So you are afraid of something after all
YEAH, HORROR THON! Keepin’ it goin’ for the Octobers I decided to take on the mash up movie of two of the most famous horror sagas, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. This fan service movie promises (and fails) to answer the question that horror nerds have been arguing amongst themselves for years: Who would win in a fight? Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees? So let’s see who takes home the crown (with some dudes head attached to it) with my review of Freddy vs. Jason, with Robert Englund and Ken Kirzinger as the titular characters, and Monica Keena, Jason Ritter, Kelly Rowland, Chris Marquette, and Brendan Fletcher.
One time potential pedophile (or at least kid killer) Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is not pleased. He’s trapped in Hell and cannot resume his favorite past time (killing people in their sleep via their dreams) because the people of Springwood have devised a way to make the people forget about him, and he requires their fear to manifest himself. He devises a plan using another resident of Hell, Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger). He invades Jason’s dreams and disguises himself as Momma Voorhees, telling Jason to come back to life and kill people on Elm Street. This will make people think of, and subsequently fear, Freddy again and allow him to resume his practice. Jason goes back and kills a dude in the house of Lori Campbell (Monica Keena) while she hosts a little get together with her friends, one of which is Kia Waterson (Kelly Rowland). In the police station, Lori overhears someone mention Freddy and he is able to use that to start manifesting in her dreams, though he’s not strong enough to do any damage there. Lori’s old boyfriend, Will Rollins (Jason Ritter), is being held in a Westin Hills Asylum as part of the plan to keep Freddy down. Seeing Lori’s predicament on the news, Will and his friend Mark Davis (Brendan Fletcher), escape to go and check on Lori. Unfortunately, Mark has a little spaz attack at school while Will tries to explain things to Lori and ends up yelling about Freddy for the whole school to hear. This gives Freddy enough power to attempt to take the life of one of Lori’s friends at another party, but Jason kills her first. This does not make Freddy happy, and he inhabits the body of another friend of Lori’s as they break into the Asylum to get their hands on the medication that keeps them from dreaming. Freddy uses this body to hit Jason with some tranquilizers and put him under, where he must fight Freddy on Freddy’s turf. To even the playing field, Lori and her friends take the sleeping Jason back to Camp Crystal Lake and Lori goes under in order to pull Freddy into the real world to fight Jason fair and square. Then we get to see who would beat who … or do we?
I say this is a solid movie. It’s light on scares (but what isn’t anymore?) but pretty solid on action. It has a good amount of call backs to the classic horror staples that I enjoyed seeing and being able to pick out. Girls always get their titties out, and the movie starts out with that. You get a couple more throughout the movie, and all of them are top notch. They have the creepy sound effects from Friday the 13th, although I can’t think of anyway to explain them in writing. It’s like CHI CHI CHI KA KA KA. You’ll know it if you’ve seen the movies from that, I think. But horror movies make women out to be stupid, don’t they? Always need to get their tits out, always tripping when running away from certain death, dating guys so douchey they should have been wearing Ed Hardy, always walking through a corn field at night to follow someone you know to be dead, even though you know there’s a killer on the loose. You know, those classics. The writing of this movie is exactly what you expect. It’s not plot heavy and the dialogue’s not great, but it’s solid enough. It was visually satisfying though. The way it was filmed, the settings, everything worked very well visually.
The biggest problem was the same problem I had with Alien vs. Predator. And that problem is the backbone of the writers. Neither of these movies is willing to pick a winner! I understand why, you don’t want to alienate the people that prefer Freddy or Jason, or Aliens or Predators, but then you shouldn’t have taken on a movie claiming it would answer that question! You’re worried about pissing people off, but you’ve pissed off people like me who are annoyed that you refused to pick a winner and end the movie in a stalemate. You want to know who would win? Jason! Because Freddy is a crappy horror villain. There, I said it. Bring it on! Jason doesn’t say anything and has no personality, but he’s a straight up killer and is immortal. Freddy is goofy and fights people while they’re asleep like a bitch. I do not understand the appeal of the Freddy character. He is so goofy and not scary at all. If I were in a dream and he came up and hit me with one of his goofy lines, I would say “If you work off of fear, you’ve got no power over me. But I would like it if you would kill me so I wouldn’t have to hear that joke again”. None of that for my boy Voorhees. He just kills you.
For the acting, Robert Englund does a good job, but I hate the Freddy character. Jason doesn’t really act. The female lead, Monica Keena is an odd one to me. Some guys let their fists do the talking, she lets her tits do the acting. She wasn’t necessarily bad, but her tits were always the center of attention when she was on. Maybe she can’t act that well so she said “Can I lose the top buttons on my shirt? I can’t act that well”. Jason Ritter does a fine job too and I was much less distracted by his breasts. Kelly Rowland annoyed me for most of the movie, and not just because she was probably the least attractive person in Destiny’s Child. The climax of her annoyance was also the climax of her life: when she gets killed. She gets Freddy’s attention as he was going after Lori and Will and so he starts coming after her. Then she decides that this is her opportunity to try out her stand up routine and whip some “snaps” and “Yo Mamma” jokes at Freddy. Then Jason smashes her into a tree. That’s what you get for that nonsense. Of course, the problems with her were the fault with the writers and not poor Kelly, so perhaps I’m too hard on her.
This movie is a slasher movie, pure and simple. Go in expecting that and you probably won’t have any major problems with this movie, unless of course you were looking for a movie to answer your nerdy mash-up questions. I give this movie “Got your nose” out of “Tilt!”
And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others. It may help me get better.
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