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yendiToday, we're looking at a film that's been known to jump a couple of spots up (or down) on the list, depending on my mood. It's the guilty pleasure of the series, Freddy vs. Jason.
(Quick aside: I wrote about this film last year when I did my Friday the 13th countdown, but I'm re-writing this (aside from the Denouement) for the Freddy countdown to focus on the film's merit as a Freddy flick).
Concept: All the kids who ever knew anything about Freddy have been either killed or drugged up. Seriously, even though he was a prolific serial killer and rapist in life, none of the kids in this town have heard of him, even on the Internet. Without anyone fearing him, Freddy has no power. So he travels to hell, where Jason is spending a nice vacation killing imaginary campers (because hell, you know, is where bad guys go to vacation, not get punished), and recruits Jason to head back into the real world and start killing people, thus scaring the kids and allowing Freddy to attack. After Jason makes his way from Hell to Springdale (you make a right at the Shoney's and head about three miles East), he starts killing kids, and slowly, this brings Freddy back to life. But wait! Jason goes and kills one kid that Freddy had been planning on killing, and now Freddy's pissed, because that was the hottie from Ginger Snaps, dammit, and he wanted her soul. So now Freddy has to find a way to stop Jason, because, you know, Freddy called dibs. It's a showdown to the finish, or at least until the sequel. Who will win?
Kills: Freddy only kills one person. Really. But Jason kills eighteen (plus another in "hell"), which probably underscores the differences between them more than anything. Jason is the Sam's Club of slashers. Freddy's the gourmet bistro, paying individual attention to each and every victim. For the nitpickers, you could probably give Freddy an assist on the death of That Guy Who Wants to Be Jason Mewes, as Freddy could easily have killed him directly, but instead put him in Jason's way to sedate him.
Really Bad Kills: None for Freddy.
Really Good Kills: Freddy's only kill is a damned solid old-school Krueger kill, as he burns and slashes up poor Mark, whose brother was killed by Freddy years ago. Not one that necessarily benefits from a major write-up, but it's a well-done sequence to watch on the screen.
Freddy's quips: "How sweet, dark meat," is a nice tribute to the third movie, but there's not much else here. Not that Englund doesn't deliver his lines with panache, but he's not given a ton to work with.
Notable Celebrities: This movie, being made in the post-WB era, should be so full of minor celbrities, it looks like VH1. But they stuck mostly with the unknowns. Aside from our heroes (Jason "Turns out acting talent isn't passed on from father to son" Ritter and Monica "Hey, I was on Dawson's Creek for, like, three episodes" Keena), victims include Kelly "Not Beyonce" Rowland and the always-wonderful Katharine "Ginger Snaps" Isabelle. But no one else, really.
Denouement: Freddy and Jason duke it out, and our two heroes cause a nasty explosion. Freddy somehow survives (*gasp*) and is attacking them on the dock with a machete, when Jason (who also *gasp* survived) reaches out of the water and stabs Freddy with his own claws. Dawson's Bimbo then decapitates Freddy, who sinks into the lake with Jason. Our heroes wander off, and we then see Jason emerge from the lake carrying Freddy's head, who winks at us.
Miscellany: Director Ronny Yu gave us the high concept movies Formula 51 (the concept? Samuel L Jackson in a kilt), and Bride of Chucky (concept: Chucky's got a bride). He's also done a bunch of pretty good pictures over in Hong Kong. The powerhouse screenwriting team behind this film, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, will soon be doing the big screen adaptation of Hawaiian Dick (starring real life non-Hawaiian dick Johnny Knoxville), and Spy Hunter (starring The Rock and directed by John Woo).
Overall: In reviewing this as a part of my Friday the 13th countdown last year, I griped about how they got Jason all wrong. And that's still an issue, but I'm looking at this from the Freddy side of things. As such, they did a better job, mostly. They recognize and acknowledge the shifts Freddy has gone through over the years, showing both the incredibly scary, intense child murderer and the wisecracking dream master of the later films. We get old-school dream sequences (the hauntings of Gibb and Mark), and new-school ones (the Hookah dream attack on Freeburg), and even Freddy taking over someone's body in the real world, something only rarely seen (in the second movie and one of the novels).
That said, there's still a lot of frustration here. I'm not upset about Freddy's low kill count (although one is low even by his standards). But the entire motivation for this movie just strikes me as bogus. Freddy can't attack kids because they don't know (and therefore fear) him? No way. The kids on drugs who have their dreams suppressed, I get. But the new kids in town? In the first movie, we still had a group of kids who had no idea who Freddy was, and it didn't stop him, at all.
Add to that the myriad problems with the Jason mythology, and even if you're grading this as a Freddy movie, it's still problematic. I mean, imagine if we had Freddy vs King Kong, and were then told that Kong was afraid of heights and pretty blondes. It just changes the nature of the fight itself. The fact that Ken Kirzinger plays the least-intimidating Jason ever (again, imagine Kong as a chimp) certainly doesn't help.
As I noted last year, it's hard to hate any movie in which nine ravers get slaughtered. Hell, it's worth watching for that alone. And I certainly don't hate this movie; we're at the point in the countdown where every movie is at least watchable, and this has tons of guilty pleasure potential. But there was so much more potential here, and they wasted it on a work of stunning mediocrity. Given the incredibly rich mythology of Freddy (which is, at least, acknowledged at the beginning), and the solid one for Jason, they should have done a hell of a lot better.
