And she dragged me along. (Not really.)

Spoilers follow, though it's not like you're going to this sort of movie for the suspense of the plot.  I do not give away the final battle or last few minutes, so you can read this and not ruin the "who wins?" question in your head.

But first, the categorized rating:

Freddy vs. Jason
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 7
Humor: 4
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4
Overall: 6.5

Going to a movie like this, you aren't expecting anything all that great.  I mean come on, it's a big-budget, cheesy B-movie, of the horror/slasher type.  You know there will be blood and murder and chasing of naked, boobilicious, dumb blonde chickies.  There is plenty of all that.

Given the title, you hope that there will be battles between Freddy and Jason, and that the battles won't be all cheesy and poorly-edited. They fight, quite a bit, and it's well done.

You also hope that there will be a real ending, with someone losing and someone winning. Not some lame ass Godzilla vs. King Kong type thing where the whole point is to have no real loser, so that fans of both monsters are satisfied.  There is a real ending, and one of them wins, but it's still set up for potential sequels.

The plot, if you can call it that, is that Freddy has been forgotten and excised from the memory of the town, with the help of a mysterious drug that blocks all the dreams of the people who take it.  I recall reading medical studies that found that we really need to dream, and that sleeping is sort of optional, and that people could last a lot longer without sleeping than they could if they got to sleep, but were awakened every time they started to drop into REM sleep. This sort of detail is, of course, entirely missing from the movie, along with dozens of other "oh that's just absurd" types of physical reality details.

Anyway, Freddy is forgotten and he's still out there in the dream world, but he's losing power and growing weaker since he draws his strength from the kids who dream about and fear him.  His solution is to somehow locate the spirit (or something) of Jason, the unkillable machete killer from the Friday the Thirteenth movies, and fire him up.  Freddy manipulates Jason's lingering love for his mother and spurs Jason to come back to life, which is detailed by a weird scene of a partially-rotten corpse regenerating flesh and then clawing out of the earth in a graveyard.  This is why you should always cremate immortal serial killers before you dispose of their remains.

Of course Jason immediately has his hockey mask and ragged overalls and giant machete.  I mean he's in those before he walks out of the cemetery.  Nice of them to bury him with all his most beloved toys, wasn't it?

Jason then makes his way, on foot, to the Elm Street area, and makes a few gruesome kills, which gets the cops thinking it's Freddy Kreuger again, and starts them whispering, which gets the kids thinking about Freddy and gives him strength, and so on.

Of course Jason doesn't stop killing once he's bagged just a few, and Freddy gets really pissed when he's just about to make his first dream kill again, and really prove that he's got his strength back, and Jason shows up and kills the girl, stealing her away from Freddy.  Freddy then decides that he needs to get rid of Jason, and they're soon battling it out.

The plot aside, the movie goes about as you expect. There are the requisite Jason stalking/murder scenes, and the requisite Freddy nightmare surreal stalking/murder scenes.  I never felt anything approaching fear, or even worry, since you know the kids are going to get it, and they always get it in the most ironic and deserved ways.  When Freddy and/or Jason are always about to leap out and skewer/slash the annoying teenager, it's not exactly a surprise when the teenager walks backwards, huffing and puffing in terror, and bumps into the monster that's about to cut them in half.

The special effects were very good throughout.  People get cut in half repeatedly, and it's realistic.  There's nice realistic blood spurting from the slices and decapitations and wounds, and the make up is good.  A scene during the final Jason vs. Freddy battle has one of them crawling while the other is chopping at their back, and each hack clearly hits with something resembling force, and each time there is a nice spray of blood and a reaction from the crawler.  I wouldn't say it's "realistic" in terms of what it would look like if an actual person were hacking at another actual person who was crawling along, but it's nice use of blood packs and hidden spray nozzles along with physical acting.  Not just some special effects added in via computer.

