Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

In 1980, Paramount Pictures unleashed Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees upon the world. Spawning nine sequels between 1981 and 2002, Jason became one of the most memorable horror villains of all time. However, Jason wouldn't have all the slasher spotlight to himself. New Line Cinema and horror maestro Wes Craven introduced a villain in 1984 that would himself become a cultural icon: Freddy Krueger. Freddy's first appearance, A Nightmare on Elm Street, has become one of the most heralded movies in the genre and spawned six sequels between 1985 and 1994.

Slasher movie fans have been wondering since the late '80s what would happen if Freddy and Jason fought, and when New Line Cinema acquired the Friday the 13th franchise in the early '90s, it looked like it might actually happen. Both guys are owned by New Line, they'd have to make it. Right? New Line even hinted at a possible Freddy/Jason showdown in the final seconds of Jason Goes to Hell in 1993. Unfortunately, the movie languished in developmental hell for a decade. Dozens of writers and scripts came and went, but nothing happened. In that time, Jason went to space and Freddy went to Hollywood, but years passed and the idea seemed forgotten. But on August 15, 2003, the decade of waiting ended and the world bore witness to the ultimate clash of the titans. Jason and Freddy finally do battle, a movie that slasher fans have been waiting what seems like a lifetime for.

The movie actually tries to have a deeper plot than other Fridays and Nightmares, so let's get to that. We start with a monologue from Freddy (Robert Englund). Everyone in his hometown of Springwood has managed to forget about Freddy, and the fear he thrives on is gone. That makes sense to me. Freddy hadn't been seen since 1994's New Nightmare (which, like Jason X, has no bearing on Freddy vs. Jason's continuity), so I'm sure many people really had forgotten about him. Out of sight, out of mind. So Freddy's scoured the depths of Hell to get someone to strike fear into the heart of Elm Street, someone to make them remember him. There's only one person that fits the bill: Crystal Lake's resident machete-swinging hockey fan, Jason (Ken Kirzinger).

Jason awakens from his post-Jason Goes to Hell grave and heads to Springwood, where he proceeds to go on a killing spree. Unfortunately, he goes too far, and Freddy decides that somebody's gotta stop Jason from taking all of his victims. Caught in the middle are Lori (Monica Keena), her boyfriend Will (Jason Ritter), and a group of their friends, who try desperately to stop both killers while their world comes crashing down around them.

Luckily, they don't change Freddy or Jason's histories, but add interesting twists to them. Past scripts were just unfortunately idiotic (such as one where Jason is a real guy that gets arrested and put on trial, and another where it's revealed that Freddy is really Jason's father), but Mark Swift and Damian Shannon hit the mark with their screenplay. They didn't dwell on the Dream Demons of Freddy's Dead or the body hopping of Jason Goes to Hell. As much as I enjoy Jason Goes to Hell, I think not mentioning that was a good idea. It took Jason and Freddy back to their roots: Jason is an invincible killing machine, and Freddy is a sadistic monster.

The characters of Freddy and Jason not only went back to their roots, but they evolved as well. In the past, Freddy was a loudmouth jerk, but in Freddy vs. Jason, he becomes true evil. He's an insulting, egotistical pervert who isn't above making a potentially racist joke. And here, we see what has only been referenced in the past: he murders a child. The murder itself isn't actually depicted, but we know it happens. I said mentioned earlier that Jason returned to his roots as a killing machine. Well, that's not entirely true. He's more complex than that now. Part of Jason's mythology is that he drowned as a child, but in at least three prior Fridays, he jumps into Crystal Lake. He's not afraid of it when he's awake, but in his dreams, he's still a little boy. We see that in the past, Jason was a victim of bullying and humiliation from other campers, and he never forgot that. As an adult, he's not afraid, but in his subconscious, he's still scared. It's a nice little bit of development that the other ten Friday the 13th movies never really bothered to hit.

