Director: Ronny Yu (Bride Of Chucky, Bride With White Hair, The 51st State

Budget: $30million

US Box Office: $114.9million

• Unskippable adverts on the DVD. This company REALLY wants me to hate their films don’t they?
• I now refuse to watch Underworld on principle. On the principle that it looks awful.
• As does Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the Michael Bay version, which is odd as I didn’t think chainsaws could explode)
• Random fact: at one point Peter Jackson was on board to direct this. Nothing against Ronny Yu but that’s the second time a studio has turned down a chance to let Peter Jackson do a Nightmare On Elm Street film. Idiots.
• Should point out: I won’t be counting the deaths in this one for two reasons
  1. There’s too many
  2. Not all of them are Freddy’s so would be wrong to compare body counts
• Opening scenes show Freddy pre-death.
• In a really disturbing scene, Freddy kills a small girl, then licks a photo of her.
• Freddy origin story. I usually abhor this kind of thing, but it makes sense here as it was a while since the last Freddy film, and plus the Friday The 13th crowd might not know much.
• Really good shot of Freddy’s eyes.
• Yay, flashbacks to the earlier films. First death shown: the human puppet death. Evidently it’s not just my favourite one.
• Also explains why there haven’t been any new films in a while.
• “being dead is okay, but being forgotten, now that’s a bitch” Oddly poignant line there.
• Montage of Freddy being bitch slapped by everyone.
• Boobs! *sigh* Not needed. Could have been achieved through just shooting from the neck up and leaving it to imagination.
• She puts a jacket on, but evidently the power of fanservice means one of the breasts attempts to escape and just hangs there outside her jacket as she runs. So disappointing. Horror films do know there’s a difference between “scared stiff” and “scared whilst stiff” right?
• “you know what your gift is? No matter what they do to you, you cannot die” erm thanks, I got you a gift voucher, I feel our gifts are slightly uneven.
• “make them remember what fear tastes like!” Chocolate covered gherkins?
• Main character is called Lori, and her boyfriend disappeared, I bet that won’t come up later.
• Hey it’s the member of Destiny’s Child who isn’t Beyonce or the other one.
• “i only smoke when i drink” “but you always drink” “well that’s what I’ll work on next” Will admit, that made me chuckle.
• “don’t be a total cocksmith” is that like a blacksmith, but with penis’s?
• “i like the flow of your place, got good feng shui”, I hope this guy dies, slowly and painfully.
• “babe, don’t make me ask you twice” All of you just die.
• FFS more pointless boobs. This one’s even more annoying as the actress had a no-nudity clause in her contract so they had to hire a body double. See, the fact that no-nudity clauses exist are why their needs to be a greater representation of female film-makers. And the fact that directors pressure women into breaking that clause is why there these women need crossbows .
• Hey, the guy died. Good.
• So just saying “freddy” is enough to somehow make people who aren’t aware of Freddy Krueger scared of him. It could have been any Freddy: Mercury, Adu etc. That would be a much weirder film, people being haunted and killed by an American soccer player.
• Lori dreams of walking past a set of posters of missing children, who turn to face her as she walks past. Proper video-game style scare. On that note: I was going to blog about Eternal Darkness today, and why that film is fantastic. I won’t now though as we’ll be having a special blog written by a guest contributor that will be very cool and we hope you enjoy. Oh, also in the dream there’s a girl with gouged out eyeballs who tells her more about Freddy and his love for little girls. I love gouged out eyes in horror, such a visceral image.
• And now the feng shui guy is dead (I think, all white frat boys look the same to me). Hacked by a machete after waking up and seeing his dad’s head fall off. I hate when that happens.
• Hey, there’s a mental institution with a guy in it with same name as Lori’s ex who disappeared randomly. What a crazy coincidence.
• Hey, it’s young not-John Cusack (no, not Miles Teller, the other one).
• “you had to sleep at a police station, I’d have had nightmares too” of course you would, you’re black, you’d get knocked the f*ck out.
• Hey, the institution guy is her ex. Who saw that happening?
• And luckily the guy not-Beyonce tried to hook her up with is now dead, so no moral questions of whether they’re still in a relationship or not. Lucky!
• Oh, side note: Lori’s ex is called Will and is played by John Ritter’s son. So close to awesome.
• “this fucker’s going to spread like the plague, kid’s are going to be falling asleep” Fairly certain that’s normal.
• Jason appears at a rave and doesn’t dance. If this were CinemaSins they’d be a ding right there. Of course, if this was CinemaSins we’d have a bigger audience so….
• He grabs a weird metal pipe, kind of like I do when I play Condemned. If he spends the next hour picking up dead birds this film is gonna suuuuuuuck.
• Not John Cusack delivers a “Reason You Suck” speech to not-Beyonce. She deserved it.
• “let’s go shake our ass on the dance floor”, says the only black character, yay stereotypes.
• A raver basically rapes one of the characters. Some people would disagree but for me, she’s passed out, he tries to fuck her, that’s rape.
• He dies. Good.
• So does she, not so good. But she was kind of annoying, that’s bad too.
• Jason steals Freddy’s kills. Come-on man, don’t be a shock-blocker (lame I know, but not many synonyms for kill rhyme with block, if he killed him with a kitchen appliance I could have said wok-block).
• That reminds me: if a serial killer kills another serial killer does it work like conkers so he gains all his kills?
• Jason appears in a cornfield and is heckled by two stoners. Because obviously if you see a serial killer (and in this universe Jason is real so you’d have to assume they know him) carrying a machete, you mock him.
• Jason kills someone with a neck massage. Then goes to kill the fat stoner who attempts to run away.
• Fat guy dies, this is why cardio is important, kids.
• The guy spits blood at the screen when he dies. Fantastic shot.
