The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 remake is a movie I picked to review around the holiday season because it is all about a family and the dysfunctional ways they have to live with one another. This was the worst movie I had ever seen when I was 14 and didn't know any other movies. I figured maybe I had been overexaggerating, and in the years since, I sort of had it built up in my head that this wasn't too bad in the grand scheme of things.

Well, I was right back at age 14. This is a huge pile of cinematic manure.

Director: Marcus Nispel

Starring: Jessica Biel, R. Lee Ermey

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This was back in the days when horror remakes were made by people who had no clue how to make a horror movie. Like, their idea of a good cast of horror actors was, cast a bunch of people who look like they belong on fashion magazine covers or underwear/swimsuit model ads. And Jessica Biel – can't forget her!

And their idea of dialogue was to just have every character be a total ass to one another for no reason! They just bitch and whine and argue so much that Leatherface is basically the new good guy of the movie. Congratulations if that was what you were going for. This is basically Tucker and Dale vs Evil from the perspective of the teenagers.

Unfortunately, Leatherface doesn't show up for like the first forty minutes of this movie, so until then it's a lot of arguing about nothing from these characters who have the personalities and looks of background extras in a shitty music video. Hell, they even pick up a hitchhiking girl who is depressed so much by their horridness, she kills herself right in their van:

Is that not what happened? I dunno. It is to me.

Anyway, they keep on arguing from then on what to do about the body, with some of them insisting it would be wrong to just dump the body on the ground. They try to pawn it off at a local gas station, but the lady won't have it or help them at all, except to say the cops could be there several hours from now. But they're going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, so they don't have time for that shit. So I guess driving around with a bloody corpse in the back seat is the new plan!

"Look, can we just leave the bloody corpse inside your store and go to our concert? We could leave it in the Produce aisle."

I guess they're trying to find a police station to pawn it off on, but they don't try that hard – instead of just finding out where the next police station is, they seem content with driving around randomly with no direction. Okay then! They do find a house with an old, legless man in it, and he lets them call the cops. The only problem is, the old man gets stuck upstairs and makes Jessica Biel help him up, as an excuse to grope her ass... because THAT'S what Texas Chainsaw Massacre needed, an ass-groping scene randomly.

The OTHER only problem is, Douchebag Boyfriend guy decides to come in and randomly poke around the house. Which is a terrible idea, because that's where Leatherface is lurking around! He kills Douchebag Boyfriend guy with a hammer while his back is turned. How did he stay so quiet and unnoticed before this? A big guy like Leatherface, you'd think Jessica Biel would have heard him and he would have killed her. But I guess he has very tiny, quiet feet and can move like a mouse. And because Biel is the main character, she gets immunity for now for no reason.

So she comes back out and finds the rest of her friends, all of whom are mildly concerned that Douchebag Boyfriend is missing but not that worried. They search for him by doing the Old Cliche Dumb Horror Movie thing: just walking around shouting his name. Maybe if they stand three feet over that way, the acoustics will carry and he'll FINALLY hear you shouting his name and come out from wherever he is!

I also love the stupid bullshit in all these movies where characters assume their missing friends are playing pranks on them. Who does that? Are they just such shitty people that they'd make you believe they were missing in a strange, unfriendly place? I guess I can see why they'd think this, though – one of their own guys decides to stick his arm inside a hole in a car and then pretend to get pulled inside, only to reveal it was a joke. What a douchebag. If I was the rest of them, I'd just leave his ass behind.

"Ha ha ha, I'm a worthless waste of human air and you should be ashamed for knowing me."

They do eventually get split up, and Biel and this other moron get stuck inside the Leatherface house again. The moron ends up in the kitchen, where he checks under every pot and pan on the stove and even looks in the fridge, finding all kinds of weird, wacky stuff. What is he expecting to find in there? Does he think his friend shrank down to a miniature size and is now hiding in the fridge behind the rotten meat this family no doubt keeps there?

"Bro, are you in there?"

Meanwhile, this crazy “sheriff” guy shows up, immediately spitting a disgusting brown loogie out of his mouth. That is so gross that I would've just been like 'nope, bring me another sheriff! This won't do at all!'

