Nightmare Week meets Friday Week: The only thing to fear is fear himself; or Dude, that goalie was pissed about something

FREDDY VS. JASON

2003

Directed by Ronny Yu

Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift

Spoilers: severe

And now we come to the ultimate gimmick for a pair of franchises that, as they entered the 1990s, became nothing besides gimmicks: in 1991, Freddy Krueger died; in 1993 Jason Voorhees, who turned out to be a mind-controlling bug demon this whole time, joined him in hell; in 1994, Wes Craven tried to convince you Freddy was real; in 2455 (2002 our time), Jason went to outer space.  (None of these are very good movies, I find; some are very bad.  Yet it behooves me to mention that New Nightmare has, in latterdays, won itself a large constituency.)  As I likely alluded to in each of those reviews, and described as early as our discussion of 1988's (already gimmicky!) Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, negotiations had been undertaken all the way back in 1987 to bring the two titans of 80s franchise horror together.  It failed then, because New Line Cinema had no immediate need for it, and it presumably couldn't have helped that Freddy vs. Jason... how to put this delicately... sounds stupid.  There were forces at New Line behind it, as each series entered their respective declines—principally Michael De Luca, who wasn't there to see it finally happen—but you get the impression that Robert Shaye, always a little ambivalent about New Line's identification with a child molesting ghost, was not championing it.

Still, by now, New Line actually owned Jason, so they needed to justify that purchase; yet every time they tried to bring Freddy or Jason back and revitalize interest, it backfired.  At last, they just started development, the hell with it, and then development took forever, with some $6 million pumped into screenplay after screenplay.  (Which turned out to be fine, because even after throwing that much money into a pit, Freddy vs. Jason still only cost $30 million, the most expensive of either series, but by this time barely "high-budget" even for a slasher—Scream 3 cost $40 million.)  I won't detail all the false starts, and maybe the final kick in the ass was when Sean Cunningham just up and made Jason X, the Jason-goes-to-space one, and if he intended that as an implicit threat—"if we don't make Freddy vs. Jason already, I'll just keep making even-dumber Friday the 13th novelty movies until we do"—it's as good an explanation as any.

So finally, in 2003, it arrived, with the umpteenth screenplay credited to Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, and directed by Ronny Yu, who represented a signal reversal of policy for both franchises, each of which had a long tradition of giving untested filmmakers their shot, early on to exceptional effect, more recently to franchise-breaking missteps.  Yu was a Hong Kong veteran with a deep filmography, and American horror experience, too, having made his stateside debut with Bride of Chucky.  He vindicated New Line's choice: Freddy vs. Jason was huge, depending on your source the highest-grossing of either franchise* at $116 million (yet for entirely unclear reasons, Yu only ever made two more movies in America or China).  To announce my own opinion, well, it's kewl, it's awesome, it's... there's no twist, I love it.  It's often denigrated (I mean, sure) but it's kind of amazing that it could exist in 2003 in the state it did, not a complete repudiation of contemporary trends in e-ticket horror, but damned near one, especially given where slashers were and what Freddy vs. Jason's own goals were—and it's more amazing still given that Yu was apparently hired for having serviced those contemporary trends with the campy, ironic Bride of Chucky, while Freddy vs. Jason is severe, even dangerous—and it accomplishes this miracle alongside an even greater one, shaking off all the accumulated crapulence of the last fifteen years of both its sources.

If you only watched the first ten minutes, you'd question the hell out of these assertions, though the dangerousness would come through (one of the first images is Freddy licking a photograph of a little girl he just murdered).  But of course it remains a product of its time, amply demonstrated by the nu-metal on the soundtrack and the discouraging omnipresence of breast implants, or, in matters of (film) form, the whole ice-slick production, from the cinematography to the hair-and-makeup jobs.  It does have, especially upfront, the quality that it feels like all genre filmmaking in the 00s was aspiring to, that is, to make every single character intolerably repulsive, to the extent I spent the first proper scene hoping that the attendees of an impromptu house party hosted by Lori Campbell (Monica Keena) were all false protagonists doomed to die, beginning with the girls playing an annoying, implausible game of "marry, fuck, kill" regarding the Three Stooges and doing the most placeholdery un-comic dialogue imaginable upon that subject (they could've at least done Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman, and perhaps that was even the original idea and Yu said "no! no meta," but, gosh, you can have a bit, early on, in a movie called Freddy vs. Jason).  Then some boys arrive who are exponentially worse.  But they're not all immediately doomed; yet I didn't hate the movie.  Did I mention Lori lives at 1428 Elm Street?