• Random fact: there was originally going to be a scene which showed that Freddy had raped Jason’s mother, thereby giving Jason motivation to go after Freddy. This was then changed to Freddy molesting Jason when he was a kid. This was then dropped for being “too dark”. I’d have dropped it for being kinda stupid and contrived, “too dark” is a stupid reason considering the amount of deaths in this.
• Hey, it’s Titus’s brother. In a photo, and yet is one of the only actors I recognise in this film without having to look them up.
• Freddy sets someone on fire, telepathically, then throws them across the room and writes a message in his back using burn marks. Personally, when I want to get a message across, I use e-mail, but I suppose he’s stuck in his ways.
• A stoner, who’s totally not based on Jason Mewes
• “freddy died by fire, jason by water, how can we use that?” I dunno, find someone died from air?
• “not a virgin, even if you pay for it it still counts”
• I think I’ve figured out the problems with these films. Too many dream fake outs. Moments where you think it’s reality but it turns out to be a dream. It pulls that trick far far too often.
• Crushed to death by door. There must be a joke there but I’m simply not seeing it.
• Not-jay follows a bong-smoking giant worm.
• Jason accidentally sticks his machete in a computer console, electrocuting himself and a cop who’s name I can’t remember but he looks like he’s called “Jesse”.
• Side note: how often do you think Jason has to sharpen his machete? Just a random deleted scene where we saw him hunched over a knife sharpner. And what does he do if it breaks? Can’t imagine there’s many places that would fix it. “Oh that, it’s just cranberry sauce, I was chopping up cranberries, why didn’t I use a normal knife? Erm, *hacks to death*”
• Stoner gets hacked to death at the waist in a scene reminiscent of using the bastard sword from ED.
• Jason chops of Freddy’s arms, I would make an “don’t worry about him, he’s ‘armless” joke but Freddy’s arms grow back and he makes the “wanker” hand gesture. And my room for jokes is “never be less funny than the thing you’re making jokes about”. That’s why I don’t make jokes about [insert public figure that you, dear reader, do not personally like]
• Change of colour scheme there from red to green. Is weird as always associated red with Freddy, so it’s odd that the power struggle shift where Jason becomes weak is signified by the colour no longer being red. I’d have thought it would be the other way around.
• I haven’t seen any Friday the 13th films so I may be wrong: but Jason isn’t afraid of water is he? So why is he here? The villain in the first film wasn’t Jason, he didn’t appear until the very end where he came out the water and killed someone. So if he was scared of water his first appearance wouldn’t work. Freddy works in dreams and has infinite powers there, you didn’t need to give Jason a weakness to make it an even fight.
• Finally, over an hour in and we get the Jason origin story. Basically, he was bald and kids bullied him, put a bag over his head and throw in the river. Kids are awful people. Surely that goes beyond a prank is more, erm, what’s the word, homicide?
• “what do you want me to, give him mouth to mouth?” dude, it’s not gay if it saves a life.
• “Kia, he has asthma!” Worst dramatic line ever.
• Beautifully lit scene where Freddy jumps out the water. One downside is the lighting makes him look like Darth Maul, or that weird thing from Insidious.
• “always had a thing for the whores in this house” Dude, I know you’re a psychopathic child killer/rapist, but is there any need the misogyny? Freddy’s not a gentleman, he has a hat yet he never doths it.
• Freddy says “bitch” far too often. It’s making me uncomfortable.
• Generic rock music, track 4.
• “it’s just a scratch” says a dying person. Sadly, not a monty python reference
• Slow pan down to blood pouring from him to make it clear he’s dead, as if we didn’t know already.
• Again with the calling women bitch?
• “how sweet, dark meat” That’s racist!
• “what kind of faggot runs around in a christmas sweater?” Kelly Rowland there being massively homophobic. Important note: it’s not the script being homophobic, she improvised that, it’s all on her. The writers detested it, because they’re halfway decent people. I bet if the writers were in Destiny’s Child then Beyonce wouldn’t have left. Basically what I’m saying is, Kelly Rowland is directly responsible for me having to google Beyonce songs to try to think of a joke to end this bit on, thereby making my google search history that little bit more embarrassing, and I couldn’t even think of one. F*ck you Kelly Rowland.
• Kelly Roland gets hit with a machete and somehow defies the laws of physics by not being cut, but by flying into a tree. If she survives I’m going to kill her.
• Several close ups as something heavy hits a wall. Not so much “chekovs gun” as “check out this really obvious thing that’s going to happen”.
• Freddy has lost his hat, now he looks more like a pizza than ever.
• Lori there carrying flames like the olympic torch. Oddly apt considering how many deaths and evictions the olympics have caused.
• Stuff happens, massive fight scene that goes on far too long and doesn’t feature any creative set pieces.
• Jason comes out the water carrying Freddy’s head. I guess that’s that settled then.
• Oh wait, Freddy winks at the audience. He’s still alive. I guess this whole endeavour was as pointless as the anatomy of a Ken doll.

Overall: not bad, but really weird when compared to the rest. From the increased death count, the language and the nudity, the whole thing makes it seem like it’s aimed at teenage males to go “wooo” at. It tries so hard to be mature that it ends up coming off as downright childish. It is very well directed though, has some truly beautiful shots, it’s just a shame the script is lacking.

The issue with these “vs” films is you can’t end them. You can’t show one defeating the other fully as it says the other franchise is weaker, so kills it right there. So you have to go with the fake out ending like they do here. It might have worked better as a video game, where you control one of the two and need to outlast/outkill the other. They’re DLC in Mortal Kombat, so we’ve got that I suppose