Movie Review: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
I can’t say I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie, but does it make sense if I say I enjoyed how much I enjoyed it? This is a movie made for the fans, and I guess you hear that all the time now, with fanservice being a real thing in blockbuster movies — sequels, reboots, all that stuff. Here, it’s not so much fanservice in terms of pointless callbacks and references to other films (though there was some of that), the fanservice here is the actual plot and the action. That’s exactly what a fan of either of these series wants to see. It’s dumb, but it works.
This movie is directed by Hong Kong director Ronny Yu (Bride of Chucky), and he definitely brings more of an action sensibility to this movie, and I think it’s justified. There were some decisions that I didn’t like much, that I think are just the Hong Kong style, but this movie kind of needed to be an actual action movie. Freddy’s dream sequences and Jason stalking people can be scary, sure, but you’re not going to scare people when it’s the two of them fighting each other to the death. So, sure, make it an action movie.
Sean S. Cunningham served as one of the producers of the film, so Jason had some input from his series creator, but Wes Craven unfortunately had nothing to do with this. Bob Shaye produced, of course, as he had with all the other Nightmare movies, but it may seem disappointing that Freddy’s creator didn’t get any input.
That having been said, I really think this movie is true to both characters (with one large exception with Jason that I’ll get to). Freddy is Freddy, balancing humor and horror. And Jason is an unstoppable murder machine motivated by his mother, as he should be.
I should probably say before I get a lot further that I was rooting for Jason. I like both characters a lot for very different reasons. Though I’m willing to admit the Nightmare movies are on average better and certainly more creative and clever, there’s just a dumb simplicity to both the Friday movies and Jason himself that I just admire.
The movie begins with Freddy narrating his backstory. We see Robert Englund without the burnt makeup, before he had died, with a little girl in his house or whatever. He keeps missing photos and newspaper clippings of all the children he’s killed, which is really creepy. We then see the parents burn him alive with molotov cocktails.
Freddy says that he’s lost his power because the Springwood kids have found a way to forget him. So far, we’re pretty true to the series here. It’s established in The Dream Master that Freddy has to use the kids from Dream Warriors to get to the newer characters. He then says that in Hell, he found someone who could help him out.
Again, we’re sticking with continuity here. This movie is pretty much a direct follow-up to what Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday had teased at the end. Sure, I’m not sure it would have been clear that Jason had actually gone to hell had that not been the title (that ending was definitely a mess), but that’s nice, and it’s surprising, given that this movie came out 10 years later and went through who knows how many different ideas and screenplays.
Of course, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is ignored, and it really had to be, I guess. There’s no real coming back from that movie, not just because of the finality of it, but because it changed so many things about the character, bringing him into not just the real world of the movie but the “real world” outside the movie. The movie shows brief clips of Freddy killing people from the previous movies as Krueger narrates, and they do not include any from New Nightmare, so that makes sense.
Our introduction to Jason (Ken Kirzinger) comes in the most Friday the 13th scene ever. A young woman takes her clothes off and goes skinny dipping in the night at Crystal Lake. This made me laugh. A Nightmare on Elm Street is about creative and haunting dream sequences, sure, but Friday the 13th is about gratuitous nudity nearly as much as it is about Jason killing everything in sight.
The young woman gets scared and runs through the woods when she sees Jason. Jason’s got a bit of a different look here. His mask isn’t as beaten up as it was in Jason Goes to Hell, but it’s a lot dirtier than it had been in the other movies. He’s also wearing a jacket for the first time in the series, and has a little bit of hair, which he also had in Jason Goes to Hell, but I believe in no other movie since Part 2.
Jason eventually finds the woman and kills her by impaling her with his machete through a tree, though her face morphs into a bunch of different faces, revealing it to be Jason’s dream. Mrs. Voorhees (Paula Shaw) then emerges and informs Jason that he cannot die, and is only sleeping. She then tells Jason to go to Elm Street because the kids have been bad there. When he turns to go away, Pamela is revealed of course to be Freddy, who has chosen him to instill fear that wil make people start dreaming about him. We see Jason’s heart beating, and the film cuts to the Elm Street house.
At 1428 Elm, we meet some of our main characters: Lori Campbell (Monica Keena), Kia (Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child), and Gibb (Katharine Isabelle). Two boys, Trey (Jesse Hutch) and Blake come over. Gibb goes upstairs to have sex with her asshole boyfriend, Trey, and Kia tries to get Lori to hook up with Blake. Lori apparently had someone she loved when she was 14, but he moved away and she hasn’t heard from him since. Jason, of course, is stalking them.
