Freddy Vs Jason
Freddy Krueger, the dream terrorist of the ''Nightmare on Elm Street'' movies, and Jason Voorhees, the goalie-masked bogeyman from the ''Friday the 13th'' series, don't meet until the final reel of ''Freddy vs. Jason.'' Yet when they do, you wonder what in Satan's name took them so long.
It's the same question we all had of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in those Nora Ephron movies. And were it not for the bared breasts and the blood that alternately sprays, spurts, and mists, it wouldn't be wrong to think of this whole gruesome affair as something the ''Sleepless in Seattle'' director would have made. Indeed, a lot of this feels like ''Freddy Loves Jason.''
Just look at the way the former taunts the latter with his five metal talons, in a sort of lewd ''come hither'' fashion. Jason, for reasons he's probably too undead to understand, is seduced.
Cobbled together by scriptwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift and directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu, ''Freddy vs. Jason'' attempts none of the witty, provocative visual and metaphysical set pieces from any of the ''Nightmare'' movies. And it offers none of the real fright of the early ''Friday the 13th'' films. In fact, the movie is deeply, proudly unimaginative. But what it lacks in vision it almost recoups in sheer malevolence.
When we meet him yet again, Freddy (who's still being grandly hissed by the indefatigable Robert Englund) is having a conniption over the possibility that's he's a has-been. Like Norma Desmond, Freddy is still big; it's the nightmares that got small. Hoping to restore the luster to his good name, he commandeers the star of the ''Friday the 13th'' series and has him kill off whatever kids remain of the Elm Street parents who burned Freddy alive back in his days as a child-slaying maniac.
For his part, Jason (Ken Kirzinger) perished two years after being cryogenically thawed in the 25th century in ''Jason X.'' Now, somehow, he's back. From outer space. But Freddy has invaded his dreams, filling him with images of his taskmaster of a dead mother (Paula Shaw) and memories of his near drowning one summer at camp, which drove him to kill every randy teenager he could.
By the third sequel, ''Friday the 13th'' had dumped Jason's trauma for humdrum slasher gimmickry. So it's nice to see him killing for a good reason again.
The aforementioned parents, still paranoid from Freddy's 1984 debut, have been drugging their teens with something called Hypnocil, which encourages sleep while preventing dreams. Freddy wants Jason to put an end to this. With no nightmares, there's no Freddy.
And with no relentlessly amateur performances, there's no horror genre. And the acting here is so uniformly hollow that you're practically rooting for carnage, which ''Freddy vs. Jason'' delivers with the cranked-up glee of a cheerleader driving pizzas around the block for Domino's.
Before boy meets boy, we're asked to hang out with Lori (Monica Keena) and her friends, including her pal Kia ( Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child) and her ex-boyfriend Will (Jason Ritter, John's son), who was booby-hatched and Hypnocilled for telling people that he saw Lori's dad kill her mom. Eventually, the gang realizes what's going on: that Freddy is using Jason to make a comeback, which they find sad and slightly amusing, like those cartoons in which the Flintstones would run into the Jetsons.
But Fred and George never went after each other with this much campy ferocity. Along these lines, Yu does a serviceable job in the later going. You might even call the final bludgeon-athon ''romantic.'' These monsters, with their charred flesh and homicidal tendencies, have real chemistry --so much, in fact, that in the final close-up you could get a little misty with visions of a viscera-soaked Ryan-Hanks flick: ''You've Got Maul.''
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