Comic Review: 'Jason vs. Leatherface' (1995)

In the mid-1990s, there was a comic book series in which the stars of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre became friends. Nope - for real, and here's the demonstrable evidence.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Nearly ten years before Freddy vs. Jason hit multiplexes, Topps Comics (yep, published by the same people who make all those baseball cards) released a three-issue limited series that gave us an entirely different crossover slasher throwdown - one that pitted the Crystal Lake boogeyman against none other than the entire hillbilly cannibal clan from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. 

And here's the really weird part - the whole thing was written by a woman. Yep, the scribe behind the three ish run was a chick named Nancy A. Collins, who in addition to penning a few Swamp Thing and Vampirella stories, also churned out a whole hell of a lot of vampire novels, so I guess you could call her a poor woman's Anne Rice. Even weirder, the primary artist was a guy named Jeff Butler, who did a whole buncha' movie tie-ins like Godzilla and Jurassic Park, although he's most famous for his Dungeons & Dragons artwork. He also co-created The Badger, but yeah - maybe you can see why he left that off his official resume. And rounding out the trifecta of weirdness, the cover art was drawn up by Simon Bisley, the guy who is most regarded for his work on Lobo and ABC Warriors. And you can tell from the very first issue - which features weird, abstract depictions of Jason and Leatherface as musclebound reptilian zombies fightin' in the swamp on the cover, with the tagline "the next Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on Friday the 13th!" posited in the corner - that this thing's going to be wackier than fuck.

Issue one, obviously, gives us all the key background stuff. Crystal Lake's been shut down and replaced by this thing called the Linhart Amalgamated factory. The splash page shows Jason stuck in the bottom of the polluted lake, with the narrator letting us know "has has his hate to keep him warm." Apparently, the EPA is clamping down hard on Linhart, so the CEO proposes moving the factory to Mexico, dredging Crystal Lake and building a new corporate headquarters right atop Jason's old stomping grounds. So the suits strike a deal with this dude to illegally dump some toxic waste, and naturally, this old coot shows up at the dock and says Jason's going to kill them all and they all laugh at him and call him crazy.

So Jason hops aboard a train and hacks off a hobo's hand and head, then he bifurcates his pet dog for biting his leg (which, as we all know, is something Kane Hodder would never allow HIS Jason to do.) I mean, killing harmless old dudes is one thing, but puppy murdering is taking it TOO FAR. Jason, of course, makes his way to the front of the train, literally slaps a dude's head 180 degrees around and machetes a motherfucker. This leads to a massive derailment and explosion, so who knows how many people just got killed. By the way, the design for Jason in this thing is weird as hell. He has this huge, pronounced, ultra-bumpy, chewed bubble gum head, which makes him look like one of those big-brained aliens from This Island Earth.

No, I can't explain why Jason looks like he's from Mars
Attacks! either.

Sure enough, Jason emerges from the wreckage without a scratch and now he's in Sawyerville, Texas, where he immediately runs into a guy being chased down by the Leatherface clan. Oddly enough, Leatherface's compatriots are all original characters, with one of them sorta' working as a composite of Chop Top from Part 2 and the psycho hitchhiker from the original movie (although he ultimately looks more like Tom Petty's character from King of the Hill on mescaline than anything else.) Anyhoo, he goads Leatherface into battling Jason by saying "git that sumbitch!" and there's a one page fight where Jason knocks the saw out of Leatherface's hand and machetes up the guy they were going to eat real good. Then Jason - going completely against type - gives Leathface his chainsaw back and the clan INVITES Jason to dinner because they reckon he's their kind of people. 

The narrator lets us know why Jason isn't killing everything that moves. "He could have killed them both. But he didn't. The emotions that fill Jason right now are alien to him as they are not hate or anger. He is uncertain how he should act." So he goes back the Sawyer farmhouse and we're introduced to a quasi father-figure named "The Cook" who is impressed by Jason's head severing abilities. Then Leatherface's aforementioned brother (who is simply called "The Hitchhiker") makes fun of him so he goes up stairs and cries in his bedroom, which is filled with all sorts of weird horror knickknacks, like Frankenstein heads, everywhere. Then the narrator lets us know Jason actually feels an AFFINITY toward Leatherface 'cause he reminds him so much of himself and he marches up stairs and tells him to come down with him (well, more like he just points at the door, but you get the idea) and we meet the rest of the cast. There's Grandpa, and Aunt Amelia, a zombie retard with a Barney the Dinosaur mug. They ask Jason what his name is so he dips his finger in Kool-Aid and writes "Jason" on the wall and that's what they figured was good enough for a cliffhanger heading into issue two. But before that, the comic concludes with an essay on slasher movies written by C. Dean Andersson titled "Halloween Chainsaw Hockey" that somehow connects the 1958 Richard Fleischer movie The Vikings to Halloween and Friday the 13th and ends with a recommendation that everybody read Robin Morgan's The Demon Lover when they get the freetime. You kn0w, this C. Dean Andersson guy seems like just my kinda' company. 

Alright, and now we segue to issue two, which begins with Jason having a nightmare about drowning. He's invited downstairs for breakfast (it's fried brains, in case you were wondering) but since he won't touch his plate, one of the Sawyer goons ask him if he's a vegetarian. Watching Leatherface's brothers bully him triggers a flashback for Jason, in which he recollects his father(?) abusing him as a youngster. The Cook shows Jason the deep freeze and tells him about his dream of opening a haute cuisine restaurant in Austin or Shreveport so he can buy a nice double wide trailer and watch Wheel of Fortune all day.

Some lost travelers go to the Sawyer-owned gas station and Hitchhiker fucks up their car so he and Jason can lay a trap for 'em down the road. All the while, Hitchhiker extols the joys of making his female victims "squawk" - especially the pregnant ones.

Shit, now we need to find a way to wedge in Sardu and
Ralphus from Bloodsucking Freaks and Henry and Ottis
from Portrait of a Serial Killer, don't we?

