Between them, the "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" series have produced 17 movies — and "Freddy vs. Jason"
is better than all of them. I say that as a person who has viewed each of those 17 films and found little to admire. They are, most of them, bad movies. They are seldom suspenseful, the acting and dialogue are uniformly bad, and there is little regard for continuity. (Jason gets cremated in one film, then has his un-cremated body dug up in the next, etc.) I suspect most of the people who enjoy them do so ironically -- they like how bad they are, giggling at the predictability and audacious bloodletting while knowing, in the back of their minds, that it's all a pretty sorry excuse for a movie. Personally, I enjoy watching bad horror movies, but I do so knowing they're bad. I like to make fun of them. I like to laugh at the hare-brained ideas some filmmakers have come up with and thought were good. Culturally, I'm interested in examining how these two merciless personifications of pure evil, Freddy and Jason, have become something like heroes, the demons we love to hate.
To read the rest of this review, click on the relevant link below.