When Gibb goes to take a shower, Trey is killed in a delightfully over-the-top way. He’s stabbed numerous times through the bed, and then Jason folds the bed, snapping his back.
When Gibb discovers the body, they all run and find a police officer, Deputy Stubbs (Lochlyn Munro, Riverdale). When other police arrive to investigate the scene, one officer mentions Freddy, which gets him in trouble with his superior. Lori overhears the name, though, and wonders about the police’s hush-hush attitude towards it, and why they keep asking her about her dreams when she’s taken back to the police station.
Officer Stubbs tries to give her some information, but he’s called away. He’s just moved to Springwood from some other town and he’s beginning to grow suspicious of how the police are treating this.
Just before she falls asleep, Lori is able to recall the name she had overheard. She wanders through an empty police station in her dream, followed by the watchful eyes of missing children posters. She eventually finds a little girl with her eyes missing, and she tells her a bit about Freddy.
Blake gets in an argument with his father, who looks exactly like Alex Jones of Infowars.
Blake then vows to take revenge on Freddy for the death of his friend, and he falls asleep to be haunted in his dreams by Freddy, who is unable to kill him because he’s not quite strong enough yet.
When Blake wakes back up, he finds that his father has been decapitated, and Jason raises his machete toward the teen, killing him offscreen with a splatter of blood against the window.
The movie then cuts to Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, the same location as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It’s here where we meet the most enjoyable non-serial killer characters of the movie, Will Rollins (Jason Ritter), the boy that Lori had been in love with when they were 14, and Mark Davis (Brendan Fletcher). Everyone at the hospital is given Hypnocil, the experimental dream suppressant that Nancy had been taking in Dream Warriors, though they don’t know what it does. One could call this a callback or an easter egg or whatever, but it’s actually a significant part of the plot, which is neat.
Will sees a brief glimpse of the news of the murder on the TV, and recognizes it as the home of Lori. It’s revealed that he’s in there because he claims he saw Lori’s father, Dr. Campbell (Tom Butler) killing her mother. The two of them escape with intentions of seeing if Lori is okay.
At home, Dr. Campbell tries unsuccessfully to sneak Hypnocil to Lori as she goes to school. After she leaves for school, Dr. Butler learns that Will and Mark have escaped from the hospital.
At school, Lori has a run-in with resident nerd, Charlie Linderman (Chris Maruqette) after learning that Blake and his father were killed. There’s also going to be a party that night at a cornfield, which Gibb reluctantly agrees to go to. Lori mentions her nightmare, and Mark enters, reciting the Freddy song. He tells her who Freddy is and a little bit about his backstory, and then Will stops him.
Shortly after Will and Lori are reunited, Lori faints, and when principal Bob Shaye shows up, Mark and Will are forced to flee.
Kia gets her first Freddy nightmare as she waits for Lori in the nurse’s office, with Krueger reaching out from the magazine to cut off her nose. She wakes up, and everything is fine. It runs contrary to the Freddy mythology of course, but maybe the fact that her nose isn’t missing in the real world can be blamed on Freddy still needing to be stronger.
At the library, Mark and Will try to learn more about Freddy Krueger, but find that all the information about him has been erased, including missing obituaries. Will realizes that they covered him up and confined anyone who knew about him so that word couldn’t get out, but then he also realizes that by spreading the word of Freddy, he may have given him enough strength to kill again.
Everybody is having a good time at the corn rave. Jason’s there, too, lurking, taking a rusty pipe from a grain silo. Will shows up, and Lori reunites with him. He finds out that the letters he had sent her were not mailed by Westin Hills, and tells her that he’s been at a psychiatric hospital.
Gibb wanders off into the corn and passes out. In her dream, she follows the talking corpse of Trey into the silo, where she meets Freddy. In the real world, some creep approaches her passed out body to rape it.
Back in the dream, Freddy is about to kill her, when she dies from Jason in the real world. Jason has performed a double impalement with that pipe through the guy that was about to rape her, who he tosses away like a rag doll. This isn’t the first time Jason prevented a rape, of course; he did it in Part VIII, but at least there, the woman came out alive.
This really pisses off Freddy, as he’s now strong enough to affect things in the real world.
Jason comes up on two partying teens and twists one of their heads around 180 degrees. It’s a fun kill in theory, but it’s botched in practice, with some bad effects. Sort of in line with this movie being more of an action movie or perhaps just given when it was released, there is a lot more CGI and a lot less practical stuff, and unfortunately, the movie suffers because of it.
