We are going to travel back in time, but first, a briefing of what happened to Jason in Jason X, which chronologically(thus far) was his final adventure. He awakens on a space vessel in 2455 after being frozen years earlier. He begins to murder the folks aboard and actually almost is destroyed, but is rebuilt in to Super Jason. He has some kind of Cobra Commander looking new metal mask and is now a cyborg. Jason ends up literally “in” space floating at a very high speed about to collide with the survivors, but Sgt. Brodsky flies towards him and they both start heading toward Earth II where they are sucked in to the atmosphere. Thankfully, lakes exist on Earth II and we see two young people at one as they watch a shooting star fall in to the lake. It’s Jason’s mask! Wooooo! What will happen next? Oh, yeah, we go back in time and visit another troubled town.
If you recall, at the end of Goes to Hell, Jason was defeated and in fact sent to hell. Suddenly, Freddy Kruger’s arm pulls Jason’s hockey mask down as well. Freddy vs. Jason picks up after that, in a crossover that fans had been anticipating for years.
Freddy is trapped in hell. He is no longer able to kill people in their dreams, because no one fears him anymore, thus he has no power. Anyone who has been tormented by Freddy is locked in an institution, and given medication to prevent them from dreaming. The rest of the residents of Springwood don’t even know who he is, or is keeping him a secret in order to prevent him from coming back. To remedy this, Freddy disguises himself as Jason’s mother and wakes him up. He tells Jason to go to Elm Street because the kids that live there have been bad. Jason first visits Lori’s (Halloween reference?) house where some kids are partying. Lori happens to live in the same house that Nancy Thompson did. Jason quickly, and quite brutally murders one of them. Because of the house involved, Freddy’s name is quickly thrown around as a possible suspect. Not quite powerful enough to kill yet, Freddy lets Jason take care of some more kids, but this just complicates matters as Jason starts killing all of Freddy’s victims. This causes the titular “versus.”
It may be because of the extremely poor quality of the last few Jason films, but Freddy vs. Jason is not as terrible as I remember. Yes, the plot of the film is a bit of a stretch and all Freddy does it repeat or alter most of his catch phrases from his films. But there’s some interesting things going on here.
While Robert Englund reprises his role as Freddy, Kane Hodder does not return as Jason. This time he is played by Ken Kirzinger. His Jason is rather frightening, as his eyes are vacant as opposed to menacing. He seems like a lifeless killing machine just following orders rather than seeking out victims. This makes sense as he is killing Freddy’s victims and not camp counselors or family members.
Also interesting was the combination of people being dispatched both in dreams and real life. It caused a sort of humorous debate of which psychopath was worse and which one should be afraid of more. Unfortunately, this also caused an unavoidable uncomfortable spilling of exposition as the survivors magically pieced together what happened and then formulated a plan to stop them both.
What wasn’t good? The films drags terribly for a while. Even with Jason killing people, there are some very long spots of things uninteresting. Freddy was too “funny.” Especially when directly compared to Jason. The mood of the film was quite dark when Freddy wasn’t present. I would have preferred an overall darker film.
Overall this was a better Friday sequel than a Nightmare sequel. It was also very mediocre. It was not very redemptive of the hype and anticipation invested in it. It was also very isolated from both franchises in feeling, despite the inclusion of music from both and obviously the two main characters. This film escapes the “crap” category, but barely.
Favorite kill: Have to go with Trey. He is repeatedly stabbed in bed, then as if it were a roll-away, Jason folds the bed with Trey in it.
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