So, obviously, I've skipped ahead.  We begin with Freddy (Robert Englund), trapped in limbo, narrating that his power comes from the terror he inflicts, and that while he has died, many times, he's now been forgotten, leaving him impotent and, worse, bored.  So he's searched hell for an instrument through which he could once again inspire fear, thereby sort of bootstrapping his way back into the collective unconscious.  He's found his catspaw: Jason (now Ken Kirzinger), once a drowned boy, but through his avenging love for his mother (Paula Shaw) reborn as a force of indiscriminate destruction, itself ultimately indestructible, who has likewise died many times, but returns to wreak carnage upon any who'd visit cursed Crystal Lake.  Freddy sees a way to interfere with that cycle, for Jason does love his mother, and, as we know, Freddy loves drag, and in the guise of Pamela Voorhees, he dispatches Jason to Springw... so, absolutely yes, the very worst thing in the movie is its lunatic insistence that Crystal Lake, NJ, and Springwood, OH, are practically neighboring towns.  Because what, did Jason take a bus?  But we must accept it, for descend upon Springwood Jason does; "naturally" (in self-referential franchise terms), Freddy sends him to 1428 Elm, and Jason annihilates the most dickish of Lori's guests (Jesse Hutch) in an interesting mixture of styles, impaling his victim with a machete but completing the look by finishing him, as Freddy might, with the bed itself.  Jason departs under "Pamela's" instructions, for Freddy's goal is to take the credit, and so the fear, and keep as many victims as possible for himself.

Lori and the others, notably semi-mean girl Kia (Kelly Rowland) and self-loathing alcoholic Gibb (Katharine Isabel), are definitely afraid, and they overhear some of the cops indiscreetly whisper the name: Freddy Krueger.  That's enough for Freddy to terrorize Lori in her dreams, but not enough to kill her—yet.  Meanwhile, in the looney bin languishes Lori's old freshman year sweetheart, Will (Jason Ritter), imprisoned to silence his assertions that he witnessed Lori's psychiatrist dad (Tom Butler) murder her mom; by his side is Mark (Brendan Fletcher), institutionalized because he's had a brush with Freddy.  (It shouldn't come as a shock that, unbeknownst to them, they have that in common.)  Upon hearing the news, they break out to safeguard Lori, and the group eventually picks up nerd Linderman (Chris Maquette), stoner Bill (Jason Mewes, I mean Kyle Labine), and out-of-the-loop rookie cop Scott (Lochlyn Munro).  All along, Freddy's power is growing, but Jason's bloodlust is rising, and Freddy won't have it, given the whole point was to slake his own; and our heroes realize that they're facing two monsters, but maybe they can use one against the other.

This is remarkably decent—exempting New Nightmare, it's the solidest foundation either franchise has had in ages.  The 00s douchebagginess is never entirely banished, but kept in check; the plot's messy, but flows well; and while the cast is variable, they're not wretched.  (Keena's performance gets better as it narrows to alternating between victimhood and bloody-minded heroism, rather than any attempt at personality; Ritter is his father's son and a worthwhile stock co-lead; Fletcher is almost destabilizingly good, as a kid who doesn't quite realize he's gone crazy because they kept telling him he was; everybody else is either deprived of opportunities or actively bad, but, usually, still in genre-affirming ways.)

