Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

Friday the 13^th Part VI brought us a new Jason Voorhees and took us in a new direction with a slasher film that understood its legacy and audience. Jason was now an unstoppable undead killing machine and the series was more broad and ridiculous than it ever was. The question was where to take things next? From this point on we wave farewell to Tommy Jarvis, whose legacy is now left behind. We also wave goodbye to Camp Crystal Lake, as we won’t be returning there anytime soon. Weirdly the lake is still called Crystal Lake, even though the last film established it was renamed ‘Forest Green’. Gone too is the self-aware sense of humour. We’ve moved on, and this is the point where the series got a bit stranger and a bit different, but not necessarily for the better. We’ve left those days behind.

The New Blood decides to mix the supernatural with a little science fiction by shoving in a female protagonist with psychic powers. It really doesn’t work too well. I can sort of see what the appeal would be – Jason has fought and killed regular teens for five films now, some of whom have been able to beat him on his own terms (as in physical force, use of blunt/pointed instruments, etc.), so why not have someone fight a physical powerhouse with mental abilities? Well it might have worked if said main character was any good. As said, we’re back to a female protagonist, but instead of being a nice, wholesome, forgettable girl we’ve got a whiny, annoying idiot that’s the worst thing about the movie, a bitchy, shrill moron that drags the movie down by being the worst F13 character. It also doesn’t help that they’ve just put the psychic powers into another generic F13 template, with the exact same tired plot (teens at lake, Jason shows up to kill them, etc.) we’ve seen countless times, with only the ‘psychic powers’ twist offering any difference.

The New Blood is a movie I find frustrating, because it could have been good. The potential was there, and some of the things in the movie work (they nailed Jason Voorhees). But it all falls apart; The New Blood is bad because of its characters and writing. It could have been great if it wasn’t for two things. 1: The gore and violence were all edited down drastically. You can see evidence of sloppy edits as the film cuts away the moment many deaths are about to occur. Without the gore the kills are unspectacular. It’s an unfortunate thing seemingly beyond the filmmakers their control or intent. 2: The most important, and completely the fault of the filmmakers and screenwriters, the main character (and all the others for that matter) and the writing/dialogue are the absolute worst to a painful degree. It’s a shame because this movie is responsible for giving us the best version of Jason Voorhees. This is the iconic version that most people probably think of when picturing Jason.

 

There’s a recap at the beginning, with some random narrator mentioning a ‘death curse’ above Crystal Lake because of Jason Voorhees while a few of the kills from the first four films play. Then we get a series of clips from Part VI (Jason’s resurrection, Tommy killing him again) to catch you up to speed some and establish that Jason’s still at the bottom of the lake. It’s a bit of a messy mix.

Tina is a girl with telekinetic powers. As a child, while vacationing at Crystal Lake with her family, she accidentally drowned her abusive father in the lake with her powers. Now a troubled teenager, she’s returned there with her mother for therapy to understand and control her powers at the suggestion of her therapist Dr Crews, who secretly plans to exploit her telekinesis for study. The therapy isn’t going well as Tina, emotional and full of angst, argues with Crews endlessly, who constantly pushes her to get results. Tina accidentally uses her telekinetic powers to free Jason from his imprisonment at the bottom of the lake, and it isn’t long before he starts stalking and slashing the youths who are hanging out in a nearby house. Tina, meanwhile, begins having horrific visions of Jason’s rampage as she tries to control her powers and stay alive.

The biggest fault by far, and the movie’s biggest crutch, is Tina, our horrible protagonist who is the absolute worst. She’s horribly annoying and completely unlikeable, always shrill and whiny, constantly crying and she’s an obnoxious and stubborn little idiot to boot, always shrieking and complaining. I hated her with a passion, which is never a good thing for a protagonist. She’s there to get therapy for her powers, but does everything she can to argue and avoid cooperating. Even when she’s fighting Jason with her telekinesis she spends the entire time crying and whining – she’s just so horrifically unlikeable and annoying, not helped by the actress being awful. She spends the entire movie being a boohoo girl, especially when she starts hanging out with the other teens (she’s really eager to unload all her personal issues on anybody who’ll listen). And she has to argue with everyone on everything! It’s a notable and jarring step down from Tommy Jarvis and Megan in the previous movie. Tina is one of the absolute worst characters in a F13 movie ever. She’s meant to be the protagonist and we’re meant to be rooting for her but she’s just so annoying and angst-ridden that you don’t care.

It’s an exceptionally obvious fault that bleeds into the rest of the cast – none of the characters are likeable in the least. This is the absolute worst bunch of teens yet; they’re all annoying, shallow, paper-thin idiots, even by F13 series standards. You’ve got geeky girl, slut girl, bitch girl, stoner, token black characters, the nerd and some other idiots. None of them are likeable so you don’t care about the ‘will they die?’ tension, and not a single one of them even acts like a person. They’re all so terrible. What’s worse is that they’re all so ridiculous as though the writer was completely out of touch with reality – the writing and dialogue are cringe worthy. The things they say and do are so awkward and pathetic it’s ridiculous. It’s a big problem because the characters are really the only other thing there is in a F13 movie besides Jason. They take up the so much of the film with their nonsense.

 

One thing that’s funny is that Dr Crews, conniving shiftiness and lies aside, is completely right in his analysis of Tina’s powers – they’re all tied to her emotions and her guilt about killing her father. Of course Tina denies this loudly and obnoxiously for the entire movie, constantly making things fall over with her telekinetic tantrums (thus proving his point), but the dude’s on the money, even though he’s intentionally antagonising her to raise her stress and document her powers (not that it takes much; Tina flips out over anything). He’s less on the money when he tries to convince her that Jason Voorhees is a figment of her imagination, even once he realises Jason’s real and is lurking around killing people. I’m actually not quite sure what his plan was there – he finds evidence that there’s a serial killer running around, and his plan is to hide it from everybody and just stick around? I do love that Crews uses Tina’s idiot mother as a human shield to protect himself against Jason.

