To the people who really care about such things, is this movie considered to be within continuity for one or both of the characters?
No. Not at all.
(Spoiler warning!)
I can only really speak for the Friday the 13th series, but continuity was lost a long time ago.
For example, the last “Jason” movie (I hate that New Line dropped the ‘Friday the 13th’ name when they took it over!) took place in 2045, and Jason was released to kill students on a spaceship. The hard core fans can make the argument that even though it was made before Freddy vs. Jason, it doesn’t mean it took place before it. I prefer to pretend “Jason X” never even happened.
Also, to make FvsJ work they had to play with the existing stories a bit to make them come together with the least amount of suspension of disbelief from the audience. They had to make Crystal Lake within walking distance to Elm Street for example. They also played a bit with the characters from movie to movie.
In part 3, Jason Voorhees was far more of a deranged human being. By part 6, he was a zombie, and in part 7 he was a full on walking dead. In part 8, he developed teleportation somehow, and “went to hell” in part 9 when he shed his physical body and became a free roaming spirit taking over other people’s bodies. :smack:
They’ve also invented various other characters that contradicted previous backstory (in part 9 we ‘discover’ a long lost sister) and totally ignored established bits of ‘fact’ (Jason never has a fear of water until FvsJ).
In fact, FvsJ did it’s best to put back as much of the original story as it could, and present it in a new exciting way. Most F13 fans agree it was one of the best movies in the series.
So it’s good? Is it worth the watch?
I’m heavily biased, but yeah, it’s very good.
If you’re not a fan boy like me, I might say “it’s good if you don’t go in expecting too much”. Some of the dialogue was re-written late to hurry the overall story along and there is one particular exchange that is a littel uncomfortable to watch (when the kids figure the whole thing out in like 4 seconds, and just happen to be right with their first guess!), but other than that and a few other passing moments, it’s pretty good. I mean, campiness to a certian level is what makes these movies good to begin with, so there’s going to be some.
The fright scenes are very good, and for those into Special Effects there are some good ones. For story driven folk like mysef, they get into quite a bit of backstory which I really enjoyed. It made me want a prequel!
It’s certainly nowhere as bad as some of (most of) the previous chapters.
As a ‘purist’ fan boy, my favourites are Part 1, 2, 3, 4, FvsJ and Part 6 when I’m in the mood for something leaning more to the silly side.
Parts, 5, 7, 8, 9, and Jason X were just …bad. Rotten vegetable kind of bad.
Just one dissenting view here. I thought FvsJ was laughably bad. They’ve all been pretty bad in differing ways since the first one, IMO, but this one was just ridiculous. Maybe I just didn’t get into the proper spirit.
It’s a masterpiece of the dead teenager genre. Which means that it is “laughably bad” (from a certain point of view, at least), but still better than almost all other films in that genre. I really enjoyed it.
As far as a comparison to the “Nightmare” films goes, I’d say it’s as in continuity as the other sequels (ignoring 6, where the children of the town are totally wiped out; and Neew Nightmare, which works on the premise that the previous movies where actually movies). It’s also better than the other sequels save perhaps New Nightmare. It ain’t scary at all, but it’s fun.