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A nightmare on Friday 13

By Elvis Mitchell
NT TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Jan 30, 2004, Page 20

Freddy and Jason discuss the merits of existentialism and forget to call the fire brigade. PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX

The mildewed, rusted aroma that archeologists encounter when unearthing a tomb is the same that will hit moviegoers attending Freddy vs. Jason, an idea whose time has come -- and gone.

This grunge match is far more horrible than horrifying. In this winter of slumping sequels, the idea of trundling to a theater to see Robert Englund, returning as the razor-fingered Freddy Krueger, taking on the latest anonymous stuntman playing the hockey-masked slayer Jason Voorhees could only be linked to either a major home air-conditioning failure or an attempt to expose 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare as the deception it really was.

The only way that Freddy vs. Jason, which is playing nationwide, might have been any fun is if these two avengers from beyond the grave decided to team up and go after the cast of American Wedding. This dumb, only intermittently (though sometimes even intentionally) funny sequel presumes that since almost everything else from the 1980s has come back, why not the cynosures of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies? Yet people are also nostalgic for the world of four television networks, a young Macaulay Culkin and antitrust legislation. That doesn't mean they're coming back.

Englund returns as Freddy, the dream weaver who uses the fear in children's nocturnal flights of fancy as a source of energy; he functions on the premise that Monsters Inc has already turned into a comedy. Striding into each shot with his hat rakishly pushed down, Freddy seems to have forgotten that his Mausoleum Rat Pack stylishness has already been worn thin to transparency by overuse. Freddy naively assumes that it will attract people who don't own VCR's and have never seen a Nightmare film. Or else it's betting that potential audiences will presume that any movie with Friday in its title has to star Ice Cube.

This movie expends so much energy setting up the back-story that it will leave those in attendance bored because the battle promised in the title doesn't start for more than an hour. Meanwhile, the residents of Santa Metro -- or whatever this Canadian hamlet standing in for a small American town is supposed to be called -- are eliminated one by one. They include a rip-off of Jason Mewes' on-screen persona in Jay and Silent Bob, as well as Kelly Rowland, whose stumbling performance rivals the tumble her solo CD took from the charts. (She alone keeps Freddy from being as white as the royalty issue of Vanity Fair.)

Film Notes Directed by: Ronny Yu Starring: Monica Keena (Lori), Kelly Rowland (Kia), Jason Ritter (Will), Lochlyn Munro (Deputy Stubbs), Katharine Isabelle (Gibb), Brendan Fletcher (Mark), Ken Kirzinger (Jason) and Robert Englund (Freddy) Running Time: 115 minutes Taiwan Release: Now Playing

Freddy's smirky sauciness at least gives audiences something to root for, or against. The real problem is that Jason (played this time by Ken Kirzinger) is a nobody whose face has been hidden for 20 years. And the first Friday was released in 1980, so long ago that Kevin Bacon appears in it, and that appearance is not meant to be ironic. (The initial Nightmare, written and directed by Wes Craven, came out in 1984 and featured Johnny Depp.)

The best joke to result from a Friday movie didn't even come from one of the pictures. It is found in the poster for Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan -- an ax slashes through the heart of an "I Love NY" advertisement, with a hockey mask visible behind. So this is hardly a contest of personalities or, for that matter, wits. Most of the leaden wisecracks that Freddy gets off before dismembering victims are so rank you're not sure if you heard them here first or from that gubernatorial candidate, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on The Tonight Show.

Ronny Yu, the director, has an enormous amount of fun with the climactic battle. The frenzied B-picture magic realism he brought to his 1993 action-dreamscape, The Bride With White Hair, with bodies hurtling across the wide screen, brings such insane liveliness to the movie that it's a shame the film waits until the last half-hour to pit the title characters against each other. A shot of Freddy vaulting out of a river in slow motion bathed in red light is as lovely and potent as anything the director has done, though he spills as much blood as all the previous Friday and Nightmare movies combined in getting there.

But by the time this struggle of forgotten behemoths, with its halfhearted denouement, arrives, no one will care. The Freddy vs. Jason concept first surfaced over a decade ago when both franchises had a trace of, well, blood, left. There will not be a sequel to this movie, but in the unlikely event that there is, maybe it can get a makeover from the Fab Five of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Both Freddy and Jason are so last century.
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