'The Babysitter' (2017) - A No Frills Review

A brutally honest, no-holds-barred take on the acclaimed Netflix original movie (surprise: I don't like it.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

A lot of people have been telling me about this new Netflix movie called The Babysitter and how great it is. Considering I'm kind of a historian of degenerate slasher movies, I'm not really surprised. Everybody keeps saying the same thing. "Jimbo, this is your kind of movie," and "Jimbo, you would love this flick." So after the third or fourth person sung its praises to me, I decided to plug in my ex's old-password and give the movie the old look-see. 

Well, call me crazy, but I just don't see what the big deal is. All in all, I thought it was a pretty mediocre movie, with maybe one or two decent scenes, but on the whole it was a pretty humdrum affair.

I don't know why it's happening, but for whatever reason Hollyweird is all about the tweenspolitation horror these days. You've got It and you've got Stranger Things and now you've got this movie, about some 12-year-old dork caught up in some sort of Satanic ritual massacre, which sounds like something that could result in a pretty decent horror flick, but - yet again - the people who made this movie just didn't want to play it straight. Instead, it's one of those meta horror movies that's all self-reflexive and self-aware, which is meant to make it a comedy hybrid, when all it really does is display the incompetence on the scriptwriter's part.

Yes, it's another tongue-in-cheek, retro-baiting, made-by-fanboys-for-fanboys (un)original, this time helmed by, of all people, the pseudonym that directed the Charlie's Angels remake from 17 years ago. Now there are a couple of really good, nostalgia-rooted movies made over the last couple of years that are clearly meant to mimic the adolescent action-adventure movies of the 1980s. Ping Pong Summer and Cop Car immediately spring to mind. This one fails because, simply put, the "comedy" just don't work. This is the kind of movie where the producers want to pat themselves on the back for flashing onscreen text reading "what the fuck?" during murder scenes, the kind of flick where the writers think just mentioning the names of sci-fi characters is in and of itself hilarious. It's the kind of movie where 40-year-old genre dorks try to make 30-year-old actors playing 17-year-olds sound like the crusty, obese patrons of the local Dungeons & Dragons parlor, the kind of flick that just assumes niche nerd culture is now the dominant culture in the U.S. and we should all chuckle at lengthy, in-joke-laden dialogue exchanges about Star Trek and Predator. And worst of all, it's the kind of movie that thinks just splashing blood everywhere is a substitute for a lack of actual humor, and that watching airhead cheerleaders get stabbed in the titties and then spend the next half hour of the movie complaining about having just one boob left is the funniest shit ever in the universe. Remember that annoying asshole in the third grade who was always being a loudmouth little cocksucker and irritating everybody and disrupting class because he thought everything he was doing was so guldarn funny? Well, if that kid was a Netflix original, he would probably be this movie.

The movie starts off with a black, overweight male nurse giving a shot to a scrawny, nerdy white pre-teen. "Come here and take this shot just like you'd take some ass," he says, which I'm pretty sure constitutes a form of sexual harassment against a minor. After that we've got your oh-so-cliched slow-mo walk through the school shot, and we're introduced to the main character's obvious love interest in waiting, whose dad acts just like Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. "NASCAR nation, bitch!" he yells at sixth-graders while blaring gangsta rap. So, yeah, this is one of those movies where instead of having real people in it, everybody's a quirky, one-dimensional caricature of the kinds of people hipsters think reside in suburbia. Trust me - it gets way worse from here.

So, needless to say, this nerdy kid (his name's Cole, by the way) gets bullied quite a bit. There's this one fat black kid, in particular, that likes to give him the business, and he also likes to talk about bedding 16-year-olds. You know, between this and that one cartoon about the talking vaginas of seventh graders, Netflix isn't really doing a whole lot to dispel all those PizzaGate rumors about the company. I mean, at all.

Then Samara Weaving shows up as the titular character and tells Cole "you gotta' punch them in the dick" to solve his bully problem. Oh, the joys of living in a manic pixie fantasy land dreamed up by obviously beta Hillary Clinton supporters. You know, one where high school cheerleaders use video game terminology like "big bad" as if they even give a fuck what kind of lingo the racist nerds on 4Chan use, anyway. 

Then Cole's dad gives him a driving lesson at a race track and promises he'll let him binge watch Mad Men with him when he's older (god, do I hate these Hollywood straw-parents who run around saying "jorts" like its intrinsically hilarious and all post-post-postmodern and shit.)

You know, if she's going to kill the poor sap, she could at least have the decency to slip him a little bit of tongue before he dies.

So obviously Cole is crushing on Bee, but the girl his own age down the street is crushing on him and then he gets jealous because she's fliritng with some gangly dork. Then his parents go away for a holiday and Cole and Bee disco dance and watch Billy Jack on their garage door and talk about which fictitious characters they would take with them on an intergalactic suicide mission (oh, just kill me now, why don't you.) So the girl down the street keeps sending Cole texts about orgies and he gets curious and sneaks down stairs and sees Bee and her gang of suspiciously multicultural best pals playing a game of spin the bottle and SWERVE! The sitter and all her pals are actually part of some Satanic cult that stabs people in the head and eats virgin blood. 

