In hell, Freddy Kruger(Robert Englund) isn't happy: his crimes have been long forgotten. Covered up by the locals of Springwood, no kids on Elm Street remember his name. As someone who can only infest the dreams of those connected to the killings or those keeping his memory going, he's become powerless to continue his murderous spree. So searching in the afterlife, he finds someone who might be of use to him: Jason Vorhees(Ken Kirzinger). If the hulking brute can get out of hell and create some carnage across the town that tried to bury Freddy's name, maybe the ensuing terror could get him his power back. If he can keep Jason under control, that is.
The Springwood Slasher and the Camp Crystal Lake killer were teased to cross paths as early as 1993 in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, when New Line Cinema got his hands on the Friday the 13th series... just as both franchises were starting to dwindle in popular reception; it's little wonder the movie spent a full decade in develompent hell. But once it finally got out, this passion project penned by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (and directed by Ronny Yu) was everything fans could've hoped for.
The movie succesfully brings some of the most frightening aspects out of both series: The unstoppable force of Jason's kills and the generational allegory of Freddy's rampage aren't skimmed over, which means the cast of traumatized teenagers is stronger than you'd expect from a movie with this title. That said, this is still ultimately a crossover between slasher icons with a fight at the forefront, so scholcky fun is to be had. Between the over the top gore, a good dose of black comedy, exciting action set pieces and not outstanding but solid enough performances, the movie relishes on its outrageous premise while paying loving homage to both franchises.
Seriously, as alluded earlier, the production of this movie was nuts. Millions of dollars worth of unproduced scripts were commissioned and discarded, and going back as the The Final Friday, the plans were pretty much unsustainably ambitious: at one point Evil Dead and Hellraiser were considered to be thrown into the the blender too. As it concerns the former, not only are there overt nods to the Necronomicon Ex Mortis in Final Friday (which would suggest Jason is some form of deadite), but Ash did end up becoming more or less the protagonist of not one, but two comic book tie ins where he had to stop both slasher villains as Freddy got access to that blasted book of the dead.
On the Hellraiser side of things, a discarded ending had Pinhead come straight from hell to interfere in the fight. Which is hard to imagine how that would've ended because Hellraiser is fairly tonally clashing even at it's schlockiest, as well as a complete conflict killer since Pinhead is just on a very different league when it comes to supernatural power. One can only wonder.
