Jun 15, 2009

Freddy vs. Jason (2003)


Buy it now!!

Not sure how well this review will cover the Freddy side of things, I haven’t seen those in a while and don’t really remember how well it follows the whole Freddy lore. It does have Robert Englund in it though, so it can’t be all too bad.

Freddy vs. Jason starts off with a brief re-cap of the Nightmare on Elm Street series of movies. We learn that Freddy killed kids, then the parents killed him and that he then came back in dreams to kill kids until they learned that by not believing in him he loses all his powers. He makes a reference to Jason being his ticket out of hell (also a throwback to “Jason Goes to Hell”) and we start in on the movie itself. Just like most of the early Jason movies we have a counselor that get’s nude, runs through the forest, and then gets killed. It’s at this point Freddy appears as Jason’s mom and tells him he needs to get to Elm Street and start killing people in order to make them feel fear again. Jason takes off and we roll the quick intro credits.

I must admit that I really liked this movie. It must have something to do with being part of the new generation as K-Fleet calls it, because I also thought Rob Zombies re-make of Halloween was great and him not so much.

One of the things it does well is cover the whole Freddy/dream side of things and how they cover it up like they do in the Nightmare series. Very early in the movie the police try to keep the kids from even thinking of Freddy, this is one thing I do remember from the Nightmare films. This movie also incorporates the rhyme used while jumping rope and the little girls in the white dresses, both awesome nod’s towards the original movies, and something that had to be there or the film would have been horrible.

This movie also takes Jason and puts him on a new level of badassitude. In particular the scene where Jason walks through the rave and kills about 4 or 5 people over the course of 1 minute. Again this might just be me being part of the new generation of movie watchers but I loved this scene.

There were a few things about this film that I just didn’t like however. First off is Freddy becoming real. I can remember something about him being real in a few parts of the Nightmare movies, but I don’t remember him walking around and just killing like he does here. Also, some of the kills and some of the effects were just too CGI heavy. Don’t get me wrong, watching an Alice in Wonderland-Freddy-worm thing smoke a hookah is pretty sweet, but did it really need to be done? My last big problem with the film is the ending. If you do much research into the film, you’ll find out that about 4 other endings were considered at one point or another for the movie…..and all of them were better than this crap. Imagine that the ending was Freddy and Jason getting sucked down to hell and fighting in an arena of sorts, with the devil in the background watching. Now think of what the ending is here if you’ve seen the movie. Which one seems like a better ending to this movie?

ACTING --3-- HUMOR --4--
BLOOD/GORE --5-- NUDITY --4--
ENDING --2-- DIRECTING --4--
OVERALL RATING

--4--

1 comment:

Robert said...

I really liked this one myself, dunno why, maybe because it was the first godzilla vs. horror type movie