It has a dumb ending – after a prolonged, unintentionally funny telekinetic battle that mostly involves Tina looking at objects and then them goofily flying at Jason (because that’s how telekinesis works, right?), Tina somehow uses her powers to raise her dead father as a zombie out of the lake to drag Jason back to the bottom. It raises a lot of dumb questions (So her dad’s body was just sitting at the bottom of the lake the entire time and they never retrieved it? And since when could she reanimate corpses? And how come Tina’s wimpy dead dad is stronger than Jason?). The battle itself is funny in its silliness, though the film treats it seriously. Tina uses her powers to: make doors close, move tables to block said doors, make pot plants/severed heads fly across the room, control tree branches, collapse a porch, make a light globe fall, control electrical cords, shoot gasoline across a room and start a massive house fire (which also explodes for some reason). It would be a better fight if it wasn’t for the constant cuts to Tina’s tearful, snotty face staring at the objects before they fly at Jason, which happens every single time.

There’s a really bad sense of place here, worse than any other F13 movie. We’re at some random houses on Crystal Lake (looking smaller again). It’s almost impossible to tell where anything is in relation to anything else. Sometimes the house Tina is in is directly next to the partying teen’s house, and other times it seems there’s a massive forest between them. Speaking of forests, so much of this film is spent with characters wandering blindly through the woods with no sense of place or direction. Otherwise it’s an ok looking movie. It’s a bit too well-lit everywhere to be creepy (Jason standing inside either house looks silly when all the lights are on).

The one thing I really did love, that the film totally nailed and that’s the absolute best thing in this film, is the look of Jason. This is the best version of him in the entire series, a large, invulnerable monster of a man. He’s been under the water since Part VI, so now he looks like a waterlogged corpse – his clothes are ragged, you can see part of his ribcage, part of his mask is cracked displaying his rotting jaw, and he even still has the length of chain around his neck like a noose. I also like how ghoulish he looks without his mask on. Most of the movies have shown Jason without his mask on, but this is the only time he’s actually looked freaky. There’s also a part at the end there where he’s on fire and completely unconcerned about it. This is Jason as the unstoppable killer and the best unmasked version of him in the entire franchise. He’s also very sturdy, as he was last time. Jason is drowned, electrocuted, hanged, stabbed with needles and even engulfed in flames for an extended period of time (something like twenty on-screen seconds, made particularly impressive since its real fire), but he just keeps coming. This is the iconic Jason Voorhees.

The kills are numerous but unspectacular due to the editing, either occurring off screen or being heavily edited for gore (this has seemingly been edited the most out of any other F13 movie; there are a lot of obvious sloppy cuts just before you see gore), but they couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group. The requisite number of stabbings aside (most kills are variations on ‘you got stabbed’), the most memorable has to be Jason killing a girl in a sleeping bag by swinging her against a tree (a kill that gets two call backs in later instalments). Another silly one is Jason using, of all things, a weed whacker to kill Dr Crews. The difference here is that this movie takes itself seriously which sort of diminishes the fun of the kills. If they weren’t edited for gore they’d be much better and probably would have raised the film up.

The New Blood is a frustrating movie. Jason looks awesome, but everything else is disappointing. The characters are annoying and aggravating, the acting is terrible and the writing is so bad, even for a F13 movie. The kills have all been neutered and the overall experience is just the same old barring its psychic twist. I will begrudgingly say that, despite my hatred for the characters, the Jason scenes are great and the final fifteen minutes of telekinetic battle are fun in their goofiness.

The ending leaves things in a weird place. Jason is at the bottom of the lake again (meaning effectively nothing was accomplished in this movie at all; it basically reset to its beginning and made itself irrelevant), and Tina is alive, but then what? Her mom’s dead, she’s still messed up and she still doesn’t have control over her telekinetic powers. She’s worse off than when she started the film, while Jason is back exactly where he started, right back at Crystal Lake. The next film will remedy this.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

 

We’re officially at the halfway point through our F13 journey, and this is where things get a bit more interesting. I said that Part IV was the most significant F13. That was less about the film itself and more about how its few changes caused a ripple in the franchise to get to this point here, Part VI. If Part IV was the most significant for the series, Part VI is the most important for its main villain. While Part IV was mostly more of the same, tried-but-true by-the-numbers F13 movie, the death of its central villain had consequences. Part V was a curiosity as they dealt with those consequences, fumbling around trying to see if they could continue on without Jason, whether he was an integral part of the franchise, and whether continuing a surviving protagonist’s story and taking it into a psychological direction could work (hint: no, it couldn’t). They returned to the drawing board so to say, but approached the situation in a different way.

As the title suggests, Jason Voorhees is back to slash up more horny teenagers. After Part V failed to light up interest with its ‘random guy pretends to be Jason’ revelation (this movie pretty much just ignores the last film), they decided to bring the hockey-mask killer back for real this time, and they do it in pretty ridiculous style. The question then is how? By the ending of Part V they had two things: Tommy Jarvis (possibly crazy) and a dead Jason Voorhees. They remedied at least one of those things.

This might come as a surprise, but Jason Lives is actually great. This might be the very best F13 sequel actually and is easily one of my favourites. I’m talking top three easy. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s gory, it’s one of the most atmospheric and it’s just a good time overall. It demonstrates an understanding of what made Jason and the F13 movies and caters to what the fans wanted. It also shows a sense of humour about itself and some genre savvy, acknowledging the inherent silliness of F13 movies and turning it up to eleven.