Robert Englund once again hits the mark as Freddy. Sure, he's got the trademark one-liners, but he's an intimidating figure. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear Englund was a psycho in real life, because he's that convincing. As for Jason, Ken Kirzinger does a great job. Kirzinger's Jason was a lot more human, yet is still an unstoppable beast. I like Kane Hodder's Jason, but he only portrayed Jason's hatred for others, while Kirzinger managed to convey fear and despair. I liked the acting of the others in the movie as well. Monica Keena is great as the movie's requisite cutie-pie heroine. She's just so cute and innocent, and like all good heroines, she grows from a naïve girl to a tough young woman.

Destiny's Child member Kelly Rowland (who plays Kia) way exceeded my expectations. Going in, I thought she was gonna end up being like LL Cool J or Busta Rhymes in the last two Halloween movies: a singer that's just there to be the token black person and/or comic relief. Yes, Kia had some comedic moments, but Rowland was a better actress than I thought she'd be. The rest of the cast put forth a decent effort as well, though Kyle Labine is only doing an impression of Jason Mewes and it seems like Jason Ritter spends the entire movie with goofy grin on his face (even during the dramatic scenes). I'm easy to please in the acting category, though. If they're not embarrassingly bad like the fifth or eighth Friday movies, I'm happy.

There were also many references to the films of the past. Hypnocil, a big plot point in the third Nightmare movie, is a main factor in the plot here, as is the Elm Street House seen in all of the past Nightmares. The house looks great, as does Camp Crystal Lake. The camp is beautiful and frightening at the same time. There was a reference to the sack Jason wore in the second Friday, and a TV station called "KRGR," which was the radio station Johnny Depp listened to before his death in the first Nightmare. Yes, KRGR. Think about it. And the movie even included a lightning-speed cameo from Bob Shaye, the CEO and founder of New Line Cinema.

The fight scenes are unbelievable, too. They met my expectations and surpassed them. I thought the one in the dream world was great, but when they enter the real world, holy cow! The sheer brutal awesomeness of it is mind-blowing. The two killers quite literally rip each other to shreds, but still get up for more. I should also point out Graeme Revell's wonderful score. If you ask me, I think it's light-years ahead of the music from Nightmares and Fridays from the past. While the only recurring themes from past sequels are Jason's trademark sound effect (you know the one) and a brief reprisal of Charles Bernstein's classic Nightmare theme, Revell's music creates a frightening atmosphere that gives the movie a much darker tone. Good stuff.

The movie doesn't take itself lightly. It's not entirely self-referential (though it does have some subtle references to the past) or a parody like prior films in each series, but a balls-to-the-wall horror movie. Personally, I think Freddy vs. Jason is almost perfect. Yes, it's a Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th sequel, and therefore will catch a lot of crap from non-fans, but it was worth the years spent waiting for it. The movie was a dream come true (I almost said "nightmare," but that would have been goofy), and I applaud director Ronny Yu, the cast and crew, and New Line Cinema for making this fan happy.

Final Rating: ***

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

You might know New Line Cinema as the distributor of movies like the Lord of the Rings and Austin Powers trilogies, but back in the 1970s, they were a fledgling company distributing movies to college auditoriums for late-night screenings. When the 80s arrived, they decided to get into theatrical distribution with little-known movies like Reefer Madness, but were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Around that time, New Line founder and CEO Bob Shaye optioned a horror movie script that had been deemed "not scary" and "unmakable" by nearly every studio in Hollywood. The script, written by legendary genre director Wes Craven, would struggle during filming (due to budget woes), but would go on to save New Line from bankruptcy and become a landmark film in both the horror genre and pop cultural in general. It's one of those rare movies that took its genre's conventions and redefined them. That movie is A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The story revolves around Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), a teenager living on Elm Street in the suburban town of Springwood. She's a typical teen; she's got a cute boyfriend named Glen (Johnny Depp in his first film role) and an easy best friend named Tina (Amanda Wyss), who has an on-again/off-again relationship with her ne'er-do-well boyfriend Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as "Nick Corri").

