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster” or, for a more timely twist, “Arnie vs. Gray.”

Unfortunately, the reality of “Freddy vs. Jason” is more in keeping with the lesser-known Spanish film, “The Wolfman vs. The Transsexuals.” The promise is there for a hilarious good time, but the venture is such a sloppy, uninvolving drag, it rarely offers audiences the hair-raising spectacle they expect.

Based on a screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, “Freddy vs. Jason” takes two exhausted pop-culture icons--Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) of the long-running “Nightmare on Elm Street” series and Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirziner) of the longer-running “Friday the 13th” franchise--and brings them back for yet another chance at life.

Fittingly, the story begins in Hell with Freddy worming his way into Jason’s dreams. Since Jason is dead and can no longer dream, the movie already is on shaky ground, but nevermind. Logic doesn’t matter here. In these movies, logic was bludgeoned long ago. What does matter is that Freddy’s meddling jolts Jason back from the dead and inspires him to go on the senseless slaughtering of several unlikable, barely clad co-eds and shrill teen-age boys.

When the film’s core group of teens (Monica Keena, Jason Ritter, Kelly Rowland) hear that it might be Freddy doing the killing, they become terrified, which is exactly what Freddy wants as it launches him back into their nightmares. There, he wreaks all sorts of havoc before his bruised ego leads him to a rote showdown with the machete-wielding Jason.

Few expect flashes of genius from any of this, but nobody likes laziness, regardless of the genre, or dumb writing, which this flick has in spades in spite of being in the works for the past 11 years.

All Yu had to do to succeed was to offer some fresh, reasonably inventive ways to get sliced and diced, a measure of wit, some characters in which we could invest ourselves, and a few memorable jolts along the way. He falls well short of that, saddling audiences with a buckets-of-blood mentality that deadens the spirit and drowns his film.

Grade: D-