Tommy Jarvis, recovering from a little stint in the mental ward, heads to Crystal Lake for closure. He wants to see Jason’s dead body one final time so he can confirm for himself that he’s really dead and cremate him so he can finally move on with his life. Things go badly when lightning strikes Jason’s corpse and resurrects him as a super-powered zombie. As a newly revived Jason goes on a murderous rampage, Tommy tries warning people, none of whom believe him due to his time in the mental ward with the sole exception of the Sheriff’s daughter Megan. As the bodies pile up, the police believe that Tommy is behind the murders and start gunning for him while Jason stalks his old camping ground.

This version of Jason is the iconic version he’s most remembered as, the hulking, invulnerable slasher. This was the first time Jason was explicitly supernatural. Before this point he was canonically human, though able to take a hell of a lot of damage, but Jason Lives sees it confirmed that Jason is now a zombie. And he’s one hell of a zombie. His eyes are sunken in, he has no lips and there are maggots in his skin. He still dons the hockey mask, and eventually gets his hands on his signature machete. He’s got a bigger, freakier appearance this time through, looking taller and larger.

Jason is also a lot more powerful this time around. He was always strong, but the decision to go supernatural with the ‘living corpse’ thing lets them go crazier with things. His first kill in the movie involves him punching a hole through somebody. He’s also impervious to pain, taking several shotgun blasts from up close (the first time he’s ever come up against a gun actually). The rest of the kills tend to be ridiculous as well (Jason decapitates three people with a single machete swing and slams a woman’s head into the side of a van so hard it leaves an impression of her face on the other side), though some veer into absurdly silly territory (like the bloodied smiley face mark left on a tree after Jason slams a guy’s head into it) but that’s all part of the charm.

Tommy is a completely different character than he was last time, played by a different actor and having a completely different personality (they basically ignore Part V completely). He’s no longer a nervous, bespectacled neurotic. This time he’s determined and strong willed. Actually, maybe a little too strong willed (upon Jason’s revival he instantly legs it to the police station, grabs a shotgun and attempts to form a posse before getting arrested). This works better for the character, since he’s more likeable and more pro-active. I do love that, upon digging up the rotting remains of Jason, Tommy angrily snaps, grabs a metal pole and starts stabbing the corpse until he starts to feel better. It’s ultimately a bad decision because, in the best sort of goofy horror logic, lightning strikes the pole and revives Jason as a super-powered zombie. Tommy is smart enough to get the hell out of dodge at this point, and does his best to try and warn people (he heads to the police station to try and start a posse).

Besides Tommy, we get two more characters that are actually more headstrong and determined than the usual slasher fodder. Megan, the Sheriff’s daughter, who involves herself with Tommy and becomes determined to try and help him stop Jason. Her decision to suddenly believe everything that Tommy says and help him out is pretty weird, especially since she’s known him for only a few hours. She even pulls a gun on one of the police officers to break him out of the police station, and then gets into a car chase with the police (the fact that there’s a car chase scene in a F13 movie at all is so strange). She’s also one of the more useful protagonists, putting herself in harm’s way to save Tommy in the finale.

The other strong character is the Sheriff, though he might be a bit too hard headed because he’s really got it out for Tommy. When the bodies start showing up he instantly thinks that Tommy is responsible. It’s perfectly understandable though; he knows kid has psychological problems, the killings only started when Tommy showed up and his story (namely “Jason’s a zombie now!”) sounds like nonsense. He uses a lot of police resources to catch Tommy, sending out patrols and setting up roadblocks. Eventually he does do good in rescuing the kids at Camp Crystal Lake, and even attempts to take on Jason. It doesn’t work 9he gets snapped in half) but this is the first time the police have properly gotten involved or somebody has even attempted to confront Jason.

The other assorted slasher victims include the camp counsellors at Crystal Lake, a corporate paintballing group and a few couples out in the woods. They’re mostly there to add to the body count and give some kills, though they add some fun (like the girl savvy to horror movie conventions acknowledging a guy in the middle of the woods with a hockey mask and a spear is bad news).

This is the first time anybody’s actually come up with a plan to kill/stop Jason. In all the others they only managed to injure/kill Jason in frantic desperation while trying to get away from him. This time Tommy actually has a plan, and it’s a pretty good one by horror movie logic. He gets a massive, heavy rock, padlocks a length of chain to it and takes it with him on a little boat to the middle of Crystal Lake. He uses gasoline to light a circle of fire around the boat and lures Jason to it. Jason attacks from the water, destroying the boat, but in the process Tommy manages to get the chains around his neck like a noose and the rock drags him to the bottom of the lake. Jason manages to drag Tommy down with him, who seemingly drowns, but Megan saves Tommy (she’s more useful than a lot of other F13 heroines). She goes out into the water and gets Tommy, taking it back to shore and resuscitating him. She even uses an outboard motor to finish Jason off, cutting into his neck with it. Good job gurl. So at the end Jason was chained to a rock at the bottom of the lake, away from where he could do any harm. How long do you think that lasted?

We return to Camp Crystal Lake (we’ve not been back there since Part II), and for the first time ever there are actually campers. A bunch of children are there, and none of them die. Not through lack of trying – at one point Jason approaches a little girl with intent to kill, but she begins praying and that wards him off. It’s a bit strange, and the only time anything like that ever happens in the entire series. The camp seems a bit smaller this time, with only a few cabins, and the lake seems really tiny and not particularly deep this time through. There’s a surprisingly good horror atmosphere here. While Jason does a fair amount of daylight stalking (as a group playing paintball unfortunately find out), most of the film is set at night. All the scenes involving a stalking Jason are pretty spooky, with dark, thick shadows and him stalking around the camp is pretty creepy.