However, her idyllic existence begins to crumble when she begins having a series of horrific nightmares about an anonymous figure (Robert Englund). Clad in an old snap-brim fedora and tattered red-and-green sweater, the stalker in her dreams is badly burned and sports a blade-fingered glove on his right hand. An innocent conversation between Nancy and her three friends during a sleepover leads the group to discover that they've all been having the same nightmares.

That night, Tina is brutally murdered in her sleep. Police suspect Rod because he was in the room when she died, but Nancy suspects something far more sinister. Fearing that the burned man from their dreams is hunting them down, Nancy claims that her only defense is to stay awake. She tells her parents (Ronee Blakey and John Saxon) about the man in their nightmares, but they just dismiss her as being delusional and urge her to get some rest while her friends are being systematically murdered. One by one, each of Nancy's friends are all killed until she's the only teen on Elm Street left. She resigns herself to the fact that she must give into exhaustion and face the killer in a life-or-death struggle for control.

I've seen a lot of horror films, and not many of them scare me, but this one does. It's not the typical 80s "body count" movie. Each character has their own life, all of which are interrupted by Freddy Krueger. Craven's script pushes home the underlying theme: that everyone faces danger if they fall asleep, either literally in some cases, or figuratively in others (such as Mrs. Thompson's alcoholism and Rod's rebel lifestyle). The story is also a deep one, thanks to its backstory. Freddy is given a well-justified reason (well, as justified as a homicidal maniac is going to be) for slaughtering these teens, which we learn halfway through the film.

But even with the deeper meanings, we're still looking at a horror movie. The suspense is laid on heavy, from the opening credits all the way to the climax. Craven, who had previously gained notoriety as the director of the cult classics The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, also doesn't shy away from blood and special effects, either. The dreams enable incredibly adventurous, surreal effects, and they are pulled off without a hitch, even for a film that cost only a million dollars to make. The direction is strong, and the cuts from dream to non-dream sequences are both seamless and appropriately disorienting. The cinematography is also fantastic, and I'd argue that while it isn't nearly as famous, the score composed by Charles Bernstein is as good as John Carpenter's famous score for Halloween.

The acting is better than expected, although it often feels like a horror film crash-landed in the middle of a soap opera. But Robert Englund takes the "scary" meter off the charts, even with his limited screen time. The movie made Freddy Krueger a pop culture phenomenon and Englund (whose prior claim to fame was his role in the V mini-series) became a cult movie star, despite the letdown called the end. Yes, I'll say it. The end of the movie sucks.

Even though I'm more of a Jason guy, I'll tell you right now that the first Nightmare on Elm Street blows any Friday the 13th movie right out of the freaking water. Despite being over twenty years old, the movie has aged gracefully, and it's still scary as hell.

Final Rating: *****

Friday the 13th (1980)

A slasher film can be simply defined as a film with a body count, in which an attractive cast is slowly killed off one by one. Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood and Bob Clark's Black Christmas are often credited with helping originate the concept of slasher films, and John Carpenter showed us slasher perfection with Halloween in 1978. But on June 13, 1980, slasher films blossomed into a money-making juggernaut when Paramount Pictures released Friday the 13th.

On a budget of 700,000 dollars, it grossed nearly six million dollars in its opening weekend and inspired hundreds of knockoffs and wannabes (rumored to be over eighty in just one year). Halloween is a classic, but Friday the 13th started the great slasher boom of the '80s. Originally conceived as just a way to make a quick buck, Friday the 13th became a cultural phenomenon. It spawned ten sequels, a video game, comic books, novels, action figures, legions of devoted fans, and over time, earned a spot as one of horror's most iconic franchises.