The other teen poors a bunch of Everclear on Jason and lights him on fire. In a really awesome shot, Jason follows him through the cornfield, leaving a trail of flames. As the teen makes it back to the party, a flaming machete is thrown through him in one of the few effects that looks pretty good.
Jason then kills a bunch of people at the party while on fire, and douses himself with water. It’s a fun scene even if the choreography is a bit off.
Lori, Will, Kia, Linderman, and stoner Freeburg (Kyle Labine) then escape in Will’s van. After they take the others home, Will takes Lori to her home, where her angry father greets them.
Will explains that he saw her father killing her mother, and Dr. Campbell starts choking him nearly to death. Lori runs inside and her father follows. Lori starts questioning her father and the story of how her mother died. He admits that he does some consulting work at Westin Hills. She then runs away with Will. They go to see Mark.
Before they can get there, however, Mark accidentally loses his caffeine pill in the sink, and when he’s asleep, he’s haunted by his brother, who had supposedly committed suicide, but was obviously killed by Freddy. His brother speaks in Freddy’s voice, and says that he needed to get Jason to kill people so that they’d remember.
Freddy then appears and tries to get Mark to send a message to the other kids, but Mark refuses, so Freddy decides to pass the message himself. He kills him with a slash to the face right when Will and Lori show up, and brands his back with the words “Freddy’s back.”
Officer Stubbs compiles evidence of Jason Voorhees, and goes to his superior, who shuts him down.
Lori, Will, Kia, Linderman, and Freeburg all talk in some basement somewhere about how to stop Freddy. This is probably the weakest scene of the movie, as it’s all exposition, and none of it is naturally delivered. Stubbs eventually shows up and tells them about Jason and his backstory about supposedly drowning and going on revenge for his mother’s death. He thinks it’s a copycat, but Linderman insists that it has to be the real Jason. They figure out that Freddy is pulling the strings.
Lori falls asleep and is attacked by Freddy. She pulls his ear off and when she’s woken up, she has the ear. Sure, it’s a variation of a scene we’ve seen a dozen times before, but I like this bit of plot progression because it’s visual rather than just expository.
They decide to go to Westin Hills to get all the Hypnocil, figuring out that it’s what kept Will and Mark from having nightmares all those years.
They break in, and there’s only one security guard, who gets crushed in a door by Jason. Freeburg falls asleep and has a dream in which a Freddy worm comes to him with a hookah. The worm then sneaks inside his mouth, and Freddy has officially possessed Freeburg, sort of like in Jason Goes to Hell. Freeburg then gets rid of all the Hypnocil.
Jason shows up in the security office and starts an electrical explosion that kills Stubbs. With the power now out, Linderman grabs a gun and meets up with Lori, Kia, and Will. Freeburg plunges some tranquilizers into Jason’s neck, and Jason cuts him in half before falling asleep.
We then enter Jason’s dream in a boiler room and have our first Freddy vs. Jason bout. It’s a lot of fun. Since they’re in the dream world, Freddy clearly has the upper hand, playing Jason around like a pinball machine. Jason starts the fight by cutting off both of Freddy’s arms with his machete, but Freddy just grows them back. The fight ends in a ridiculous way, with the discovery that Jason is afraid of water.
This is a controversial moment that has pissed off a lot of fans of Jason. It doesn’t bother me too much, to be honest, because not a lot arises from it, but it is ridiculous. It makes sense that Jason would have some kind of fear of drowning, of course, considering he nearly drowned as a child, and also was killed underwater in Jason Lives, and drowned by Tina’s zombie father at the end of The New Blood. But still, Jason swam from a shipwreck to Manhattan in Part VIII, and killed people in the water in The Final Chapter and The New Blood. I know the credited screenwriters, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, have insisted that they never wrote that Jason was afraid of water, but this movie had dozens of rewrites, so I guess somebody somewhere did.
Jason appears as a crying, deformed child, still wearing the hockey mask. Freddy tears off the mask and plunges his finger knife into the boy’s brain, which causes the movie to cut to another level of dream, like in Inception. In this dream, we see Jason carrying a body home to his shack from Part 2.
In the real world, Jason is in the van with the remaining teens, tied down with duct tape. The plan is for Linderman to keep giving him tranquilizers to keep him asleep until they can get to Crystal Lake, where they will put Lori under in order for her to grab Freddy and bring him to the real world for Jason to kill him.
