Movie Review: Freddy vs Jason

15 years ago last week (yeah, I'm a bit late to the game, my personal life, uh, got in the way, so to speak) the movie Freddy vs Jason came to theaters. And I wanted to give it some love. Currently on Rotten Tomatoes, a site I'm not a fan of anyway because it scares and confuses me, it sits at 41% from "critics" and 50% from "fans". Whereas on IMDb, it's got a 5.8 out of 10. People don't seem to like this movie and I'm not sure why.

Lemme explain why, for me personally anyway, this movie was a big deal when it finally came out. We need to go back in time to 1991. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was released and everyone involved said this is totally the last Freddy movie, we swear, ignore us crossing our fingers behind our backs. We found a way to kill Freddy and he was dead for sure. It involves a 3-D gimmick that won't hold up but he's dead, you guys. Promise.

Flash-forward to 1993 and we get Jason Goes To Hell. This was honestly, for sure, the final Jason movie. Seriously, you guys. No more after this. We beat this to death, literally and figuratively, he's dead. But...we're gonna end this movie with a shot where Freddy's glove comes from Hell and pulls Jason down while we hear Freddy laughing.

To our horror-loving teenage minds, this meant one thing: FREDDY AND JASON WERE GOING TO BE IN A MOVIE TOGETHER!! Now, according to the wikipedia page, the powers that be planned a movie since 1987 but keep in mind we didn't have the Internet back then, so those types of rumors never made it to the public. We only knew what we saw and back in 1993, we saw Freddy pull Jason down to hell. This mean they were gonna square off, yo!

But it would take another 10 years of development hell, constant rewrites, studio issues, and an act of God before we hardcore horror fans would get what we been promised for so long. Freddy Krueger vs Jason Voorhees.

I was gonna make this a caption but it ended up too long. Here's a picture of my ticket stub from when I saw it in theater back in 2003. August 16th to be exact. Let's talk about two things:
1. The fact the theater I saw it at felt the need to shorten the title on the stub to "Fred vs Jason" just so it'd fit. They didn't even go with "Freddy vs J" or whatever. Just shorten it to Fred, no one will care. Who saves these anyway? Which leads to-
2. Yes, I saved a lot of my ticket stubs. I plan on doing a post about them sometime in the future. For now, ignore the other stubs around it "Fred vs Jason", which in my mind, because it was the early 2000's makes me picture Fred Durst vs Jason and I kinda wanna see that now.

What is the movie even about? Sure, you can have Freddy and Jason square off but there needs to be a "plot" supposedly. We can't just have an hour and a half of these two fighting, said no one ever. Well, I guess one person said that cause we got a plot that's a bit of a stretch.

See, Freddy is sort of dead. He was banished from Springdale or Springfield or something and the powers that be in the town have wiped all history of Freddy even existing. Even Freddy's house appeared on one of those flip the house shows and now looks all fancy and modern. Freddy realizes that people in this town have forgotten him so they need a kick in the ass to bring fear back to Elm Street.

So through the power of movie magic, he resurrects Jason and sends him down to Elm Street. By the way, RIP to movies that'll feature 3 different pairs of breasts within the first 10 minutes of your movies. That's probably never going to happen again. Anyway, at the Elm Street house, we meet our main character Lori who's friends with your typical horror movie tropes: the black girl played by Kelly Rowland who honestly should never attempt acting again, the slutty chick and her asshole boyfriend, and two guys who don't matter because they're about to be killed.

After the slutty chick and her asshole boyfriend have terrible sex, Jason kills the asshole, freaking everybody out in the house. The police, knowing this is THE FREDDY HOUSE, is like "oh crap! It's happening again!" and the teenagers are all confused.

Lori falls asleep at the police station and gets a warning that Freddy is coming back but doesn't know who that is. Meanwhile Lori's former boyfriend Will (played by Jason Ritter, which I didn't know that until this last viewing) and Will's friend who looks like the lead singer of Eve 6 are locked away in a mental institution and forced to take these drugs called Hypnocil, which prevents people from having dreams. If you don't dream, you don't bring Freddy back.