So he basically tortures the other three assholes for a super long time, and in a not-very-scary way – he has the nerdy glasses-wearing guy mime how the girl from the opening scene killed herself. I guess this is supposed to be threatening, but honestly it drags on waaaay too long and was never scary in the first place. Mostly it is just annoying to watch the sheriff guy mug for the camera and chew scenery like a starving man on a desert island given a rump roast. Jesus Christ is he bad.

Jesus, will somebody get the suicide help line on set for these maniacs? On second thought, eh, maybe don't.

I guess after that we get the reveal that the sheriff guy is working for the Leatherface family! Wow! I couldn't have seen that coming unless I had even the smallest morsel of a brain cell! Also, this barely feels like Texas Chainsaw at all. I don't care if you don't keep every little detail of the original, but this just feels like Shitty Midwest Horror Movie #933357.

Even the crazy family trope that was so integral to the original is toned down. The original family was totally unhinged, just mad and raving and constant screaming and noise. This one? Eh. Just kinda irritating and gross! Not that big of a deal. Pretty sure you could find some similar families in any rural outback state if you turned down a creepy enough road. Remember, the overall theme of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is “Mediocre boring stuff, because the crazed excess of the original was just not that important to bring back!”

Guess which one of these pictures is from a movie that's actually scary?

So Biel gets kidnapped and thrown in a basement, where she finds the one guy whose leg got cut off in another scene hung up on a hook. He doesn't really seem to be bleeding or in any great pain, and earlier we saw him trying to unhook himself from the hook and acting like he just got a hangnail rather than a meathook in his back – why would THAT hurt, after all? Biel ends up killing him to put him out of his misery. Got to love how there's no blood at first when the camera is on him, but then it's just all over Biel in the next shot.

Blood: who knows how it works? It's just magic!

Speaking of Biel being all wet, this movie sure does love to make up excuses for her to get her white T shirt wet and show off her boobs. That seems to be what they wanted to get across: Jessica Biel has breasts. How informative of them!

Honestly, though, as the movie drags on and on through the endless, boring, poorly done chase scene, Biel just keeps getting that tight white shirt wet! The movie seems to have an endless amount of excuses – the sprinklers are on in the random meat factory she runs into and that gets her soaking wet! Then outside, even though it was perfectly dry all movie, suddenly it's a monsoon of pouring rain that soaks her to the skin!

To offset this, the director and producers just thought about feminism and Susan B. Anthony a lot while filming, so this is actually OK in my books now.

Christ. Just call this 'Jessica Biel: Wet T-Shirt Contest Winner,' put it in the Special Interest section of the video store and it would've been more honest. I mean, I wouldn't be complaining if you did that – it'd be honest. But as is, it's not like she ever gets naked or anything, so what really is the point?

And this isn't some kind of porno. It's a fucking horror movie. Do the directors of this kind of trash think we have nowhere else we can look to see tits? If your only source of seeing boobs is to watch a serial killer slasher movie... you probably have a freezer full of dead animals that I think the cops should know about.

I know that was a lot of talk about boobs, but honestly, there was nothing else of interest happening. Fucking boring, shitty chase scene that has nothing on the terrifying 1974 version, and Leatherface is basically just Jason Voorhees with a chainsaw here. Total snoozefest.

I guess there is some subplot about a stolen baby, possibly from the woman who killed herself at the beginning of the film, though it's never elaborated on. Biel figures out the baby doesn't belong to them. I only bring this up because, in a totally unrelated scene, the baby goes missing from the Leatherface family's home! Now, come on. Don't jump to conclusions. Maybe baby's just taken his first steps!

But no, of course Biel took him. They drive away in a stolen car. I'm sure that infamous 'dinner scene' is coming up soon, right? I mean, any second now...

Wow. They just left it out, huh? Ah well. What was ever important about THAT scene in the original movie? You can totally just do TCM without it! Doesn't neuter it like a sad cat at all. Remember, the motto of this movie is 'Mediocre boring stuff that doesn't have the craziness or extremity of the original, because that wasn't important.'

This is horrible. I can't believe this ever was some kind of cutting-edge horror – but it kinda was, for 2003. This was sadly the norm for that time period, with awful disposable characters acting like jackasses so you would root for them to die in terrible ways, a lot of blatant and pointless sex symbolism that was never needed and, especially in the case of remakes, they missed the point of the original work. You don't have to keep everything identical – I like it when things change, I want to see your original interpretations of it. But to just miss the point this hard, and take out everything that was good...

