2003's Agonizingly Idiotic Freddy Vs. Jason Fails Two of Pop Culture's Most Iconic Monsters

This is like my ex-wife's "Meatloaf" Surprise: stomach-churningly bad!

I’m glad that I watched the six hours and forty minutes long Friday the 13th documentary Crystal Lake Memories and the four-hour-long Nightmare on Elm Street documentary Never Sleep Again for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on American movies about filmmaking. 

I thoroughly enjoyed both gargantuan non-fiction features. They’re chockablock with fascinating anecdotes, strange trivia, and casual cattiness. They also provide priceless insight into both franchises and the horror movie business. 

Never Sleep Again has been very useful in writing up the Nightmare On Elm Street series for this newsletter, but Crystal Lake Memories helped me understand the unfathomably awful, surreally misconceived 2003 crossover exploitation movie Freddy Vs. Jason. 

I’ll tell you what even monsters fear: Taxes! And my ex-wife!

Since I’m watching and writing about all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I feel ferociously protective of them. I’m emotionally invested in the series to an unhealthy extent. 

These movies belong to me. Just as the children of Springwood belong to Freddy Krueger, these movies are my property. They’re mine. If you criticize them, you criticize me. If you praise them, you praise me. On a related note, thank you for all the praise you’ve given the original. I put in a lot of work watching it, enjoying it, and later writing about it, so it’s good that people appreciate it and, by extension, me. 

This also explains why 2003’s Freddy Vs. Jason filled me with white-hot burning rage. It angried up the blood. At the risk of seeming extreme, even hyperbolic, everyone involved with the movie should be stabbed in the heart with a knife or have their chopped off head chopped off with a machete. 

It amuses me to ponder maliciously the ultimate Freddy Vs. Jason fanboy leaving his mother’s basement to catch a Friday morning screening wearing a goalie mask, red and green sweater, homemade knife glove and clutching a sweaty copy of Fangoria. I envision this luckless Poindexter feeling an incredible, transcendent feeling of excitement and anticipation going in that dissipates further with every wildly misconceived scene and nonsensical development. 

I can see this nerd’s spirit sinking further and further until he has given up all hope and reconciled himself to the uncomfortable truth that he had been waiting DECADES for something that couldn’t suck harder. It sucked as hard as it was possible for something to suck. 

For this cursed horror geek, Freddy Vs. Jason was nothing short of the Phantom Menace of both franchises, if not Star Wars: The Rise of the Skywalker. It’s a long-awaited follow-up that is so infamously abysmal that it makes the franchises as a whole seem less impressive. 

Freddy vs. Jason is one of those perplexing, frustrating cases where a high-concept project has been in development for decades and burned through script after script and screenwriter after screenwriter. Yet when the movie was finally released, the result felt like a confused, underwhelming first draft, one so dire that no further drafts are requested or needed. 

Needless to say, they did not wait until they had the perfect script before greenlighting Freddy Vs. Jason. They knew that that particular set of words was so magical and the idea so foolproof that even if the crossover were flaming garbage, it’d still be a sizable hit. 

They were right! Strangely, if inexplicably, the three top-grossing films in the series are also the three least loved: this abomination, and the Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Friday the 13th reboots, which were so poorly received that they were not followed by sequels. 

For horror franchises, that is a big deal because slasher auteurs love to make sequels to low-budget, commercially successful fright flicks. There’s no such thing as a sure thing in this sick and sad and unknowable world, but slasher sequels come close. 

I remembered Freddy vs. Jason being bad—really bad—but I was still gobsmacked by its awfulness. It’s a work of staggering stupidity and cynical calculation that disrespects rather than honors two of horror’s greatest icons with something that feels more like a ninety-seven-minute episode of Celebrity Deathmatch than a real movie. 

Jason Vs. Freddy is all about tits titular ghouls trying to kill each other, which is stupid for many reasons, the most notable being THEY’RE ALREADY DEAD! They’re so fucking dead, you wouldn’t believe it. 

Freddy got burnt up pretty good by the apoplectic parents of the youngsters he murdered. The situation with Jason is more complicated in that he dies a bunch of times but always comes back, machete in hand, to do his part in ridding the world of smoking, drinking, and fornicating teenagers. 

The insultingly idiotic premise of Freddy Vs. Jason is that Springwood has somehow managed to forget about Freddy Krueger, the hideously burned dream demon murdering their children in their sleep. 

In Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy is so successful at murdering teenagers that there’s nearly no one left. He has almost finished the job. A much different, even dumber dynamic is at play here. 