So if you're unfamiliar with the series, here's how it all began. We're taken to the long-closed Camp Crystal Lake, which young entrepreneur Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer) fully intends to open back up for business. The locals in the nearby neighborhood don't exactly think that's a good idea, however, as they'll be the first to tell you that this summer camp should probably stay closed due to its horrible history. A camper drowned in 1957, and subsequent attempts to reopen the camp saw a series of fires, poisoned water sources, and even two murders. There's a reason Camp Crystal Lake has been nicknamed "Camp Blood," after all.

But no matter how much they're warned about the camp's past, Steve and his team of counselors are determined to reopen the camp. But there's a little something that stands in their way: the murderer that arrives at the camp and starts picking them off one by one.

Director Sean Cunningham had just finished the 1978 film Here Come the Tigers, a low-budget soccer-themed knockoff of The Bad News Bears. He was preparing to start a TV show based on the movie, and after seeing Halloween, Cunningham decided to make a similar film as a way to make a little money to fund the show. So I guess we can blame the whole thing on Halloween and a Bad News Bears rip-off? Cunningham, whose prior experience in the horror genre was as the producer of Wes Craven's 1972 cult classic The Last House on the Left, assembled a cast, crew, and a script by Here Come the Tigers writer Victor Miller, not expecting Friday the 13th to become anything more than a detour on the way to bigger fame and fortune.

But when the movie was picked up by Paramount and released, it started raking in money like gangbusters. Says Cunningham, "I thought the big hit I was gonna have was gonna be a TV series, but it was Friday the 13th. The TV series never got picked up, and Friday the 13th put my kids through college."

So Victor Miller's script isn't all that groundbreaking, and the acting seems a little hokey at times, but that's probably to be expected. I mean, a group of twenty-somethings at a summer camp in the middle of New Jersey in 1980 would probably act like that. I hadn't been born yet, so don't quote me on that. With the exception of a pre-Footloose Kevin Bacon as one of the camp counselors, the majority of the cast would eventually fall off the face of the earth, so I guess I really shouldn't be bothered if they gave crappy performances or not because at least they didn't do much of anything afterwards.

Despite the cast full of no-names, Betsy Palmer proves herself to be one of the two true stars of the movie. Everybody recognizes Jason Voorhees as the franchise's primary villain, right? But the killer in this first movie is Jason's beloved mother, whom Palmer plays wonderfully. She makes you really believe that she really is a homicidal maniac fresh out of the asylum. I'll admit that a tiny woman in her 50s committing nine horrific murders is a bit of a stretch, but she pulls it off to perfection.

I think it's worth noting is that when the film was released, the late Gene Siskel encouraged readers of his newspaper column to write letters to both Paramount and Palmer herself to express their displeasure with the movie. It was less than successful. "Somebody showed me the review," Palmer said in an interview, "but I didn't get any hate mail. He [mentioned] the wrong place. He [said I lived in] Connecticut, but my real hometown's in Indiana." But in all honesty, I think Siskel overreacted big time. A horror movie is only as good as its villain, and I've always thought that Palmer was absolutely wonderful in the role. She brings a very fun level of intensity to the role, and with a lesser actress in the role, I don't think it would have worked.

The other big star in the movie isn't even a member of the cast. Tom Savini did the makeup effects, and he did a smash-up job. He'd just come off George Romero's classic zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, which the MPAA slapped with an X rating due to his makeup effects, and with the fame he got from that film and Friday the 13th, he became the hottest makeup man in the horror industry. He even joined the press tour on the 1981 slasher movie The Burning. Not counting Stan Winston's work on the Terminator trilogy, how many makeup/special effects guys do press for movies?

Countless imitators and nearly three decades later, Friday the 13th still holds up as one of the true classics of the horror genre. While those that don't appreciate films like this view Friday the 13th and films like it as a joke, I do appreciate it and I do enjoy it. So while it might be one of the oddities of the Friday the 13th movies due to its lack of the franchise's most famous character, I'm going out on a limb and giving the movie hearty recommendation. Go check it out. 

Final Rating: ***½