Fuck Texas Chainsaw Massacre '03. Thank god this kind of slop isn't the norm anymore for the genre.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

The Room (2003)

This movie has been talked about over and over. It's the Troll 2 of our generation. Something in us is just fascinated by bad, bad movies, and not the kind that ends up boring. No – we like the fucking weird, whacked out bizarre crap that we can't stop talking about. The stuff that has the worst possible, most ridiculous scenes, characters and dialogue. The Room is exactly that, the pinnacle of that.

Director: Tommy Wiseau

Starring: Tommy Wiseau, Juliette Danielle, Greg Sestero

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you really don't know, this is a writer-director-actor project by Tommy Wiseau, a fantastic bizarre alien from unknown origins. It's about him playing this guy Johnny, a super great dude who has a vague job that is never explained, and his fiance Lisa, who cheats on him with his best friend Mark. If you don't get that, well, don't worry. There are enough sex scenes in this thing to replace all the porn in your backlog for the next two months.

Oh yeah, his man tits sure turn me on.

These sex scenes are, if you never heard, all filmed to the soundtrack of terrible, terrible fucking emo rock songs from the early '00s when this was filmed. Even 14-year-olds going through break ups would hear these songs and say, wow, those songs are fucking terrible. I also love how overly long these scenes are, as it's a great way to develop character. Oh wait, I mean show off Tommy's ass:

I'm sorry, I'm just so sorry...

After that sex scene which was longer than most actual sex scenes in real life, we get Lisa talking to her mother, Claudette. Lisa, despite acting like she liked Johnny before and having passionate sex with him, now says she doesn't love him and she wants to break up with him. Her mom is a pastiche of 1960s sexist cliches, spouting off about how Lisa can't provide for herself and needs Johnny's income to survive. I get the idea this woman has had about five past husbands, all of them having died mysteriously.

Oh, and there's one scene where she casually admits she has breast cancer and is dying. This is never brought up again, and nobody ever seems to care. It's literally never even mentioned again after this one scene. It's so backwards and wrongheaded, I'm tempted to think it's actually a brilliant commentary on something. But then again, that's what I say every time I see unspeakable and callous cruelty, so what do I know?

Johnny himself is a marvel, a man who can seemingly barely keep his fucking eyes open, while at the same time being able to hold down a job that keeps him busy all day, multiple friends who all love and revere him, and of course somehow he got Lisa, who was apparently a great person who would wait around for him all day and fuck him as soon as he got home, until recently when she decided she didn't love him for no reason. Phew. I need to take a breath. Most of the time, Tommy Wiseau looks like he is about to fall asleep on camera.

There's also Denny, a mysterious man child, anywhere from 19 to 35, who constantly appears in the doorway like a phantom. In his first scene, he enters their apartment without knocking or asking, says he wants to hang out, and they immediately go upstairs to fuck. He follows them, because what ARE social cues anyway? Are they ancient relics from a distant past? I guess it's pretty rude for them to go upstairs and have sex the second he comes over, but can you blame them for being in the mood? Look at that face:

And after they go upstairs, this happens, because we didn't have enough reasons to fear this character yet:

What the hell? Isn't this the kind of behavior and look of a man about to commit a murder-suicide? "He was a quiet man, so normal..."

Denny is the human mystery. He is the missing link. He is the reason mankind can't make sense of anything at all and can't find a true link with God. And he's here, in this movie. He is the one who holds all the secrets of the universe, and they can be found in his dead eyes as he stares at the moon each night with emptiness and nothing in his soul. He will be here long after the rest of us are gone. Denny is the alpha and the omega.

The movie is full of characters just appearing at random in rooms after previously not being there. The dialogue is all written as if spoken by a space alien who originally learned Cantonese and is now being forced at gunpoint to read an English sentence. The scenes just repeat and repeat, like some kind of horrible Ouroboros nightmare: Lisa has sex with Johnny or Mark, and then bitches to her mom about how she doesn't love Johnny. But she can't call it off because she doesn't want to be mean. So she'll just keep cheating on him instead, y'know, like a nice person. That one sequence happens like, six times within the first hour of the movie. It's like the characters are stuck in an endless loop. They might be in Hell.

