The Friday the 13th series teased having its last movie in the series so many times that I've lost count. Most recently, in terms of my viewings, it was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. But that was still two movies ago in the chronology.
Now, I've finally seen the last movie in what you would call the original chronology, before they rebooted it in 2009 with the film that I watched a year ago so am not watching again this year.
Unfortunately, it feels like a pretty disappointing end to this 11-movie viewing series for Halloween, not just because of the quality of Freddy vs. Jason, but because of how it feels as a capper to a series of movies about Jason Voorhees.
Simply put, this is much more Jason Voorhees in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie than it is Freddie Kreuger in a Friday the 13th movie.
And to be fair, I was never promised otherwise. Freddy's name comes first in the title.
But the very fabric of reality is quite different in these two series. As many flights of fancy as there may be in the Friday the 13th series, never is there any question about whether it's taking place in the real world, at least as this version of the real world defines and presents itself.
Nightmare on Elm Street? People are always jumping in and out of dreams, changing shapes, causing things to materialize that do not exist, and so forth.
And that's kind of a hard change to make after you've watched ten movies about a lumbering adult in a hockey mask who is basic, who doesn't talk, and who likes to stick sharp objects through people.
Even the recap at the start is a recap of events in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, of which there had been seven before this. Only two of which I've seen, so this might also be a future Halloween-themed viewing project for me. If I end up doing that, I might have been better off saving Freddy vs. Jason as a capper for that series.
To be fair, though, it does meet up with the chronology of the Friday the 13th series. Freddy vs. Jason was teased in the final shot of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, but then the chronology got a bit scrambled, because Jason X was made next, set in the 25th century, and in any case, it took them ten years to make this mashup movie that they teased with the idea that it might be only two years off.
But Jason does end up in hell at the end of that movie, and that's where Freddy tells us he found Jason in order to bring him in Freddy's own timeline and reality.
What happens from there? Well it's a bit of a blur.
I should probably set the stage about the week I've had. Work was semi busy, not crazy, at least my boss is back on board after being off the previous two weeks, so I wasn't doing her job anymore. Another co-worker has gone on leave instead, so the workload is still high. But on Wednesday, I worked in the city, always a tiring day, and then went to the Wild Horse Nine screening I told you about a couple posts ago. I'd normally tack on a second movie, but I didn't, in expectation of the busy Thursday I'd have and not wanting to get home too late. On Thursday I worked in the city again, and then met my wife to see Lily Allen perform her album West End Girl at Rod Laver Arena. Which was a profound experience and which I'd love to write about here if I could figure out an actual movie connection, other than her ex-husband David Harbour, the inspiration for the album. That got us home after 11. On Friday, I worked from home, went for a long walk, made jack-o-lanterns with my son, and then drank too much of our lovely old-fashioned pre-mix while preparing everyone's dinner. This left me in no shape to start a movie at 10:50 p.m.
So what happens in Freddy vs. Jason? Couldn't tell you.
But this isn't because I didn't watch most of the movie. I couldn't have missed more than ten percent of it. It was because I think all the conditions combined to sort of check me out. Yes, Jason Voorhees guest stars in this Nightmare on Elm Street movie, but he's clearly the +1. This feels like the resolution of a journey I haven't gone on with Freddy Kreuger. And though Freddy might be the more dynamic villain, capable of holding my attention better than Jason, that's not what I've spent the last 31 days doing. I've been watching Jason kill people -- quite often in disappointing fashion. But I still wanted a pure resolution to that experience, not one clouded by the wisecracks of a shape-shifting former abductor of children who was burnt to a crisp by angry parents.
I have a dim memory of one or two interesting kills, many of them initiated by Jason. There's one time a guy gets folded away into a fold-away couch. That was pretty cool.
But any time someone is getting sliced up in their dream by Freddy, and you see the marks of his claws across their real body while they're sleeping, I just felt like I was in a universe I didn't want to be in right now.
I was looking forward to the scenes where Freddy and Jason actually clash, but these felt pretty weightless to me, and not fun in the way I'd hoped. These are both characters who seem impervious to what you would think were fatal blows, so it's a bit like two superheroes fighting in that nothing of consequence is actually going to happen to them. And the whole thing didn't feel comedic in the way I hoped.
One interesting thing is that, as with other mashups like Godzilla vs. Kong and Alien vs. Predator, the characters cannot have equal rooting interests for the audience. While it was obvious that Kong would be the hero of Godzilla vs. Kong, and a little less obvious that the predator would hold our sympathies in Aliens vs. Predator, making Jason the hero of Freddy vs. Jason seems like the most desperate yet of any of these arbitrary assignments of comparative good. After all, we learned in Jason Goes to Hell that Jason is responsible for the deaths of 83 people -- and that was only at the start of that movie.
But maybe it shouldn't surprise us, especially compared to Freddy. There was never anything sympathetic about Freddy Kreuger, a creep who kidnapped and killed children (and hopefully nothing worse than that). But Jason Voorhees started as an innocent boy bullied by other campers and ignored by the counsellors charged with watching out for his safety. He got vengeance for his drowning death and then some, but this movie leans into the sympathy inherent to his origins, including flashback footage of him as a child. In fact, I think for the first time there is the suggestion that his drowning was the direct result of a bullying incident. There's no similar plea for the guiltlessness of Freddy Kreuger.
At least this movie has some interesting people in the cast. We get a very young Jason Ritter here, John's son, as well as Kelly Rowland from Destiny's Child. Christopher Marquette would appear the following year in a personal favorite, The Girl Next Door, and Lochlyn Munro is a comedic character actor you would know from Scary Movie and others (295 credits on IMDB!). Then Katharine Isabelle and Monica Keena were both actors I recognized even if I couldn't immediately produce any of their credits. So I guess you have to come over to the Nightmare on Elm Street series if you want actors with credibility -- though it may just be that they went on to good things from here, not that they had already done them when they were cast.
Okay, this has been fun. Even though I only had actual positive feelings about two movies out of 11 -- and that doesn't include the original, which I thought was pretty lame on rewatch -- the overall feeling of watching these movies was one of fun and of anticipation. And that's what you're going for when you do something like this.
Happy Halloween, all.
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