Everyone's been waiting for this one for years.
And there are plenty of subtitles, in a variety of languages, along with a surfeit of extra features, so enjoy!
As far back as I can remember, horror fans have been waiting for a battle between the two biggest franchises, and the debate has gone on endlessly. Just who would come out on top in such a battle?
Freddy has always had the edge of an incredible array of supernatural powers. We've seen him appear and disappear semi-randomly. We've seen him alter his appearance in any of a hundred different ways. We've seen him do things that only a cartoon character could do, and take
Freddy Vs. Jason box art punishment that would kill any hundred men.
Jason has always had his own edge, too. His unequaled strength and sheer resiliency have allowed him to survive punishments that would topple buildings. He moves with incredible stealth, for his monstrous size and build, sneaking up on victims with a silence more fitting for a classically trained ninja.
And yet each comes with a set of weaknesses all their own.
Freddy is a roaring egomaniac, believing himself unbeatable when his history says otherwise. On the rare occasions Freddy has been tricked into the real world, he's proven to be an utter pansy, getting soundly beaten by slight teenage girls armed with baseball bats.
And Jason is, in all honesty, an imbecile. He's been tricked numerous times, including by a girl wearing his dead mother's sweater. He's been lured into throwing himself from a hayloft onto rusty, pointy, farm equipment.
So thus, we get the contest of a lifetime, Freddy versus Jason. Of course, it can't just start there. A two-hour brawl would get downright dull after a while. Watch boxing sometime, and ask yourself if YOU wouldn't get bored after round three hundred. We have to have a PLOT. And a plot there is.
We start in director Ronny Yu's vision of Hell, which, continuity-wise, is a plot hole the size of Jason's boxer shorts. Freddy is sitting nonchalantly in an oppressive, inky blackness, in a room so tight, it could win a wet t-shirt contest. Never mind the end of "Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday" in which Freddy's clawed hand reaches up from a flaming crevasse in the ground to seize a temporarily fallen Jason's mask.
He then proceeds to rant away about how everyone has forgotten him, sounding for the world like a demonic version of Gloria Swanson. But of course he has a plan-to trick Jason, whom everyone thought was dead a couple episodes back but somehow isn'twait, did I just SAY that? Am I glossing over an even BIGGER plot hole?
Yes. I did. And I am.
So now, Freddy, in a positively egomaniacal glee, is orchestrating a plot from beyond the grave to send Jason in the midst of Springwood. And why? So that Jason can start killing on a scale that is trademark Jason. Everyone would blame Freddy for the murders and remember him, thus allowing him to leave the inky black hole that Ronny Yu decided to stick him in for the first five minutes of the film, presumably to conserve the special effects budget.
I guess no one was supposed to notice the seven-foot tall, three hundred and fifty pound troglodyte wandering away from every crime scene. You know, the one dressed like the NHL's worst nightmare and carrying a machete that's bigger than Springwood High's place kicker?
And, as is the norm for most horror movies since the eighties, the plot holes go unnoticed by absolutely everybody long enough for Freddy to return in true Freddy style.
Freddy gets a chance to take on Jason on his own turf--Jason's own nightmares. And Jason's resiliency alarms Freddy. Every person Freddy had ever taken on before in dreams died within a five-minute dream sequence. But Jason simply will not die, regardless of the punishment Freddy inflicts on him. Concussions, lacerations, a multiple-ton industrial furnace to the headnothing stops Jason. Freddy, in a growing state of mystified terror of Jason's capacity for injury on turf that Freddy should own, grows desperate. Freddy throws every single punch he can think of, including playing Jason like a giant pinball with accompanying sound effects. But then a key event happens.
Jason develops a roaring case of hydrophobia. Yes. Jason has suddenly become terrified of water. I know what you're thinkingyesyeshe almost DROWNED as a child. Sure he's afraid of water!
But then those of us who've paid attention remember Jason walking full-bore, unstoppable as ever, THROUGH THE CENTER OF A LAKE. This is not the behavior of a hydrophobic, proving conclusively that a drunken chimp was left in charge of the continuity.
The teenagers whom Jason had been stalking in order to make Freddy's comeback tour a grim reality, however, have begun to figure that the devil they know is better than the dream demon they don't, and are thus setting up circumstances to pull Freddy out of his dream world and into the REAL one, where Jason can take a solid whack at him. And indeed, it does work. Freddy is now a fixture of the real world, and Jason is none too happy about the last twenty-odd minutes in which he took a greater beating than an Enron 401k plan.
Part two next Wednesday, folks...and I can assure you, it's a doozy.
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