Oh, and there's one scene where Denny has a run in with an extremely tall, menacing drug dealer who shoves a gun in his face. Johnny and Mark immediately rush out from nowhere, I guess having been hiding and waiting for the best moment to intervene, and carry off the drug dealer with no resistance from him. He is never seen again. Johnny claims they took him to the police, but how do we know that? I think this deserves more scrutiny. But not too much. Only as much as Johnny and Mark would allow without taking me “to the police” too. Cough. Hack. Wheeze.

Look for a body washed up on the riverbank in a poor area of town...uh, I mean, DON'T do that...

Meanwhile, Denny, Lisa and Claudette have perhaps the least convincing and least helpful intervention ever, as they basically just stand around pulling on each other's clothing, crying and shouting at one another.

Let's instead talk about how all the characters constantly hold footballs for no reason. Mark is the kind of guy who sits on the rooftop of his building to think, with a football in his lap. I guess that's what gets his brain going. Footballs in general are treated like sacred objects in this film. They are everywhere, and the characters play football apropos of nothing multiple times. It's like Tommy Wiseau really just wanted to include every American stereotype, the most hollow markers of what it means to be a man in this country.

Except Denny. He will never be a man. Because, frankly, he is more than a man. He is a god in human form.

There's also a scene later where, at a birthday party for Johnny, Lisa reveals she's pregnant, and then secretly confides to her friends that she was making it up for fun. Wow. That's an unabashedly shitty, awful thing to do. But she still doesn't break up with him, because again, she doesn't want to be mean to him! Wow. It's like Tommy Wiseau is just painting her out to be the perfect, unrealistically awful girlfriend, almost like he wants to tell this story about her to make a hamfisted point.

The ending involves him finding out that Lisa and Mark were fucking behind his back, and going on a tantrum and destroying everything in his house. Then he just straight up shoots himself in the head. Wow, is he really putting himself at the center of this thing, like some kind of forlorn, Greek tragic hero? He's saying he's completely blameless in this, an innocent victim, preyed upon by people out to do him harm for no reason other than their own malice! They're practically Disney villain-esque!

Favorite part about this scene is how Lisa asks if he is dead. Uh, I dunno. Check his pulse.

Hey, don't you know that's how you get corpse AIDS? Get your mouth off his filthy head.

It's so completely crazy and one sided. There's no reason for these characters to act the way they do. It's like Tommy is this unreliable narrator, just telling you he's the greatest guy ever and his evil witch of a girlfriend cheated on him, and aren't women just the WORST? It's totally ludicrous. That along with the horrible acting, the writing, the random scenes that come out of nowhere like hurled balls of flaming garbage and then evaporate into nothing - it's all just so fucking insane.

And yet, the film comes off as surprisingly genuine.

Yeah. I mean, it's still hilarious to watch, don't get me wrong. But there's a lot of heart and passion in The Room. This movie has soul and feeling to it that many others do not. It was all 100% Tommy Wiseau, with everything that happens reflecting his own warped, but strangely endearing, worldview. He lives in such a simplistic world. Everything is black and white – he did nothing wrong at all and is trying to be the best man he can be. But everyone turns against him, for no reason – it's kind of a weird, Kafkaesque world where nothing makes sense and so the sadness and misery the main character experiences are that much more affecting. Or, well, they would be if this was a different movie, let's not get any illusions here. But you can see the intent! That's important to me.

There's just such a bizarre, unique, unfiltered, raw passion to The Room. It was a labor of love for Wiseau. He told this fucked up, weird, badly told story the way he wanted. That's kinda cool to me – it's respectable. He just went for what he wanted to do and didn't compromise at all. That's a fuck of a lot better than watching films controlled by corporate whore studios and measured for maximum ratings with focus groups and box office sales in mind. The Room is a piece of art, if you allow that art and things you can laugh at are not mutually exclusive.

