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 precious hours of ones life watching each of the previous installments of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series (most of them in cinemas, and some of them numerous times over!) one felt a natural gravitation to watch Freddy Vs Jason despite the million stops and starts and hiccups it had endured before it finally made it to the big screen at least a decade after it the idea was first floated.

This film had been making for absolutely ages and had undergone countless plot revisions before finally the powers that be at New Line green lit a version that was directed by Ronny Yu, well known to horror fans due to his recent Bride of Chucky. The film builds on the idea that Freddy has been long forgotten and doesn’t induce the fear that he needs in order to thrive. His name has all but been expunged from the memory and the new kids living on Elm Street haven’t heard of him and don’t have the slightest idea as to who he was.So ingeniously the ailing Freddy devises a plan by which he hopes to resurrect Jason to start a killing spree and hopes that once the killing spree triggers terror among the community this terror will trigger some memory of Freddy and the fear will once again be reborn which means his powers slowly regenerate. The only obstacle is that once he gets Jason rampaging again he will have to contend with masked maniac who is already carving up all the teens that are supposed to be “Freddy’s Children”.

So the long awaited showdown must finally take place to decide who gets to carve up the teenagers of suburban America. Jason, tricked into a return by Freddy disguised as his mother starts his butchery in fairly spectacular style and with each death Freddy regains more of his powers of old.

With a premise as infantile as this the rest of the film inevitably follows in similar vein – sadly everything that was infantile and clichéd to the point of parody are accentuated in this film yet while the parody element worked fairly well in Jason X, this time its utterly pre-pubescent, stale and very forced. But then, what kind of film could one have realistically expected from “Freddy Vs Jason”?

The film amassed a fortune at the Box Office and one now cringes to think what the next installment will be like……….more drivel aimed at the same audience that gets its kicks watching the likes of that insufferable fake wrestling that has plagued TV and cable channels for the last 20 odd years. Freddy vs. Jason along with SWAT will be remembered for being the most putrid tripe in a summer of wretched films that was the summer of 2003.