"Freddy vs. Jason" (2003) d/ Ronny Yu

Ironically, our final Friday the 13th review (until the day they decide to haphazardly throw another sequel/prequel/remake together, of course) also marks the first time we're covering Freddy Krueger here. If it's up to me, this will be the only time. Oh yeah, I'm fully aware just how many of you were weaned on and subsequently scared half to death by the corny one-liners and ugly sweater-fedora combo since Wes Craven's first successful series poo-step in 1984, it's just that I never was, thankfully. Even as a teenager watching the original, I felt insulted that they'd waste such an impressive m.o. on such an embarrassingly impotent-looking bad guy, horror's equivalent of Doctor Detroit (1984).
With the phoned in ending of Jason Goes to Hell:The Final Friday still cemented to the bottom of my breadbasket like a pound of grilled venison, I purposely avoided seeing this one on principle until finally, I snagged the dvd off of an A-Town Wal Mart shelf while rubbing elbows with the two a.m. shower cap and bedroom slippers crowd, it having finally been reduced in price to something that I no longer considered rape, and also constituting "something new"(post 70's), which my then concubine-of-the-moment constantly complained that I never indulged in, caustic little ball-breaker that she no doubt, was. What followed, was a decorous, campy effort from director Ronny Yu ( The Bride With White Hair, Bride of Chucky) that reminded me of an updated version of the old Universal monster battle flicks at times.

One, two...look at the bobblers on you.
Having been rendered powerless when the townspeople of Springwood forgot his horrible crimes over time, Freddy Krueger (Englund) enlists the homicidal services of  prolific Crystal Lake slasher Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) to jog the town's collective memory, by posing as his mother and sending the silent giant off to punish the bad children of Elm Street, like Lori (Monica Keena) and her friends, who are having a sleepover. One of the boys gets butchered, leading the authorites to start throwing around the ol' capital F, capital K name again, which leads the kids to suddenly start having nightmares about Krueger again, but he finds himself too weak to actually snuff anyone in their dreams at this point. Jason, on the other hand, is more than willing to pick up Freddy's slack, murdering kids and parents alike, even hack-slashing his way through a cornfield rave while set ablaze, once again picking up Krueger's spare by stealing his intended victim. Lori and a handful of her friends escape in her ex-boyfriend's van, after he and his friend escape from a mental hospital where they've been kept, to warn her about the evil janitor's return.


When they say you ought not tear the law label off of the bottom of the mattress, they ain't whistlin' Dixie.
Freddy does in Mark(Brendan Fletcher) with his signature glove o' finger-knives as Will (Jason Ritter) and Lori watch helplessly, sending them rushing back to the psych ward for the Hypnocil script that kept them from dreaming while asleep. At the hospital, Freddy assumes the form of a hookah-smoking caterpillar and dives down Lori's stoner buddy's yap, possessing him to flush all the pills down the sink drain. Voorhees makes the scene, electrocuting a cop, before splitting the stoner down the middle as he pumps two syringes of the drug into the hulking killer, sending him into a prolonged catnap as the remaining kids rush him home to Crystal Lake for his final face-off with Freddy, who's already discovered Jason's fear of drowning (?) in the killer's subconscious, and is using it to great advantage against him, poking his finger-knives into Voorhees' hydrocephalic head, being an obnoxious dick, and whatnot. With Jason drowning in his sleep, Lori volunteers to enter the dream battle-scape herself to even the odds, and manages to pull both baddies into reality, where Freddy reveals that it wasn't the girl's father who killed her mother all those years ago...it was him all along! Cue: the epic final reel serial-killer-fu-on-wire fight to the finish you paid to see, and throw in your obligatory shabby disembodied Freddy-head wink at the camera, and that just about wraps it up...


Krueger-pillar, cater-killer, either or. Just pass that hookah.
Yu not only succeeds at making a relatively entertaining Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street mash up here, he uses just the right amount of Freddy to not piss me off and lose me before the end credits, which might be a trailer's worth for me? I dunno, but for some reason, I didn't mind the cheesy wisecracking and mugging for the camera the way I would normally have done. Definitely worth a look for the completist and the curious, but it probably won't end up among your all-time favorites. Not quite enjoyable enough to pass out Jason Lives (1986) or The Final Chapter (1984), but more than enough boobs, blood, and brawl to top garbage like Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) or Jason Goes to Hell (1993).Two wops.