Time to meet the rest of the cast. We've got the token black dude who says stuff like "Carrie would've been better if she was black, she would be covered in Hennessey" and "you know what happens when you kill someone? They lose all their Instagram followers and shit." Then you've got Bella Thorne as the bimbo cheerleader who gets shot in the tit-tays by the police and says "no dude's gonna motorboat these" and "who's gonna' wanna' suck on my nipples?" Then there's the jock Chad boyfriend, who runs around without a shirt on the whole movie and this one Asian chick who wears too much eye shadow. And they all decide it's probably a good idea to sacrifice the kid, so just like that the movie turns into Clive Barker's Home Alone, with all the demonic teens trying to capture Cole and our wee-sized hero trying to off 'em one by one with firecrackers and mouse traps.

The cops show up pretty early, but naturally, they all get killed off by the devil worshiping high schoolers. The black dude is the first to die (genre law mandates it, after all, but let's face it - after ten minutes of screen-time, the writers ran out of high-larious "black things" for him to say, anyway) and then the Asian broad gets blown up after a loooooong crawlspace chase sequence. Then the shirtless Chad almost strangles the kid to death, but then the fat black bully from earlier shows up to egg his house and the would-be strangler tells the kid "this is America, you need to wreck his ass." So Cole challenges the fat black bully to a fight, and of course, gets his ass promptly kicked. There's a chase up and through the abandoned treehouse (complete with the most unbelievable "accidental" hanging mishap in movie history) and the kid runs across the street to his not-canonical-yet-girlfriend's place and Bee chases after him with a shotgun en tow (this stuff takes forever, by the way.)

So Cole goes back into his own house to stare down Bee, but the cheerleader from earlier ain't quite dead yet, but rest assured she'll be dead enough in just a few minutes. Eventually, Cole and Bee do have their climactic showdown, which comes in the form of Cole stealing Bee's ride and driving it through his kitchen window while "We Are the Champions" plays for no real reason other than "lol, random-ness." After that we get a wholly inauthentic, pseudo-syrupy finale with the demonic babysitter giving a mea culpa while trapped underneath the axle of a Chevy Blazer and she appears to die, but come on - you KNOW what's going to happen in the post-credits stinger and you don't even need me to tell you, neither.

So for those of you keeping score at home, we've got eight dead bodies. No breasts (what's the deal there?) One lesbian tongue lock. Fire poker through the eyeball. Throat slitting. Awards placard through the jugular. One exploding head. One exploding basement. One flipped car, with totally demolished dining room area. One unintentional hanging. Up-close needle poking. Cookie force-feeding. Gratuitous slow-motion disco dancing. Gratuitous Friday the 13th references. Gratuitous titty punching. Gratuitous Billy Jack re-enactments. Pocket knife fu. Hand job fu. Firecracker fu. Mousetrap fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... some serious contributing to the delinquency of a minor fu.

Starring Samara Weaving as Bee, the Satanic babysitter who drive daggers through the skulls of high school nerds and steals blood from 12-year-olds so she can conjure up the the forces of darkness; Judah Lewis as Cole, the 12-year-old needlephobe who doesn't know the differences between prostitutes and Protestants and has to Google search what an "orgy" is; Bella Thorne as the bisexual cheerleader super-slut who sold her soul to the devil so she could be an MSNBC host; Andrew "King Bach" Bachelor as the unfunny black guy who keeps saying things black people only say in the minds of white democrats; and Robbie Amell as the guy who's really, really opposed to wearing shirts.

Written by Brian Duffield, the same guy who wrote Insurgent and Jane Got a Gun and directed by McG, whose first movie in four years isn't exactly a happy return to form. Then again, considering the guy's creative apex was making music videos for Sugar Ray, maybe the he never really had that much of a form to return to in the first place.

I'll give it a ho-hum two stars out of four. It has its moments, but all in all it's just another soulless genre movie that thinks making offhanded references to other movies constitutes "comedy," and that with enough arterial explosions, none of us will pick up on how plastic and unnatural all of the dialogue sounds. Which, as we all know by now, can only be offset by lots and lots of ample female nudity ... something The Babysitter, unfortunately, is all but devoid of.

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Coin-Op Review: 'Demon's World' (1990)

Think you've played every great 2D, horror-themed action-platformer from the early 1990s? Well, you haven't if you've never gotten your hands on this preposterously underrated Toaplan title starring an avatar that looks WAY too much like the Unabomber for it to be just a coincidence.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

The great thing about retro gaming is that there's so much great stuff out there that we'll be rediscovering awesome shit for years - hell, maybe even decades - before every hidden gem is uncovered. And that's especially true when it comes to arcade games, because I assure you, there are WAY more that got released than any of us managed to play back in our youths.

