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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