Review of Freddy vs. Jason (2003) by Kai82 — 04 Nov 2020

The rare case of development hell producing a real good movie. It was teased 10 years earlier at the end of „Jason goes to Hell“. There Jason's mask was pulled underneath by Freddys glove. This was awesome and fans were excited for the battle of two legends of horror / slasher movies.

It took however 10 years to get this done with lots of rejected ideas, production issues and conflicts of interest. Ronny Yu was finally chosen as director and succeeded in making one of the best versus horror movies.

Even the story is pretty good for a horror / slasher movie. The Elm Street has become peaceful as the residents have put Freddy Krueger into his worst nightmare. He is weakened as he is forgotten and not feared anymore.

All his possible victims are out of his reach and there is nothing he can do against it on his own. Then he found a way out as he tricks Jason into doing his bidding expecting that his story will resurface and the knowledge and fear gives him his entrance back to action.

However he did not expect to have no victims left as Jason does nothing halfhearted. This spawns an epic battle across the whole movie. In other movies the characters fight only at the end while here they clash again and again for a big part of the movie.

They also archive to give both characters their strengths and weaknesses. I think both characters were handled well. Also for the rest of the cast the theme from Alien vs Predator is valid. Who ever wins we lose.

Maybe there is a way for them to win or at least not to lose. For the Actors there is nothing wrong here too. Robert Englund is the embodiment of his role as Freddy Krueger and will forever be remembered as legend of the genre.

Ken Kirzinger is an intimidating Jason Voorhees. For the others I think I will praise Monica Keena as Lori Campell, Jason Ritter as Will Rollins and Kelly Rowland as Kia Waterson for their roles and enhancing the movie.

The fights are epic, brutal and merciless as each of the icons of horror tries their best in killing the other for good. I will not talk about themes, visual representation and ideas I enjoyed because of spoilers.

Be warned for the ending. It is excellently done and satisfying but also something that can be a disappointment for others (Not for me). Overall this deserves credit for its ideas, style and being a success-story of a movie from development hell.

A must see for fans of both franchises and the genre in general. Bonus knowledge: There was a plan to end the movie with both characters ending in hell where Pinhead from the Hellraiser franchise would appear and asked them what the problem was.

A Freddy vs Jason vs Pinhead would even be more stuff of legends.