That's why it does the heart good to hit up the emulators from time to time and play through a couple of totally random games. Granted, most of the time you just wind up with really bland, generic Pac-Man and Raiden clones, but every now and then you'll stumble across a totally overlooked mini-classic that you can't believe hasn't been celebrated ad nauseam by the retro gaming elites. And that's how I became aware of the existence of Demon's World, an absolutely fantastic action-platformer from Toaplan, that's basically the combination of Ghosts 'n Goblins with Metal Slug. 

You have to be a hardcore retro gamer to know about Toaplan. While most regular folks have never heard of Truxton or Hellfire or Fire Shark, old school arcade purists tend to consider them one of the most painfully underrated developers in the history of gaming. Indeed, Toaplan is responsible for two of my all-time favorite shooters, Grind Stormer and Batsugan, which are so damned obscure that a lot of well-versed SHMUP fans have never even heard of 'em before. Hell, most people don't even KNOW that Toaplan were the guys who made Zero Wing, because I'm guessing most people out there on the Internet think the whole "all your base" shit created itself, but I digress.

Despite its super-generic title, Demon's World (not to be confused with Konami's Devil World, nor Capcom's Demon's Crest) is actually a damned solid side-scrolling shooter that kinda' sorta plays like a drunken orgy of Contra, Castlevania AND Gradius. Even for its timeframe it's unbelievably difficult, but thanks to the advent of emulators, we can now play the whole thing from start to finish without cashing out $20 worth of tokens. And if you've never played it before? Old Jimbo's quick overview will give you all the incentives in the world to hunt this sucker down for yourself ...

In defiance of genre conventions, you're asked to input your initials at the beginning of the game. Also, you might notice your avatar looks a LOT like Chuck Norris, but trust me, it gets even weirder from there. Additionally, the game DOES offer a two-player mode, but I've never played it cooperatively before. So it could be as good as the one-player mode, substantially better or substantially worse - I can't tell you, so ask somebody else. 

The opening cinematic shows a buncha' people fleeing from a horde of monsters overrunning what appears to be a (literal) ghost town, filled with dillapidated, crumbling Western-ish buildings, which have giant signs for "Rodeo" and "biggest Bar biggest," because the Japanese don't care that much. The game begins without any formal explanation of who the main character is, but it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that he's got a bad ass 'stache and a LOT of weapons, and that means some ghosts and goblins are about to get royally fucked up shortly. 

In the first stage, you blast away a couple of pink ghosts wearing cowboy hats, so I guess the level is a canonical Western-themed tourist trap, I suppose. Power-ups constantly float across the screen, Contra style, and you'll have to use your double jump to catch most of them. Anyhoo, your upgradable weapons are as follows: a triple scatter shot, a rocket launcher, a lightning gun, bombs (which have the worst range by a considerable margin) and these funky laser arrow thingies. All of the weapons can be upgraded to shoot faster with wider ranges, too, so mixing and matching - while not an integral part of the game - is oftentimes advantageous. Like in Castlevania, you can collect hearts, but they don't restore your health. They just add more points to your score, and no matter how many of those fuckers you horde, one hit is still enough to kill your ass dead. Of course, there is a major exemption to that, but we'll cross that proverbial bridge when we get there.

It doesn't take long for the game to start throwing a TON of different enemy types at you. Frankenstein monsters, skulls that cry deadly tears, midget Draculas, hell, even a couple of JASON VOORHEES imitators enter the fray just seconds into level one. Also, you have to dodge a lot of rolling barrels, too, which is probably harder than any actual enemy in the game you have to fight.

It isn't long before you grab hold of the power-up armor, thankfully. Basically, this stuff works just like the suit of armor in Ghosts 'n Goblins, powering up your abilities and allowing you one extra hit before plopping over dead as a doornail. But best of all, the power up transforms your costume into a grey hooded sweatshirt that makes your avatar looks just like the fucking Unabomber, and it's goddamn hilarious.

After you bump off a couple of obese gargoyles and fire-dripping ghosts, the background turns into this grassy terrain in front of a mountain with an ominous purple sky. You have to cross a creaking bridge and platform over tricky flame-shitting demons, but thankfully you can jump on their heads, Mario style, for a little added step to your bounce.

Then killer plants start bursting out of the ground like in Ghouls 'n Ghosts and you have to jump across tree limbs while mini-dragons chase you (and this is HARD as fucking shit like you would not believe.) Now we've got zombies tossing boulders at you, and as the backdrop transitions to a desert like setting, a buncha' vultures start dropping rocks on your head. Eventually, this paves the way for the game's first boss fight, against a skeleton Indian ghost who drops giant-eared tiki statues on you.

I told you I had reservations about fightin' that ghost Indian!