As for the acting, it was adequate.  Freddy was pretty good and campy, the wax statue playing Jason was fine, and the unknown actors playing the high school kids all looked like they were 27, and did a relatively good job pretending to be terrified of fake blood and guys in make up.  It's got to be hard to breath frantically like you are hyperventilating and running and terrified with 20 film crew guys 5 meters away, so they have my respect for pulling it off to any extent.

No one in the movie gave a performance that was in any way memorable.  I guess Freddy was pretty good, and Jason was okay, but none of the non-made up actors were anything more than adequate. Any moments of interest and excitement were provided by the script and the scenes, not the actual acting performances.  My only possible exception was a girl who opened the movie with a dock-side strip tease that of course led to a frantic chase and the inevitable screaming death scene.  She did a good job looking amorous for her vanished boyfriend, and then looking scared of the menacing figure in the night woods.  Plus her giant perky implants were relatively easy on the eyes, though they were about a half-cup too large.  As implants usually are, to my jaundiced eye.

One other girl, the skinny little one whose boyfriend is the first victim, was pretty good at being stupid and skinny, and she played a really drunk bimbo well, before her horrible death.  I also thought the crazy younger brother was adequate, at least in his one scenery-devouring scene in the high school.

On the other hand, they had several just dreadful performances.  This is sort of expected, and almost demanded in a cheesy horror movie, much as it is in a soap opera. One character has to electrify the viewers with their mere presence as the worst actor on the show.  Think Tori Spelling on Melrose 90210, or whatever Fox teen opera she was on.  I can't really single one out for that honor in Freddy vs. Jason, though Malaya can.  She absolutely cringed in pain every time the young guy who played the one smart cop came on screen, and rejoiced at his inevitable death.  I thought he was bad, but the token minority black chick was my personal, "Oh god, she's talking again." person.

I had no idea who she was and would never have thought to check, if Malaya hadn't mentioned after the movie that she was one of the other women in Destiny's Child.  I saw Beyonce, one of the girls in that group in Austin Powers III, and she was pretty much death in it, but had no idea the girl in FvJ was another of her singing mates. She was bad throughout, showing her obvious inability to act by never changing her mood or inflection or delivery, no matter the situation, but really shone in a scene near the end, where she suddenly becomes all sassy and brave and talks a bunch of smack to the somewhat-surprised Freddy.  She's doing this whole, "What are all those knives, compensation for something lacking elsewhere?" speech, and I was just moaning in pain at her delivery.  It so reeked of "Up until 4am memorizing these lines that someone else wrote." in her total lack of spontaneity.

It didn't help that she had nothing interesting to say and that it was ridiculous that Freddy would waste time listening to it, nor that she was suddenly no longer afraid of him, and it was additionally dumb how she died in an un-ironic fashion.  She'd spent the whole movie wondering about getting a nose job and asking everyone if she needed one, so you were primed for her to get her nose cut off and then get a quick look in the mirror to think she looked better now, or something like that.  Instead she was just smashed and slashed summarily, like everyone else.

I don't really have much more to say.  The Rotten Tomatoes critical mass is pretty negative, with just 37% overall and 21% of major critics giving it an approving vote, but I suppose that's to be expected.  However, to somewhat echo what Ebert said about Gigli, what were they expecting?  It's a cheesy horror flick.  It's not supposed to be suspenseful or have great acting performances or dramatic twists to the plot.  It's a slasher movie and a monster battle movie, and it does both those things pretty well.  I wouldn't say it's a good movie, but I'd certainly recommend it to people who are fans of the genre(s) of the film.  If you like dumb action and/or horror and/or slasher films, go see it, and you'll get what you require, and you'll have a good time.

Criticizing FvJ for lacking great acting and a suspenseful plot is like bitching that a Merchant Ivory movie about some old English Queen didn't have any car chases or kung fu battles.  I mean no shit, Mr. Critic. Neither Freddy nor Jason recite Shakespeare either.

Originally posted August 19, 2003.

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