One of these guy is from Freddy vs Jason. The other is the lead singer of Eve 6.
Can YOU tell who's who?!?

Anyway, they hear about the murder at Lori's house and pretty easily escape. All they did was steal some keys from some dude and just walk out without anyone even attempting to stop them. Anyway, a few other teenagers get killed, which makes everyone in town now scared that Freddy is indeed back.

But Jason is having too much fun killing and he just starts killing everybody, in one of my favorite scenes. I'm not sure what's with teens in horror movies that decide to throw a major party after three teens are brutally killed but they do just that but because this is an early 2000's horror movie, they have A FUCKING RAVE IN A CORNFIELD!! DROP THAT MOLLY AND FUCK A CORNCOB!!

This scene is so awesome that someone UPLOADED THE WHOLE THING ON YOUTUBE! God bless you, sir or ma'am!



The slutty chick falls asleep and before she can get date raped by Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jason comes and kills a whole shit-ton of kids at this rave, pissing Freddy off. Our main characters (which now includes two new tropes that showed up late: the nerd Linderman and the stoner who I swear to FUCKING GOD they just wanted to cast Jason Mewes from Jay and Silent Bob but couldn't so they got the best imitation that money could buy) manage to escape and go back to the lead singer of Eve 6's house, where he falls asleep, discovers his brother is Zach Ward AKA the main bully from A Christmas Story, and is killed by Freddy. Ignoring his dead body, they stay at his place and figure out what to do when a rookie cop who is also confused about everything wants to help.

Will tells them all about Hypnocil and they decide they need it so Freddy won't enter their dreams which involves them breaking into the mental institution. While there, Fake Jay gets stoned with a Freddy worm (don't ask) and is possessed by Freddy. When Jason shows up, Fake Jay/Freddy manages to tranquilize Jason, knocking him out, but not before slicing Fake Jay in half.

With Jason now asleep, Freddy can kick his ass in my second favorite scene ever, which I hope Robert Englund puts in his demo reel because he clearly was having a fucking blast with this scene. The teens, meanwhile, realize that Jason is the only one to stop Freddy and Lori realizing you can bring Freddy to the real world, they decide to take Jason back to Camp Crystal Lake because why not? There, Lori was gonna fall asleep, look for Freddy, and bring him into the real world.

Well, Freddy is almost killing Jason, who is scared of water. But thanks to a convenient car crash, Jason's body goes flying into the lake, waking him up. I know, that's weird since he's all scared of water but...whatever. So Freddy chases after Lori in her dream and before Jason can officially kill the rest of the teens, Lori manages to wake up, bring Freddy into the real world, and then we get my third favorite scene, the final showdown between Freddy and Jason.

There's a lot that I skipped, mainly the B-plot about Lori's dad but no one's here for that. They want Freddy to fight Jason and that we get. Again, I realize they had to come up with SOME reason for these two to come together and it was the biggest stretch they could think of.

Now, is this movie that bad? OOH! I use to do a feature called "Is It Really That Bad?" where I take a look at movies that are famously bad and ask if it deserves that title. Well, in a way...yes. This movie is terrible acting wise, mainly Kelly Rowland, who nothing personal, I like her but her character sucked and she wasn't a great actress. The plot is barely there and the CGI, even in 2003 standards is bad. But it's still a fun movie. I didn't go into fucking Freddy vs Jason for the ACTING or the GRAPHIC! I wanted Freddy to fight Jason and that's what I got. So shut up!!!

Is this movie terrible? Yes probably. Do I still love it? Hell yes. I'm gonna give this movie, just on pure entertainment alone, four Freddy Gloves Pulling Jason Into Hell out of Five.

Thanks for reading and if you like this, considering buying me a cup of coffee. I, uh, could use it right about now...
-Jason