Next up, we're in a Mexican-looking pueblo. Horse-drawn carriages immediately attack, as do platoons of annoying ass bats and more fucking runaway barrels. After that you have to platform across rocks over an ocean, and the music changes to this funky, warbled tropical beat and it's great. Also, you can now jump onto balloons and float over obstacles, which is a cool little touch, but really tricky to pull off in execution. You hop over some crabs with skull heads and maneuver around giant tiki statues that puke molten lava on you, then these trees shoot porcupines (maybe even Critters?) at you. I mean, your character does sort of resemble the space bounty hunters from the first two movies and all. Then you do some more tricky balloon platforming and blast through wave after wave of one-eyed gnomes before entering an area glutted with dilapidated pagodas.

You can safely traverse the muck pools by using the ducks in Raiden hats as stepping stones. After that you have to avoid punji sticks and kamikaze crows, then these skeletons start shooting at you with bows and arrows. Judging by that spooky, tinny Asian restaurant music, I take it those enemies are supposed to be Chinese?

The Devil's Rain starts falling out of the sky, which thankfully, you can blast out of the sky rather easily (can you name any other game where you have to shot rain droplets with rocket launchers?) Then you get attacked by long-necked demon geishas and what I can only describe as possessed umbrellas. After that, paper lanterns and ghost school girls come after you, and the rain starts teaming up in circular wheels that chase you down like heat-seeking missiles. This is a segue to the game's second boss fight, this one against a samurai skeleton with a spear who tries to bite you. Alas, despite taking a billion hits to kill, he really isn't that much of a challenge to polish off.

Now you have to platform across boats while orange demons shoot fireballs at you that look suspiciously like pieces of fried chicken. Then a pirate ship emerges. Time to shoot some rapier-brandishing skeletons en masse. The insanely hard ocean platforming sequence continues, as you have to use those balloons to dodge sharks and ridiculously hard to predict horizontal scrolling fireballs. Then a buncha' blue demon heads start materializing everywhere, and your only way to avoid them is to hold the fire button down and constantly hit every button on the directional pad simultaneously. You think I'm joking, but you play this shit for yourself and find out.

Now killer butterflies and Chinese kids on tricycles start attacking (interestingly enough, this is where the PC Engine CD port begins - no clue why, that's just how them Japs do it, I reckon.) You shoot more fan-carrying geishas and platform over clouds, periodically having to hop on and over these annoying petals that open and close in oddly timed intervals. Then dragons attack you, but every time you shoot them their bodies shrink a little. The boss fight here is against a giant golden dragon, who spits smaller dragons at you, whose heads you have to jump on so you can shoot him in the head.

Another ocean stage awaits. This time you have to hop over ice shelves while suicidal squids and gigantic jellyfish that look like Metroids try to chew your asshole off. Eventually you will encounter these giant jellyfish blobs that shit smaller jellyfish at you, and this is easily the most bullshit part of the entire game, because it's practically impossible to avoid taking at least one hit depending on where the things spawn. After that, thankfully, it's back to more rudimentary blasting action, as you enter a graveyard and immediately start mowing down shambling zombies sans heads.

Why the Japanese have such a fervid fear of possessed umbrellas, I'll never comprehend.

This heralds the return of those ghosts in cowboy hats, who are now green, for whatever reason. These new Dracula enemies also debut, which turn into four separate homing bats when killed. There are more porcupine trees, more golden goblins and even a passage where you have to hop over columns while avoiding sentient knight helmets, which has to be an oblique "fuck you" firmly directed towards Capcom, isn't it?

So you enter a castle and full-suited knights attack you. This is a prelude to a boss fight, this time against a smaller, fire-breathing dragon that looks more like a crappy Play Doh dinosaur than the more traditional mythological beast we fought in the last stage. After that you get on an elevator and fight these blue guys wearing metal suits. I've no idea what the hell they're supposed to be, so don't ask. However, I will tell you these fuckers like to push giant blocks at you, and you have to duck at JUST the right moment or else the constantly scrolling screen will push you right into some insta-kill spikes. Needless to say, your timing has to be pitch perfect here or else you're deader than Harvey Weinstein's OK Cupid profile.

You do some more jumping over, around and underneath weirdly shaped blocks and barriers and platform over ghosts carrying caskets while shooting the firebird enemies that emerge from the lava pits below. Yeah, not that you need me to tell you this, but this shit is hard as fuck, too. Then you jump over the roofs of several houses and fight sleeping orange vampires who are morbidly obese and more sword-toting skeletons. 

Then there's ANOTHER gnome-block pushing sequence over lava pits, and it's so insanely hard I'm running out of ways to tell you it's an insanely hard game. Then there's another boss fight with a cartoon dragon, except this one pukes projectile orbs on you instead of a direct line of fire. And after that? You jump down a hole into a cob-webbed cavern and prepare for the game's final boss fight ... 