The best thing about the movie is that it has a sense of humour about itself and the series in general, with a slightly meta understanding of the genre. None of the preceding or following films (with the exception of maybe Part VIII unintentionally and Jason X) were self-aware at all, always playing things straight. Jason Lives doesn’t, and it’s probably its greatest strength. It openly knows what its audience is expecting, and seems to take great glee in dishing it out. The kills are violent and ridiculous, the horror conventions it takes are knowingly camp and it’s full of some delightful black humour. The best part is at the very beginning, where it zooms in on a newly resurrected Jason’s eye and then does, of all things, a parody version of the iconic James Bond gun barrel opening, only with Jason swinging his machete before blood splashes across the screen and the main title appears. What else? The soundtrack is filled with songs by Alice Cooper, who even wrote the theme song for the film, ‘He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)’. It’s clear that they went in a different direction this time, and it’s definitely to the film’s credit. It’s still violent and has effective horror atmosphere, but it acknowledges the inherent silliness of the Friday the 13^th series and just rolls with it.

 

This is the only F13 movie to really properly attempt to handle the ‘Camp Blood’ stigma, which really only existed in the first movie (though barely). Crystal Lake has been renamed ‘Forest Green’ to hide the stigma, with the local police doing everything they can to pretend Jason’s massacres never happened. It’s to the point that most of the younger characters aren’t familiar with the story of Jason Voorhees, while those who are don’t want to hear of it, so Tommy’s arrival and warnings are treated as a nuisance. Also, for the first time since the original, Friday the 13^th Part VI is a Friday the 13^th movie actually set on Friday the 13^th. Think about it – the first film was set on Friday the 13^th, but the second was set a few months later, and parts III and IV were mere days after that and Part V six years later.

Jason Lives is one of, and possibly the, best Friday the 13^th movies, and just about the only one to poke fun at itself while also revelling in all the gory nonsense and tropes that it’s made up of. It’s not as serious or scary as the series initially was (or at least intended to be), but it took things in an entertaining direction that was ultimately better for the series. It understood why the F13 movies were popular and what the fans wanted, and had fun dishing it out. It took its iconic killer in a new direction and opened up all sort of ridiculous opportunities for the future. Whether those opportunities were good or not is another matter entirely.

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning

 

Friday the 13th Part IV ended with Jason Voorhees dead, killed by twelve year old Tommy Jarvis. He’d been seemingly mortally wounded twice before, but this time there was an air of finality – I mean his head was just about cut in half and you don’t really walk away from something like that. But here we are with another F13 movie, released only a year later. How would they deal with the death of Jason?

Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Jason Voorhees isn’t the killer in this one. He’s actually not even in the movie at all, barring a nightmare sequence in the beginning, with the killer instead just being a regular guy who just puts on a hockey mask and goes on a revenge killing spree, pretending to be Jason. The film keeps Part Iv's ending as canon, meaning Jason is dead. The movie attempts to make the killer’s identity vague (is it really Jason again or somebody else?) and also tries to make it psychological (is it Tommy Jarvis?), but it fails on both accounts because you know it’s not Tommy and it ends up making it clear it’s not Jason. What’s strange is that it attempts to move away from Jason while also not moving away at all – everybody constantly talks about Jason, the main character is obsessed with him and the villain even takes his identity. It’s such a strange film in that respect, wanting to move away from Jason but being too lazy and incompetent to do so. If anything the strangeness in what they tried, and ultimately failed, to do makes it interesting to watch in a weird way, even though the movie is largely more of the same once again.

It begins with a dream sequence with a cameo by Corey Feldman as young Tommy Jarvis once more – on a dark, stormy night he trudges through the woods and finds Jason’s grave. Two hunters turn up and unearth Jason, who comes back to life and kills them before turning his attention towards Tommy. It’s all just a nightmare though (and a massive tease).

Tommy Jarvis, now eighteen years old, played by some other guy and with serious psychological issues, is sent to a halfway house for troubled youths. The other teens there are weird, and some of their problems aren’t exactly therapy worthy. There’s a pair of nymphomaniacs, a guy with extreme rage issues, a goth chick, a guy who stutters and a simple minded fat guy named amongst a few others. Tommy struggles to fit in, still haunted by his experience with Jason Voorhees, though he manages to befriend therapist Pam and little black kid Reggie. After a violent incident at the halfway house where the rage issues guy snaps and kills the fat guy, it seems as though Jason has returned as a hockey-mask wearing serial killer begins to kill the troubled teens and everybody else who gets close. As the bodies pile up, Tommy begins to fear he may be the killer.

One thing the film tries to do is to create ambiguity over who the killer is. More specifically, it tries to make it seem as though Tommy might be the killer. He’s never around when the killer is going on his rampage, has a few violent episodes himself, sees visions of Jason and goes missing for long stretches of the film. He’s also absent for most of the finale, where the killer attempts to murder Pam and Reggie, only reappearing right at the very end to help finish the killer off, but before then they tried to put a little ambiguity in there. I don’t think that it worked as intended though, since I think most people watching would have just assumed it was Jason the entire time, meaning they’d feel betrayed or confused when it’s revealed to be somebody else (and really just a random nobody) at the end. The attempts at being psychological are also half assed. They certainly had the intent, but didn’t put the effort into it.

