Review #398: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #26 - Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

After yesterday's review of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, I'm skipping the next two Friday movies (Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X) because I've already reviewed those, several years ago. For anyone who might be following along (but unwilling to read those two reviews), I'll give a quick summary: in Jason Goes to Hell, Jason does not go to hell, he is instead revealed to be a body-hopping magic slug and he's trying to find a blood relative of his original body for some reason, until the final scene when he gets stabbed by a magic dagger and then Freddy Krueger's glove inexplicably pulls Jason's mask into the ground. And in Jason X, we skip forward several hundred years, when Jason's cryogenically frozen body gets taken to a space research station, and his body gets rebuilt by nanobots to make him a half-mechanical super soldier just in time for a fight scene with an enhanced sexbot. Needless to say, both movies are completely irrelevant to the plot of Freddy vs. Jason, which takes place at an indeterminate point in the series timeline and has almost nothing to do with the past few movies.

In Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy Krueger has become weak because nobody remembers him and therefore he can't enter anybody's dreams to terrorize them. So he instead goes into the dreams of one Jason Voorhees (not sure why a dead Jason has dreams, or why Freddy was able to go into Jason's dreams but not anyone else's) to provoke him into travelling across state lines to Springwood, Ohio, in the hopes that his inevitable killing spree causes people to remember Freddy himself, thus allowing him to grow stronger and kill once again. So a group of high school students get caught up in the whole mess, and have to figure out how to stop both of these supernatural villains- or at the very least, get them to fight each other.

Overall I think this is a fine movie (technically it's more of a Nightmare on Elm Street movie than a Friday the 13th movie, but whatever, I've covered all mainline entries of both now so it doesn't really matter), it does a lot of fun things but ultimately feels like a bunch of fanservice rather than an actual attempt at making a good movie. That's not really a knock against the film- I'm sure people at the time wanted exactly this movie so it was catering to its target audience- but looking back after-the-fact, especially as someone who has watched all of the movies leading up in quick succession, this one definitely feels a bit "lesser" from a filmmaking point of view. (But if it makes any sense, this movie looks like what I thought both series looked like, before I had actually seen any of them.)

This movie does some interesting things, mostly in line with the kind of stuff I've come to expect from these series. There's a scene transition where one of the characters (the girl that gets killed at the cornfield rave) seamless walks into Freddy's domain without realizing it- that part was superbly done. (For that matter, ALL of the dream sequences in this movie are fantastic.) Many of the kills are really clever and interesting, and although a lot of the fighting between Jason and Freddy is kind of silly (like when Freddy is playing pinball with a CGI Jason by thrusting his pelvis), there's a couple really cool sequences, like the fakeout right near the end where you think Jason is walking along the dock but it turns out to be Freddy. Small things, but really well-done.

There's some parts of this movie that make less sense the more you think about them- like how Jason suddenly is deathly afraid of water (despite having spent several movies entering the water all the time, in fact he has shown to be incredibly capable in the water), or how Freddy's whole plan in this movie is just complete nonsense from beginning to end. He's too weak to enter people's dreams because nobody remembers him, so he enters the dreams of Jason (someone who definitely doesn't remember him) and possesses him go commit murders. Even ignoring the fact that many people clearly still remember Freddy, if all it took was any murders whatsoever in Springwood to remind people of Freddy Krueger, why did he need to bring back Jason? Why not just go into the dreams of literally any adult (which he clearly can do, he apparently possessed Lori's dad to kill her mom) and just have them go commit a few murders? I don't understand why Jason needed to come into play at all, except because the movie needed to be about Freddy fighting Jason. This movie also has a couple things that don't hold up twenty-plus years later (like Kia using the f-slur, right after Freddy called her "dark meat"), so it was clearly a product of its time for better and for worse.

I wouldn't necessarily say this is a satisfying or cathartic movie to watch, as it could have been if this were actually intended to be the end of either series (it wasn't meant to be, as they planned on a Freddy vs. Jason sequel, but it ended up getting scrapped- though this movie did get some sort of a follow-up in the form of a comic book series that also included Ash from the Evil Dead series) but it was still fun to watch after having seen all of the others. I can't really comment on how good it was for people at the time, but nowadays, it's a nice romp driven by some long-deserved fanservice.

Overall Rating: 7/10 Mental Wards With Giant Sci-Fi Control Panels

Change Of Plans: This film went through many, many rewrites over the years, and allegedly there was a point when the ending was going to show Jason and Freddy continuing their battle in hell, at which point the Lead Cenobite from Hellraiser would walk out and say, "What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?" However, due to licensing issues with Miramax, this ending never got greenlit and was scrapped. Just imagine, though!