Friday The 13th: Ranking Every Movie From Worst To Best
7. Freddy Vs. Jason
Why, you might ask, is this film so low down the list? Didn't it gross more worldwide, before inflation, than any other film in the franchise? Why, yes it did. Wasn't it the movie mash-up fans had been waiting for? Yes, again. Wasn't it also the first Jason film to truly hit the mainstream? You'd be right again. It's also a mess. An unholy, bloody mess. Watch it again without the rose-tinted glasses of horror fan excitement and you'll see a horror film which is badly written, badly acted and, worst of all, is not scary in the slightest.
Freddy is trapped in hell, forgotten (and probably unloved). The kids of Elm Street don't remember him. He decides the only way to get his power back is to convince Jason (by pretending to be his mother) to go to Elm Street and start murdering the teens. From here, Freddy begins to grow in power but, when Jason won't stop killing Freddy's potential victims, Freddy drugs Jason. The surviving teens, however, in a bizarre twist of making Jason the hero, take Mr Vorhees to Crystal Lake for a final smackdown with his jumper-clad foe.
There is an initial frisson of excitement to see these two horror behemoths together at last. DeNiro and Pacino have nothing on this. There is also a bit of humour to be derived, as expected, from Freddy and his increasing anger than Jason keeps stealing his victims but, after that, there's nothing doing. In a world of increasingly interesting takes on horror films, the opening moments that the world has forgotten Freddy and Jason could have taken us in an interesting post-modern direction similar to Wes Craven's A New Nightmare.
The writers baulk at this, however, and go for the tried and tested. The final twenty minutes is just a fight between the two monsters. A fight. Nothing horrific. Nothing terrifying. A fight. The fact that the film ends with Jason walking out of Crystal Lake holding the decapitated head of Freddy, which winks at us, is the final insult. He's winking because we've just wasted our time watching this snore-fest. What we would have given for Bruce Campbell's Ash to add some humour to the film.