Although I was born in the mid-seventies, I never hopped onto the eighties horror train, and as a result, I'm uninvolved with the affection many people hold for series like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and their lesser-known siblings. Though the first in each series was worth watching (even if it was a rip-off of Halloween, the original Friday the 13th managed a creepy ambiance at points), each of the sequels has been of varying quality--some okay, some plain terrible. Freddy and Jason have gotten older, but they haven't changed a whole lot, and now it's time to refresh them a little.

Which leads us to Freddy vs. Jason. This movie was in the works for a decade by the time it finally hit the screens, ever since Freddy's glove reached out of the ground to snag Jason's mask at the end of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. I have to give F v J credit; it does successfully combine the approaches and atmospheres of both series into a coherent film. Unfortunately, the Nightmare series has always focused on modern horror framed by sadistic "humor," and Friday the 13th has almost exclusively been a deadly serious blood-and-guts slasher film. And the combination that resulted was--unsurprisingly, on reflection--competent but not really that clever and not much fun at all. It's a movie of stylized horror framed by faux-atmospheric set pieces that's watchable enough for genre fans but isn't likely to convert anyone outside of the fold.