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I'm going to see this tonight, but in the meantime, this rather interested me...
From http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/freddyvsjason:
"Though it doesn't work at all as a scary movie, with even its jump scares curiously tepid, there's a possibility with Freddy Vs. Jason to engage in an anagogical discussion as rich and fascinating as any offered before by the already meaty respective series (Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, natch). Pitting Freddy Krueger--razor-fingered child murderer, victim of vigilante justice, and avatar of the sins of the literal fathers--against Jason Voorhees, hockey-masked victim of the cruelty of adolescence and the fear of sensuality, is amazingly fertile ground and handled herein with a seriousness that understands the death that post-modern cleverness represents for horror's slasher subgenre. This is not to say that the film doesn't make nods to Signs and 2001: A Space Odyssey, just to suggest that its story proper is firmly grounded in its own hermetic mythology, the curiously heady equation of its titular bogeys to some sort of modern holy pantheon.
Freddy (Robert Englund) has been defeated by forgetfulness, the god-killer, his omnipotence neutered as it were by his prey's ability to suppress his memory. To get the gears churning again, Freddy visits Jason (Ken Kirzinger) in Hell (which looks suspiciously like Jason's stomping ground Camp Crystal Lake and, therefore, heaven for Jason, right?) disguised as Jason's dead mother and "frees" the flesh golem with the idea that a spate of murders on Elm Street will resurrect the fear of him and restore his power. His plan working too well, Freddy's attempts to harvest his flock are repeatedly thwarted by Jason's unslakeable bloodlust, leading to the realization that Freddy, in order to properly collect his measure of obeisance from his acolytes, must destroy the monster that he has created. Freddy Vs. Jason is a Prometheus mythology in that respect, the titan releasing a scourge upon the earth for his own ends only to find himself made impotent and in agony for that transgression; yet Freddy Vs. Jason is also a retelling of the walk of 6th century Catholic saints St. Maurus (who saves a boy from drowning) and St. Faustus, the latter of whom, like Jason in this film, was pierced by arrows and, in his way, the chronicler of his companion's legacy. No kidding.
The gaggle of meat puppets assembled to be variously skewered (raped) and decapitated (castrated) include Destiny's Child diva Kelly Rowland (Kia) and Brittany Murphy look-alike Monica Keena (Lori) as the requisite reluctant virgin. Freddy punishes Kia for her desire to improve her perfect features in a deeply subversive scene that equates plastic surgery with butchery--a strange lesson, indeed, from such a teacher and one that suggests an aesthete's ascription to beauty as truth. For Lori, the death of her own mother and that requirement for a young girl to assume the role of female of the household is dissected by Freddy's sadistic masquerade as Lori's father. More, Freddy frames Lori's father for the murder of Lori's mother (by stabbing, of course), while Lori's father compounds the tension by offering nepenthe, Suspicion-style: "At least drink your juice!"
At its root, Freddy Vs. Jason is a deeply moral film that takes its cue from those tent poles of teen anxiety pictures: fear of sexuality, fear of responsibility, fear of bullies, suspicion of parents. Consider a central geek character who is given a level of nobility and a martyr's death, as well as a speech to vain Kia delivered with seriousness and allowed to stand unchallenged. The possible transference, then, of the Jason persona to the prototypical Geek--unloved, unlovable, horny--becomes one of many suggestions that Jason is not so much the hero of the piece as the projection of frustrated heroism: the elevation of manhood arrested as Greek tragedy (and, after all, didn't early Greek theatre revolve around the wearing of masks?), with a school bullying subplot (a throwaway line about Columbine, a school banner that says "Harassment and Violence: Not At Our School") illustrating how we all as a collective create the shape of our monsters.
I think it's overly simplistic to suggest that inexorable hockey-masked killer Jason punishes the camp counsellor archetypes responsible for his drowning death for having sex, smoking pot, and partying--closer to the truth that the Jason mythopoeia revolves around a certain Keatsian "consumption sublime" poised at that exact moment of sexual awakening in the young male and its Freudian Oedipal complexities. Consider that Jason, for the most part, targets the males while Freddy tortures the women, their roles defined in this picture along strict lines of Oedipal dysfunction and paternal transgression. The phallic devices of mayhem employed by Jason distract from the idea (suggested by critic Alex Jackson) that Jason himself may be the manifestation of a penis, tumescent and ramrod straight: the murders--particularly the penetration murders (and here the film resembles most Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter)--are the kind of frustrated sexual performance circumscribed in Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (itself a description of a rape, a dream, and a disappointing reality--not so much "afterglow" as "after-disgust"), with Jason, unsated and indeed unsate-able, forever re-enacting the moment of his mother's death and his resultant inability to ever make appropriate mate choices (proper release)--robbed, as he is, of the mother at the moment of the all-important split. A scene where Jason repeatedly jackhammers a stud with a giant machete is filmed in such a way as to suggest a homosexual rape, while an extremely loaded sequence in which a young woman is about to be "saved" by a rape (in the midst of Keats' Ruth's alien corn, no less) is interrupted by Jason pricking her attacker with a jagged pipe, appearing to "save" her from a successful rape with an unsuccessful rape.
Too thorny to deconstruct in just a few lines, sufficed to say that there's something alive in this film, and it's not necessarily the undead fiends enjoying their second coming, nor the awful dialogue their victims are forced to spew. Freddy Vs. Jason speaks of Freddy as a contagion to be contained, furthering the idea of blood contamination in a thaumaturgical sense--the transformation of sin into a physical stain while recognizing that Freddy's power has always been more impishly magical at its essence than truly demonic. The centre of the film isn't the duel that takes up its last twenty minutes or so, but two images: the first an unbelievably clever effect of Freddy as a hookah-smoking caterpillar, the second Freddy's discovery that Jason is afraid of water and subsequent delivery of a "cold shower" that "shrinks" Jason from his priapic height to a limp, flaccid, more manageable size. Freddy Vs. Jason is fascinating stuff that works its campy measure of gratuitous gore and nudity to adequate effect while offering the sort of cohesive rule structure that allows for a deeper analysis. Arguably the best entry in either series (with the possible exception of the first A Nightmare on Elm Street), Freddy Vs. Jason, which even has the audacity to offer a princess' kiss to wake a sleeping paladin, is a B-movie that understands the freedom that the slasher subgenre offers the devoted to indulge in psychosexual opera. A minor shame that the film's pleasures are more of the mind than the trip-hammer heart."
Ummm... yes. Will come back later and... yes. |
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