It’s Freddy Vs Jason! It’s Ken Vs Lyz! Who will walk away with whose severed head!? Who will survive and what will be left of them!?
Freddy Vs Jason (2003) at Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension
Freddy Vs Jason (2003) at AYCYAS!
Then join us as Ken takes a crash course in the Friday The 13th franchise; as Lyz demonstrates that she might have had a viable career as a Legal Aid attorney by mounting a defence of Jason Voorhees (“….and while it is true, Your Honour, that the defendent did kill 160 people over a period of 20 years….”); and as Ken and Lyz gawp in astonishment at each other upon being confronted by a true rara avis: a well-written, intelligently constructed modern horror film.
#1 by The Rev. D.D. on January 18, 2008 - 11:01 pm
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Oh my goodness….look at all the goodness promised by this post. *drools*
I cannot wait to cram all this into my cerebrum!
#2 by Blake Matthews on January 19, 2008 - 10:26 am
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Excellent reviews. I don’t know if I’ll go out and rent this movie, but I’ll do my darndest to catch it if it comes on television. Jason and Freddy doing HK wire-fu? That just warms my heart.
#3 by Ed on January 19, 2008 - 12:05 pm
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Ooh, a double feature. Cool! I like this movie quite a bit as well, a good old fashioned 80’s splat fest done 00’s style.
#4 by Matthew Fudge on January 20, 2008 - 9:24 am
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what surprises me (though doesn’t upset me) is why, five years later, they haven’t managed a sequel. as far as I know this made a fair bit of money. having said that it took ten years to make the first one so maybe it’s just really hard to come up with ideas for it.
#5 by Chad on January 20, 2008 - 12:48 pm
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I was sort of indifferent toward Freddy vs. Jason when it first came out, but these reviews do make me believe I should give it another chance.
Weirdly enough, I did enjoy Freddy’s Dead. Apparently I’m in a stark minority.
#6 by lyzard on January 20, 2008 - 3:23 pm
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No, no, no!! They SHOULD NOT do another one. There is absolutely nowhere left for them to go, and I’d hate to have the fun of this film spoiled by a really lame follow-up.
On the other hand, you know that they *are* making another F13 film? – a kind of “Jason, The Early Years“, I gather. Shannon and Swift have been tagged to write it. I don’t know how I feel about that. Could they actually pull it off twice? (I am prepared to believe that if anyone is capable of coming up with a reasonable explanation for how dead-child Jason got to be undead-adult Jason, it’s these guys. Personally I think it’s time that horror cinema’s most notorious Deadbeat Dad made an appearance….)
#7 by lyzard on January 20, 2008 - 3:24 pm
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Perhaps it’s what age you are when you first see it?
#8 by Matthew Fudge on January 21, 2008 - 4:18 am
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Whether they ‘should’ make another is neither here nor there for these guys. The F13 producers will keep reanimating the corpse as long as there’s one more dollar to be wrung out of it. Didn’t they make Jason X purely to generate enthusiasm at the studio for F Vs J? I have an idea that the delay is down to them trying to secure the rights to another character. I know they had a crack at getting Ash from Evil Dead, and I believe they couldn’t get Michael Myers because of the Halloween remake… they’ll probably end up with that evil snowman from Jack Frost.
#9 by Tom Meade on January 21, 2008 - 5:17 am
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Jason Vs. Robocop.
#10 by Matthew Fudge on January 21, 2008 - 8:04 am
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The F13 guys are determined to never ever ever undestimate their audience.
#11 by lyzard on January 21, 2008 - 3:14 pm
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Oh, I know, I know, it’s stupid of me to use the word “should” when talking about studio executives. I’m better off hoping that the various rights issues never get themselves untangled.
#12 by Matthew Fudge on January 22, 2008 - 9:17 am
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Where there’s a pile of money there’s a way.
At the same time I think they’re still tying to get themselves a big budget remake from the Platinum Dunes guys who have so cleverly redone the Hitcher, Amytiville, et al. Though maybe the flop Halloween will put them off. At any rate there’s no chance that they would actually remake the first one as it is, because it’s not really about Jason is it?
#13 by Chad on January 22, 2008 - 10:26 am
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No, actually, I saw it just a few years ago.
I think my enjoyment of the film springs from a combination of two things: I really like Rachel Talalay’s directorial choices (yes, I also think Tank Girl is underappreciated) and I’m generally more interested in Freddy Krueger as a figure of pop culture kitsch than as a serious horror icon (although I agreed with your point about how it’s a little eerie how a child-murderer had “evolved” into a wisecracking anti-hero).
#14 by Ken Begg on January 22, 2008 - 11:04 am
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Now that I’m back from the dead, or recovered from B-Fest (same thing), let me thank Lyz for a) posting my review while I was MIA, and b) providing an article herself that lived up to every expectation I had of it. And how she got that dialogue piece to flow the way she did is a miracle.
#15 by lyzard on January 22, 2008 - 3:55 pm
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Hey!! Welcome back, buddy! Just a few more random reflections on your review—
I’m inclined to think it might have been a bit more entertaining for the punters if we had disagreed more. I don’t think Great Minds have Thought this much Alike since Orca!
