Every Freddy and Jason movie rated as Magic cards

I recently witnessed some people talking about what they looked forward to in Magic these days. While their discussion seemed to have originated from a place of discontent, it was kinda interesting to be a fly on the wall regardless. Their topics ranged from having a hard time looking forward to new sets as they didn't get to savor them before the next thing dropped, to the lack of in-person events due to the pandemic, to the last year and a half of card design having rendered most sanctioned formats unrecognizable at best and broken at worst. Product fatigue and lack of familiar gatherings in some weird vicious cycle. In the end, they seemed to settle on looking forward to ban list updates, but they also felt that that was a kinda sad thing to look forward too.

I can relate to the ebbs and flows of Magic passion. Having played for the odd 25 years plus, some months, or years, are more exciting than others. But I know that good times always comes back. So when The Gathering fails to gather, I find myself biding my time. I have a larger than normal focus on collectibles these days - rather than cards for actual decks - as I do not know when I have the chance to play the way I want to again. Maybe in August. Maybe in 2021.

In the long run, nothing will prevent Magic from being an awesome game. But sometimes we need to take a step back from the gathering. Magic will be there when we get back.

So with a stunning lack of new tech and tournaments musing from my end these days, I figured this would be as good a time as any to write about horror movies. Having no editor is awesome.

Magic!

Some people might question my credentials for trash-talking Friday the 13th part III. What am I, some sort of YouTube-schooled fanboy jumping on an ill-informed hater train? Nope, I'm the guy who don't question the plot of Oasis of the Zombies. My idea of a drama movie is Dellamorte Dellamore and my spirit animal is the shark from Zombie Flesh Eaters. My first VHS of Evil Dead 2 was less than 50 minutes long due to all the cuts, and at one point I got passable in reading Greek and Dutch as those were the closest countries without censorship and their VHS movies had burnt-in subtitles. What I'm trying to say is that I have an actual black belt in mediocre 20th century horror. 10,000 hours down that drain, and can't complain about my life choices.

Not the basement stash of a rookie.

Today we're rating every movie in the Freddy vs Jason universe using old school Magic cards. Buckle up mofos!

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street is not only a genre defining horror flick, it's actually good. The teenagers on Elm Street have their dreams invaded by a scorched man with a razor-bladed glove, and soon realize that getting killed in their nightmares will kill them in real life. Their parents dismiss them, but it turns out that they have more knowledge about their kids' nightmares than they care to admit. Frederick Charles Krueger became a pop culture icon comparable to few, the effects are gnarly, and the high-concept idea is tight. It may have borrowed a lot from the masterwork that is Phantasm, but this is good enough that I would call the influences an homage rather than a ripoff.

While A Nightmare on Elm Street may not be as scary today as it was a few decades ago, it's still rad and have a place and legacy. I rate it Hypnotic Specter.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

Freddy's Revenge make very little sense as lore goes. In the first one, Freddy is defeated by ignoring him and, in a sense, realizing that he's a nightmare. In Nightmare part 2 Freddy gets into the real world, walks around boiling water and whatnot, and is defeated by the use of love rather than disregard. A dream-being that can be ignored and a douchebag crashing pool parties are almost as much polar opposites as it is having full inattention as weakness and being showered with love as weakness.

The movie is by no means good, but has become a cult classic due to its homoerotic themes and gay subtext (not a joke). It's kinda mediocre on paper, but it does things far removed from the other films in the series and is beloved for it by a subset of fans. I rate this movie Gate to Phyrexia.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Wes Craven is back in the director's chair, and a kind soul could see this one as a mostly logical sequel to the first movie. Nancy from the first movie returns, now as a sleep therapist working at a psychiatric hospital. Her patients are conveniently the last surviving children of the parents that killed Freddy prior to the events in part one. Freddy starts picking them off, but the main girl, Kristen (played by Patricia Arquette), has the power to get other people into her dreams. This prompts the gang to go into sleep hypnosis together and power up. Freddy laughs it off and kills most of them with ironic violence. It is all very rad and unnecessary. Eventually a nun tells the hospital's doctor that Freddy can be properly killed by dousing his remains with holy water in the real world. They do that, and Freddy is finally killed, for real this time, never to return again.

