3 out of 5

Directed by: Ronny Yu

No, you’re right, it’s a horrible movie.  However, it nails the B-movie vibe Sean Cunningham’s previous Jason productions (‘Goes to Hell’ and ‘Jason X’) had toyed with, absolutely assisted by Ronny Yu’s cheeky zooms and pull-backs.  And may I be cursed for saying so, but regardless of whose actual decision it was, Yu or studio, I agree with the substitution of Kirzinger for Hodder as ol’ hockey mask.  Hodder made his mark in ‘New Blood,’ making Jason scary again, but subsequent films just leveraged his aggressiveness into casting Jay as a stonecold killer; Yu and Kirzinger bring back the unhinged version of the character we haven’t seen since part 2, which plays perfectly off of Kruger… which also happens to be one of Englund’s best performances in-character, unleashed by some computer effects to go as full on kooky as he did in part 3 of that franchise.

F vs. J takes a while to hit its ridiculous groove, though, struggling to explain to us that Freddy, forgotten by the citizens of Springwood (thanks to some careful ‘don’t say his name’ work on behalf of the town’s parents), lures Jason into doing some killing in his name in order to generate the necessary fear to feed Kruger back to power.  Freddy tells us near the flick’s opening, then, later, two other characters rehash the plot, because a whole batch of ridiculous edits make linearity a joke: often, it’s as though the same scenes were shot with different characters, different settings, then stitched back together, cherry-picked from the batch.  It doesn’t help that the flick is a bit overstuffed to get us to care about Lori’s troubled past (played wonderfully unconvincingly by Monica Keene) and her once-boyfriend’s (Jason Ritter) similarly troubled past… and then Brendan Fletcher, who’s there to be crazy and drop some Kruger exposition.  Thankfully, Yu at least keeps things moving, peppering awesomely brutal Jason kills into things along the way (thank the lord for lessened censorship by this point) before Freddy finally gets frustrated that Jason is suddenly stealing his thunder and we get to a half-hour worth of the promised versus.  Which is a kick.  The CGI is obvious, but Yu does it all in quick cuts or with color washes that give the whole scene a bit of a ‘heightened’ look, helping the effects to blend in.  But the somewhat cheesy vibe satisfies because, again, we’re just committed to being a B flick this time around, which is what both franchises had been waiting for.

As with ‘Jason X,’ the Friday the 13th flicks had finally found some footing that made them fun to watch again, except, y’know, X flopped and after F vs. J we started in on Platinum Dunes remakes.  Oooh well.