It’s incredible to me that it was allowed to get that far. Didn’t they hold preview screenings? How could they not have realised they’d get that reaction? (Kudos to your fellow cinema-goers for their rare critical acumen, though.)
My first impulse was to snark, “Well, *they* oughtta know!” but instead I’ll just argue that the porn comparison is a teensy bit unfair. I’m pretty sure no-one ever watched a porn movie hoping that one of the girls would get away without having sex.
Fair Game, Cindy Crawford’s boobs conspicuous by their absence. I referenced it while dealing with the equally annoying “Mac goes topless – or does she?” subplot of JAG Down Under.
Well, I think this comes back to what you say: it’s better to be killed by Jason than by Freddy. Given Gibb’s circumstances, she *was* going to die – so getting killed by Jason while blacked out was probably the kindest fate on offer.
A lot of critics bitch about the “Got your nose!” moment, but since we’ve seen clearly that Freddy isn’t up to full power, I don’t think it’s cheating for Kia not to get her nose-job.
Inasmuch as (I would argue) about 95% of all cinema plays out that way, I’m inclined to give a hearty “ME!!!!”
We assume that while Jason killed Dad, it was Freddy who put his head back on.
As has Jason, which is probably the correct reply to your objection to him as one-note. For someone unstoppable, he’s been stopped an awful lot over the years, however temporarily. In that respect these films are oddly optimistic.
Something else that occurred to me afterwards, in respect of the Campbells probably (in fact, certainly) having moved to Springwood – can’t you just imagine Dr Campbell being warned about that house’s history, and laughing it off and moving his family in anyway? In that, and the attendant guilt, lies the root of the Springwood Conspiracy.
#16 by lyzard on January 23, 2008 - 2:12 am
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And that reaction – and its inverse – is what it finally comes down to.
#17 by The Rev. D.D. on January 23, 2008 - 11:03 am
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I knew this whole thing would be delicious, and it has been. The whole thing’s been a delight to read. I’ve already read it all twice and not been bored a moment.
Kudos to both of you for it.
I’m going to have to see the whole movie now. I caught the last part of it a while back on SFC, and was pretty “meh” and didn’t pay much attention to it. Now I need to watch it in its entirety and see what all the fuss is about, and if I agree.
#18 by El Santo on January 23, 2008 - 8:04 pm
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The Sci-Fi Channel is the last venue on Earth through which to see it. One of the great things about Freddy vs. Jason is that its creators remembered that slasher movies are supposed to be brutal, bloody, and graphic to an unpleasant degree. For example, I don’t see there being a whole lot left of the rave scene after Sci-Fi’s Standards and Practices department gets through with it.
#19 by lyzard on January 23, 2008 - 10:24 pm
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They tampered with the rave scene!!?? BARBARIANS!!!!
#20 by Matthew Fudge on January 24, 2008 - 4:39 am
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Do American’s really have raves right in the middle of huge cornfields? Because I’ve seen it before on films and, I dunno, it seems odd. Doubly so, as the risk of surprise death is so high.
#21 by Blake Matthews on January 24, 2008 - 5:31 am
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I know they do big parties and mazes in cornfield around Halloween near the city I used to live in. I think they had a coornfield maze in Lodi (where we used to buy our yearly pumpkins) and in Tracy, which I think attracted more youth. So maybe not raves, but in the same general vicinity.
#22 by The Rev. D.D. on January 24, 2008 - 7:18 am
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Yeah, the cornfield party thing seems to be a Hallowe’en thing only. Raves tend to be held in clubs from what I know of them (which is admittedly little.)
I suppose part of my lack of attention was knowing I was missing the best of the gore. To be fair, though, I happened to turn it on right about where Freddy discovers Jason’s fear of water, which is probably the goofiest stretch in the film (being the part with the pinball noises), and that probably colored things for me at first glance. The stereotypical “sassy black woman” didn’t help things (although her getting whacked did…even more so when I pretended it was Brandi’s character in ISKWYDLS); and while the final fight was pretty fun, I felt compelled to invoke Ken and Andrew’s Rule of Plot Holes and decide that Freddy must’ve hung out in Kroenen’s dojo while in Hell.
I didn’t see the cornfield massacre, which I would probably enjoy highly.
Like I said, to be fair, I’m going to rent it sometime and give it a proper chance. Although, like Ms. Kingsley before me, I feel compelled to watch all the proceeding films from the two series (haven’t seen the third and fourth NOES films or Jason X, and most of the Ft13 ones I’ve seen were on cable so I missed the best parts.)
#23 by Matthew Fudge on January 24, 2008 - 8:34 am
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I was surprised by how positive the reviews were (and the comments here). I thought it was watchable but marred by being too enslaved to a pair of profitable franchises… whose commerical dictats meant that nothing final could happen to either character. Also, I guess we’ve reached the point where there’s nowhere you can take them, they’ve both been dead numerous times (or are actually dead now??) and they’ve both been to hell and survived, so what can threaten them? Until New Line are ever willing to truly, honestly, finally kill one of them off there’ll never be a winner.
#24 by El Santo on January 24, 2008 - 12:58 pm
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“Lodi (where we used to buy our yearly pumpkins)”
The one in New Jersey? Or some other Lodi?
#25 by Blake Matthews on January 24, 2008 - 1:03 pm
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California