The year was 1993; the film was Friday the 13th Part 9: Jason Goes to Hell. In its final frames, Freddy Krueger’s trademark bladed glove graces the screen as it pulls down Jason’s equally iconic mask.
Speculation was rampant.
Every slasher movie fan’s and elementary school boy’s dream was to become a reality: Nightmare on Elm Street’s wisecracking dream demon Freddy Krueger was to take on the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees in evil’s ultimate encounter. For ten years development problems prevented the pairing, making expectations even higher for the combination of horror’s most enduring icons. Does it succeed?
Yes and no. First time scriptwriters Mark Swift and Damian Shannon had fans of the series in mind by keeping with and emphasizing the mythologies of both Freddy and Jason, which have been slowly developing over the course of seventeen feature length films. References to the other instalments are abundant; the score cleverly combines the trademark theme music from both franchises. Appearances are made from Jason’s notorious mother, the Springwood psychiatric ward, and of course Jason still murders the teens that are having sex first.
Freddy vs. Jason takes the viewer from Freddy’s infamous home on Elm Street in Springwood, Ohio to the two titans awesome final showdown at the site of Jason’s favourite haunt: Camp Crystal Lake.
Freddy and Jason’s connection is established from the opening scene, which gives Freddy his first monologue ever, appropriately enough from hell. Angered because the Elm Street parents have erased any record of him, he can no longer terrorize their children because no adolescent fear exists for him to feed off. To rekindle memories of his horror, Freddy resurrects the dull-witted but powerful Jason by posing as his mother. Freddy then admonishes Mr. Voorhees to slash, decapitate and otherwise punish the “very bad” Elm Street children. More successful than Freddy could have imagined in his wildest nightmares, Jason starts stealing all the souls for himself. From here on its war as Freddy and Jason battle each it out for ultimate slasher supremacy.
If the film stuck to this core plot it would be horror heaven (or is that hell?), unfortunately the film wastes a lot of time on the relationships between the one-dimensional clich
