Many
students and fans of the horror film, I am sure, will welcome the new movie Freddy
vs. Jason with expressions of gratitude and relief, and possibly even a few
resounding cheers. Surely, after so many years of shock and fright, so many
buckets of gore and gobbets of flesh, so many scores of dead teenagers, it’s
about time that two of the giants of contemporary horror meet on the common
ground of celluloid. After such classic cinema antagonisms as Frankenstein vs.
Dracula, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Batman vs. the Joker, Arnold Schwarzenegger vs.
Gary Coleman, the confrontation between Freddy Krueger, dweller in bad dreams,
and Jason, champion goaltender of Camp Crystal Lake, seems absolutely
inevitable.
For anyone familiar with that long
block of Elm Street, with so many young residents plagued by so many Nightmares,
along with any of the unhappy campers at Crystal Lake on that month of Fridays,
the movie will recall a thousand screams from the haunted past. It begins with
a recapitulation of some of the historical high points of the Nightmare on
Elm Street and the Friday the 13thseries, introduced in
a voiceover by Freddie Krueger himself. (That narration by the principal menace
constitutes a daring innovation in the form, one of the few groundbreaking
moments for both series.)
After reintroducing both villains
and providing a brief biography of each, the picture mostly settles into the
familiar patterns of just about all the dead teenager flicks. It shows a group
of unsupervised high school kids at a friend’s house conducting themselves in a
manner that the form regards as punishable by a violent visitation from a
villain — swearing, smoking, drinking, and copulating. One couple repairs to
a bedroom for the usual reasons, Jason shows up in his hockey mask, swings his
machete, the blood spurts, and the real fun begins.
At one time, both the Nightmare and the Friday series displayed a number of pioneering images and
effects. The notion of a monster who invades one’s dreams allowed for some
startling moments that followed the insane logic of hallucination — Freddy
walking down an alley, elongating his arms and scraping his razored fingers
against the wall, his tongue thrusting up out of a telephone mouthpiece in a
grotesque parody of a kiss, the green and red stripes of his ratty sweater
popping up ominously in other places, like the top of a convertible. The awful
need of exhausted teenagers to stay awake in order to ward off their dreams
provided a peculiar quality of desperation to the films.
Jason’s depredations in the endless Friday
the 13th series, on the other hand, created their terror mostly
through some skilled manipulation of both film and audience. The various
writers and directors usually managed to escalate suspense through a number of
false alarms that kept the viewers off-balance and uneasy, then exploded the
tension in some genuine shock, then started the sequence all over again. The
only really startling contribution of the series otherwise lies in the really
gruesome nature of Jason’s killings, which, with a few other films, profoundly
influence contemporary horror.
Although the smirking, chortling
Freddy Krueger dominates the movie as a character, the masked, taciturn Jason
controls most of the methodology. The killing proceeds in a typically ghastly
manner, with just about every imaginable technique of violating the body —
bisection, dismemberment, impalement, evisceration, and especially,
decapitation (heads, as they say, will roll in Freddy vs. Jason). For
reasons difficult to comprehend, somehow the silent, blank-faced, inexorable
Jason actually appears more frightening than the hideous, loquacious Freddy.
At some point in the film, Freddy
reacts angrily to Jason’s hogging the action and trying to kill the children
Freddy regards as his own special prey, which in the picture’s logic causes the
great confrontation of the title. By the time their battle occurs, almost every
identifiable character has met a horrible death, so there’s barely anyone left
for these monsters to kill, except each other. Since the distributors, no doubt
in the interest of artistic integrity, request reviewers not to reveal the
result of that final battle, I will maintain a grave silence about the outcome.
Be assured, however, that the ending is quite as predictable as the events that
precede it.
Aside from the film’s bold
connection of two separate series — why not try to work in the closely
related Halloween group next? — and its addition to the contemporary
form of high-school horror, Freddy vs. Jason stakes out little in the
way of new territory. It continues the exploitation of adolescent guilt as a
source of horror and continues as well the form’s appeal to exactly the people
who populate and suffer in the film. Not coincidentally, it is also the only
movie of the summer to lead all others at the box office for two weekends in a
row: guilt and gore make a great combination.
Freddy
vs. Jason, starring
Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Kelly Rowland, Jason Ritter, Christopher George
Marquette, Lochlyn Munro, Kathryn Isabelle, Brendan Fletcher, Zacharias Ward;
written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift; directed by Ronny Yu. Cinemark
Tinseltown; Hoyts Greece Ridge; Loews Webster; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal
Eastview; Regal Henrietta.
You can
hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5 Fridays at 7:20 a.m., rerun
on Saturdays at 8:50 a.m.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2003.