Hitchhiker shows Jason his Ed Gein-inspired workshop, complete with a stuffed Santa corpse and rocking chairs made out of human bones. Naturally, Leatherface shows up shortly thereafter and fucks up his sibling's latest project so he starts beating the shit out of him. This makes Jason think back to his daddy beating the hell out of him as a kid and how his mama - now named Doris, for whatever reason - put a stop to all that by greasing his brain with a meat cleaver. This sparks a near fight between Jason and Hitchhiker, but Leatherface stops right before Mr. Voorhees can drive a sharp bone through his bro's skull. Jason goes up stairs and the narrator lets us know he has conflicting thoughts. He never hesitates to kill anybody at Crystal Lake, but here in Texas, something is making him a little more wishy-washy. And before we formally wrap up the ish, we get another essay, this 'un penned by a guy named Ric Meyers who talks about Frankenstein being emblematic of the fear of death and Dracula being emblematic of the fear of sex. Then he talks about everybody in the 1950s living in an age of atomic bomb paranoia and communists taking over the government, before saying Psycho ushered in the age of "the human being as monster," which he suggests could be a metaphor for our fear of truly living. Aye, deep thoughts, Senor Meyers. Deep thoughts, indeed. 

And now we come to the third and final installment of the saga. They've been building up the big dinner scene for three issues now and we're finally getting it. The cook says he he hopes "everybody's ready for soul food, he's making some cooter pie," tonight, which I REALLY hope isn't what I THINK it is, so it probably is. So Hitchhiker gets into a fight with Leatherface for getting thumbprints all over his comics and he stabs Jason with a dinner knife and then it's an all out donnybrook. Jason decapitates the zombie retard aunt and the Cook buries a meat cleaver in Jason's back, but of course, he no sells it (and LOL at the Sawyers repeatedly calling Jason "a Yankee.") The clan hides out in the freezer and Jason bursts in. Now here comes Leatherface with his baby buzz saw to make the save. The narrator explains how Jason is jealous of Leatherface for having a family, even a fucked up one, and this makes him go psycho. Eventually the cook bashes Jason's brains out (literally) with a mallet and the gang wonders if they should eat him, but they decide not because they figure he'd taste too gamy.

So they bury him in a nearby lake instead. Of course, Jason is revived by the sense of deja vu, but instead of going back to the house and killing everybody, he decides to return home. And the final page shows him walking back to Camp Crystal Lake - which a billboards says is in Vermont, not New Jersey. Well, that's some weird ass shit, for sure.

And to think - a one-off comic series from 1995 would
give us the best explanation for Jason's bloodlust to date.

Well, not that you really need me to tell you this, but that thing was strange as shit. I suppose there aren't really any logical reasons why Jason and Leatherface would ever hypothetically go toe-to-toe, but the folks who drew this one up were really grasping for straws. It's kinda' weird how that whole Crystal Lake chemical plant thing got dropped - I mean, you'd at least figure Jason would want to show up at the tail end of the series and lay siege to the factory or something. Indeed, that whole plot dynamic was just iffy as hell. Is it supposed to be some sort of pro environmental metaphor, with Jason representing a symbolic ecological champion? And why were rich ass businessmen reduced to taking Amtrak, anyway? Mutant hillbilly cannibals and zombie retard mass murderers making friends, I can sorta believe, but that C-level industrial tycoons wouldn't have better personal transportation options demands I suspend my disbelief way too high.

Speaking of which, so Jason's on a train to kill some mofos that accidentally resurrected him from the dead, but he takes, what, 10 or 12 hours to do it? New Jersey to Texas takes fucking forever, so what did he do off-panel to kill the time? I know, I know, that's the kind of stuff that makes me half retarded for even wondering, but still - plot holes like that really gets my goose. 

Of course, the characterization of Jason as a more HESITANT psycho killer in this book might miff some fans, but shit, that's pretty much the only way you could've gotten more than three pages out of the concept, let alone a full three issues. If anything, the depiction of Leatherface ought to be what irks hardcore horror fans the most - I mean, the dude is reduced to a crying little pussy for half the series. We're supposed to think this blubbering baby is a credible threat to Jason friggin' Voorhees, even if he is going through his slightly emo phase? Get out of here with that noise. 

That said, I really liked the supporting cast, and the weird rockabilly-like aesthetics were a hoot and a half. There's practically no plot getting in the way of the  story here, and there's absolutely nothing political or socially-cognizant about the book you have to cogitate on. It's pretty much a trashy, pulpy, read-once-and-discard series, but it nonetheless makes for an entertaining seasonally appropriate read. And in my humble opinion, it's vastly superior to those Freddy vs. Ash vs. Jason comics that came down the line a few years back - which, I know, ain't exactly winning Olympic gold, but you know what I'm trying to get at here.

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The Weirdest 'Freddy vs. Jason' Script EVER!

There were a lot of weird Freddy vs. Jason scripts floating around in Hollywood in the mid-1990s, but none of 'em were as brass-balled out there as the one penned by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore which saw Jason go on trial for mega-homicide and Freddy mass murder an entire shopping mall full of children. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Even now I'm not sure if 2003's Freddy vs. Jason was a rousing success or a dismal failure. At the time, I thought it was a goddamn hoot, but then again, me and my pals had also spent an hour in the parking lot before the movie started drinking Dr. Pepper and vodka and listening to Soundgarden, so there may have been some chemical influence on our perspectives. My second (and first sober) screening of the movie when it hit the DVD rounds, I wasn't anywhere near as impressed, and by the third time I watched it, I was wholeheartedly disappointed. I mean, shit, we've been waiting on this movie for more than a decade - that was a LOT of hype, and I don't think anybody, even the people who actually made the movie, would say that it came anywhere close to living up to its sky-high expectations.