I haven’t seen something so hideous since my EX WIFE on our honeymoon!

The movie opens with our good friend, child murderer Freddy Krueger, talking directly to us through narration, sometimes while looking directly at the camera. He explains to us, his best pals, that Springwood forgot about him, just like they forget about Dre, and while he could handle death and burning and hell and the pressure of constantly having to come up with colorful and creative ways, he can’t stand being ignored. He’s like Donald Trump: a grotesque monster who angrily demands attention. 

The movie makes the bizarre mistake of re-introducing Freddy Krueger as a total wuss who couldn’t scare an easily scared baby with a nuclear-powered scare machine. We might remember Freddy as one of the great horror movie villains when it turns out the character actually fucking sucks and is almost surreally non-scary. 

That’s a great starting point for a horror movie.

Freddy Krueger is such an impotent, ineffectual putz that he needs to recruit the services of Jason Voorhees to put the fear of God back in the teens of Springwood. By “God,” I, of course, mean “Freddy Krueger.” 

Freddy manipulates Jason into doing his evil bidding by pretending to be his mother and chastising him. This is, of course, so fucking stupid I can hardly believe it, but the whole movie is just the absolute worst. 

Freddy (left), Jason (right)

In a real switcheroo, Jason, who previously traveled to New York and outer space, takes a trip to Springwood. He has some time to kill and some kids to kill as well. 

The first two acts of Freddy Vs. Jason takes place in Springwood and feel, unsurprisingly, like a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Unsurprisingly, it feels like one of the worst Nightmare on Elm Street sequels because it is one of the worst Nightmare on Elm Street movies and one of the worst Friday the 13th movies. 

Jason seems lost and confused anywhere outside of Crystal Lake, his beloved Broadway, where he presumably took in all the sights of the Great White Way when not slaughtering naughty teenagers and, of course, outer space. 

Jason feels like a natural, organic part of Crystal Lake, and New York, and outer space, but he feels lazily shoe-horned into a movie series that proves a decidedly awkward fit. 

The Nightmare on Elm Street movies are more cerebral, visual, and idea-oriented, whereas Friday the 13th is all about the visceral thrills of a giant dude in a hockey mask chopping misbehaving adolescents up with a big-ass knife for fucking and drinking and enjoying their beauty and youth. 

Freddy Vs. Jason splits the differences between these very different and not-at-all simpatico cultural institutions by combining their faults while lacking all of their virtues. 

The result is brutal yet unimaginative and goofy without actually being any fun. Every scene feels like a mistake, but nothing feels more off-brand than the big guy with the knife doing his thing at a cornfield rave. 

Nothing says “2003” quite like a cornfield rave, except for supporting characters who are clearly supposed to be Jay and Silent Bob by different names. They admit as much in Never Sleep Again. 

The fiercest exception is a scene late in the movie where Kelly Rowland straight up ROASTS Freddy Krueger by challenging his manhood and sexuality and implying that the reason he feels the need to murder children with a knife-glove is because he has an embarrassingly insufficient dong.

Beyonce became arguably the most important artist of her generation. Her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland’s post-Destiny’s Child career peaked with roasting Freddy Krueger. That seems cruel, considering that he’s already been roasted pretty badly, particularly his face.

Freddy Vs. Jason tracks the complicated relationship between its killers, from an uneasy alliance to murderous rivalry. At first, Freddy is happy that Jason is killing lots of teenagers and spreading his name and reputation far and wide. But then he gets mad. Jason is too good at murdering. He’s kicking his ass. He’s so good at killing kids that he makes Freddy seem like a child-loving, non-murdering saint by comparison. 

So, in a wholly unexpected development, the movie Freddy Vs. Jason climatically pits Freddy against Jason. Imagine a fight between these two titans in your mind. It doesn’t matter how lazy or unimaginative you are: you still thought up something infinitely more colorful and exciting than what’s in the actual movie. 

Freddy just doesn’t have the same power in a world of CGI and digital effects. He needs the homemade warmth of skilled craftsmanship, not empty code. 

The more you think about Freddy Vs. Jason, the stupider you get so I am going to end this article before contemplating the screenplay’s plot holes and inconsistencies renders me incapable of logic or coherent thought and I end up voting for Trump. 

The movie single-handedly made the world a dumber, cheesier place, a nightmare dystopia where awkward young men who will never know the ecstasy of a woman’s sensual caress didn’t have to guess who would win if Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees were to fight because a movie exists with the most underwhelming and disappointing possible answer.

Even Jason Voorhees deserves better.