"You couldn't find this machete?!!? It was buried in your lung the whole time, you boob!"

"Jason X" (2001) d/James Isaac

A glimpse across the almighty interwebz tubes will tell you that a lot of critics and Friday the 13th "purists" (Save yer blind fanboy backlash, I know where you're coming from. I, too, was thirteen once...) hate this entry, the tenth in the series,  for a myriad of  reasons, the most 
preeminent being how far from the franchise formula the movie deviated. If you're unfamiliar with said formula despite having read my previous nine F13th reviews,  it involves sex-starved teenaged morons poking around a certain lake where any number of murders have been committed by an indestructible deformed mongoloid zombie in a hockey goalie mask. That's just about it, in a nutshell. And, if  by chance you weren't paying attention at the outset of the review,  X means 'ten'. I'll let you think about that while we get to the syn-wop-sis.


"Now you've got the same range of facial expression as Keanu Reeves!", sez Jason (Kane Hodder).
In the future year of 2008 (when a horrible band named Coldplay would become inexplicably popular), the American government has finally captured the prolific maniac, Osam-uhh, Jason Voorhees (Hodder), holding him at a research facility built on Crystal Lake itself. Two years later (music's gotten worse, too), they decide upon freezing him to further study his inhuman cell regeneration rate when he busts the fuck loose like Janet's nipple at the Super Bowl, killing soldiers and David Cronenberg-in-a-cameo in inventively brutal ways before a young scientist named Rowan (Lexa Doig) lures the lumbering monster into a nearby cryogenic chamber, getting herself shanked and frozen in the process. Fast forward to the year 2455. The members of Coldplay are all finally dead. Unfortunately, so is Earth, whose polluted soil is visited upon by a field trip of students (from 'Earth Two', naturally) with their professor, who stumble upon the ruins of the research center and the frozen scientist and her giant hockey masked attacker, which they bring back to their ship for further inspection. Upon the 'Grendel' are a few more horny, stoned teenagers and a hot redheaded android with no nipples named Kay-Em14 (Lisa Ryder). You see where they're going here, don't you?


"No, no, I wanted  you to have nipples, Kay-Em14 (Lisa Ryder)! It's the vocal chords I wanted you to get rid of..."
The crew of misfits manages to thaw out both the young woman and Voorhees, who proceeds to plough through victims in his typically inventive and violent m.o. ( liquid nitro-frozen faces smashed into pieces on counter tops, skewering on giant screws, etc.), destroying two ships and forcing the survivors to take refuge on a rescue shuttle, until a weapon/skill updated Kay-Em finally blasts him into an unrecognizable pile of smoldering flesh. Of course, the corpse lands atop a medical station, which malfunctions, sending nanites out to repair the serial killer's remains, and wouldn't you just know it, the result is the new and improved muscle-laden cyborg Uber-Jason who punches Kay-Em's head off for her folly. After breaching the hull with his fist(!) which sucks one poor chick screaming out into space, the remaining crew create a virtual Crystal Lake, complete with topless bubbleheaded e-victims(!) to pacify the killer, while they repair the damage to their craft from the outside. A pantoon explosion hurls the chromed-out psycho through space at the survivors, but he is intercepted by the resilient sergeant-in-space suit, and both plummet into Earth Two's atmosphere and burn up. On the planet's surface, two teens watch a falling star, as the charred Uber-mask sinks to the bottom of the lake. Cue: Ki ki ki ma ma ma...


As absurd as it is, you gotta admit this is pretty cool.
So what, if anything, have we learned from all this? Apparently, Jason Voorhees should stay on present day Earth, slaughtering interchangeably stupid people in inventive ways on the same tract of land around the same lake, forevermore. And woe to James Isaac and company for injecting slightly new bloody, sexy life into the series, undervaluing itself through humor and cleverly acknowledging it's own many flaws, but mainly because they didn't do the exact same thing with the same exhausted material that the previous crews did. Except that, I actually dug it, and found myself more entertained with it than any F13th flick dating back to Part Six, giving it the respectable deuce for it's effort. Those of you who like your horror franchise flicks the same way that McDonald's processes the pink meat paste into McNuggets will disagree, no doubt...


"There's one or two things missing from this picture", said my hands.