Watching the movie now, though, I'm kinda' on the fence. There were some cool elements, but as a whole, it really didn't add up to anything truly transcendent. I can appreciate the writers' reluctance to fuck with the series chronology of each respective franchise, but considering how long people have been waiting for the flick, you sorta' expected them to hit us with some big go-home point that wedded the two brands together, like revealing Freddy was Jason's dad or that Michael Myers was the Kruegers' next door neighbor or something. Still, the fact that Ronny Yu's movie came complete with a coherent (even rational) plot can't be considered anything other than a minor miracle - especially considering how clusterfucky some of the proposed FvJ scripts were. 

You may not think the 2003 movie was the bee's knees, but compared to what we could've ended up with, it was a fucking cinematic triumph. One proposed script had a teenage cult resurrect Freddy so he could rape a retarded elementary schooler and bring about the Apocalypse. Another one had Freddy and Jason literally fighting each other in a boxing ring in hell, with Ted Bundy as the special guest referee. And in yet another, there's a scene where a character gets sucked inside Freddy's nostril and has to do battle with a giant talking wad of CGI snot. Actually, that's a lie on my part - that wasn't three different plots, those are all taken from a single script, which was THE ONE screenplay New Line Cinema almost produced (indeed, that it put the brakes on that turd of a concept might be literally the only good thing to come out of the Columbine massacre.)

I'm not quite sure just how many Freddy vs. Jason scripts were floating around in Hollywood - a great new book, Slash of the Titans, examines at least ten different ones - but of the ones that have made it to the Internet, in my humblest o' opinions the absolute weirdest one had to be the treatment penned by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore titled simply Jason vs. Freddy.

Now Braga and Moore (whose co-writing credits include the second Mission: Impossible movie, among many others) are no Johnny-Come-Latelies. Around the time of the script, Braga (who has since picked up a couple of awards for his work on Terra Nova and the Cosmos reboot and written a few 24 episodes), had already penned a pretty good number of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. His partner Moore (who later wrote the Battlestar Galactica reboot and is currently writing Outlander) also had a fair amount of writing experience, not just on TNG, but also on a few full-length Star Trek movies, including Generations. Now, considering their sci-fi pedigrees, you'd expect their FvJ treatment to be more in line with Jason X than Yu's movie, but hold your horses: instead of making the crossover slasher movie a straight-up monster kung-fu movie, their treatment was effectively a courtroom drama.

Yep, you heard right - they literally turned Freddy v. Jason into, well, Freddy v. Jason. OK, so maybe it's not a full-length John Grisham legal potboiler, but it's certainly unlike anything we've ever seen in a Friday the 13th or Elm Street movie before or after. The full script isn't too hard to find with a little bit of Googlin', but for those of you who would prefer the CliffsNotes version, I've taken the time and the effort to sum up the whole dang thing for you below. Enjoy it, kids - it's some way out there shit.

We begin with these two land developers at Crystal Lake. They make jokes about Jason and get lost in the woods and take refuge in a dilapidated old house. The male developer talks with a realtor on his cell phone. The house is glutted with knifes, machetes, chainsaws and, of course, hockey masks. His female companion sees some odd newspaper clippings on the wall. Then her partner goes missing. She prowls around the house for a bit and finds him hanging on a meat hook, deader than the prospects of a Prodigy comeback. She grabs a knife and finds Jason just sitting in a recliner in the living room. She throws it at him, he grabs it in midair and in one fell swoop, throws it right back at her and through her skull.

Then an FBI assault team swarms the house. Meanwhile, Ruby Jarvis gets a phone call at three in the morning letting her know she's going to be the public defender in the capital murder trial of one Jason Voorhees.

Ruby discusses the case with federal prosecutor Keith Harding. She says the warrant was signed by a local judge and therefore remains in her jurisdiction. She visits Jason at the county jail and reads him his rights. He stares at the floor the entire time. She freaks out when he scratches his hand.

Ruby then speaks with her assistant, your stereotypical Asian sidekick Kwan. She says she wants a change of venue and the jurors sequestered. She thinks copping an insanity plea might be the best defense moving forward.

They go to video store and check out the horror section. She says slasher moves have made America prejudiced against her client. Kwan then picks up a copy of Friday the 13th, then Zombie Sluts From Beyond the Grave. So it looks like we're living in a diagetic world where Jason exists, but all of the previous F13 movies were also fictitious. Keep that in the back of your head for later on.

Ruby goes home and watches Friday the 13th Part 10: Jason's Greatest Hits and Chops for research. She mocks the movie and gets a phone call from the local sheriff, letting her know Jason has escaped. She hears a mysterious sound and fog starts rolling into her living room. She's soon attacked by Jack the Ripper, then Charles Manson tries to give her a swastika tattoo. She finds a severed head in a kitchen pot, then gets sneak-attacked by Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Then Jason approaches her. He slowly takes off his mask and it's Freddy! Of course, she wakes up right before he claws her.

It's a media circus at the Crystal Lake courthouse the next day. Some protesters have signs reading "Jason needs to die," others have signs reading "free Jason". Ruby speaks with a psychologist ("he's fucking nuts," he says, "and interestingly, it appears he doesn't sleep, ever.") Jason is literally wheeled into court with chains all over him. Harding mocks Ruby's outfit and literally takes all day to read all of Jason's charges. Ruby enters a not guilty plea at the arraignment and everybody freaks out. Then a guy who said Jason killed his sister runs into the courthouse and shoots him six times.

So Jason is taken to the hospital (He has Type O Negative blood and a resting heart rate of 180, in case you've ever wondered such) and shot full of barbiturates and gassed. He finally falls asleep and starts dreaming. He's a boy being chased though the woods, having flashbacks to pre-burnt Freddy K. having sex with his mama. He grabs a doctor during some x-rays but gets needled again and falls back asleep. Still a kid in the dream, Jason tries to escape Freddy in a metal canoe. Freddy attacks him in the middle of a lake, then a nurse sees what appears to be a metal glove on the X-ray monitor, swiping at his chest. Jason goes into violent convulsions. He wakes up, but remains deathly still on the table the second he regains consciousness. The public defender can't believe he made a full recovery.