The killer turns out to be Roy, a paramedic whose son was the fat kid who got hacked up. Seeing the corpse of his son, who he had disowned, made him snap and so he dressed himself up like Jason and starting killing in revenge. It feels a bit cheap. Interesting to note, the only person Roy didn’t kill in his revenge rampage was the one person who was directly responsible for killing his son. It makes a little sense (the dude was sent to prison for murder, and it’s kinda hard to get into prison and kill somebody without getting caught) but it’s so weird to see somebody go on a revenge killing spree and not actually get revenge on the one person responsible. Roy even kills a whole bunch of other random characters that have nothing to do with the halfway house. Roy eventually meets his end when Tommy ends up pushing him out a window and he lands on some farming equipment. His mask even conveniently falls off for the revelatory twist.

The end twist has Tommy wearing a hockey mask and wielding a knife about to kill Pam, apparently now completely insane. Just prior to that Tommy has a dream about killing Pam, and wakes up in his hospital bed to see a vision of Jason at the foot of his bed. The vision fades away, and then Tommy gets out of bed and puts on the mask and lays in wait for Pam. It’s a strange ending, trying to continue an ‘anybody could become a killer like Jason’ thing that the entire movie seemed desperate to convince the audience of, as well as giving a weird sort of conclusion to that final shot of disturbed 12 year old Tommy in the ending of Part IV.

It’s not great. The fact that the killer is pretty much just some random, ordinary guy kind of diminishes the legacy of Jason Voorhees and the franchise overall and sort of just makes this like almost any other slasher film ever. In a lot of ways it can be seen as something of a true sequel, in that it moves on from Jason as the killer and instead looks to the lingering effects surviving a killer has on its characters (Tommy Jarvis’ mental issues and the effect Jason has had on him). Unfortunately it doesn’t try to move on as a sequel, remaining stuck to the template of its past entries and banking on familiarity, almost as a trick. It still has a hockey-mask wearing killer, he’s still referred to as Jason and it all just plays out like another F13 movie, barring the ending bait and switch. It’s comes across as lazy, as though the makers wanted to move on from Jason but didn’t know how so they just defaulted.

They make it pretty obvious that Roy is the killer when he’s first introduced, as his name is dropped and he gets a lot of camera attention, which is weird for what would otherwise be a random background character (basically ‘Paramedic #2’). When he shows up he’s completely horrified about seeing the fat kid hacked up like that. His expression of horror eventually turns to one of anger, and he even looks around at the halfway house kids almost accusatorily. The camera even lingers on his expression before a fade to black. It’s noticeably weird, and immediately after that the killings start. They even weirdly have him pop up again in a scene where another character name drops him again, just to remind you about him.

 

Tommy is messed up here, mostly being silent and neurotic, but prone to violent snaps. He pops pills to control his issues, and sees vision of Jason around. It’s a bit weird having a protagonist who is so strange and awkward, and honestly he’s not particularly likeable here, but it’s not too much of an issue since the movie doesn’t spend that much time with him. Pam is terrible at her job and exists to talk to Tommy about his issues. Little black kid Reggie, who befriends Tommy, is another decent kid character. He thinks Tommy’s costume effects and masks (the one holdover for his character from Part IV) are cool and he’s scared of the killer running around in a realistic way, but then he comes to the rescue towards the end driving a tractor and knocking the killer over momentarily which is a bit silly.

The characters are the most ridiculous they’ve ever been but at least they’re varied. Besides the group of overly exaggerated troubled teens (rage issues guy is so intense) and the halfway house employees, there’s a police force for the first time, complete with a detective trying to hunt down the killer. He’s ineffective, and most of his ‘investigating’ involves standing around at the scene of a murder and saying “It couldn’t be Jason because Jason’s dead. Or is he?”. The most ridiculous of the lot are the angry hillbilly lady and her idiot son, who spend their screen time being loud and stupid.

The halfway house is run really poorly. They pretty much just let the teens run around with no supervision. They don’t seem to have any set rules or even a curfew, with half of them just freely wandering off to their deaths. I mean how and why they would let a guy with massive rage issues be allowed to get his hands on an axe I’ll never understand. The guy running it doesn’t seem to know/care where they are, and he basically ups and disappears for no reason whatsoever (later found pinned to a tree). Pam is strange in that she basically only ever deals with Tommy, leaving the rest of the kids to their own devices.

The kills are fairly varied but I think they’ve been heavily edited, with a lot of them occurring off-screen. It cuts away from a lot of the murders instantly, and a lot of the deaths and violence aren’t shown at all. That being said, in terms of raw numbers, faux-Jason Roy hacks through a hell of a lot of people. Besides the halfway house kids he also kills the employees, the neighbours, and several other completely random people who just happen to be in the vicinity. It has a higher number of kills than the first four, though a fair few are off-screen and some are fairly bland. There’s the requisite number of stabbing and a lot of bodies found either impaled on something or with their throats cut. More memorable is a guy getting his head slowly crushed against a tree with a belt but it’s edited before any gore happens. Weirdly one of the most violent isn’t even by the killer, it’s when the fat guy gets hacked up. It’s the first time in the entire series where somebody other than the killer has murdered somebody. It also must be said that by this point a lot of the kills lack impact since they’re happening to characters with no names or personalities. This is a problem with slasher films in general, but it’s especially apparent in Friday the 13^th movies – you don’t care about the people who die so unless the deaths are gory, freaky or funny you won’t care.

So Part V, a New Beginning, ends up being a bit of a wash and a weak, half-hearted attempt in trying to move away from Jason. It’d say it’s at least interesting in some curious way, since it’s so strange overall. The ridiculous characters, the number of deaths (even if they’re not particularly inspired), the lukewarm attempts at continuing Tommy Jarvis’ psychological journey, the weak attempt at having another killer (by basically being the same killer as before) and the ending with Tommy Jarvis donning a hockey mask all make it oddly watchable. Part V didn’t do as well as hoped and the fans were annoyed and disappointed at the lack of Jason. But what happened next? Jason was canonically dead, Tommy was crazy and perhaps a new murderer; is this truly a ‘New Beginning’ or would they scrap all that, renege and bring Jason back somehow to appease the angry fans? Take a guess.

Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter

 

And here we are with what was originally meant to be the final F13 movie. After three movies they were ready to call it quits, and this one promised the death of Jason Voorhees. Of course this wouldn’t really be the end (not even close) but it’s interesting to see how they’d initially planned on sending him, and the franchise, off. The movie itself is, for the most part, more of the same – teens get slowly stalked and slashed – but it does have a few tweaks, with a couple of stronger (than usual at least) characters.

It starts with a recap of the series, but this is an actual good one, using the footage of Paul from Part II by the campfire telling the legend of Jason Voorhees with footage of important parts from the last three movies playing over. It even gives a montage of many of the kills from the first three movies which really gets you pumped up for more carnage. Unfortunately a lot of the movie doesn’t quite deliver on the promise. It’s par for the course for the most part. It’s fairly entertaining in its simplicity and familiarity, but its kills are mostly basic and it doesn’t have the punch one would expect from what was meant as the ‘final chapter’.

Beginning only a few hours after the last film, paramedics retrieve Jason’s body and take him to the morgue. But Jason isn’t really dead and escapes, slaughtering a few hospital staff before returning once more to Crystal Lake. The next day a group of teenagers head out to a cabin they’ve rented on Crystal Lake for a holiday. The cabin is next to the Jarvis family’s house, home to teenaged Trish (our heroine), her twelve year old brother Tommy (our unlikely hero) and their mother. Also in the woods is handsome camper Rob, mysteriously there to ‘hunt bears’. It isn’t long before Jason arrives on the scene and the killings begin.

Besides Trish, who is once again a nice, forgettable girl, we finally get something of a male protagonist, and it’s one that bucks tradition: Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), a twelve year old horror movie make-up enthusiast (and the first child character in the series). This is one of those rare times where a horror movie has a kid character that doesn’t completely ruin things. Tommy is perfectly fine; he’s never annoying, he’s proactive and helpful (kid knows how to fix an engine), and he even acts like a kid (his obsession with horror movie make-up, his excitement at the prospect of seeing boobs). Tommy Jarvis ends up being the most significant protagonist in a F13 movie, with the events of this film having consequences for the franchise and its next few instalments, which eventually led to Jason becoming the more iconic killer he is known as.

In the finale Tommy manages to trick Jason momentarily by dressing himself up to look like a child version of Jason (somewhat similar to how Ginny in Part II tried to pretend to be Jason’s mother). I have some issues with this – for one, all Tommy had to go on was a crappy hand-drawn ‘artist’s rendition’ of child Jason from a tiny newspaper clipping, so his attention to detail is weird from such a limited, mostly inaccurate reference point. More importantly, considering Jason has spent the last twenty-plus years living in the wilderness and covering his face it’s likely the guy doesn’t actually know/remember what he looked like as a child.

More to the point: Tommy Jarvis kills Jason. Actually kills him. He hits an unmasked Jason in the side of the face with a machete, the blade lodging itself in there. Jason falls to the ground, his head slides down the blade and he’s seemingly dead. When his fingers twitch, Tommy grabs the machete again and starts hacking away at Jason. Kid’s really hardcore. Kid’s also pretty messed up from it, with the final image being a slow close-up of his disturbed little face. This is something that’ll be dealt with in another movie. You see, Tommy Jarvis is probably the most memorable, significant F13 character in the entire series because he’s one of the only reoccurring ones (not counting Alice from the original turning up to get killed in Part II).

Crispin Glover is here as Jimmy, one of the only characters in a F13 movie to get some sort of character arc, regardless how silly. Jimmy starts off as a bit nervous and completely lacking confidence with the ladies after being dumped by his girlfriend (and not helped by his douchebag ‘friend’ Teddy who belittles him), afraid that he’d be unable to get/please another girl, then he loosens up, gains some confidence, dances like he’s spastic and successfully has sex with one of the girls. And then almost immediately after Jason stabs him in the hand with a corkscrew and hits him in the face with a meat cleaver, killing him. It’s about the most characterisation a victim has had in the series to this point.

The rest of the characters are mostly forgettable, mostly there to get hacked up. Rob is the first character we’ve had who is actively there to find and kill Jason. He knows that Jason is still alive and is determined to kill him, though they don’t really explain why. He turns out to be pretty useless in the end. The rest of the teens are just there to die and don’t have much in terms of personality, except for douchebag Teddy who thinks he’s a stud, belittles Jimmy and then strikes out with every single girl in the film before Jason hacks him up.

Jason himself is more imposing here than he was in the last two films. He’s rocking the hockey mask/green jumpsuit look he has for most of the rest of the series, and when he shows up he’s more threatening than he was in the last two. I guess it’s because of his slower walking speed and larger frame. When he’s unmasked he once again looks a bit ridiculous, but more monstrous than he did in Part II and III. He gets beaten up a great deal, which makes sense considering he’s meant to die here. Besides having a machete embedded in his head, one of his hands is cut into and he takes a claw hammer in the neck. He brushes that off though – even in the last two movies he shrugged off a lot of drastic damage, but he could still get hurt.

