Thoughts on “Freddy vs Jason”

So, the last movie from the “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” series is “Freddy vs Jason”, where the two horror movie icons face each other for the first and probably last time, since the modern takes on the franchises are both not all that popular and not light enough to pull that off. So, how does it work?

Pretty well.

The main point of the movie is indeed to bring these two horror icons together and let them fight it out. So you need a plot to do so, but since the audience is really only going to come to the movie to see them fight that plot doesn’t need to be all that deep, and the longer it takes to develop that plot the more impatient the audience will be to get to that fight. The plot of this movie works well to bring them together in a sensible way that doesn’t require a lot of explanation and gets a lot done. The town elders of the town where Freddy used to stalk his prey tried to defeat him by having everyone forget about him which means that he can’t use their fear of him to enter their dreams. So he decides to set Jason loose on the town to kill people, reasoning that they will jump to the conclusion that he has returned. And it goes wrong in exactly the way you’d expect, as eventually people figure out that the killings look a lot more like Jason than like Freddy, hurting Freddy’s powers. At around the same time, the protagonists figure out that both of them are active and try to figure out a way to use Jason to defeat Freddy. Jason can’t beat Freddy in the dreamworld, but in the real world in his place of power …

The set-up allows for two fights: one in the dreamworld and one in the real world. It also allows for both settings to be represented and key to the plot. It allows the human protagonists to have things to do that are important but that facilitate rather than get in the way of the epic fights between Freddy and Jason. So it really works for this movie.

And overall the movie works well, giving us what we’d want to see in an entertaining way that nevertheless fits into both universes and works well with both characters. This was the second time, at least, that I had watched this movie, and I will certainly watch it again.

After this, I’ll move on to a new series.

Tags: horror