Ruby, Kwan and the psychiatrist go to the hospital basement to read Jason's old medical records from when he was a (human) kid. They learn his mom died from ovarian cancer in 1969 and his dad was named Elias (so, uh, I guess it's sticking to the official Friday canon, I suppose.) Ruby says that although a string of murders did happen in the 1980s, all those damn Friday the 13th movies have confused the realities of Jason's life to the general public. The records suggest Jason has insomnelence, an extreme form of insomnia where he goes without sleep for three months at a time. Ruby says that could explain his violent behavior and potentially get him off by reason of insanity.

What - you thought I was making this shit up?

They hook Jason up to a brain scanning EEG machine and dope him up on 47 ccs (did you know that stands for cubic centimeters?) of Valium. "If we're lucky, maybe he'll fart in his sleep” one tech remarks. Two hours later, Jason finally hits R.E.M. sleep. He dreams about being a kid again and walks in on human Freddy fucking the shit out of his mom (again.) Then Freddy in his more recognizable burnt form chases him and says he ain't getting away this time but when he hits him with his glove, a hockey mask magically materializes over his face. Jason becomes full grown, grabs an ax and dismembers Freddy, Evil Dead style. But Freddy (with green blood!) reassembles himself. Jason IRL starts convulsing. Freddy's arm pops out of Jason's chest and slices the jugulars of Kwan and a cop on standby. Freddy's thrashing hand catches Kwan's ponytail and drags him into Jason's chest and thusly, the dream world. Ruby and pals try to yank him out but accidentally inject Jason with more hypno-juice. Freddy fucks up Kwan's face something fierce with his claw and spits his corpse out into the real world. Then Jason wakes up - of course, right before Freddy can escape from the dream world.

Ruby is grilled by Harding about the murders. She is adamant Jason didn't do it and the razor hand she saw was real, dabnabbit. She goes home and scans a police sketch of the glove into a federal murder weapons database. Sure enough, it pulls up a file on Freddy, who was supposedly burned alive in the late sixties. Then, she finds a report on the 1984 Springwood child murders ….

Then Ruby visits the psychiatrist (they just call him by his last name, Dr. Sena) and tells him the classic Freddy backstory. Apparently, Springwood is just eight miles from Crystal Lake (this, despite the official mythos of each franchise putting the series in Ohio and New Jersey, respectively, but as they say in France, "fuck continuity.") She brings up a few reports of teens saying Freddy visited them in dreams and tried to kill them. She looks at the EEG-thingy and it clearly shows two distinct brain waves while Jason was sleeping.

Next there's a big FBI dig at Jason's old place. They find 47 bodies buried on the premises. Ruby finds a fedora in Mrs. Voorhees' bedroom with the initials "F.K." written on the inside. Dr. Sena hooks Jason to to the EEG thing and sedates him again. This time, though, it's being filmed. Meanwhile, Ruby goes under Mrs. Voorhees' bed and it starts shaking violently. She gets out and sees young Jason in the house, but not unlike John Cena, he can't see her.

The EEG machine explodes and Freddy hops out of Jason's body into our real world. He mind controls four guards to blow each other's brains out and Ruby and Harding return to Crystal Lake. There are dozens of dead bodies everywhere, with a whole slew of cops getting blown away by invisible bullets. Ruby finds a newswoman's camera. She rewinds the footage of an invisible jail break, in which 50 dream men attack the cops in a bloody shootout. Then the newswoman gets ghost raped by some sort of unseen presence, and Freddy pops up on camera at the very last frame.

Ruby returns to the jail. Jason's still sleeping and Dr. Sena, surprisingly, is still alive. He says Freddy has the ability to induce mass narcosis - basically, to create walking nightmares in real life. They look under Jason's bed and hey, young Jason has apparently crossed over from dreamworld too.

Elsewhere, Harding's driving on the interstate when he sees a couple of girls in white dresses playing in the middle of the road. This causes a massive pile up, but Freddy manages to reassemble the cars so they are perfectly parked on the highway, but inside everybody remains mangled and decapitated with the radios and engines still humming. "Don't dream and drive," Freddy quips.

Then Ruby speaks to boy Jason. He's terrified of Freddy. At one point, four bloody claw marks show up on his forehead and Ruby wipes it off. He talks about Freddy trying to drown him in the lake, but surviving and living the rest of his life in the woods, growing angrier and angrier. Eventually boy Jason snaps and beats Dr. Sena with a billy club. Ruby hugs him and he starts crying. Adult Jason wakes up and boy Jason disappears. He grabs his hockey mask and ax, leaves the room and hits the city streets.

We enter Springwood, which is described as a city of hundreds of thousands of people. If Freddy's whole shtick is killing teens, Dr. Sena says he's probably headed to a place where there are a lot of teenagers to shish-ka-bob - the local mall. And on cue, Freddy enters the Elm Street Shopping Plaza. Ruby gets a shotgun and Dr. Sena gives her a stimulant that will keep her from dreaming, but it only lasts ten minutes. Well, that's not foreshadowing or anything.

Freddy gets on an elevator and kills two punks by making their tattoos come alive and their piercings grow Hellraiser-esque barbs and dig into their flesh. He then places an invisible gate around the mall, and says "it's time to shop till they drop."

From here, it's absolute bedlam. An invisible semi crashes through the mall and invisible Rottweilers attack little girls. Kids get sucked into a man-eating ball pit and teens popping pimples have snakes come out of their faces. Hairspray turns into flamethrowers and horny nerds are strangled by mannequins. Then the food court explodes and people have their legs eaten off by escalators (which has always been one of my greatest irrational fears, by the way.)