There's an integrity to this, no matter how goofy it gets, that lends itself to a raw, weird passion. You don't get that all the time with big studio movies, with their super-controlled and calculated ideas. This is a rare moment of complete honesty. It's unabashed, wild honesty – Wiseau's account of what happened is childish, biased and completely human. It's what you'd hear if your best friend called you up right after a difficult break up. He's telling you his side of the story, as dumb and over-dramatic as it is. Every interaction and every reaction to things is so earnestly childish, colored with the naivete of a foreign child seeing America for the first time after hearing about it all his life. Every scene shows how Tommy sees America and the world. There's no filter and it's fascinating.

You know, maybe I was too quick to judge The Room. Maybe using movies like this for cheap mockery and memes was the wrong approach. Maybe despite the ridiculous qualities this movie has, it can also show us something interesting. It can show us interesting things about people and how we make art, and how this one warped view of reality created a whole world around itself, which became The Room. Maybe there's more to most movies than a funnily-delivered line of dialogue, or a goofy accent.

I think The Room is pretty great. You should give it a shot and enjoy it for all the ludicrousness, but also the passion and the individuality behind it, the bizarre accident of birth that created this whole mess.

Happy New Year.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

In the 1980s, movie fans united as one as a voice to the ever-present and deafening winds of Hollywood, crying out for a crossover film between Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Film studio executives, being perceptive as fuck, waited until 2003, long after both characters were past their primes, to give fans this crossover. And so now, for all the people too nerdy to watch pro-wrestling, we have Freddy vs. Jason.

Director: Ronny Yu

Starring: Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Jason Ritter

IMDb

Apparently the idea for this production goes all the way back to 1987, and possibly even before. Like all great films, this went through a rotating carnival circus of new production studios, script drafts, writers and everything else under the sun before finally surfacing as what we have before us now. Apparently one of the old script drafts involved Freddy at one point being a camp counselor at Camp Crystal Lake who molested Jason.

...I wonder how that would have gone. Freddy would be like "Hey, Jason, I once touched you in a bad place!" Jason would be like “....” and then would keep slashing. Only then the audience would just have a very uncomfortable picture in their head, which is important to avoid in a movie about two serial killers hacking up teenagers. So I guess they concluded that plot wouldn't have been very eventful.

Another draft included a cult called “Fredheads,” which sounds more like devotees of a bad 90s pop boy band member. In this draft, there would be a cult based around Freddy Krueger trying to sacrifice a little girl. Her older sister would put her dead boyfriend's heart in Jason's body so he could fight Freddy. This sounds better than the other idea, but it still raises a few problems. How would that whole 'dead boyfriend's heart' thing go? That's gotta be awkward.

“Kristy! What are you doing?!”

“Cutting John's heart out! It's okay; he got a stroke last week after eating too many Hot Pockets! I figured putting his heart in a serial killer would be the best way to honor his memory!”

“You need help!”

There was also an ending in which Pinhead made an appearance. I guess they ditched that one because they figured that while Freddy and Jason were washed up has-beens at the time, they were at least better than fucking Pinhead in terms of film quality. I mean even Jason X is better than most Hellraiser sequels.

Well, I think that about sums up everything I need to talk about in regards to this thing. I think it's clearly established now that the finished product is by far superior to all the other ideas that almost happened. So what now? Oh, I know. Let's actually do the really stupid part of all my blog posts where I go through what actually happens in the movie. Ugh. It's my least favorite part of every review, too. I feel your pain.

We start off with Freddy Krueger where he deserves to be, in hell – or rather, a metaphorical extension of the shitty scripts bin in Hollywood studios. He's angry because nobody remembers him anymore. It's okay, dude, you'll be played by Jackie Earle Haley in the remake a few years from now. That will really revive your character.

I know, dude. I, too, feel your pain.

He gets the idea to summon Jason back from the dead too, to go kill a few teenagers in Springwood to make them remember Freddy. Which is really kinda a stupid plan, when you think about it – I think if you have a big hulking abomination in a hockey mask cutting people in half, that will really only make them afraid of him and not you, you weirdo dream-monkey, you.

Then we get our main characters Lori and Kia, who think it's totally cool to talk in normal-volume voices about how much Lori hates the guy Kia is trying to set her up with, when he's right around the corner in the next room. I'm sure you guys are the catches of the century. I'm sure he won't be offended by this at all – which I guess he's not, seeing as he rather creepily puts his arm around her within like a second of meeting...