(Quick aside: I wrote about this film last year when I did my Friday the 13th countdown, but I'm re-writing this (aside from the Denouement) for the Freddy countdown to focus on the film's merit as a Freddy flick).
Concept: All the kids who ever knew anything about Freddy have been either killed or drugged up. Seriously, even though he was a prolific serial killer and rapist in life, none of the kids in this town have heard of him, even on the Internet. Without anyone fearing him, Freddy has no power. So he travels to hell, where Jason is spending a nice vacation killing imaginary campers (because hell, you know, is where bad guys go to vacation, not get punished), and recruits Jason to head back into the real world and start killing people, thus scaring the kids and allowing Freddy to attack. After Jason makes his way from Hell to Springdale (you make a right at the Shoney's and head about three miles East), he starts killing kids, and slowly, this brings Freddy back to life. But wait! Jason goes and kills one kid that Freddy had been planning on killing, and now Freddy's pissed, because that was the hottie from Ginger Snaps, dammit, and he wanted her soul. So now Freddy has to find a way to stop Jason, because, you know, Freddy called dibs. It's a showdown to the finish, or at least until the sequel. Who will win?
Kills: Freddy only kills one person. Really. But Jason kills eighteen (plus another in "hell"), which probably underscores the differences between them more than anything. Jason is the Sam's Club of slashers. Freddy's the gourmet bistro, paying individual attention to each and every victim. For the nitpickers, you could probably give Freddy an assist on the death of That Guy Who Wants to Be Jason Mewes, as Freddy could easily have killed him directly, but instead put him in Jason's way to sedate him.
Really Bad Kills: None for Freddy.
Really Good Kills: Freddy's only kill is a damned solid old-school Krueger kill, as he burns and slashes up poor Mark, whose brother was killed by Freddy years ago. Not one that necessarily benefits from a major write-up, but it's a well-done sequence to watch on the screen.
Freddy's quips: "How sweet, dark meat," is a nice tribute to the third movie, but there's not much else here. Not that Englund doesn't deliver his lines with panache, but he's not given a ton to work with.
Notable Celebrities: This movie, being made in the post-WB era, should be so full of minor celbrities, it looks like VH1. But they stuck mostly with the unknowns. Aside from our heroes (Jason "Turns out acting talent isn't passed on from father to son" Ritter and Monica "Hey, I was on Dawson's Creek for, like, three episodes" Keena), victims include Kelly "Not Beyonce" Rowland and the always-wonderful Katharine "Ginger Snaps" Isabelle. But no one else, really.
Denouement: Freddy and Jason duke it out, and our two heroes cause a nasty explosion. Freddy somehow survives (*gasp*) and is attacking them on the dock with a machete, when Jason (who also *gasp* survived) reaches out of the water and stabs Freddy with his own claws. Dawson's Bimbo then decapitates Freddy, who sinks into the lake with Jason. Our heroes wander off, and we then see Jason emerge from the lake carrying Freddy's head, who winks at us.
Miscellany: Director Ronny Yu gave us the high concept movies Formula 51 (the concept? Samuel L Jackson in a kilt), and Bride of Chucky (concept: Chucky's got a bride). He's also done a bunch of pretty good pictures over in Hong Kong. The powerhouse screenwriting team behind this film, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, will soon be doing the big screen adaptation of Hawaiian Dick (starring real life non-Hawaiian dick Johnny Knoxville), and Spy Hunter (starring The Rock and directed by John Woo).
Overall: In reviewing this as a part of my Friday the 13th countdown last year, I griped about how they got Jason all wrong. And that's still an issue, but I'm looking at this from the Freddy side of things. As such, they did a better job, mostly. They recognize and acknowledge the shifts Freddy has gone through over the years, showing both the incredibly scary, intense child murderer and the wisecracking dream master of the later films. We get old-school dream sequences (the hauntings of Gibb and Mark), and new-school ones (the Hookah dream attack on Freeburg), and even Freddy taking over someone's body in the real world, something only rarely seen (in the second movie and one of the novels).
That said, there's still a lot of frustration here. I'm not upset about Freddy's low kill count (although one is low even by his standards). But the entire motivation for this movie just strikes me as bogus. Freddy can't attack kids because they don't know (and therefore fear) him? No way. The kids on drugs who have their dreams suppressed, I get. But the new kids in town? In the first movie, we still had a group of kids who had no idea who Freddy was, and it didn't stop him, at all.
Add to that the myriad problems with the Jason mythology, and even if you're grading this as a Freddy movie, it's still problematic. I mean, imagine if we had Freddy vs King Kong, and were then told that Kong was afraid of heights and pretty blondes. It just changes the nature of the fight itself. The fact that Ken Kirzinger plays the least-intimidating Jason ever (again, imagine Kong as a chimp) certainly doesn't help.
As I noted last year, it's hard to hate any movie in which nine ravers get slaughtered. Hell, it's worth watching for that alone. And I certainly don't hate this movie; we're at the point in the countdown where every movie is at least watchable, and this has tons of guilty pleasure potential. But there was so much more potential here, and they wasted it on a work of stunning mediocrity. Given the incredibly rich mythology of Freddy (which is, at least, acknowledged at the beginning), and the solid one for Jason, they should have done a hell of a lot better.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-23 07:51 pm (UTC)I was caught off by this one for a while. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is the whole "Jason's actually a daemon" thing that came up in "Jason goes to Hell," which makes sense if he's been put to work hunting and slaughtering other souls, and makes the whole scene a lot more disturbing.
But, admittedly, it's just a half-assed guess.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-23 08:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-24 12:58 am (UTC)