NABOKV-L post 0008404, Fri, 15 Aug 2003 10:57:30 -0700

----- Original Message -----
From: "Basil Lawrence" <hhumbert@HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 9:53 AM
Subject: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Nabokov
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (4
lines) -------------------
> Truly bizarre...
>
>
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,1018615,00.html
More about Freddy Vs Jason

Freddy Vs Jason


Cert 18

Peter Bradshaw
Friday August 15, 2003
The Guardian


Freddy Vs Jason: the Splatter Premiership

In Christopher Hitchens's recent study of George Orwell, the author
muses on Orwell's missed rendezvous with Albert Camus, and ponders the
sadness of history's great aborted and almost-meetings - those between Marx
and Darwin, Evelyn Waugh and HL Mencken, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and
Vladimir Nabokov. Very little, in fact none, of this intellectual piquancy
attaches to the meeting here of horror titans Freddy Krueger from the
Nightmare of Elm Street movies and Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th
franchise.

The man with the hat, pizza face, claw-hand and jumper takes on the
man with the hockey mask and the machete, for a kick-ass confrontation of
the uber-slashers. It has the air of almost an exhibition match, a contest
with little or nothing really at stake, like Manchester United and Arsenal
in last weekend's FA Community Shield. The idea is that Freddy, marooned in
hell, resurrects Jason to kill lots of attractive young women with breast
implants, as it were, on his behalf, but then decides Jason is getting too
big for his boots, taking over slashing territory which is rightfully
Freddy's.

The problem with this battle of the bad guys is that when they are
busy fighting each other, the pert and sexy teens who would otherwise be
their victims are safe: so their opposition neutralises the drama and the
horror. Weirdly though, getting Freddy and Jason to duke it out brings out
entirely unsuspected dimensions to what might laughingly be called their
characters - Jason is almost the nice horror villain in this pairing, what
with being abused as a child and being stolidly silent, and gleefully
sarcastic, smart-mouthed Freddy, the unrepentant child-killer, is the nasty
one. In the end - well, I wouldn't dream of revealing the result of this
unique fixture in the Splatter Premiership.