I need to start this review by admitting something that may well cause an eruption of controversy throughout the western world.  I've never seen any of the Freddy or Jason movies.  I know next to nothing about them.  It seems relatively unlikely that I will ever see any of them.  An "historic pairing" of the two horror characters in Freddy vs Jason was therefore not something to which I greatly looked forward.  Indeed, given the poor response most of the previous 3,000 (or so) entries in each series has attracted, I didn't think many members of the film-going community around the globe would pay much attention either.  And how wrong I was.  In what is surely the most surprising box office hit of the year, the movie made almost $40m in its opening weekend.  (The combined grosses of the most recent films in the individual series - Jason X and New Nightmare - was less than this.)

On board to provide the score was Graeme Revell, no stranger to the horror genre, who had worked with director Ronny Yu previously on Bride of Chucky.  Given how little Revell's recent scores have enthused me, I was all prepared to come into this review with some sort of oh-so-witty comment about the last track, called "Is It Ever Over?", expressing what some of us were wondering about Revell's career.  But  I'm both surprised and pleased to report that the score really isn't bad.  Yes, it's as generic as they come, but I doubt there's a composer in the world who would have written anything other than a generic slasher-movie score for a film like this.

Yes, there's a fair share of slightly dull suspense music, but there's a surprising amount of action music.  Revell usually goes off the wall and has wailing ethnic voices and weird instruments that seem to have no relevance to whatever picture he's scoring, but here his more traditional approach results in by far the strongest score he's written in a very long time.  The album's produced very well: the suspense and action tracks are mixed so that there's always something just round the corner, so things don't lose too much momentum.

The action music is the most impressive.  Yes, we've heard it all before, but it's still great fun to hear it again.  It actually reminds me of Christopher Young's music for similar films (and he's done enough of those, God knows - including, in fact, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2).  Charles Bernstein's original Freddy theme is not included anywhere, but Revell does interpolate Harry Manfredini's Jason theme in a few places.

OK, so it's not groundbreaking, but Freddy vs Jason makes for an entertaining and most enjoyable album.  Recommended.  (Quite note: if you do want the album, be careful you do buy Varese's score album and not the obligatory "inspired by" rubbish - there's also an album of that.  The score's available from the link below.)

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