Ruby and Dr. Sena finally arrive. Now a "real" fire has broken out. They shoot up the stay-awake juice and free some people.  Ruby shoots at Freddy, hits a coffee machine and sprays his face with espresso. Dr. Sena gives another Freddy-reversing  injection to a girl who thinks she's being attacked by dolls. A nurse saunters on up to Dr. Sena (who is painted as a big perv earlier in the script) and she flashes him. But instead of nipples, she has gnashing teeth. Now, his anti-hallucination drugs haven't worn off, so it doesn't kill him. Then Freddy says he has to finish the job himself. Ruby shoots Freddy and he runs off into a movie theater. Inside are piles of dead ushers, complete with one guy stuffed inside the popcorn machine. Ruby sees a cardboard standee for Jason 2010 … a fictitious movie that eerily foretold the coming of Jason X in 2002. Naturally, the standee comes alive and attacks her. "The verdict is in bitch," Freddy says, "you're guilty of fucking with the wrong guy." Yeah ... his dialogue could've used some work.

And here's the part where the "real" Jason makes the save and fights robot Jason. Then Freddy makes 50 of Jason's victims appear as zombies and attack him including the two land developers from the opening scene. Jason fights them off and Freddy says they should join forces and he turns into his mom … only for Jason to grab the razor glove and stab Freddy in the throat.

Ruby yells from a dentist office. She's trapped in a chair, which has been transformed into a  torture device. Jason tries to free her (wait, what the fuck is Jason doing trying to SAVE somebody else's life?) and what do you know, it's actually Freddy and he criticizes Jason for going soft in his old age. Freddy hits Jason with some laughing gas and he starts to doze off. He tries to jump back up out of dreamland and pops out of Freddy's chest, then Ruby hits Jason with another dose of anti-sleep juice and it basically fuses Freddy and Jason into a Siamese twin freak of nature. They run around the fiery mall and Ruby fireman carries Sena to safety. Jason tells her to leave - yep, he can talk in this script - and Freddy and Jason, sharing the same body, keep fighting. Jason hits a propane tank and the mall goes kaboom. "My client is dead," Ruby remarks, "but he's a free man."

We cut to the Voorhees house getting demolished. Before cutting to black, we pan to a photo of boy Jason - only instead of looking scared, he actually looks happy. Then the wall comes down, and that's all she wrote, kids.

A computer simulation of the original ending of Freddy vs. Jason.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good treatment, even though I do have some major complaints about the way Jason is depicted. Ultimately, they made him far too sympathetic, and if there's one thing Jason should never be, it's a victim. Oddly enough, almost all of the major FvJ scripts out there had the same motif, with Freddy playing the "real" bad guy and Jason doing a Godzilla/Venom-like face turn. Really, only the one used for the 2003 film seemed to get away from that concept, and for as much shit as we give that flick, we should at least be thankful it kept Jason the emotionless psycho killer we all know and love.

The nightmare sequences, though, would've been awesome, and the grand finale kill-fest at the mall would've been a hoot and a half. It's kind of a pity nobody's attempted to translate the script into a comic book mini-series, or even better, a DCAU-like feature length animated movie. The script, as a whole, never would've worked as a full-fledged live-action movie, but it could've been pretty cool as a non-canon spin-off in a totally different medium. I mean, at the absolute least, we should've got an action figure of the Jason/Freddy Siamese twin monster, and there's no excuse for McFarlane Toys never giving it to us. 

An aside, but I've always thought it was odd New Line would just let the Friday rights lapse without giving us a proper FvJ sequel. I mean, the movie did make a ton of money, and it wouldn't have been too hard to crank out a follow-up every Halloween, Saw style, if they really wanted to. And there were certainly no shortage of novel approaches to the crossover hook, as evident by the kookiness of Braga and Moore's script. 

Who knows. Maybe one day Freddy and Jason will once again be fighting under the same corporate umbrella again, but it's a pity we didn't get more of a good thing back when Robert Englund and Kane Hooder were willing and ready to do it. Alas, each and every Friday the 13th, we can always reflect on what could've been - and as bad as a movie about Jason being put on trial for 400 counts of murder and Freddy killing people by turning their tattoos alive might have been, there's no way it could've been worse than most of the crap that passes for "horror" in this day and age ...

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Comic Review: 'Evil Ernie vs. The Movie Monsters!' (1997)

You want "random ass Halloween-themed nonsense," you've got it! Presenting a sucky one-shot comic from the late 1990s starring a whole host of unlicensed cinematic creatures getting done in by a ripoff of the Iron Maiden mascot!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

By the time 1997 rolled around, I was pretty much through with comics. I was an avid collector (but not really an avid reader) of all the hot titles of the polybagged era, but once I was in middle school I just stopped giving a damn. Oh, I would pick up the occasional issue of Wizard and maybe scoop up an old back issue or two of The Untold Tales of Spider-Man, but my adolescent love affair with funny books was rapidly nearing its terminus - primarily, because I required more time to focus on other geeky (but slightly less culturally-maligned) bullshit, like pro rasslin' and PlayStation 1 games. Besides, next to being seen wandering the action figure aisle at the local Walmart, there was no quicker way to lose your coolness at my school than being caught reading a comic book, even if it was some weird, indie goth shit like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac; sorry, but eschewing the old four panel adventures was a necessary undertaking if I ever wanted to catch a whiff of what high school was like (which, yeah, involved way less sex and way more vomiting than the movies had led me to believe.) 

But with stuff like Evil Ernie representing the bulk of what was going out there in the world of comics at the time, maybe I picked the best time possible to exit the hobby. EVERYBODY these days likes to shit all over 1990s comics as being nothing but grimdark, convoluted, hyper-gimmicky bullshit with everything looking like Rob Liefeld drew it and everything reading like Todd McFarland wrote it, but there was certainly plenty of good stuff out there, pending you knew where to look. Even Marvel and D.C., at quite possibly their respective nadirs as publishers, were still pushing out relatively fantastic stuff like Major Bummer, The Infinity Gauntlet, Hitman and Skull Kill Krew, and of course you had all the indies out there flooding the market with top tier tomfoolery a'la Milk and Cheese and Give Me Liberty, so - for the most part - the ceaseless comic book nerd antipathy of the decade remains largely displaced and unwarranted.

