Freddy vs Jason (2003)
Cast: Jason Ritter, Monica Keena, Kelly Rowland, Robert Englund, Lochlyn Munro
Director: Ronny Yu
Synopsis: Freddy and Jason in a battle to see who gets to carve up teenage America!
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

Having spent countless precious hours of one's life watching every previous instalment of both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series—most of them in cinemas and some of them numerous times over—it was only natural to gravitate towards Freddy vs. Jason, despite the endless delays, false starts and production hiccups that kept the project in limbo for almost a decade after the idea was first proposed.

The film had been in development for what seemed like an eternity, undergoing countless rewrites before New Line finally settled on a version directed by Ronny Yu, best known to horror fans for Bride of Chucky. The premise is reasonably ingenious. Freddy Krueger has become powerless because he has been forgotten. His name has virtually been erased from Elm Street folklore, and the latest generation of teenagers has never even heard of him. Unable to generate the fear he feeds upon, Freddy devises a plan to resurrect Jason Voorhees and unleash him on the unsuspecting teenagers of Springwood. The resulting murders will, he hopes, rekindle the town's memories of Freddy and with that renewed fear his own powers will gradually return.

The only snag in this otherwise cunning plan is that once Jason gets going, Freddy finds himself competing with a homicidal masked maniac who seems perfectly happy carving up all the teenagers that Freddy had earmarked for himself.

Thus begins the long-awaited showdown to determine who gets the exclusive rights to slaughter the youth of suburban America. Jason, lured back into action by Freddy masquerading as his mother, embarks upon a spectacular killing spree while Freddy steadily regains his former strength with every fresh victim.

With a premise as inherently juvenile as this, the remainder of the film inevitably follows suit. Everything that had already become clichéd and self-parodic in both franchises is amplified still further. While the tongue-in-cheek approach worked surprisingly well in Jason X, here it feels stale, forced and relentlessly juvenile. Then again, what else could one realistically have expected from a film entitled Freddy vs. Jason?

The film went on to become a sizeable box-office success and one shudders to think what further monstrosity the studios might dream up next. It feels like entertainment aimed squarely at the same audience that has embraced the pantomime theatrics of professional wrestling for the past twenty-odd years. Along with S.W.A.T., Freddy vs. Jason will surely be remembered as one of the most thoroughly putrid pieces of nonsense to emerge from the dismal summer of 2003.