... which just so happens to be against this weird monkey mummy stuck inside a pulsating spider-like womb who shoots blue flames at you. Well, despite his wacky appearance, he's actually pretty easy to kill, and after that the screen starts rolling right to left and you have to jump your way to safety. That triggers the game's final cutscene, as you watch the castle implode behind you, Castelvania style, while your avatar joyously jumps up and down. During the credits, he grabs a balloon and flies by sepia tone screen shots of all the previous levels in the game, and that's all your quarters are going to get you this go-at it.

Yep. Nothing weird about watching a pixel-art Theodore Kaczynski celebrate an imploding building. Nothing weird about that at all.

All I can say is damn, this is a fun game. It's an absurdly difficult blast-a-thon that's hard for all the right reasons. It's a game that's doable, it just takes well-honed reflexes and just a little bit of rhythm to get through it - unlike so many other games in the genre, it isn't cheap, it's a title that rewards you for timing and memorization.

As briefly mentioned above, the game did get ported to the PC Engine CD, albeit under a totally different title - Horror Story. Essentially, it's the same game, but for whatever reason, the order of the stages is all out of whack. Oh, and the final stage is way longer, but I'll let you compare and contrast this shit on your own time.

Going back to what I said at the beginning of the article, Demon's World really is a hidden gem of horror gaming. It's an immensely enjoyable monster mash with great visuals, plenty of humor and a ton of replay value, and that co-op mode seems like it would be an absolute hoot and a half to experience. I never saw the arcade game in the wild growing up, so there's no nostalgia driving my adulation of the title; it's just a flat-out fantastic, Halloween-flavored game that you definitely need to check out at some point during your All Hallow Eves sojourns. I mean, what in life is better than pairing an hour or two of this game with a big bowl of candy corn and a replay of Halloween II at 2 in the morning? That's right, fucking nothing, and if you haven't gotten a load of what Demon's World is offering you, you're not just missing the boat - you're missing the whole damned armada.

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DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Blade Runner 2049 / 'Circus Kane'

Forget about the return of Blade Runner - what we REALLY ought to be pumped about is Chris Olen Ray carrying on his dad's sleazoid cinema legacy.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I don't know if you folks know about it or not, but we're just a few years away from Cookout taking over the world.

Never heard of Cookout before? Well, that's probably because you're a Yankee who lives in some third world country like California or Oregon. Down here in the South, these things are popping up like fungi on cow pies, and I for one, couldn't be happier. 

Not since Chick-Fil-A has there been a fast food place with so much market upswing. You see, not only do these guys LOVE being heterosexual and being married to their first wives, they're patriotic in addition to being Christian. Every Styrofoam cup you get there has both Proverbs 1:7 and God Bless America printed on 'em, and if you don't know what Proverbs 1:7 says, basically it says being fearful of Jesus is the start of being smart, but as we all know, there's a lot of Democrats out there who just plain despise wisdom and the truth and will prolly be protestin' the place outta' spite soon enough. Of course, Proverbs 1:7 is no 2 Kings 18:27 - for all you heathens out there, it's one about making your enemies eat their own doo-doo and drink their own piss - but it ain't too bad a bible verse to build your burger joint around, regardless.

But loving the Judeo-Christian God and the U.S of A is just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce.) What really makes Cookout a blue chip prospect is that you can get an entire day's worth of food there for less than $5 Americano, AND the food tastes like real backyard barbecue instead of stuff a Mexican rancher probably spit in before being stuck in the deep freeze for 200 days at a time.

You kinda' have to wonder why nobody thought of selling charcoal-cooked hamburgers en masse for a fast food concept before. Yeah, Burger King likes to brag about having charbroiled hamburgers, but that's bullshit compared to what Cookout offers you. These things are fat and plump and charred blacker than a whore's conscious and they taste wonderful. You eat a hamburger from McDonald's or Wendy's, you know you're not really eating a hamburger, but when you eat at Cookout, you feel like you're eating something that might actually be 100 percent real food. And even if you don't like hamburgers for some stupid ass reason, check out this menu. 

Just look at all that shit. They've got hot dogs. They've got GENUINE barbecue. They've got three different kinds of chicken, plus quesadillas, plus chicken nuggets, plus corn dogs, plus hush puppies PLUS bacon wraps. That means you can have a double-patty burger, onion rings, chicken wraps AND a Cheerwine float for just $3.99. You just can't beat those prices, and once word spreads about how good a deal they offer, it's fucking over. Nobody can compete against a strategy like that. What Cookout has isn't just a license to print money, it's a license to take the damn dollar bills out of the cash registers in every other fast food place in town. 

And we haven't even gotten to their milkshakes yet. All I'm going to say is that the executives at Sonic are prolly shooting up Oxycotin into their eyelids right about now, 'cause their time as kings of the cream has about as much life left in it as Harry Dean Stanton (and he's dead, btw.) And Dairy Queen would be getting ready to suck on a bag of helium, too, if it weren't for the fact nobody working at DQ has been able to speak a lick of English since 1996. 