This is a pretty distressing movie for its style, dealing with suicide and other more tangible horrors than the last one. At the time it was released it was highly praised by fans of the genre, and still today it occasionally shows up trying to find new audiences. While not as iconic as the first movie, this one still certainly has a place in horror history. I rate it Underworld Dreams.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
This is quite possibly the world's most forgettable movie. I mean, it is hard to remember exactly the plot of Police Academy six (the one between the one in Miami and the one in Moscow), but damn, this is far more amnesia inducing than that. I think it has something to do with a girl that can bring other people into her dreams, though I might be confusing it with Kirsten from the third movie. I guess it could be the same person, but I can't recall Patricia Arquette being in this one. Wait, is this the one with the scary trampoline and the motorcycle? Nope, that's the fifth. But I'm pretty sure this one had a topless woman swimming around in a waterbed? 

Well, I can't remember the story nor the kills for the life of me. This is an utterly forgettable movie, and from what little I recall, an unimpressive one. I rate it Spiritual Sanctuary.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
One of the more odd beliefs in late 80s movies was that mixing a bunch of sperm would create a super-baby. Occasionally you'll end up with a Schwarzenegger (and a DeVito), but if the dad is a hundred maniacs, what to expect when expecting is Freddy.

There are a couple of cool scenes in this one. The scary trampoline is, as noted, pretty sweet. And the nightmarish setting in the asylum for criminally insane is very memorable. Though all in all, this is just a terrible movie. The Dream Child has some spicy flavor, but it is clearly the little brother of old school greatness and close to unplayable. This is Junun Efreet.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Most bad movies are just bad, not really making a fuzz about it. Like Volcano or something. If a movie is bad enough it might even get appreciated by virtue of inferiority, like The Room or Bryan Manolakos: The Hands of Fate. But then there's a scale where a movie's ineptitude is like spreading sickness. Movies so fundamentally off the mark they taint the masterworks that spawned them. Like how we hear fans say that The Matrix would have been a better movie if it never had sequels, or how Escape Plan 2: Hades make us feel worse about enjoying the glory that is Escape Plan.

It is hard to be so bad and disrespectful that you make five eighties slasher movies worse and close to ruin an iconic villain like Freddy Kruger in the process, especially when Alice Cooper is involved. You thought The Phantom Menace was disrespectful to the legacy of Darth Vader? Then you clearly never was a Nightmare fanboy exposed to Freddy's Dead. If these movies ever had lore, if Freddy ever was a scary figure, Nightmare part 6 spits on it. Apart from the nightmare scene with Tracy and her abusive father (which is intense and uncomfortable) the movie is not even funny bad, it's just embarrassing bad.

Nightmare part 6 is not only a bad thing to bring to the table, it manages to make all other things worse by playing it. This is sleeving up City in a Bottle when you're playing an Arabian Nights only deck.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
Series creator Wes Craven is back again, for the first time since Dream Warriors. I can't put my finger on why, but this is one of the most mid-90s feeling movies I've ever seen. Like how you just know that Phone Booth was made in the early 2000s. 

New Nightmare, much like The Human Centipede Part 2, is a sequel taking place in the real world. Robert Englund (the actor playing Freddy Krueger) plays Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp (Nancy in the first and third movie) plays Heather Langenkamp, Wes Craven plays Wes Craven, and so on. The previous movies in the series exist as actual movies here, but it soon turns out Freddy Krueger goes far beyond being a fictional character. This is a horror movie taking place within a horror movie, peeling proverbial layers of the proverbial onion inception-style. It cleverly moves the series to a sub-game of sorts, with new stakes, and manage to step outside the game state set by the last train wrecks without retconning or rebooting. And it's a pretty fun ride. This movie is Shahrazade.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
This is like the third, possibly fourth, best movie in the series, and still get more haters than the seven preceding it combined. I guess that people just dislikes remakes and have misplaced nostalgia for 80s movies. But being a remake is no real crime on its own; e.g. The Thing from 1982 is inarguably cooler than the 1951 version and Evil Dead from 2013 is nothing if not entertainment.

While Nightmare #8 is far weaker than the original Nightmare on Elm Street, I believe that if we had this one 25 years earlier we would have appreciated it for what it was. Freddy is back being 75% scary and 25% glee (rather than full Willy E. Coyote like in The Final Nightmare), and the story is mostly coherent. A Nightmare on Elm Street tries to go back the roots and emulate what made the original work, but falls short in that almost none of the original fans really care anymore and the kids of today have shinier toys to play with. This movie is Headless Specter.

Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th is often noted as being influenced by Halloween, but I think that The Toolbox Murders is a far more apt comparison. Grief-stricken parents played by relatively famous actors going on a mysterious slasher spree. Yeah, sure, Jason turns into a supernatural silent killer eerily similar to Michael Myers in later movies, but in this one Jason the killer is nowhere to be found. In the original lore, Jason was a kid who drowned two decades back when his camp counselors were to busy having sex to watch the water, and the main bad guy here is (40 YEAR OLD SPOILER ALERT!) his mother Pamela. In her maddening grief, Pamela wants to prevent Camp Crystal Lake from being reopened using any means necessary, including killing future counselors.

Friday the 13th is mostly a whodunit murder mystery with mediocre acting and Kevin Bacon. And awesome effects by Tom Savini. If Nightmare on Elm Street hit the accidental jackpot casting Robert Englund as Freddy, Friday the 13th struck all the gold hiring Tom Savini for special effect. I fully assume that this movie had been forgotten if it wasn't for his art. So this is a kinda unimpressive story that becomes appreciated and borderline iconic due to it's cool look. This movie is Jovial Evil.

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

I would love to love this movie. The part between the beginning and the end is sweet, and if we just look at the middle 40 minutes or so we'd have a pretty great 80s slasher. But the beginning and end is plainly annoying and make less than zero sense. But we get to meet Jason for the first time, and Kirsten Baker is stunning, so I guess there's that.

The movie looks pretty good, and could have been a great one in the genre, but the inept development just gives it too much overhead and the end result is sorely lacking. I rate this one Black Mana Battery.

Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
The golden rule of eighties horror movies state that any film experiencing a drop in quality with the first sequel should make part three in 3D. Amityville 3D, Jaws 3D, Piranha 3D, etc ad nauseum. People kept doing it, despite this approach having only worked once, and it was in 2003, and the movie was Spy Kids 3-D. What do you mean Spy Kids 3-D is only rated 4.3 IMDB? It should be at least 5.4. I mean, the actual character Machete (from Machete) is in the movie, and Sylvester Stallone gets cloned or something and yells at himself. It's all deceptively brilliant.

We should probably note for disclosure that Nightmare on Elm Street 3 surprisingly wasn't in 3D; they saved that for part 6. And for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they actually waited until part 7. Madness. But these are the exceptions that make the rule.

Anyway, as a standalone movie, Friday the 13th part 3 is a rare breed of garbage. I'd rate this as the least enjoyable movie in the series; an artistic failure well beyond what a casual viewing of e.g. Nightmare part 6 could offer. However, where Nightmare 6 manage to insult any fan of the series and de-claw the main villain, Friday 3 instead takes an ill-defined Jason and makes him approximately 80% cooler. This is the first movie where Jason resembles the Jason we know today (in part 1 he's a drowned kid and in part 2 he's basically a forest troll), and this is where he picks up his iconic hockey mask. It doesn't make the movie better on its own (again, garbage fire), but it does in a sense help the things coming after it. And a kinda amusing thing with this flick is that people tend to assume it's pretty good, only to get utter disappointment once they give it go. I rate this movie Mana Matrix.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
The plan was originally to wrap up the series as a trilogy after part three, but in the end they figured just one more movie couldn't hurt. And for the fourth and final movie in the Friday the 13th franchise, master makeup artist Tom Savini from part one serendipitously return. So we're back to having neat gore and far fewer annoying jump-cuts. (Yes, I know that Stan Winston did some work on part 3. But that may be the most perplexing coincidence of theatrical arts since Edwin Booth saved the life of Robert Lincon.)

The story this time centers on a group of teenagers that goes to Crystal Lake and gets killed. To be fair, that pretty much summaries the entire franchise. I guess there's a sub-plot where a preteen Corey Feldman makes a bunch of rad masks, probably as an excuse for the producers to show off some more of Tom Savini's handiwork. In the end Corey shaves his head and goes to town on Jason with a machete. While this movie was marketed as the end of the series, there's still a cliffhanger of sorts hinting that Jason's soul may have possessed young Corey Feldman after he killed him at the end.