"Please, allow me to invade your personal space. PLEASE LOVE ME!!!"

Then two of the others, Gibb and Trey, go upstairs to have sex. Afterward, to prove he's hip to all the new fads for what to do after sex, Jason shows up and stabs the fuck out of him. Kind of a buzzkill, but hey, different strokes for different folks.

Kind of a turn off, according to 9 out of 10 victims. The 10th one was just a real freak.

Gibb, in the shower, doesn't see anything that unusual about the blood on the floor, but it's only when she actually sees him dead that she freaks the fuck out.

Lori, in the police station, falls asleep for a few minutes and then wakes up and is baffled at how she missed the fact that the police station was actually doubling as a stage for the fall production of Jacob's Ladder everyone was putting on:

So I guess the backstory here, if you want to call it that, is that when they were kids, Lori's boyfriend Will disappeared, and he hasn't been seen her since then. It turns out he's been put in the worst mental hospital since 12 Monkeys, as we clearly see when they just leave the TV on to the news when a grisly series of murders has just happened – not only would that make them agitated, but in this case, it's also the exact same case of murders that the hospital was trying to protect the kids from in the first place! Safety shmafety. Just let em run wild with firearms and knives if they fuckin' want to. They're all adults, after all!

Will and his friend break out, and go to the high school to try and find Lori. They just break in with no consequences, and Will's buddy tries to talk to them by doing the whole Freddy “one two coming for you” song – which of course freaks everyone out, because Will's buddy has the social skills of a drunk migrant worker on cocaine.

"You can also find me in the drunk tank at 3 a.m. or outside my next serial killing victim's window at 5 a.m."

Will, not to be outdone, merely shows his face and causes Lori to faint and lose consciousness. Wow. What a guy.

He's a real ladykiller.

The police decide now is a good time to act, springing up and chasing the two intruders off the premises. They hide in their super-cool van, which I'm sure they had plenty of fucking time to decorate while doing all this other important shit:

The next ten or fifteen minutes is all about discovering the backstory to Freddy and how the town covered it all up. One of my favorite dumb plot points in this is how all the kids apparently “heard the cops mention” Freddy's name after the first murders. Yeah, real good job there, guys – you spent years specifically trying to make everyone forget Freddy so he couldn't kill anymore, then at the first sign of trouble, you're blabbing his name all over the place like teenage girls gossiping about who they slept with. Come on. At least put in a little effort.

Aside from that, it's pretty much the same kind of stuff in every movie – they discover that Freddy is America's favorite pedophile, who was burnt alive years ago and now comes back to haunt peoples' dreams. Yawn. 3/10 for storytelling factor by way of the fact that I've heard it all before.

Another prominent main character is Linderman, a nerdy, skinny guy whose apparent mission in life is to get Lori to notice his existence. That's difficult, though, because Lori's friend Kia is apparently the ultimate cock-blocker. She compares Linderman to “one of those frou-frou dogs that keeps humping your leg,” because having tact and politeness is her strong suit. I guess, to be fair, she IS right though – the kid's pretty desperate.

The first real action scene of the film comes when the students do the most logical thing when it comes to mourning the deaths of their murdered friends – have a corn-maze rave in their honor. You know, the traditional middle-America send off. It's the Viking Funeral of...well, funerals.

"So are you really just the compilation of every nerdy geek stereotype in the world?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"That really sucks."
"You're still not going to have sex with me even out of pity, are you?"
"Not a chance in Hell."

At the rave, Gibb gets really drunk to mourn her dead boyfriend and then goes and passes out in the cornfield. She wakes up in a dream, finding Freddy's boiler room in the windmill – you know, the windmill. Where all boiler rooms are located, really. She wanders around for a bit, gets chased around by Freddy, and then locks herself in a locker. I think it really shows my age, though, that when I watch this now, the scariest part of the scene is the glow-stick wearing fuckwad trying to rape her in the real world:

Without the glow-sticks it would be tragic and despicable. But WITH them it's now hilarious I guess...or maybe not. Maybe it's still despicable.