I've honestly been thinking about applying for a Cookout franchisee license myself. Of course, my credit score may not be high enough for that $1.3 million loan I was contemplating, and my previous arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct and imitating a police officer (a two-for-one special, actually) may not make the Cookout people too happy, but trust me; if you folks give me the keys to the kingdom, I'll have you guys rolling in so much green you can cosplay as Montana Max from Tiny Toons. 

I mean, you folks have to send me a couple of coupons for praising you, at the very least. It's not everyday I use my award-winning publication for the sole purpose of garnering free chicken nuggets and hamburgers, and for that, you higher-ups at Cookout ought to be mighty thankful.

Yeah right. Like Harrison Ford's old ass will still be alive in 2049.

Speaking of shameless whoring, this newfangled Blade Runner 2049 movie is the biggest ripoff since Mr. Pibb - or the last Alien flick, at least. Now, to be fair I was never really that big an admirer of Ridley Scott's original movie. Even back then, it was filled with too much pretentious claptrap about the meaning of life for my liking, but compared to the heavy-handed techno-existentialism of this movie, it was practically a Roger Corman blood-and-titties sci-fi cheap-o.

The big problem here is that we don't even get Ridley Scott calling the android-blasting action no more. Instead, we've got this French Canadian froth named Denis Villenueve. Now, I'm actually a pretty big admirer of his work - in fact, I thought 2009's Polytechnique and 2011's Incendies were two of the very best movies from their respective years - but this guy is so clearly not cut out for directing sci-fi action opuses. He's too busy trying to get the cinematography just right, with all of these lingering shots of giant CGI ash heaps and dirt-smeared child faces, when the audience just wants to see The Goose blast away robo-hookers while synth-wave music plays in the background. Instead, this Denis fruit keeps trying to hammer us with questions about our inert mortality and what it means to be truly human, as if THAT and not Joanna Cassidy running around with her tits hanging out and Daryl Hanna trying to smother Harrison Ford with her coochie was what people really liked about the original movie. 

We start the movie with this scrolling text prologue about global warming (of course!) causing a whole bunch of famines in the 2020s, then we learn about this rich guy who invented some farm bots that saved the world. But a lot of the older replicants are still around, and there are still plenty of Blade Runners running around trying to catch 'em, too. Ryan Gosling (who, by the way, is so good at portraying socially maladjusted, subconsciously violent retards) plays K, our lead Blade Runner, who this time around is clearly depicted as a robot. Anyway, he gets the flick off to a rollicking start by shutting down Dave Bautista's illegal maggot ranch, but not before multiple walls get broken and at least one party exits the scene with one fewer eyeballs.

Anyway, L.A. circa '49 is a bombed-out, Brazilian looking shit hole, but it still has Atari ads everywhere, for whatever reason. K lives in a scmmy 80-story apartment with opium smoking Chinese people but he doesn't really care because he has a hologram wife that makes him Minute Rice and suggests to him which Nabokov novels to read after every shift. But the next day at work, his boss chews him out for not deleting enough zetabytes from his memory-stealing USB drive, and they tell him for his next assignment he has to off a real person. So he goes to that aforementioned billionaire farm bot mogul's basement (which is a literal memory bank), but there ain't a whole lot of shit left 'cause there was a big EMP blast in 2022 or something like that. Oh, and the owner of FarmBot, Inc. is this one hipster-looking asshole with weird eyes who literally squeezes robot people out of slimy Ziploc bags and stabs them in the stomach for having too many stretchmarks. And (I think) he's actually a cyborg Anti-Christ who wants slave replicants to take over the world so nobody has to work no more and we can all live in a Bernie Sanders multicultural commie utopia. So yeah, you know this is one evil motherfucker we're dealing with right here.

Then Ryan Gosling turns down some human hookers and tells his boss about all these implanted childhood memories and this one time he dreamed a bunch of skinhead third graders beat him up over a wooden horse. So he goes to a dump, which is actually just the entire city of San Diego turned into a scrapheap, which I think we can all agree is an upgrade from what it is today. Then he takes a nap in his car and some homeless Russians start banging on the windshield so he's gotta' shoot about four or five of them in the head at point blank range and then a mysterious missile strike wipes out half of Little Stalingrad.

Then he accidentally stumbles upon a sweatshop for elementary schoolers and the slavemaster is a black dude so he roughs him up for a bit (a side note, but apparently cigarette smoking comes back into vogue big time 33 years from now.) Then Gosling spends 20 minutes rummaging through ashes, and holy shit, he FINDS that wooden horse from his implanted childhood memories. So now it's the inverse of the original Blade Runner's shtick, where the guy is a robot who starts thinking he might be human after all.