Tom Savini aside, this movie lures you into thinking that it will be an epic showdown that breaks the genre. At the end it even teases strange plot threads and potential builds for future shenanigans. But once you look it up, it delivers nothing of the sort. This is sneaky bulk, and I rate it Relic Bind.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

If you thought the cliffhanger at the end of part 4 would amount to something real, part 5 is here to show you the door. If you want coherent stories, go watch Fassbinder.

Viewers with their foot inside the door of slasher history may be familiar with Jason not being a player in Friday the 13th part one, or Michael Myers absence from Halloween 3. But only the least social of us know that Jason wasn't in Friday the 13th part five either. The tagline says it's A New Beginning and taglines don't lie. So we're back to a whodunit murder mystery where the killer turns out to be (35 YEAR OLD SPOILER ALERT!) the grieving dad of the kid that gets axed in the mental hospital early in the movie. I can't remember his name.

The movie is about as exciting as a bag of moss. Apart from a rad opening scene (which was all a dream), it is pretty much a powered down version of part one with some borderline amusing nudity and less evocative art. I rate this movie Inquisition.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
This is the best sequel so far, though that's a lot like pointing out that Link: Faces of Evil is the best Zelda CD-i game. In ascending order of tolerability, Friday the 13th goes third, seventh, fifth, eighth, fourth, second, tenth, sixth, ninth, first, eleventh. Yeah, the remake is slightly better than the original. Fight me.

Part six takes place about seven years after part four, and Corey Feldman's character has grown up to become a 18-year old man-child (played by a 28-year old Thom Mathews). The character's name is Tommy Jarvis btw, and he's perhaps the most established returning character in the series apart from the Voorheeses themselves. Tommy was an important guy in part five as well (where he was played by yet another actor), and those in the know often refer to part 4-6 as "The Tommy Jarvis Trilogy". I feel I should point out the irony in having a trilogy that starts with The Final Chapter and ends with Jason Lives, but it seems just saying the titles out loud will do the trick.

And while we're a bit off topic: 9/11. Maths argue that this movie takes place in 1991; it's one year after part five which was around six years after part four, which took place in 1984. At the end of the movie (YET ANOTHER DISTURBINGLY OLD SPOILER!) Jason gets chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake, and it's been stated numerous times by the director that he's stuck there for 10 years before part seven takes place. That places part eight, Jason Takes Manhattan, around 2002. And no one in the movie even acknowledges 9/11, which was a pretty big deal in downtown Manhattan circa 2002. That's just cold.

Anyway, part six. Jason is finally the murder zombie we've all come to know and love. And, I mean, the movie is mostly enjoyable. At least as much as Spy Kids 3-D. If I were to recommend just one of the 80s era Friday the 13th movies to a person new to the franchise, I'd give them this one.

So, a comparably bad movie as the full pool of horror goes, but a fun enough ride for people wanting to spice things up. A perhaps overly optimistic resurrection plot on the director's side, and a lot of words to accomplish comparably little. I rate this movie Glyph of Reincarnation.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Friday part 7 manages to cross the magical threshold and become so bad it's entertaining. Part 3 didn't really do this, as it, while technically worse, didn't have a synopsis to make you shake your fists at clouds. If you have a reasonable story, you have to be really bad before you are entertaining. And where part 3 starts (and ends) with a group of teens going to Crystal Lake to be killed by a still-human Jason, part 7 starts with Jason getting accidentally surfaced and resurrected by a surprised telekinetic woman, and ends with a random deus ex machina. It is all very baffling.

The New Blood was originally envisioned as "Jason vs Carrie", and when the terrible story couldn't get the rights to Stephen King's iconic character, they basically just went on and did it anyway. (Though the bar wasn't exactly through the roof for Reagan-era King movies either, so in the best timeline King said yes and then went on to write I, Jason.) "Carrie" has a different name of course, and the writing is slightly worse than a suicide note from a horse, but the basic idea is there.