Make-up artist Tom Savini is back to do the gore effects this time, but unfortunately most of the kills are ordinary or uninspired. It begins with an absolutely awesome one – Jason uses a saw to cut into a mortician’s neck and then twists his head around – but that’s basically the pinnacle, with the majority of the others being pretty basic (stabbed, crushed head, thrown out window, etc.). I do get the impression that some of the kills were edited down for violence (it’s happened in a great many F13 movies actually). Weirdly Jason getting the machete in the face and his head sliding down the blade is still there, which is pretty gruesome (though obviously fake). There’s a lot more nudity in this one than in the first three, with a lot more girls taking their kit off (there’s a skinny dipping scene, and a pair of twins who seem there just to disrobe).

Part IV, besides its premature claims of being the final Friday, actually ended up having the biggest effect on the franchise by far. While the film itself is pretty basic, not straying too far from what had come before, the events in the film would lead to the biggest changes in the next few sequels, with long reaching effects for the franchise and Jason Voorhees.

Of course we aren’t finished yet. Part IV was meant to be the final chapter, but it made a bunch of money so of course they made another one. But Jason is supposed to be dead, right? So how could they continue the series? They found a way, though it might not be the one you’d expect.

Friday the 13th Part III

 

Also known as ‘Part 3-D’, this third entry brought Jason into the third dimension in tacky style. A lot of things come improbably flying towards the screen, because apparently that’s what 3-D means. Otherwise this is a mostly by-the-numbers slasher, though it does make a few attempts to mix things up somewhat with some violent kills, weird characters and its cheesy 3-D effects. It has a noticeably different feel than the first two, and a few faults the others didn’t have but it’s ultimately fun for what it is. This is a tiny move away from the generally more serious horror tone of the first two, and faults aside it’s ok.

In a continuing trend that thankfully mostly stopped here, the first six minutes or so are just the ending six minutes of the previous film. They don’t even tie it in as a flashback here; it’s literally just the ending of the second film shoved right in as the beginning of this one. It’s more than a little jarring and unnecessary since knowing the end of that film isn’t really that necessary to understanding this one.

There are no camp counsellors this time, and we’re no longer even at Camp Crystal Lake. Instead we’re at Higgin’s Haven, a family summer cabin with a barn on a different end of the apparently enormous Crystal Lake (the size of which is highly inconsistent between films). Set the day after Jason’s rampage at Camp Crystal Lake in Part II, the story is focused on college girl Chris Higgins. Chris takes a group of her friends to her family’s lakeside summer home, Higgin’s Haven, which she hasn’t returned to since a traumatic event some two years earlier. A wounded Jason Voorhees also makes his way to Higgin’s Haven, taking refuge in the barn to recuperate from his injuries. It isn’t long before Jason ventures out of the barn and starts to slaughter the group.

Besides the opening recap, the film acknowledges the previous film – a TV shows a news report on the massacre – but the characters don’t seem to know or care that a whole bunch of people were massacred nearby only a day earlier, which is a bit weird. Instead everybody is too busy doing stupid teen things. Once again it takes an absurdly long time before people begin there’s a killer around or even realise a whole bunch of them have been killed already.

 

Our heroine is Chris Higgins, who is another nice, wholesome girl. There’s not much to her, barring a character-defining traumatic event in her past where she was attacked by somebody in the woods. At the end of the film she realises it was Jason who had attacked her. It’s a dumb, meaningless coincidence that doesn’t actually change anything, but this sort of idea will reoccur later on in the series. Chris’ traumatic story is stupid. Upset with her parents for some reason, she wandered into the woods and then fell asleep (I guess she got tired?) before being attacked by a monstrous knife-wielding Jason. Then she blacked out and woke up later in her bed, which just raises a whole bunch of questions – was it a just a dream, and if not how the hell did she escape from Jason if she blacked out? Chris spends a lot of time shrieking like crazy, is really panicky and, by the end, has completely lost her mind, all of which kinda goes against her character story of ‘trying to get over past trauma’.

Once again Jason is still only human in this film and easy to hurt, and Chris gets a lot of good hits in. Jason backs away in fear when Chris starts swinging a knife at him and limbs when she stabs him. Chris actually really delivers a beat-down on Jason; she clobbers him in the head with a log and a shovel, attempts to hang him and eventually finished him off by hitting him in the face with an axe. It does kind of work in the confines of Chris’ weird ‘trauma victim strikes back’ personal story, but as said before her character becoming a shrieking mess sort of counteract this.

Part III is where we get our first truly annoying F13 character: Shelley, the ugly, whiny dweeb. He wants to impress girls, but can’t because he’s gross, ugly and whiny. So instead of talking to them like a normal person he plays stupid pranks using props and make-up to scare them and then whines when they hate him even more. He’s annoying. Thankfully he eventually gets his throat slashed by Jason and in a ‘boy who cried wolf’ bit of karma nobody helps him because they think it’s another prank.

Actually the characters here are noticeably a bit broader and stranger than usual, acting far more ridiculous than the standard, forgettable teen fodder seen before. While we do still get a collection of interchangeable teen victims, we also get some weirder ones with strange quirks which makes them a bit more colourful and fun, while also potentially a bit more annoying. There’s a white trash couple at the beginning, a weird crazy hobo brandishing an eyeball, a duo of stoned hippies, and a guy who can walk around doing a handstand (Jason isn’t impressed by this trick). The most ridiculous by far are the mean bikers who seem way too silly to be taken serious. Their outfits are comprised entirely of leather, denim, bandanas and studs. They get involved when Shelley ends up trashing their bikes, and end up sneaking into Higgin’s Haven, siphoning gas out of their car (giving a good excuse as to why they can’t just drive away from Jason), and coming up with a plan to set fire to the barn as revenge. Of course Jason is in the barn, so their plan doesn’t get far.

