When you’re a fan of films, it’s easy to sit there and say “Hay Mawm! Wouldn’t it be cool if So and So fought Such and Such!? They’re both so badasses and cannot be dieded!!!” But when you’re a filmmaker and your job is to make Such and Such fight So and So, the problems start coming in pretty early, and you’re left with a huge heaping hole of “Oh shit, I’m about to dishonor on not one but TWO beloved franchises!”
Problem #1 is that both Such and Such and So and So have their fanbases. If the two figures fight, logically one should win. Whichever winner you chose, you are basically saying to the world entire that THIS thing is better than THAT thing. Problem is, both THINGS need to make dough once they get back home to their own films. Thus, there can be no definite outcome to the fight. This pisses people off.
Problem #2 is that you have to come up with a stupid reason for the fight in the first place. Not only that, but you have to spend most of the movie setting the fight up because every fight eventually gets boring if it goes on too long. If God fought Satan in real life, people would still switch channels twenty minutes in, even if God attacked with sharp rainbows and the Devil with exploding porn.
Problem #3 is that Roger Ebert will automatically hate your movie. Ebert hate hurts.
Had someone been around to warn me about these problems, I never would have bothered with Freddy vs. Jason. But my burden is to blaze trails so that others may benefit from my pain. For better or worse, Freddy vs. Jason is my cross to bear.
For those who don’t know (mormons!), Freddy is a burnt-up child molester who kills teenagers in their dreams. Jason is a retarded hillbilly zombie who kills teenagers in their woods. I like them both, but I tend to favor Freddy because he can talk and do cool dream stuff, while Jason just silently stabs things. If the Jason character had retard dialog and a retard accent to go with it, he’d be my man. But as things are, I have to go with Freddy. That’s why this is really more of a Freddy movie.
As the film begins, Freddy is in some kind of villain time-out. He has no power to kill kids because his last few movies were so silly that no one is afraid of him anymore. This is bad for Freddy because fear is his electricity. What he needs is someone to put a real scare back into all those gothy arm-cutting Elm Street kids. This is where Jason comes in.
Freddy finds Jason sitting on a log wishing he knew how to read the Berenstain Bears book he found instead of just looking at the pictures. When Jason goes to sleep, Freddy jumps into his brain and instructs him to go kill kids on Elm Street in exchange for a chocolate milk. Jason agrees and awakes to find a WalMart Freddy mask and claw set sitting next to him. He puts them on and goes to Elm Street, which is only two blocks away from Camp Crystal Lake Street.
Things go well at first. Jason stabs lots of people in the chest and slices lots of people in the neck and everyone gets scared again. But when Freddy jumps into their brains, they laugh at him because he’s so scrawny and talkative compared to the New Freddy. Not only that, but Jason is killing everyone, not just teenagers. Freddy needs the adults alive so they can hump and make more kids for him to kill. If Jason wipes out all eight Elm Street households, Freddy will be out of victims forever, and the last time that happened it killed him in 3-D.
But that’s not Freddy’s only problem. All that killing made Jason tired, and after getting ready for bed, he demands his promised chocolate milk (he does the “drinky-drinky” pantomime), which Freddy doesn’t have. This enrages Jason, and his inability to properly communicate feelings only frustrates him further. Jason starts screaming and doing that “slapping his own head” move from Rain Man. The remaining Elm Street kids record this hissyfit and put it up on youtube.
Now, because Jason is still wearing the mask and glove, the whole world is laughing at Freddy. At this point the two are dying to kill each other. Jason is pissed about his chocolate milk, Freddy is pissed that Jason is such an idiot. They try to hit each other, but can’t because they are in two different worlds: real and dream.
Luckily, the remaining Elm Street kids are wise enough to solve the problem. They take sleeping pills, grab Freddy in their dream, take RedBull pills, and pull Freddy into Jason’s world as they wake up. Genius!
What they don’t realize is that the whole “pull Freddy into the real world to real kill him” has been used in something like twelve of his ten movies and he’s built an immunity to it. So, while he may be able to die, it’s not likely because he’s got the real world weaknesses of a fake world cartoon character. As the remaining Elm Street kids hi-five to celebrate their cleverness, Jason throws a machete through all their heads and suddenly they’re not so remaining anymore. (It returns to him like a boomerang!) With all those pesky humans out of the way, the fight is ON!!!
Here is some helpful play-by-play…
*Jason slices Freddy’s front a few times. Later, he slices Freddy’s back as well.
* Freddy stabs his glove into Jason’s side twenty five times. Twenty five stabs with four knives means that Jason sustains 100 wounds and could still fuck up Clint Eastwood.
* Jason throws Freddy into a tree…two miles away. The tree explodes.
* Freddy paints a tunnel onto a boulder then runs through it. When Jason tries to chase him…SMACK!!! That was just a rock, you big dummy!
* Jason cuts off Freddy’s head. Freddy lumbers around like a blind fool trying to find it. FredHead says stuff like, “Hey, I’m over here…Over here!”
* Freddy eats a carrot and says, “What’s up doc?”
* Jason eats a donut and says, “D’oh!”
* Freddy rips off Jason’s arm and stabs him with his own machete, which is really really mean and hurts Jason’s feelings.
* Jason rips off Freddy’s arm and stabs him with his own glove. Then he takes back his machete and cuts of Freddy’s head, only this time he puts it in a bag so Freddy’s body can’t find it.
* Freddy, despite having no head, manages to take off Jason’s mask and eat his eyeballs.
* For the next ten minutes they both stab whatever body parts they have left with whatever body parts they have left.
* Whenever another thirty minutes passes, they both fall into some water and the movie ends.
And that’s it! The tagline for this film read, “Whoever wins…we lose,” probably the most meta tagline every written for a film. I wish I could take the lessons I learned from this one and do it all over again, but I can’t because lesson #1 is: No more fucking around with lame-ass vs. movies!
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