Then his hologram wife tells him he's a real boy now and that she probably would've called him Joe if he was her son, so yes, they ARE going to go full retard with the Pinocchio references. So he takes his wooden horse to this Somalian dirt merchant who runs a Geiger counter over it and he tells him that shit is practically glowing green with radiation so he goes on the 2049 version of Google Maps and starts combing through the hitherto unmentioned nuclear wasteland where Vegas used to be and he decides to visit the irradiated desert, but thankfully its the kind of irradiated desert that still has fully intact public libraries and casinos in it.

And at the hour and half mark, Harrison Ford's 80-year-old ass *finally* shows up. And he makes Gosling watch a holographic Elvis revue at gunpoint and then it's time to kung fu for a little while then they get tired of slugging each other in the puss so they decide to throw back a couple of brewskies and discuss Deckard's kid he gave up for adoption and ... well, you can figure this one out, can't you?

Anyhoo, somebody calls in a drone strike and here come the Blade Runners to put the kibosh on Deckard. Now, I ain't gonna tell you if they get him or not, but I assure you there's STILL another hour worth of movie left, somehow. In fact, I don't even really know how to explain the last 30 minutes of the movie to you, but I will say this: it involves a lot of water, a lot of stabbing and a whole lot of robots getting strangled to death. But there's STILL about 20 more minutes of movie after that, and trust me - it's definitely 20 more minutes than should've been kept in the final print.

We've got 23 dead bodies. Five dead robots. Four breasts. Three fist fights. Four exploding vehicles. One hobo encampment bombardment. One crash landing, with underwater submersion. Eyeball plucking. Stomach slicing. Hand crushing. Gratuitous Elvis. Gratuitous Frank Sinatra. Hologram fu. Drone fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - some major league waifu fu.

Starring Ryan Gosling as the autism-bot who dreams of electronic sheep horses who thinks he might be a real human being but won't nobody tell him, for some reason; Harrison Ford as Deckard, who still isn't quite over his dead robo-wife from the first movie and is convinced he managed to have the world's first half person-half robot lovechild and drops gems like "sometimes, to love someone, you've gotta' be a strangers"; Ana da Armas as Ryan Gosling's virtual reality girlfriend; Jared Leto as the Billy Mitchell-looking evil cyborg industrialist with goofball eyeballs; and Dave Bautista as the first replicant on the "to-kill" list, who looks like Steve Jobs jacked out of his mind on steroids.

Co-written by Hampton Fancher (whose biggest screenwriting credit prior to this was 1989's The Mighty Quinn) and Michael Greene, who also wrote the screenplay for Logan and Alien: Covenant, and directed by the aforementioned Denis Villeneuve, whose talents are apparently better suited for movies about drug cartels and deciphering alien languages than cyber-punk neo-noir shoot-a-thons.

I'll give it a just OK two stars out of four. It's got some decent scenes, but by and large, it's hardly anything more than just another big budget sci-fi opus with a couple of good ideas it has no clue how to properly execute. Which, yeah - is pretty much all of 'em Hollywood makes nowadays.

And before you ask - no, it isn't about the professional wrestler.

As a free (and vital) public service, I feel it is my duty - no, obligation - to highlight at least one no-budget, straight-to-the-bottom-row-of-the-new-release-section-at-Walmart micro-horror indie movie every month, and one look at the DVD box art of Circus Kane would suggest the whole thing is nothing more than a halfhearted ripoff meant to capitalize on the success of It. But you can't judge a book by its cover, though, and I assure you, this Circus Kane is no ripoff of It - rather, it's a ripoff of House on Haunted Hill and Saw, which depending on your perspective, is either a minor improvement or a massive downgrade.

But that's not to say this movie ain't important. No sir. As soon as the name of the director flashes onscreen the first time, you just know you're witnessing a major milestone in American degenerate cinema history. Why? Because it's the first slasher movie ever directed by Christopher Olen Ray, and if that last name rings a bell, it should, 'cause he's the son of legendary B-movie king FRED Olen Ray, who's responsible for such all time masterpieces as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Evil Toons and Scream Queen Hot Tub Party. And although this Chris kid's been kicking the tires for awhile now, making movies like 2-Headed Shark Attack and Asteroid vs. Earth, we here at TIIIA can't tell you how thrilled we are to watch him follow in his daddy's illustrious footsteps. And yep, Circus Kane is precisely the kind of loving homage to Freddy O. Ray's filmography that you'd expect - meaning the movie as a whole sucks, but at least it's got a lot of blood and guts everywhere.

What we've got here is a movie where eight disparate people whose only common characteristic is that they're assholes on Twitter (no, that's a real plot point) get text messages telling 'em if they survive one night in a haunted house this old circus freak named Balthazar Kane will give 'em $250,000. So we've got your usual assortment of genre fodder; some nerd collector with a bum ticker, this fat black dude who plays Xbox all day, this one guy who argues with his wife a lot, some washed up indie actress who goes to punk rock shows with five foot tall spikes in her hair, a drug dealer and perhaps most terrifying of all, an all grown up Jonathan Lipnicki, who is now sporting a downright fash-tastic alt-right haircut. And there are these two brunette chicks who look really alike, but the director fucks it all up by letting us know that only one character survives the whole ordeal upfront, so it loses the numbero uno aspect of all great slasher movies: knowing that any character can die a bloody, horrific death at any point in the movie.