I was already rooting for Jason of course, but I like that movie gives you reason to cheer for him. Freddy is truly the villain here, and it makes sense. Jason is just a mindless killing machine, but Freddy is a legitimate monster. I think it’s safe to call him more evil.
They decide to put Lori under, with the plan to wake her up after 15 minutes. She’s given a tranquilizer, and shows up at Camp Crystal Lake in 1958. She sees young Jason getting bullied, but doesn’t realize it’s Jason. She goes to the camp counselors to get help, but sees that they’re having sex. One of them becomes Freddy, having sex with a corpse.
Lori reaches into the water to pull Jason out, and then realizes that it’s Jason. Freddy then pulls him under, and in the real world, Jason is drowning. Kia reluctantly goes to give him mouth to mouth, lifting his mask. Jason violently wakes up and causes the van to crash, launching him from the site.
In the dream world, Freddy turns to Lori. The alarm goes off and she grabs him, but in the real world, they’re unable to wake her up.
She winds up at 1428 Elm, and sees her father entering his bedroom with a knife, to reveal Freddy killing her mother. After killing her mother, Freddy ends up on top of Lori, about to rape her.
In the real world, she’s bleeding in a cabin while Will tries to revive her, when Jason shows up, accidentally knocking down a bunch of gasoline and lighting the place on fire. He cuts Will with his machete, and throws Linderman into his machete when it’s stuck on a wall.
When Lori’s hand gets burned in the real world, she grabs Freddy in the dream world and brings him to Camp Crystal Lake. Will and Lori sneak off as the two icons begin the final stage of their fight, with Jason having the clear advantage.
Linderman is left to bleed to death in the woods, as Kia goes to reunite with Will and Lori.
Meanwhile, Jason is kicking the crap out of Freddy, until Freddy starts using the objects around him to his advantage. It’s really a great fight. I mean, Jason should in theory be able to dispose of Freddy in seconds, with or without a machete (this is a guy that has punched someone’s head off, punched through someone’s heart, and hugged someone to death), since Freddy in the real world is just a regular guy. But the movie prevents the fight as even, of course, and Freddy is able to take the upper hand at a constuction site, when he impales Jason with a bunch of metal rods.
At one point, Kia taunts Freddy, but Jason kills her, hitting her with his machete with such force that it launches her at a high speed. It’s an effect that seems like it’s come from Ronny Yu’s Hong Kong film days, and it doesn’t seem right. Machetes should cut through people. Come on.
Lori insists on staying to see the fight, now knowing that Freddy killed her mother.
Freddy and Jason both get hit by a minecart thing that launches them on to the dock after Jason is freed from his impalements. Here is when the fight gets incredibly brutal and bloody, as Jason slashes Freddy a number of times, creating geysers of blood. Lori and Will meanwhile spray the deck down with gas.
Freddy is knocked to the ground and as Jason goes for a final kill swipe, Freddy slashes his fingers off and grabs the machete when it falls. He fights back with the machete, knocking Jason to the ground and eventually stabbing through his eyes with his finger knives. As Lori lights the dock on fire, Jason is able to punch through Freddy’s torso and rip off his right arm. Freddy gets another machete stab in before the fire hits the propane and causes an explosion, launching a firey Freddy and Jason through the air and into the water.
Lori and Will start to relax, climbing back on to the dock, when a machete-wielding killer arrives. When the camera pans up, however, it’s revealed to be a one-armed Freddy, who gets stopped when Jason shoves the finger knife glove through his back out his chest. Jason then falls back into the water and Freddy drops the machete. Lori then decapitates Freddy with the machete. She then drops the machete into the lake as a sign of respect to Jason.
The next day, Jason emerges from the misty lake holding Freddy’s severed head. Freddy then winks at the camera, and it ends. Obviously they had to keep the ending ambiguous, because no fan wants to see their favorite franchise’s monster lose, but I think it’s a bit disappointing considering the efforts the movie made to make Freddy far more villainous.
I had a blast watching this movie. Sure, it has its shortcomings, but it succeeds in what it needed to succed in. The plot is nothing more than an excuse to get Freddy and Jason in the ring together, but it definitely works. The teens mostly suck, but if you think of it, they mostly suck in most of the Friday movies and definitely some of the Nightmare movies, so it’s not really a disappointment on that end.
The movie largely stayed true to the two characters, with the only exception being Jason being afraid of water, which was really just a plot device, and I think sort of worked in that regard. It gives you what you want to see. A lot of the deaths of the teens are exciting and fun, and the fights between the two monsters are exhilarating.
Rating: 6/10
