Search - Freddy vs. Jason [Blu-ray] on Blu-ray

My favorite film from Freddy OR Jason!

Monty Moonlight | TX | 06/04/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"After many, many years of slashing teens, supernatural killers Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are both in Hell, but Freddy has a plan to get back to work. He attempts to use Jason to bring the fear of Freddy back to Elm Street, and after a while, it starts to work, but Jason just proves to be too difficult to control. Freddy quickly gets sick of Jason stealing his best kills and becomes intent on taking him out of the picture now that he's no longer needed. However, Freddy's latest nemesis, teen beauty Lori, is working together with her friends to try and use Jason to finish Freddy off once again. It ends in a fantastic and brutal fight to the finish at Crystal Lake that is the stuff horror fans' dreams are made of!



"Freddy vs. Jason" is, in my opinion, the most entertaining film from either franchise to date. It stays true to the characters' pasts and manages to come up with a very clever way to bring the pair together, and even the ending is very well done. The teens in the film are a good mix of the partiers Jason usually takes out and the more relationship focused ones Freddy often encounters. And, of course, at the focus is a female survivor, this time named Lori and played by the always gorgeous Monica Keena. I'll admit that I've always had a thing for Monica, but that is not the main reason I love this film. In fact, I really prefer her in earlier films, when she had a much more natural looking beauty, like in "Snow White: A Tale of Terror", which I highly recommend. Nor is the main reason I love this film the fact that it also has the lovely Katharine Isabelle from the "Ginger Snaps" film series. No, the main reason I love this is its clever way the characters are brought together and interact. Everything in the film is well-balanced, making it a near perfect "vs." film. Granted, you have a few of the teen characters that aren't as well played and/or a bit annoying, but no big deal since they are probably going to get slaughtered anyway, ha. Robert Englund is back in perfect form as Freddy, and while many fans were outraged that Kane Hodder was not used to play Jason, Ken Kirzinger does a fine job in the role and makes quite the imposing figure. If you're a fan of the franchises, you'll love the throwbacks to the characters' pasts and all the brilliant ways they tie things together here without going over the top. The fire vs. water concept really adds an interesting, poetic aspect to it all. The writers and director Ronny Yu really should be commended for doing a wonderful job with finally making this film a reality, as well as New Line for not making it until they had something really, REALLY good. They had so many scripts before this one that would have been a REAL Nightmare onscreen...



New Line serves up a great 2-disc DVD set for this excellent film, complete with an enjoyable commentary by the stars who play Jason and Freddy along with their director. Robert Englund definitely takes command of this recording session, but he's a pleasure to listen to and it's a really fun commentary, which, if you've listened to as many as I have, you know isn't always the case. If you're all about the kill scenes, Disc one also has a jump to a death feature, and you can opt to watch the film in either widescreen or fullscreen. Disc 2 is where the bulk of the bonus features are, including a nice bunch of deleted and alternate scenes that can be watched with or without commentary (there's also a little Easter Egg on that menu). Disc 2 also has some nice galleries, theatrical trailer and TV spots, a music video, featurettes on Visual Effects and Behind the Scenes stuff, and probably its best item (besides the deleted scenes), a 2 part look at a Fangoria article that describes the various script ideas that came before what we finally saw on the screen. Don't let the page numbers deter you. Read this all through. It goes quite fast, and it will help you appreciate the final film all the more. There were some really lame ideas they could have gone with, but thankfully, they didn't. Also on disc two is a humorous pre-fight press conference and a look at the neat premiere event set up by the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in Austin (my favorite theater; I'm practically going to live there when I move to Austin next month, assuming I find a job to pay for movie tickets) in which film goers took part in an all-day summer camp event that culminated in an outdoor viewing of the film. With innertubing, dodgeball, craftmaking, and a wet t-shirt contest, it looked like a real hoot! Sad that I missed it!



The New Line Platinum Series 2-disc DVD release of "Freddy vs. Jason" is fantastic. I highly recommend it if you're a fan of the film, either franchise, or even just like the characters and the idea of seeing them pitted against each other. But, frankly, this is a good buy even if you just like cute girls,... but I seriously think Freddy and Jason are at their best here, and it's just such an excellent example of how to do a "vs." film or even a sequel right."