Freddy vs. Jason

As early as 1987 executives at New Line Cinema were attempting to green light this battle of the cinematic titans between the notorious boogiemen of A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th. A full seventeen years later the collective breath of the horror film connoisseur need be held no more.

At first the inhabitants of Elm Street are happy having finally condemned char grilled janitor Freddy Kruegor to purgatory by ingesting giant quantities of drugs, the solution to everything it seems! However their doped up world is then shattered when bodies start to pile up again. They soon discover the cause is no longer Freddy, but hockey masked slasher Jason Voorhess who is taking a break from the holiday camps to say hello. Before long both Freddy and Jason are slaughtering innocent youngsters left right and centre before the inevitable climactic battle for supremacy between the two of them.

The horror movie market has been reinvented more times than higher education funding in recent years with films such as Scream, The Blair Witch Project and Scary Movie ripping up the rule book. This makes it difficult to know what you are likely to get from a slasher movie these days. With Freddy vs Jason it's simple, you have all the best bits of the countless Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th movies in one place with severed tongues placed firmly in cheeks and a finale to die for, literally. There is even a montage from the previous Nightmare On Elm Street films for people who need to catch up. The cherry on top of the icing of this bloody cake for many will be the decapitation of Destiny's Child warbler Kelly Rowland who gets what she deserves for a seriously wonky performance.

The big question is clearly who wins at the end. Even preview screening audiences couldn't tell you that. The version of the film they saw had the final 60 seconds removed to preserve secrecy. An early draft of the script even had Hellraiser's Pinhead turning up and kicking both their killer backsides. If you want to know what actually happens, you have to come along and find out for yourself.

David Goody