Freddy vs. Jason, according to Andrew Burgess

08Jun09

I’ve recently been doing some comparisons between the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, and the Friday the 13th series. After hours of intensive work, I’ve watched every film (and in some cases, I use the term “film” loosely) in each of these landmark series, and I’ve come to a conclusion. More on that later, though, as getting there is half the fun.

The Nightmare movies feature that classic sweater-clad  villain, Freddy Kreuger (pictured, right). I had always thought of Freddy as a terrifying ruler of some distant and lawless dream landscape, where your greatest fears became your undoing. But then I actually sat down and watched the movies for myself, and I realized that as portrayed by Robert Englund, Freddy is just a wise-cracking maniac with a razor-fingered glove. His jokes, twisted as they may be, fall flat, and ultimately any scariness he possesses is only what has built up in the collective archetype over the years. The second film in the series, Freddy’s Revenge, certainly had some potential, as the idea of becoming possessed by a maniac, and of unknowingly committing horrible crimes in your dreams has a lot of emotional weight. But, execution here (as throughout the series) is heavy-handed and leaning too far toward slapstick. Certainly, a low point in the series is the cameo appearance of stuck-firmly-in-the-early-nineties-mythology couple Tom and Roseanne Arnold. By this point, the series had run its course, and it seemed that the filmmakers knew this; even a ham-handed application of 3D dream-fish couldn’t save this one.

The Friday the 13th movies, however, with the terrifying Jason Vorhees (pictured, left), will always have a special place in my heart. First, Jason is a silent killer; he has no sense of humor, and he never cracks wise. He doesn’t resort to over-the-top methods when a blunt instrument will do the trick. And even scarier, he exists in the real world (despite the zombie-like status he achieved in the later entries in the series). Most notable for me is Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, in which a young Corey Feldman plays Tommy Jarvis, who kills Jason violently and finds himself scarred for life. There are real-world consequences for surviving a run-in with Jason Vorhees, and while the Nightmare films tried to show this in continuing characters (who almost always fall off in the beginning of the subsequent film), the mythology varies too wildly from film to film for the audience to establish any sort of connection. Not so with Friday’s Tommy Jarvis, who makes it through three entries in the series, and who’s mental health obviously deteriorates throughout.

And, after all, what’s scarier than being out in the woods, and realizing there’s a hockey-mask wearing maniac after you? Jason can’t be thwarted by caffeine pills, and in that respect, I declare him the winner of this horror-hound showdown (despite what the 2003 film, Freddy vs. Jason has to say, declaring the match a sort of double-knockout draw). Jason wins, friends.

Filed under: Movie Review, Reviews   |  1 Comment