But the story is good; for one thing, it's the first time any Nightmare, including Nightmare '84 itself, has attempted to honor Craven's original vision of Freddy as a god who only exists because you believe he does.  (They unfortunately stop honoring this two-thirds through, in favor of a Freddy's Dead gambit of pulling Freddy onto the material plane.  Happily, it's less annoying here, because this movie, after all, has one essential duty, enshrined in its very title, and I don't know how you get there otherwise, unless you had the downright elephantine gonads to short-circuit Jason's effects-heavy championship bout with the dreamlord by having Jason turn away, Nancy-style, and refuse to believe in his opponent.  For that matter, I think the clever-but-ramshackle set-up might've been smoothed out if Freddy approached Jason as a creature, like himself, of collective nightmare, rather than a literal corpse in a hockey mask; but hey, this isn't Sandman.)  What's earnestly fascinating, however, is how this conception of Freddy plays into things, all Springwood conspiring to eradicate its past as the only means of protecting its future, at the cost of its present.  Frankly, it's more nuanced yet also more coherent than Craven's attempt to shoehorn in his tangents about blackhearted suburbia: the adults are still condescending liars here, destroying their children slowly rather than Freddy's all-at-once, but they really did have good intentions, and it lets you make your own judgments.  It's an awfully smart, interesting way to engage with the continuity of an old and gnarled franchise by turning towards basically full-on speculative fiction, pondering how a world would work if people knew dream demons were real.

As the foregoing unmistakably suggests, Freddy vs. Jason is almost entirely a Nightmare On Elm Street movie, that Jason has simply stumbled into—from its structure (close-knit high schoolers discover Freddy quickly and wage a secret war for their survival; there's a Friday-style opening montage that's, nonetheless, devoted to Nightmare movies), to its geography (only the ending's at Crystal Lake), to its villainous hierarchy ("line count" obviously isn't useful, but Jason never threatens to be the principal antagonist)—and that's fair, given that Nightmare movies have actual plots and Freddy's an actual character.

I do like the way Jason's used here, though: as a bludgeon, kind of dumb but not nearly as dumb as Freddy thinks he is, and eventually our antihero, by the simple calculation that while Jason's a murderous zombie, Freddy's an evil god.  I'm going to speak some heresy by forwarding Kirzinger as perhaps my favorite Jason: Kane Hodder had been thanked for his service and dismissed by Yu, who preferred Kirzinger's more automaton-like lumbering perseverance, and, for these purposes, I prefer that too (homage is offered to Hodder, though they edit the heck out of Kirzinger's conceptually-even-cooler flamesuit sequence).  This is not to mention his sheer hulking enormity, akin to Tyler Mane's Michael Myers, but what's best about that is how it interfaces with Englund, who, by comparison, is a twerp, so that when their first battle occurs, Freddy's overdetermined victory only underlines his supernatural horror and the superiority of mind over matter, while the climactic second battle, with Freddy forced into physical combat, shifts rather seamlessly between the borderline atavism of a dog struggling with a bear, to a cartoon-logic thinker striving at a pronounced disadvantage against the inconveniences of real settings with (somewhat) real physics, as well as an opponent who is, still, basically a bear, to just two exhausted bladed-weapons combatants continuing trying to murder one another despite each one possessing a pronounced measure of immortality.  It's superb, gory action figure spectacle—dishonorable, maybe, but good—and benefiting (not even distractingly) from Yu's wuxia background, it delivers on what you came to see, especially that superlative final frame.

But then, it's a superlative final frame because of Englund, and while I'm going to circle around it for a moment, it's his best performance in the role.  If Freddy vs. Jason lets down the Nightmares' legacy, it's nothing to do with him.  It's on one front alone that it falters, though it is a big one: I don't know whose decision it was, but Freddy vs. Jason, though twelve years removed from the last "real" Freddy outing, is still afraid of its own shadow and embarrassed by the series' increasingly-misjudged nightmare setpieces. Thus we have a Nightmare—a spectacle-oriented Nightmare still wallowing in its own plebeian taste—that, despite it all, opts for restraint, and only barely engages whatever skills its production designer, John Willett, might've otherwise brought to bear on it, mostly with a dreamscape Crystal Lake.  It's more varied than the straitjacketed New Nightmare, but the apex surrealism might be a wave effect through some hardwood floors at 1428 Elm that knocks Lori down.

