In the mid 1940s when the producers at Universal Studios were wracking their brains to find a way to breathe new life into the old plots of their once popular, but by then pretty much played out monsters, they hatched a daring plan. Instead of a new film featuring a single monster, they fused two of those tired plots into a single new story featuring not one, but two classic monsters, pitting them against each other in a climactic dual.

Thus was born the first monster match, "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman."

But as hokey as the idea was, nearly six decades later, producers at New Line Cinema decided to do exactly the same thing by setting two of their once lucrative but now pretty much painted into a box office corner superstar fiends against each other.

The result is "Freddy Versus Jason", a collaboration of producers Sean Cunningham (director of the original "Friday the 13th) and Wes Craven (director of the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street"). Obviously intended to get both money-making monsters back onto a familiar track following Cunningham's outer space misfire, "JasonX", and Craven's dismal attempt to revive Freddy in "Wes Craven's New Nightmare," "Freddy Versus Jason" offers audiences all the familiar elements that made the "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" series so incredibly popular – namely, a shallow grave of a plot, really thin writing, specious reasoning, predictable situations, incredibly bad acting, lots of action, tons of humor and buckets and buckets of blood.

The film begins as a typical "Nightmare on Elm Street" outing, with that dream hobgoblin, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) lamenting over the fact that since all of the teens in Springwood with any memory of him are now under sedation in a psychiatric hospital, his fear-based power won't work and he can't hack anyone up anymore.

But Freddy isn't a guy who likes to be snubbed or forgotten. So after searching every room in the halls of Hell, he finds and somehow revives the rotting corpse of Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) and sets him loose in Springwood, reasoning that once the blood starts to flow, he'll get credit for the kills.

"He'll get the blood," Freddy says of Jason, "but I'll get the glory!"

Unaware of all this and the fact that she's currently living in Freddy's former Elm Street home, the film's protagonist (and final girl) Lori (Monica Keena) is having a party where all of her friends are doing all the things that always irritated Jason, namely, drinking, smoking pot and having sex. When Jason shows up and brutally murders one of them, the town fathers immediately suspect Freddy. Of course, none of the teens knows what's going on until Lori's boy friend, Will (Jason Ritter) escapes from the mental hospital and clues them in. Meanwhile, Freddy's power continues to grow, but he is incessantly denied his victims because Jason keeps killing them first, leading him to the conclusion that since Jason won't stop, Freddy has to get rid of him. So after a blood bath in a hospital where the Lori, Will and a group of soon-to-be victims fearless teens are trying to find the anti-dreams drug that will keep Freddy away, Freddy manages to lure Jason into dream land. But, unwilling to let Freddy win, the wily teens take Jason's sleeping corpse to Camp Crystal Lake, and then employ the same device used in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Freddy's Dead, the Final Nightmare" to bring his burnt persona into the real world where Jason can confront him on Jason's home ground.

The mostly unknown teen actors and actresses populating "Freddy Versus Jason" are, as one might imagine, as wooden, unbelievable and forgettable as any of the teens in any of the Freddy or Jason flicks. Likewise, Kirzinger doesn't do much with Jason, since the ultimate screen slasher has no lines or personality either, for that matter. He just, well, hulks. Once again, as one might suspect, it's Englund as Freddy Krueger that steals the show. Englund is as comfortable in his burn-scar make-up as if the whole Elm Street gig hadn't ended nearly a decade ago. Even though he has appeared in other teen horror flicks such as "Urban Legend," Freddy is the character Englund was seemingly born to play. It's interesting to note that similarly, Lon Chaney, Jr. considered his Larry Talbot/wolfman character to be his legacy, and it's Talbot who brings his adversary, Frankenstein's monster, to life so they can battle in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman" just as Englund's Freddy does with Jason in "Freddy Versus Jason." It's also interesting to note that the scene on the dock at Camp Crystal Lake during the climactic battle is eerily familiar to the exact same scene at the conclusion of the final Universal Frankenstein/Wolfman/Dracula pairing, 1949s "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."

I'm sure these facts weren't lost on director Ronny Yu ("The Bride of Chucky"). Yu obviously did his homework, since he has crafted a film that looks exactly like its predecessors. The entire first hour is a forgettable mess of unconvincing teen angst, clueless officials and predictable senseless murders of the exact same kind seen in every single "Friday the 13th" or "Elm Street" flick. It's only when Yu sets Freddy and Jason against each other in the last half hour that the film really takes off. But it's a guarantee that the last half hour is what will stick in fan's minds and bring them flocking back to the theater for the sequel. Unlike its distant godfather, "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman," the battle between the monsters isn't some lame, unsatisfying five minutes of film. It is, rather, the extreme glove versus mask pay-off everyone plunked their ten bucks down to see.

Which, of course, leads to the question of who wins? Well, since I've never been a spoiler, my lips are sealed. But I will say this, if you're a fan of either Freddy or Jason, you will have fun.