PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 8/20/03)

The teen slasher movies of the late '70s and early '80s are the most distinctive films to adhere to the trite purisms of the horror subgenre; a direct byproduct of Republican rule, these psychopath-in-a-mask spectacles enforced conservative values (i.e., smoking pot while trying out premarital sex equals a machete to the face) as wicked distortions of the middle-class American dream. It didn't take long for cinema's one-gruesome-trick pony to breathe its dying breath amongst a slew of sequels and camp imitators, but then the unthinkable happened: The splatter movie got smart.

In 1996, Wes Craven (creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street) and scribe Kevin Williamson unveiled Scream, an ironic slasher parody brilliantly bundled as a conventional slasher, hitting high-brow audiences with its overt winking cleverness while satisfying the low brow with impressive kills and cheap shocks. Post-slashers revel in their tongue-in-cheek postmodernist detachment, poking fun while stabbing bodies. The Friday the 13th series added a post-slasher sequel in its goofily futuristic tenth installment, Jason X, and the murderous doll from Child's Play became a caricature in Hong Kong director Ronny Yu's bucket-of-blood-and-laughs Bride of Chucky.

The slasher paradigm was never vast enough to keep the self-referential jocularity a-coming, but that low culture still managed to latch onto the formulaic foundations recycled from the original hack-'em-ups, bringing new and wide commercial success to a dumbed-back-down third-wave slasher revival. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Wrong Turn, Joy Ride, Jeepers Creepers, and the soon-to-be-released remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may marvel with gory CGI, more convoluted death sequences, and fresher-faced teenagers than their Reagan-era ancestry, but these unnecessary 21st-century clones are way past their prime.

Yu's latest reissuing of '80s throwback villains, Freddy Vs. Jason purports to be a meta-sequel to the two most successful first-wave slasher franchises, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. FVJ was foreshadowed way back in 1993 when Freddy Krueger's blade-fingered glove pulled Jason Voorhees's hockey mask into the depths of hell in the finale of Jason Goes to Hell. New Line Cinema, which had just purchased the Friday franchise that same year, put the crossover movie on its production slate, where it wallowed for many years in development hell. But like the heavyweight baddies themselves, an idea this good just could not be killed; at last, a studio-accepted script by the writing team of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon was green-lighted, the final product (as if the word "final" meant anything in these series) now two decades removed from its origins. Are these iconic, antihero relics smartly satirized in a post-slasher, or is FVJ just more dated, third-wave trash? Disappointingly, it's the latter.

Hanging out in Hell, a powerless and still crass Freddy (puckishly played, as always, by Robert Englund, but looking nastier than ever before), in a fiendish plot to put his fear and name back into the hearts and minds of children, resurrects Jason (first-time goalie Ken Kirzinger, sufficiently mute and bulky) and rooks him into terrorizing Elm Street for him. The Crystal Lake terror gets a little machete happy, however, stealing Freddy's victims and, in essence, his power. Jason even figures out the burnt one's muddled plan, and the two characters turn to each other for a bloody battle of the egos, two impenetrable, monolithic monsters fighting like comic-book superheroes.

The premise is asinine, admittedly, but to the screenwriters' credit, it is the most logical connection between characters that exist on different planes (Jason is grounded in reality, but Freddy attacks in dream reality). What makes FVJ an inferior entry amongst, say, the gold standard of slashers, the four-star Halloween, is that it isn't very scary, or its opposing compensation, funny. Oodles of fake blood and a soaringly high body count can be disgusting fun for horror hounds, but there is too much exposition (including an out-of-place introductory narration by Freddy) and long-winded backstory before anything even spottily interesting happens. The frights, the archetypes, even the predictability of it all is predictable, leaving behind a dull, brainless novelty that makes more sense as a TV sweeps stunt.

So who is it that wins this long-awaited grudge match? Well, that would be New Line, which set up the ambiguous ending for a potential sequel.

— Aaron Hillis