Baroque elaboration is off the table, then (nobody's turning into a cockroach in this one), and Freddy and Jason's first fight happens in a facility resembling, yes, a boiler room, that's also where he already tormented Gibb.  Maybe it was budget, and if we Dream Mastered this, it'd be $60 million.  Mark's confrontation with his suicided brother at least indicates some skill at squirmy psychohorror in Yu; but then, there's a beat where stoner Bill is waylaid by a CGI'd, Freddified version of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar that begs for a fuller, goofier treatment, but there's no wonderland.  (Of course, it could be for the best: the movie is slightly too indebted to its 2003-era CGI.)  Yu is stylish about it, at least—it's generally dynamically-directed and well-staged no matter what, and indulging in a lot of totalizing colors within (and even without) the dream sequences, while the baseline "reality" remains some appreciably heightened stuff, so if I made it sound like 00s slickness was bad, cinematographer Fred Murphy is doing admirable work within that niche, with blue-tinted, brightly-spotlit nights that never come off as overlit, and some unusually effective uses of Gothicky "lightning," even in the middle of a house.  But whatever the hell Yu's doing with those horrible random swerves into step-printed slow-mo, "Hong Kong" only begins to explain it.

But it matters much less than it should, when Englund's spectacle all by himself.  So: maybe Nightmare '84's was the Freddy that was most unexpectedly malign and personal; Freddy's Revenge's the most willing to savor dominion over body and soul; Dream Warriors' the most startlingly self-amused and foul; Dream Master's the most darkly whimsical and godlike; Dream Child's the dumbest and loudest-mouthed; Freddy's Dead's the most comically exasperated; New Nightmare's the most incomprehensibly inhuman.  But this is Englund striking an ideal balance between all of his Freddies, the favored and the disfavored alike, bolstered by the series' best makeup, and supported by what could only have been a rigorously curated script that still feels like it's letting Englund off the leash rather than strangling him with notes.

Freddy is fucking mean in this one: he's still doing puns, and still ending so many sentences with "bitch," but with a chilly rage underlying it, like he wants to give himself a good laugh, but he's been too angry too long to fully enjoy himself, and he's taking that compounded anger out on you.  Jesus, he's slightly racist in this one, as a grace note and added edge to an already hyper-aggressive conception of Freddy's villainy that's amping his explicitly sexual menace to the highest degree in the entire franchise—for instance (not even the most harrowing instance), one of the semi-serious weaknesses of the script gets turned on its head when we think they're launching into yet another discussion of plot information we already know, but it's always been a Freddy-induced nightmare, revolving around Lori's "virgin sacrifice," that, likewise, involves her dad.  It's not for everyone, clearly, but it leans as fully as possible into Freddy as a cosmic rapist, which, if we're clear-eyed, has been the center of all his horror since Tina back when.  Even his cruelty to Jason—who is in some ways a vulnerable child himself, after all—feels correct in its gratuity.  And Englund gives it bleak power, plumbing the darkness that Craven had seen in him two decades earlier, but harder, deeper, and in greater quantities than ever before.

Freddy vs. Jason is the capstone to two franchises—given its financial success, I can't imagine by what forbearance New Line did so, but having brought their franchises to satisfying conclusions for once, they let its finality stand—and, honestly, I think it does right by Jason Voorhees, too, dredging from the lakebottom sludge of his mind a more cohesive originating tragedy than ever before (even if it is a caricatured Freddy nightmare), and giving him some onscreen time with something that at least purports to be his mother, and, of course, letting him win.  But you know, the Fridays, in their deceptive flexibility, would be the easier of the two series to "do right by."  So it's the way that this movie affords Robert Englund such a glorious showcase, and Freddy Krueger such a flawless sendoff—undignified in the most glitteringly perfect of ways, coming complete with possibly the cheesiest fourth-wall breaking wink in film history, its significance as a promise that this story will never end magnified by the knowledge that this was, nevertheless, Englund's last word—that actually turns the gimmick into something more, something I knew I needed, but by this point never expected I'd get.

Score: 8/10

*However, in inflation-adjusted dollars, Friday '80 beats it handily ($225 million to $198 million), and it's wild to remember just how successful the original Friday the 13th was.

Reviews in this series:

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)

Friday the 13th Part III (Miner, 1982)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)

A Nightmare On Elm Street (Craven, 1984)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus and Cunningham, 1993)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)

Jason X (Isaac, 2002)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

A Nightmare On Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)