So these guys in clown masks toting assault rifles force 'em into the back of a S.W.A.T van and they spend the next 15 minutes talking about how many Instagram followers they have and how they think the whole think is some viral marketing stunt, even though they've just been kidnapped at gunpoint and knocked out with goofy gas (and you know we're dealing with some bottom of the rung acting when nobody in the movie can even act like they're falling asleep.)

So anyhoo, thy go inside the haunted house and there are plasma screen TVs everywhere with Kane (who looks like Rob Zombie cosplaying as pro 'rasslin great The Undertaker) telling them to livestream everything as they make their way through his house o' death traps. Early on we've got the mixed-race guy getting bifurcated by chainsaw-lugging zombie jesters, but nobody thinks its real until he makes them hop across a fire pit with axes swinging on a pendulum back and forth and crawl under barbed wire.

From there, it's your usual no-budget horror hokum. We've got guys having heart attacks and hitting metal grates so hard their heads explode (yeah, we all know that's scientifically impossible, but like they're gonna' waste all those blood bags they bought at Spirit Halloween last year), a clown chomping off a fat black dude's fingers and this one broad getting sliced up in a barbed wire kill lifted right outta the first fuckin' Saw movie. But like a whole lot of modern indie horror movies, the folks who made this one just don't got no idea how to end the movie. We've got too many flashbacks, too much monologuing, too many intelligence-insulting plot twists (at one point, the survivors call 911 and are told they'd have to wait two hours before the po-po got there) and a final girl vs. main psycho killer grand finale that just drags on forever. 

And even worse? The movie commits the ULTIMATE post-post-post-postmodern slasher movie sin: it hits us with a totally nonsensical "twist ending" that serves only to set up a sequel don't nobody want to see and won't ever get made no how. How many times do I have to keep telling you people this? If your movie don't end with the final girl turning the bad guy's intestines into a Picasso painting or the bad guys grabbing the final girl and eating her or raping her two seconds after the screen fades to black, you might as well just toss the whole damn movie into a Dempster Dumpster and say a buncha Puerto Ricans stole the reels so you can get a little bit of insurance money out of it. 

Still, I'll give it some credit. I mean, for a movie that was apparently filmed in one of those "escape room" attractions with all the props on loan from Party City's Halloween discount section, it ain't too shabby an effort, I suppose.

We've got 19 dead bodies. One severed zombie head. Eyeballs roll. Fingers roll. Legs roll. arms roll. One jugular sliced open. One suicide by cop. One Nazi cannibal 'rasslin match. Gratuitous skeletons. Gratuitous crapola punk rock music. Gratuitous Marky Mark impersonations. Blacklight fu. Chainsaw fu. Barbed wire fu. Meathook fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some serious influencer marketing fu.

Starring Jonathan Lipnicki as the guy you think is probably going to survive the movie because he's the only guy anybody in the audience might recognize; Tim Abell as big bad Balthazar Kane, who says lines like "I am the hunter who eats the flesh of his prey" and "death is the one true god, and I'm her angel spreading her harsh, cold words one soul at a time" while looking like a combination of Jeff Bridges and Royal Dano's zombie cowboy character in House 2; Ted Monte as the scummy baseball card shop owner who says "this was totally worth being drugged or gassed or whatever he did to us"; Cameron Jebo as the guy who says "Shalom, motherfucker" after snapping an S.S. zombie's neck; and Victoria Konefal as the final girl, who really shouldn't keep her hopes up about getting the lead in Circus Kane 2 anytime soon. 

Written by James Cullen Bressack, Sean Sellers and Zack Ward (who played Scut Farkus in A Christmas Story, believe it or not), whom all did an outstanding job ripping off Five Nights at Freddy's obliquely enough to probably not get sued; and directed, of course, by the one and only Chris Olen Ray, who doesn't even care that his actresses' makeup keeps changing mid-scene, because that's stuff viewers of the soil wouldn't even notice, anyway. 

We'll give 'em credit for adhering to about four or five of Jimbo's Ten Commandments for all Modern Slasher Movies, but again, it's a movie that just lays on the self-referential shit too thick. Which we could've overlooked had the director distracted us with some titties here and there, but the zero breast count alone is worth bumping off half a star. As such, I have no choice but to give it a ho-hum two stars out of four simply out of principle. Jimbo says check it out, but this Chris O. Ray kid definitely needs to rewatch some of his daddy's old movies (we'd wholeheartedly recommend The Alien Dead and Beverly Hills Vamp as starting points) to learn how to make these things the right dadgum way.

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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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