Fortunately he gets shiskebab'd by Jason shortly after. Freddy is angry because Jason stole his kill and Freddy needs those kills to come back to life! I guess it was kind of a dumb idea to let another serial killer loose in your town, then, huh genius? Really not sure what you expected to happen otherwise. I guess this is the reason Freddy Krueger isn't a shining example of entrepreneurship. Maybe he was in that bargain-bin hell for a fuckin' reason after all.

What follows after this is the only true example of the Burning Man festival:

It's not your parents' Burning Man - though, your parents were the same generation that gave us Jason Voorhees to begin with...hmmm....

He kills a bunch of people, but the main characters get away. They just kind of drive home, without any of the shock, awe or reverent fear-of-God terror you'd normally have after seeing a seven-foot tall psychopath in a hockey mask slaughter several of your classmates. Seriously guys – I don't think you really fully comprehend what just happened! But it's okay. I'll assume you're just in shock.

Lori's father is apparently an older, fatter version of Liam Neeson, who gets mad when Lori is driven home by Will, and promptly has to hold back any speeches about how he has a very particular set of skills and will find and kill him.

Here we finally get some of the backstory, as Will tells Lori that he saw her dad kill her mom years and years ago, and that's why he got shipped off to that mental hospital. Lori's dad tries to keep her from leaving, but she runs to join Will. They make it over to his friend's house just in time to see his friend get murdered by Freddy. What a cheery scene indeed. We also see Freddy has been working on his tattoo artwork since we last saw him. I sure am glad he's taken up that hobby.

He loses points for using a Comic Sans-ish font though.

The gang ends up breaking into that mental hospital to steal some drugs that can prevent them from dreaming and, by extension, prevent Freddy from killing them. We see the hospital is engaged in some truly legal things like this, where they have a bunch of patients catatonic hooked up to machines after experimenting with drugs:

They get the drugs, but the problem is, the random stoner character they brought along for no reason gets possessed by Freddy somehow – did he fall asleep while walking? I guess the conservatives were right: marijuana is evil. Anyway, he dumps the drugs down the drain after seeing a vision of a talking slug, and then gets cut in half by Jason. What a way to go, I tell you. My grandfather went the same way.

And no I don't feel like going through the convoluted explanation for all of these seemingly random events.

They then drug Jason with tranquilizers and load him into the Mystery Machine (yes, that's what it's called, even if it's just something I made up). I guess their plan is to wake him up once they drag Freddy into the real world and let them fight. Why do I get the idea the movie's producers were devil-whispering in their ears? “This is the reason you've been put on this Earth...to make this ridiculous match-up fight happen and MAKE US MONEY!”

Insidious.

So then we get the big fight. It's actually pretty fucking awesome. It's full of machete-slashing, throwing each other into walls and cutting off limbs – it's pretty much like what you'd expect from a Freddy and Jason mash-up, and why wouldn't it be cool? For all the flaws these characters' worst films have, this fight is pretty damn entertaining.

It is. It features moments such as Freddy taking cues from the Knights of Ni:

...to Freddy's terrible aim as he tries to impale Jason with a bunch of strategically-placed construction objects and still can't seem to get the big lunk to stay down:

...to Jason's triumphant Rocky-esque rise from the water after Freddy's discrimination. All it needs is Eye of the Tiger and it's complete.

In the course of this fight, all of their friends die. Afterward, Will and Lori just sort of go off and it's supposed to be a happy ending. I assume the next day they wake up and realize 90% of their class including most of their friends are now dead and that they watched them horribly murdered the night before. Then they probably get sent back to that mental asylum Will was trying to escape from in the first place and spend the rest of their young lives on an alphabetically organized lexicon of prescription drugs.

Yup. Sounds like a happy ending!

Freddy vs. Jason is a modern day epic on-par with the best adventure stories of all time. It is a timeless struggle and conflict in the mode of many Greek tragedies. That must have been why most of the characters died at the end, as it's clearly trying to emulate the bittersweet and bizarre nature of a Greek tragedy. Freddy and Jason, to that end, are obviously homages to the great gods of Greek mythology. If superheroes are our new mythological figures, well, obviously slasher villains are our new mythological monsters. But it's better, because it's Freddy and Jason, and they had twenty years before this to set up their characters and what not. So it has to be better, and my logic is infallible. Don't challenge me!

Well, maybe I was exaggerating about all those parallels to Greek myth. Except I wasn't.

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