But then you remember just how popular shit like the Chaos! Comics oeuvre was back then, and you just want to ball up your fist and punch the nearest windowpane right off its fuckin' frame. For those of you in need of some exposition, Chaos! was one of those fly-by-night comic imprints that (momentarily) hit it back during the "bad girl" era with its flagship wank-rag Lady Death. Alas, they just HAD to expand their universe beyond sordid tales of some white haired chick with humongous boobs fighting the devil, and lo and behold Evil Ernie was born (and yes, before you autists start sending me angry letters, I know Evil Ernie debuted before Lady Death, so go on ahead and just cram it.)

Next to Orbitz soda and NAFTA, nothing reeks of desperate 1990s-ness more than Evil Ernie. I mean, goddamn, that character was such a creation of its times - a zombified psycho killer with a haircut like Howard Stern who talked like Bart Simpson and was apparently modeled after the iconic Iron Maiden mascot Eddie. This thing was tailor-made for the 14-year-old, aspiring school-shooter set that listened to White Zombie but couldn't buy their CDs at Tower Records because that meant making eye contact with the 16-year-old blonde behind the cash register while simultaneously holding in their chubs. Evil Ernie is pretty much the comic book equivalent of Saved By the Bell: The College Years - hokey, cheesy, and so utterly cemented in its own cultural zeitgeist that today it's virtually impossible to ingest it as anything other than an unintentional self-parody. Some relics of yesteryear produce nostalgia, but Evil Ernie produces what I like to call nost-nausea ... the sudden recollection of just how vapid, empty and utterly pointless most bygone things actually where. And if you thought the mainline Evil Ernie series was nost-nauseous, just wait until you get a hold of its 1997 Halloween special!

Eh ... I still like it better than just calling him The Gill Man.

The title Evil Ernie vs. the Movie Monsters pretty much tells you everything you need to know, don't it? It's a one-shot special guest starring a whole bunch of parodies of classic horror stock characters, all of whom are given high-larious roman a clef names like Teddy Leugar and Jensen Vorhead. So basically it's nothing more than a gigantic unlicensed monster movie bash, so how in the world could it possibly suck, right? Well ... you'll see, and I'll just leave it at that. 

OK, so the Evil Ernie backstory. He was this one kid who was constantly abused by his uptight parents so one day he started killing people and he got caught and these scientists hooked him up to some sort of experimental dream-monitoring device and somehow he got astral projected to the netherworld and he made a pact with the living embodiment of death (who, naturally, had Dolly Parton-sized jugs) and he died in the real world only to come back as an unkillable lord of the dead who can resurrect corpses and command them to do his bidding. Oh, and he's trying to literally kill everybody on the planet because when he does, he can finally have sex with Lady Death. Wait, did I leave the part out about Smiley, his talking jacket lapel button? Well, he has one of those, too, and it's annoying as fuck.

So with that out of the way, I suppose the coast is clear to hop smackdab into the middle of this 'un. We begin the comic with Ernie playing golf at Cosmic Studios in Florida, where he recounts his abusive childhood while knocking balls into the hollowed out eye sockets of severed heads. After awhile Ernie gets bored, even though Smiley tries to motivate him to keep playing by telling him Iggy Pop is an avid golfer.

So he walks around the theme park, making fun of the rides based on the My Lai Massacre and Dirty Harry, then he thinks about the time his parents wouldn't let him go see "Exterminator 2"(*) because it was too violent and eroded their Quayle-ian family values (cue flashbacks to his parents making him watch National Velvet and The Sound of Music while taped in a chair with his eyeball lids pried open, A Clockwork Orange-style, and lamenting never getting to see all the old Hammer horror movies until he was institutionalized ... long story.) 

(*) Oddly enough, there is indeed a real movie called Exterminator 2, but methinks the writers were trying to make an oblique homage to T2 here. [THNX, MGMT.]

So, uh, I take it the writer had no idea two REAL Saturday the 14th movies actually got made?

Ernie takes a ride on the Ghost Train attraction and he's attacked by Dracula and the Wolfman (with Smiley, naturally, taking a chunk out of the Wolfman's hide.) Then a Jason wannabe whacks the head off Evil Ernie's cameraman (just like a reality TV star, he has a big entourage running around filming all of his nefarious activities) and then Ernie gets attacked by a mummy that apparently has Robocop's chassis underneath all that gauze.

Meanwhile, one of Ernie's zombie chums is captured by a rotund (and, presumably, mad) scientist. Ernie's fisticuffs with Dracula resume and the former tosses a giant candle holder through the latter's heart. Then Ernie throws Frankenstein into an electrical grid (ironic - that's what gave him life, and that's what gave him death) and encounters the Creature from the Black Lagoon ... who, for copyright reasons, is referred to as "the Gill Beast from the Haunted Lagoon." It isn't long before old Gill turns on Dracula, allowing Ernie to slam a giant tree through Drac's sternum, presumably killing him. 

Then the cast of Them! attacks and Ernie kills the oversized ants by blow torching 'em with hairspray (that was one of his favorite pastimes as a kid, you see.) Then a turd-shaped alien called What the Unconquerable (I have no idea what this guy is supposed to be a parody of - readers, do send me a line if I'm missing something here) shows up and puts Ernie to sleep with some kinda' mind control ray. He wakes up in the mad scientist's lair and he tells Ernie he needs his "green energy" - I guess it's an offhanded reference to the elixir in Re-Animator, maybe? - to turn his pet lizard into a giant Godzilla pastiche. Smiley the button escapes (complete with a "to infinity and beyond" quip), and frees Ernie, who immediately kills the scientist by tossing acid in his face. 

