Movie Review by Dr Kuma
Starring: Robert Englund, Monica Keenan, Ken Kirzinger, Kelly Rowland, Jason Ritter
Director: Ronny Yu
UK web journalists were not allowed to see this film at press showings. We think it’s because it’s so bad that the UK distributors didn’t want the film’s target audience who use the web as their primary source of information to find out how bad it really is and avoid seeing it.
FREDDY VS JASON: Spoiler
FREDDY VS JASON – spoiler: So who wins The Final Battle?
The fact is, like the movie, no one wins. In the style of the Universal classic monsters, the film tries to tell us that they are both afraid of something, setting up the grand finale.
Like the werewolf and silver, Dracula and the crucifix, Freddy is scared of fire and Jason of water, so both monsters battle it out in Camp Crystal LAKE, while the forest BURNS. In the style of both franchises the ending is left open for another sequel but is the most pathetic tag on I’ve seen, which does not make sense and seems to have been an afterthought. With the continuity errors all the way through, this just wasn’t needed. As I said at the end of my review, I hope that the filmmakers realize that even the most forgiving of horror movie fans know when they have been ripped off.
As I said at the start, no one wins, but the audience loses.
REVIEW
I got into my time machine yesterday and seemed to go back to the early 80’s, back to the time when horror films were gory, the first thing you saw after the movies opening title was a women taking her clothes off jumping into a lake at midnight, then, hearing a sound from the bushes, saying “Johnny is that you?” then, scared, she ran through a forest chased by a madman.
Secondly, in the A-Z of 80’s horror, the actors couldn’t act to save their lives (literally).
Thirdly, all this was being watched in a near empty cinema.
But hey, hang on! – there were a few changes:
The New Line distributor logo was far better than I remembered, sort of space aged.
Secondly, the cinema was empty but not because people were watching a video.
Thirdly the person who took my ticket was 14 not 84.
Finally all the girls’ breasts looked the same and didn’t seem real, as though they were made of plastic and stayed perfectly still as they ran through the forest, before their owner fell over in some leaves.
What was going on? Then I realized; I was having a Nightmare. I did another checklist to see if my time machine was working.
Strangely, it had cost twice as much to see the film as it did in the 80’s. The machine hadn’t worked, I’d aged 20 years since the first film I’d intended seeing and what I was seeing on screen was the reason WHY the cinema was empty. Then I got confused There wasn’t a smell of hotdogs and a trailer for another PORKY’s movie and I then realised to my horror it was 2003 not 1983 – 20 years later!!!! Again. Didn’t it look good on the trailer? Wasn’t the first lot of FRIDAY THE 13 TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET crap as well? No, I thought, I loved them, which is why I wanted to capture the excitement of my teens by seeing his one. Weren’t they a bit dark? Yes, but not sick like this was. There was no humour or deft touches that made this special.
Didn’t I see a movie last year, called JASON X which was set in the far distant future and the killer from FRIDAY THE 13 TH was loose on a spaceship, making this ‘fight of the horror giants’ I was witnessing redundant as if that was set in the future, it meant Jason won and did make the next hour and a half redundant. Was I not the same age as the kids in Peril? No, in the 20 years that had passed I was now the same age as the friendly cop who helps the kids, which may explain why I thought that the music at the ‘party scene’ was crap and that there seemed to be more time for drugs and less time for people who smoke cigarettes than when I was a lad. I released then that I was still in 2003, not 1983, although the opening scenes in this film had led me to believe my time machine had worked. Then I released that, no, I felt too old to be sitting through this.
In confusion, I looked at the synopsis in front of me which said the following:
Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is in hell but desperate to kill, but he can’t since the kids had forgotten him and that today’s kids take dream suppressants, blocking him out. So, he, as he would manipulates hulking, hockey-masked serial killer Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger – also in hell) by taking on his mother’s likeness telling him to go to Elm Street and dispatch the kids so the parents will think the pills are useless and stop giving them to them which will free Freddy once again. Freddy’s plans backfire however when Jason forgets he’s on a mission and leaves nothing left for Freddy. The kids figure out what’s going on (which is more than we could) and decide that they should play one off against the other so our teen hero’s Will (Jason Ritter), Lori (Monica Keena), and Kia (Kelly Rowland), along with other survivors of both killers, lure Jason back to Camp Crystal Lake to kill Freddy once and for all…
I then realise that I’m glad my time machine had broken as I could have found myself traveling into the future at some point to find that this pile of shite has spawned even more sequels such as Jason Does Dallas, Freddy vs. Godzilla or the spin off series of horrors about the horse Freddy possesses; Nightmare of Elm Street: the foul foal.
The open ending at the end of this crap is the most frightening thing (bar the acting) in this terrible, terrible film.
There are one or two good scenes; the scene where the pictures of the murdered kids come to life and follow our hero through the corridor like a picture at Hogwarts, as well as the scene where Freddy turns into what looks like a Tequila worm and Jason on fire, chasing annoying kids through the corn. The crop plant that is, not the script that doesn’t light up at any point.
This really is a bottom of the barrel offering that seems to have been pasted together like a 70’s David Bowie song, bit’s taken from lots of sources then just glued together and hoping for the best. Even things like seeing an abandoned 50’s car (setting the scene for a Jason as a kid flash back) in Camp Crystal Lake when the camp had been used throughout the 80’s and 90’s in nine other films started to annoy me. Surely it would have been moved by now, taken to the scrap yard along with this script. Continuity was out the window here it seems. It would also make Jason over 50.
There was a point towards the end that our heroine shouts “I can’t leave until I see him dead”. I could, I’d been contemplating leaving for some time as, lets face it, if this makes any money, she’ll never get her wish, which is the worst Nightmare I can think of.
Dr Kuma’s verdict in the style of the Elm Street Freddy Rhyme:
1,2 – Freddy’s turned to poo
3,4 – Best to stay indoors
5,6 – Give this a miss
7,8 – It’s such a waste
9,10- Please don’t meet again.
