Viking Night: Freddy vs. Jason
By Bruce Hall
November 3, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But what kind of contrivance could bring together franchise icons from competing studios together into one film? There's a reason why we'll never see James Bond team up with Jason Bourne, or Captain Kirk get busy with Princess Leia. And it's not just because Bourne would be a terrible wingman or because Scotty could never bring himself to sabotage the Millennium Falcon. It's because, as Bruce Campbell said of the aborted Freddy vs Jason vs Ash sequel - because of lawyers. And, I guess, crappy screenwriters, and the fact that no director worth a damn wants to be anywhere near a movie like this.
That’s no offense to Mr. Yu, but come on, we all saw Bride of Chucky, right? Not the worst movie ever made, but it shouldn’t exactly fill you with hope for a tentpole matchup like Freddy vs Jason.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the premise. Since we last saw him, Freddy (the incomparable Robert Englund) has become powerless because the residents of Springwood have “forgotten” about him (how anyone can forget a guy who killed enough kids to fill a Home Depot is dubious, but let’s just go with it), and no longer fear him. He surmises that it’s their fear that gave him the power to kill, so he needs a fall guy to get back in the game, and get people talking about him again so that he has the power to return. I can’t say I quite follow the math on that but again, this is the kind of story where you know going in that you need to just shut up and buy what they’re selling.
Fine. I’m okay with that. So since Genghis Khan and Hitler missed their flight (I imagine one objecting to flying with a pilot named Rosenberg, and the other mistaking the plane for a dragon), Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) was the next man up. In this universe, it’s implied that Camp Crystal Lake is within Sunday afternoon driving distance of Springwood, making the travel arrangements pretty economical (it’s hard to picture Jason hitchhiking, but I really wish they’d given it a shot just for grins). Through an unspecified process that we'll call “because shut up, he just does,” Freddy brings Jason back to life and unleashes him on the unsuspecting town.
So back in Springwood, at Heather Langenkamp’s old house, where a new batch of super attractive kids with big boobs and tight abs are drinking and groping each other in the dark, Jason wastes no time getting to work. He kills one of them most spectacularly, leading the police to immediately suspect that Mr. Knife Hands is back in town. But the townspeople have worked hard to take Freddy's name out of the historical record, so much so that they refuse to even speak his name. The children seem curiously unaware of the local legend involving a prolific, metaphysical night stalker. But at this point in the series continuity, the adults of Springwood seem to have come to grips with the fact that there’s a madman running around in the fourth dimension, slaughtering people in their nightmares. But the moment one of the children utters his name, Freddy starts to gain power, and begins tormenting them.
But he’s still not strong enough to actually disembowel anyone, so he needs Jason to keep killing.
As a contingency, some of the kids present at Jason's first killing are either drugged or institutionalized to keep them quiet. They're locked in an asylum whose residents appear to be largely other teens. So I guess if you live in this town, and you're under the age of 18, your life-path options are getting beheaded in your sleep or locked in a cage and pumped full of horse tranquilizers. The reasoning for this is that some of the kids have ties to Freddy's previous victims, making them likely targets. The kids discover this, and as they begin their own, clandestine investigation, they learn that the adults of Springwood have instituted a morbid, Kafka-esque strategy for combating Freddy doing whatever is necessary to keep the kids from learning about him.
Now, the children are up against not just Jason, not just Freddy, not just their parents and not just the police. They're also fighting cheap jump scares, hackneyed one liners, weak CGI and worn out dialogue tropes like “You just don’t GET it, do you?” and “I haven’t been the same since WHAT? Since my mother died?” And of course, there's the matter of that incredibly unimaginative super predictable ending - but let's not spoil, or get ahead of ourselves.
Instead, let’s be fair. By its own standards, Freddy vs Jason is hardly the worst entry in either series (Jason X, Final Nightmare, I'm looking at you), and although it is self referentially slick and painfully lazy at times, the elemental narrative here is actually quite interesting. The residents of Springwood are well aware of what Freddy is and what he represents, and they're so desperate to protect their children from him that they're willing to become monsters themselves. It's an ominous inversion of the usual Elm Street formula, and the movie would have been a lot better off exploring that more, thereby requiring it to take things a little more seriously.
But neither franchise made its hay mining serious horror. Self-conscious camp is the name of the game, and it’s less often a matter of intent than it is an excuse not to take the time to write something compelling. For example, we still need to leave room for Jason’s habit of punishing attractive 20-somethings disguised as teenagers for their sins of self-indulgence. To some degree it’s satisfying, and to another degree it’s what audiences want to see, but what’s the point of putting together a mashup like this if you’re just going to paint by the numbers? Freddy vs Jason flirts with some interesting concepts, but backpedals from them whatever chance it gets.
And whatever merits the plot DOES have are largely negated just over halfway through, when the kids all level up, and successfully extrapolate Freddy's scheme right out of thin air, like the last 10 seconds of every Scooby-Doo episode. With all that pesky plot development out of the way, that leaves the last third of the film free for a lengthy brawl between Freddy and Jason. It starts off with entertaining promise, but quickly devolves into a farcical WWE match. Like the entirety of the film before it, the third act teases us with possibilities, but exchanges them for cheap tricks and lunges for the low-hanging fruit. I insist that this is not a terrible movie, but it's definitely at least as bad as every other movie like it. And that's really the problem. There should BE no other movie like this. There was such a great opportunity to break some ground, but instead they played it safe, retracing the same well-worn tracks of all the past installments.
You'll notice I didn't mention much about the actors. Nothing personal, but does it really matter who they are? You've never heard of them, and while we're on the subject of rehashing material, they're the same assortment of jocks, nerds, token minorities, bad girls with attitudes and good girls with daddy/mommy issues that you’ve seen in countless other slasher films. The saving grace of this whole affair is Robert Englund, whose Freddy Krueger is as delightfully warped as ever - bearing in mind there are precious few circumstances under which a badly scarred, homicidally deranged child molester might be described as “delightful”.
So who wins, you ask? Freddy or Jason? As I said, I won't spoil or dwell on it except to say that in these kinds of movies, even when they DO buy the farm, the villains never really stay dead anyway. And in this case there really ARE no winners. Bruce Campbell was right; the lawyers are the only ones who always come out on top, and Freddy vs Jason is no exception.