When I see this movie I think of Saw. The Saw movies are basically gorno, but I'll be damned if their story and characters aren't still somewhat coherent eight movies in. Exploitation sequels don't get to be this stupid this side of the millennium. Hell, Spy Kids 4-D had some sense to it, and that was a soft reboot where they argued that the 4th dimension was smell. But Friday the 13th Part 7 is almost incomprehensibly stupid. And that makes it great for a certain kind of movie night. The New Blood is comical in its ineptness, and so I rate it Wood Elemental.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Jesus, why are there so many movies? I though this would be a fun, quick post to write, and by now we're almost 4,000 words into this nonsense. Why can't all 80's horror movie franchises be like Evil Dead? Part 1 - masterpiece horror; part 2 - masterpiece splatter; part 3 - masterpiece adventure; part 4 - enjoyable soft reboot; part 5 - there's no part 5, but please watch the Netflix series if you want some more. As I write this, it starts to dawn on me that Friday the 13th is actually a pretty bad movie series. I mean, I actually enjoy teen slashers. I think Urban Legends 2 is underrated and I own two copies of Fulci's The New York Ripper on VHS. But these movies are just so plentiful and mediocre. They are like aggressive hot takes about Strip Mine on Facebook.

Anyway, the majority of this movie take place on boats. Jason gets resurrected when an anchor accidentally hits some underwater power cables (which make no engineering sense to have there, but if I start nitpicking now, we'll never be done) which electrocutes him back to life. He then jumps aboard another boat (the "main boat", if you will) and kills a bunch of teens. The main boat catches fire or something and a few survivors escape to a third boat. That boat eventually anchor in Manhattan - as seen in 1980's drug PSAs - where Jason teleports around scaring thugs and throwing people out of windows. There's an amusing scene of Jason fighting a boxer on a rooftop, and a cool shot at Times Square. But thrilling, this is not.

The high-concept of the movie is sweet, but the execution is supremely pedestrian. It doesn't even properly deliver on the title; this seems like a case where people though they should build on a flavorful name, but never considered whether or not they could deliver on the premise. It's also very over-costed, having a price tag between twice and ten times that of any previous Friday the 13th movie. So - not only because Jason clearly teleports - this movie is Teleport.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

After the lukewarm response to Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount Pictures sold the character Jason to New Line Cinema; the home of A Nightmare on Elm Street. They only sold the character though - not the name of the film series - which is why this movie is called Jason Goes to Hell rather than Friday the 13th part IX. New Line Cinema even brought back producer Sean S. Cunningham - the guy that directed and produced the first Friday the 13th - in a move to make the nonsense more palatable. Though Cunningham reportedly stopped watching the series after part 2; a potential objection against his ability to make a logical sequel in the timeline. Heh, in Halloween they at least had the sense to retcon the franchise every time they made a too baffling sequel (seriously; eleven movies and five timelines for that one).

Jason Goes to Hell has a bad rep for having a nonsensical plot and changing the main character, to which I reply, have you seen any other movie in the series? If you didn't complain about lore breaking at part two (oh, Jason is alive and is a forest hermit now), part three (and he can heal non-lethal machete wounds, also it's a day later but now he's got no hair, and did his mom just turn into a lake ghast?), four (well, Phineas Gage survived something similar I guess), six (so now he's actually a zombie), seven (dude is in fact immortal), or eight (yep, he can teleport); then check your whine at the door. The whole "Jason is an evil spirit more than just a physical body" was a thing already in part four. And nonsensical plots are the bread and butter of the series. So no foul there. This garbled mess is actually a movie, and as such stand in stark contrast to the last few non-movies in the series.

Anyway, Jason does an Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing and jumps around in different victims, while the good guys do an The Omen thing and try to kill him with a magic dagger. It's not Tarkovsky, but there are some memorable over-the-top characters and amiable scenes here. The kerfuffle by the police car comes to mind. Also the actual Necronomicon ex Mortis (the very same prop used in Evil Dead) is in the movie, as well as a cameo by an in-universe Freddy Krueger.

I... enjoyed this movie? While not the most fondly remembered entry by the hive mind, it is definitely niche playable and sets the stage for future entries to be more impactful. I'd expect people giving it a casual try to get more positively surprised than negatively so. Jason Goes to Hell is Wyluli Wolf.

Jason X (2001)

If you're only going to watch one exploitative sci-fi horror from around the turn of the millennium, watch Event Horizon. But if you're going to watch five, make one of them Jason X.

A bunch of bureaucratic red tape stopped Jason vs Freddy from being produced in the years after Jason Goes to Hell, and instead of abandoning the idea New Line Cinema opted to make a sequel set in the distant future. That way, an upcoming Freddy vs Jason could technically take place between part nine and part ten. And we clearly needed more sequels.