Speaking of acid-spewing no good-niks, some hive creatures (coughCOUGHthexenomorphsfromAliencoughCOUGH) arive and Ernie picks up a pulse rifle that was conveniently just laying there and blows them all to kingdom come. And that's a segue to our all-slasher donnybrook, as expies of Freddy, Jason and Micheal (this one, not this one) rear their collective ugly heads. "Buncha' losers," Smiley comments as Ernie easily dispatches (and dismembers) them, "shoulda' stayed in the '80s!" An aside, but I love how in a comic featuring insane amounts of hardcore, NC-17 level graphic violence, they still elected to replace all the fucks and shits with random, self-censoring symbols a'la #$!%. 

Somehow, that lizard from earlier has indeed grown into a full-sized Godzilla pastiche. Jason - err, Jensen - returns and the Godzilla-wannabe immediately squashed him underneath his toes. Ernie and Smiley shoot the shit for a while and then Ernie suddenly realizes that since all of these monsters are officially dead now, he can resurrect and control them, effectively making him the true "king of the monsters." Then the fine folks at Chaos! let us know the proceeding was a non-canonical Elseworlds/What If style affair and if you want to read a real Evil Ernie comic, they've got this new one out called Destroyer you can pick up. And barely 30 pages in, we are over and out, kids!

That is easily the best non-licensed appearance by Godzilla in anything other than an early Sega Genesis game.

Well, folks, there ain't much to say after that, is there? There just ain't a whole lot of meat to this one, and even as a one-off larf it leaves much to be desired. Nobody really went into an Evil Ernie comic expecting much beyond the usual juvenile instant gratification, but with a premise that at least had the potential for something interesting, I reckon it's safe to say Chaos! royally screwed the pooch here. 

I'd like to say there's some kind of halfway decent Evil Ernie or Lady Death book out there you can pick up for some light seasonal reading, but like fuck I know anything about the Chaos! bibliography (except that they made a couple of comics based on The Undertaker, which in hindsight, I prolly shoulda reviewed instead.) Wait a minute, I just checked out their Wikipedia page - did you know these motherfuckers did comics about Halloween and the Insane Clown Posse, too? Goddamn, those people got around.

So, as much as I hate to say it, this Evil Ernie one-shot (even as brief as it is) probably isn't worth your time or effort. If you're looking for some solid Halloween comic readin' fun, there's a ton of stuff out there - the whole Marvel Zombies line, that one mini-series where Ash, Jason and Freddy K. all fight one another, etc. - that are vastly superior to this totally irrelevant slice of late '90s nos-nausea. Hell, I think you'd be better off sticking with those old Kool-Aid Man comics from the 1980s - after all, unlike this Evil Ernie dud, at least those things had some pretty amusing activity pages.

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Ten Underrated ‘90s Metal Albums

…that you should definitely take a listen to.

With March unofficially representing Heavy Metal Appreciation month here at The Internet Is In America, I reckoned it would be worth our collective whiles to take a look back at some of the lesser heralded metal offerings of the 1990s. Sure, sure, we’ve all heard the bona fide classics a million times by now -- hell, I just did a list counting down the 10 most ass kicking death metal albums of the era -- but what of the records that, while not setting the world afire then, sound pretty darn impressive in hindsight?

Well, here’s a sample platter of ten heavy metal albums released during the “Beavis and Butt-Head” era that I believe all self-respecting metal heads would be wise to revisit; you may have scoffed at them way back when, but something tells me the past twenty years or so might just open you up to some reevaluations of your tastes…

Anthrax -- “The Sound of White Noise” (1993)

Anthrax is probably the least heralded of the “big four” of thrash, but to their credit, they are probably the only group out of that quartet that can say they recorded genre-defining master works in three different decades. While “Among the Living” and “We’ve Come for You All” stand out as among the absolute best metal offerings of the 1980s and 2000s, respectively, 1993’s “The Sound of White Noise” remains one of the most underappreciated albums of the grunge era, and quite possibly the finest alternative-metal record of the decade not produced by a band named “Helmet.” Far and away the most popular track on the record is “Only,” an ass-kicking alternative-metal hybrid that James Hetfield once described as the absolute perfect song. From “Black Lodge” to “Potter’s Field,” it’s actually a fairly nuanced and original-sounding album throughout; it may not be the thrash masterpiece you’d come to expect from Scotty Ian and the boys, but it’s definitely a diamond in the rough, nonetheless.

Body Count -- “Body Count” (1992)

Although rap-metal grew to become one of the late 1990s biggest scourges, this pioneering release from 1992 is actually one of the best start-to-finish alternative metal albums of the 1990s. Even without the original album’s closing ass kicker (the controversial-beyond-words “Cop Killer"), Body Count’s eponymous debut album is still a tour de force, with so many underappreciated anthems that you just have to  wonder how this thing kept from becoming a mini genre classic in its own right. “There Goes the Neighborhood” and “Body Count’s in the House” are both pure testosterone ass-stompers, while alternately morbid and hilarious tracks like “KKK Bitch” and “Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight” are certainly deviations from the wannabe Megadeth and Metallica norm that came to represent most early ‘90s metal offerings. All in all, this is a rock solid album; if you’re looking for something to change your perspective on the separation of metal and rap, this is about as good a starting point as I can imagine.

Megadeth -- “Cryptic Writings” (1997)

While Dave Mustaine, the individual human being, is crazier than a shit house rat, its hard to deny the dude’s musical dexterity, and “Cryptic Writings” stands out as one of the band’s better post- “Rust in Peace” outings. Initially decried as the band’s equivalent of “Load,” this late ‘90s release certainly holds up a lot better than most mainstream metal releases from the same timeframe, due in part to the album’s atypical production qualities and stylistic diversity. While the prospect of technical thrash titans like Megadeth toning it down for an album of relatively simplistic tunes may sound like a gargantuan fuck-up, the more subdued and experimental nature of the album makes it a lot more interesting, and pleasurable, in my ears than something like “Risk” or “Youthanasia.” Tracks like “Use the Man," “She-Wolf” and “Vortex” really aren’t the kind of tunes you’d expect from Megadeth -- which may be at least one reason why the album stands up as well as it does today.