In Jason X, our villain is frozen in carbonite or something around the future year of 2010 and is retrieved half a millennia later by some space randos on a field trip to Old Earth. His frozen corpse comes back to life and starts killing people. Then we get NANOBOT SPACE JASON. It's all very dumb and awesome. And unlike much sci-fi horror from the era, Jason X never insists upon itself or tries to be overly clever. Jason, space, nudity, shatter a frozen face on a table. Done.

The movie feels very off-brand for a series that mostly took place in a technology-free rural America up to this point, but it works. And while there are movies in other series that use the "killer on a space ship" premise more effectively, like Alien, it's fun to see Jason take a stab at it. In the grand context of sci-fi horror, there are other options, but within the colors of slashers wanting to spice things up and shatter faces, Jason X has a home. I rate it Mind Bomb.

Friday the 13th (2009)
Friday the 13th 11 is our long awaited cleanup of the Jason lore. Well, not as awaited as the masterwork of thread connecting that was Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, but this is kinema, not some nerdy comic book. Though we're in reboot land now, and need to step carefully. Friday the 13th part 11 ignores most everything from the previous movies, rather opting to create fiction with the pop-cultural perception of Jason. So hockey mask, dead mom, crystal lake, machete, psychotic killer and all that; but no deadlights, nanobots, magic daggers, teleportation, nor weakness to toxic waste. And more of the forest troll we saw in part two than the magic zombie that emerged in part six. It seems like part one is still mostly canon for this one though, so this is in a sense similar to the reboot made with Halloween 11 from 2018. Leave it to part eleven to try and sort out the pre-Reddit sequels I guess.

The movie is good, possibly even great, as 80s slashers goes. The acting doesn't make you cringe, the kills are brutal, and the nudity is voluptuous. I appreciate that the movie doesn't try to make fun of itself the way that e.g. the Scream movies did or going all Hardy Boys with kids trying to figure out what's going on like the Final Destination movies from the same era. While those movies certainly have charm, it's nice to just get a plain gritty slasher that doesn't wink at the camera every now and then.

Unfortunately, it's about twenty years late to the party. A couple of decades earlier, this would have been a gold standard for slashers. But today it is almost mocked; who'd go for this when we have, like, The Babadook to compete for our attention? But the nostalgia is there for those who bother to look for it, and in the right setting it's still scary. Just not as scary as the threats we have come accustomed in the last years. This movie is Ravenous Giant.

Freddy vs Jason (2003)
Here we are, for all the marbles. Ten years of copyright disagreements after the cliffhanger in Jason Goes to Hell, we finally get the smack-down to kill the 80s. Freddy vs Jason takes place about three months after Jason Goes to Hell, which actually makes the movie's belated release date align well with the in-universe timeline. 

Freddy is stuck in hell after the local government deleted all records of his deeds and made the kids and most adults on Elm Street forget about him. He musters his last forces to push Jason out of hell and puts him on a strategic murder spree to rekindle the town's memories and restore his powers. This works fairly well, but eventually Jason goes a bit overboard and does his own thing. Rivalry ensues, and the lovable misfits end up facing down each other rather than any wayward teens. The semblance we get of plot is mostly an excuse to have two iconic slasher villains go at each other at their home turfs, but as means to justify the end, it satisfies. And Katharine Isabelle is a fox.

Freddy vs Jason is a study in fan service and nostalgia, and old fans of the characters snicker as they discover all the winks and nods left for them. Hey, is that a Serendib Efreet that ETBs with Bazaar of Baghdad? And a Flying Carpet and Dancing Scimitar in the art! And Aladdin's Lamp, and Disrupting Scepter, and Mox Ruby, and... We chuckle. But we can't fully commit to it. Because even though we like it, we realize that while it serves the fandom, it's not the fandom itself. We need to go back to our pre-internet days and youthful ignorance to be able to fully embrace these kind of things. And for good or bad, there's no turning back. That's why we care more about Jovial Evil than Ravenous Giant. And that's why this movie is Bazaar Trademage.

Seventeen pages later we end up with a card from Modern Horizons. A bit anticlimactic for an old school blog. But I guess it's ok for us to look away from the Magic we most enjoy and embrace new things every now and then. Sometimes life, society or enthusiasm demand a shifted focus. Hypnotic Specter, Jovial Evil and Underworld Dreams will still be there when we have the opportunity and urge to return to our pubs and lighthouses. And in the meantime, we could always watch a movie.