Motorhead -- “Sacrifice” (1995)

While many claim that Lemmy and company haven’t really done anything new since “Ace of Spades,” this forgotten mid-90s release shows that, contrary to popular misconception, the band DID have the ability to shake up their sound a bit, and the overall outcome, surprisingly, is quite enjoyable. While tracks like “Sex & Death” and “War for War” are very much the bass-driven, The Kingsmen on crystal meth-sounding tunes the group are known for, the band actually does mix it up a bit with this 1995 offering, especially with tracks like “Make ‘Em Blind” and “Don’t Waste Your Time” -- the latter being a piano and saxophone-accompanied ode to Jerry Lee Lewis. Clocking in at a blistering 36 minutes, the band never lingers any longer than they have to on any one track, and the general “stripped-down” production of the album makes it sound unlike anything the band has recorded since…or, really, before, for that matter.

Ozzy Osbourne -- “Ozzmosis” (1995)

Post “No More Tears” yet pre-MTV reality show, “Ozzmosis” catches Ozzy at a fairly staid point in his career. Now, you’d think that (relative) stability would result in a rather uninspired album, but 1995’s “Ozzmossis” is actually a pretty damn fine release, with some of the best ballads Mr. Osbourne has ever recorded. While the opening track "Perry Mason" is just sheer cheese, things pick up considerably with the super symphonic sounding "I Just Want You," which gives way to the suprisingly soulful "Ghost Behind My Eyes," which sounds like Black Sabbath with Matthew Sweet on lead vocals. Really, "See You On the Other Side," the album's centerpiece, is reason alone to give "Ozzmosis" a listen -- not only is it one of the finest songs Ozzy has ever recorded, it might just be his single best ballad ever, even eclipsing classics like "Mama I'm Coming Home" and "Changes."

Rollins Band -- “Weight” (1994)

No matter your opinion on Mr. Rollins, you have to give the ex-Black Flag front man some credit: not only did he find a way to excel after he severed ties with his bread and butter, he actually managed to craft a new sound that was not only about as far removed from his old band as imaginable, but actually pretty damn awesome and innovative, to boot. So what do you call the disaffected, “Disconnected” angst alt-metal contained in “Weight?” With its half-spoken, mostly observational lyrics, the entire album feels more or less like the internal dialogue of Michael Douglas’ character in “Falling Down,” only with crunching guitar riffs in the background. There's actually a quite bit more to the album than it's most celebrated track, "Liar", including standout post-punk-alternative metal tracks like "Icon" and "Shine." If you're looking for some '90s metal that's funkier -- and certainly, much more cerebral -- than the norm, this is a record you definitely need to give a spin.

Slayer -- “Undisputed Attitude” (1996)

It’s Slayer doing metal-tinged covers of sundry DIY punk standards -- how could it possibly suck? I always tend to think of this album as the CD “Garage Inc.” wanted to be.  The band absolutely blazes through Minor Threat, D.I. and Verbal Abuse standards, stopping periodically to pound their way through a reworked version of The Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (now christened  as the far less subservient-sounding “I’m Gonna Be Your God”) and “Gemini,” a Slayer original that appears to be inspired by “The Exorcist III.” Even better? The Japanese release has even more tracks, including a few Suicidal Tendencies and GBH re-dos. It may not be the “Reign in Blood”-era Slayer we all know and love, but it’s certainly an experimental risk that pays off; and if nothing else, it’s WORLDS better than just about anything the band has released post- “God Hates Us All,” for certain.

Sleep -- “Jerusalem” (1999)

Simply put, Sleep’s “Jerusalem” is the single riffiest album in the history of recorded music. Clocking in at a little under an hour, the entire album is basically one full-length, chopped up song, containing some of the chunkiest, sludgiest guitar work you'll probably ever hear -- seriously, if you thought the dudes in Crowbar and Corrosion of Conformity could make slow sound so heavy, you haven't heard shit, amigos. In a decade with so many guitar heavy metal masterworks from bands like Down, Monster Magnet and Kyuss, this is arguably the zenith of the stoner metal subgenre. Although definitely not for all tastes, for those of you that like your metal booming with the kind of thud that only irradiated dinosaur footprints could muster,  "Jerusalem" is a largely unheralded record you direly need in your collection.

Stormtroopers of Death -- “Bigger Than The Devil” (1999)

While S.O.D.’s landmark  1985 hardcore/thrash fusion debut “Speak English or Die” put Scott Ian and Billy Milano’s other band on the genre radar, in many ways, their much less celebrated 1999 release “Bigger Than The Devil” may ultimately be the better of the two recordings. With hyper-fast, bluntly political "satirical" tunes like "Kill the Assholes," "The Crackhead Song" and "Skool Bus," S.O.D. is one of the few quasi-intelligent metal albums of the decade to merge humor with hardcore, resulting in some truly amazing, mini-crossover-triumphs. From "Celtic Frosted Flakes" to "The Ballad of Michael H." to "Frankenstein and His Horse," this is an irreverent, self-reflexive record that also happens to be a truly fantastic metal recording by its own merits. That, and the special edition bonus EP contains what may very well be the greatest Slayer song never actually recorded by Slayer -- the hilarious (yet undeniably ass-kicking) homage "Seasoning the Obese."

Vader -- “Black to the Blind” (1997)

“Black to the Blind” is far from being Vader’s finest album. Heck, one could argue that it’s not even the band’s best recording from the 1990s. That said, the first time I heard this album way back in '97, it totally blew me away; as soon as Doc Raczkowksi started pounding his drumset like a maniac on "Heading for the Internal Darkness," I knew I these Pollocks were for real. Not quite visceral enough to qualify for death metal and way too fast and abrasive for the Metallica set, this album was pretty much the perfect entry point for thrash and alt metal fans to hop into the heavier, darker stuff. At only 29 minutes in length, this is a record that pulsates like liquid magma, erupting and not even thinking about stopping. And to think: the sole reason I picked this thing up back in the sixth grade was because the group shared its name with my favorite pro wrestling bad guy!

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