Higgin’s Haven has an entirely different feel to Camp Crystal Lake. It seems a little bit more claustrophobic, perhaps because the place is relatively small, really only made up of just a house, a barn and a small jetty. Crystal Lake itself seems substantially smaller, looking more like a pond really. Otherwise the film uses a lot of the same sort of tricks and techniques as before, including more liberal use of the ‘spooky intrigue theme’. This time though there are a lot of dumb fake jump scares. These are things the first two movies didn’t have at all, but here, especially early on, we get a lot of parts of somebody getting scared by an animal or a person. This is coupled with more use of the ‘spooky intrigue theme’. It’s a bit disappointing to see the series go down that route. It also misses the tension of a character being unknowingly stalked.

This is the film where Jason gets his iconic hockey mask. Actually the film is pretty much responsible for establishing a lot of the basic elements to Jason’s iconic look for much of the series – the hulking frame, the green clothes and the hockey mask, even a bit of his ugly mug. Speaking of which, Jason looks really damn goofy when unmasked this time around. When you see him right at the end he’s grinning like an idiot, resembling some kind of simple minded, malformed goon. Basically without the mask he’s far from intimidating, even though it seems they tried hard to make him look inhuman and grotesque.

The end does the ‘nightmare twist’ thing again, this time as a dumb call-back to the first film – Chris, thinking Jason is dead, is in a canoe floating on the lake when she  sees a mask-less Jason alive, staring at her from the barn window. He bursts out of the barn and comes running towards her as she paddles away and then, suddenly, Jason’s dead, zombified mother bursts out of the lake to attack her. Then she wakes up with the police escorting her away as she shrieks hysterically. It’s a really stupid end twist.

 

 

The 3-D stuff is silly and often more than a little forced. Amongst the things that come towards the screen are fists, a snake, a yoyo, a baseball bat, a harpoon, popcorn and some eyeballs. Honestly for the most part it’s unnoticeable and barely used, and when it is it’s obvious. On a better point, some of the deaths are fairly gory and inventive this time through, though the effects are pretty fake and silly looking. A guy’s head is crushed forcing his eye to pop out (in goofy 3-D!), one guy is cut in half, a girl gets shot in the face with a spear-gun and there are a few stabbings/impaling with knives, needles, pitchforks and fireplace pokers. It’s more violent and memorable than most of the stuff in Part 2. One unfortunate issue, linked to the 3-D effects, is that some of the gore effects are painfully obvious. With every object that comes flying towards the screen, be it a knife or spear, you can visibly see wires holding them.

There really isn’t much else to say about this one. It has got plenty of faults, some annoying characters and overall it’s pretty silly, but it’s a little bit of a step up from Part II, if only because it’s a bit different. It has a different feel with the change in location, the goofy 3-D effects and the focus on somewhat stranger characters. It’s ok. Not one of the good ones, but still entertaining. Jason looks pretty dead at the end here – after the nightmare twist the camera shows his body, with an axe still embedded in his face, and he seems pretty definitively dead. But we’re nowhere near that done yet. We’ve got a whole lot more F13 movies to get through.

Friday the 13th Part II

 

The original Friday the 13^th ended up being a surprise hit, making a whole bunch of money. And when a film makes a whole bunch of money, a sequel can’t be far behind. Thus we get the imaginatively named ‘Friday the 13^th Part II’. It’s essentially a re-tread of the first film, not really bothering to break new ground, just doing the same thing over again. It is notable and somewhat iconic as being the very first appearance of Jason Voorhees as a serial killer. While he doesn’t have his iconic look yet, it’s still the first time Jason runs around killing people.

The story is even simpler than last time, and is mostly a repeat of the first. Only two months after the last film, where a deranged Pamela Voorhees hacked her way through a group of camp counsellors before meeting her end, a new group of camp counsellor trainees head to Camp Crystal Lake for a training camp, run by supervisor Paul and his assistant (and our heroine) Ginny. Paul tells the group the legend of Jason Voorhees, the young boy thought to have drowned twenty years ago who is rumoured to live in the wilderness. He tells it as a joke, but in reality Jason really is lurking in the woods, and it isn’t long until he starts to stalk and kill the trainees.

There are more teens this time around, but they’re also a lot less memorable. Half don’t even have names I don’t think, so they’re all pretty forgettable. There’s one in a wheelchair and an Asian one and that’s about it. Half of them don’t even die; they leave to go get drunk in town while Jason goes on his rampage. I have to say that the F13 franchise as a whole really lacks good characters and with only a single real exception there aren’t any notable protagonists. For the most part the characters in an individual film will be completely forgotten by the sequel, meaning most characters are completely disposable.

 

Our heroine this time is Ginny, who is studying child psychology and has some theories about Jason. Her theories are way too specific though, especially since she starts sprouting them before she even knows Jason is real, basically basing her analysis on Paul’s story of ‘there’s a crazy guy in the woods whose mom got killed’. Jason is described as ‘some sort of demented creature surviving in the wilderness’, and she suggests that witnessing his mother’s death would have turned him into a feral killer. This makes little sense since that only happened two months ago, while if he survived drowning he’d be in the woods for over twenty years. I will say that it’s refreshing that the characters already know about the murders two months earlier, but it’s also somewhat strange that nobody is concerned or cares at all.

The first six or so minutes of the film have a lot of flashbacks of the end of the original – Alice fighting and killing Pamela Voorhees, going out on the canoe in the lake, having the nightmare of zombie Jason dragging her into the lake and then being questioned by police in the hospital. It’s a bit odd, since instead of just having characters fill in the backstory (which they pretty much do anyway) the movie just shows it. It also feels a bit cheap (I usually find the use of stock footage cheap), especially since it shows so much of the end.

After the flashbacks it begins with the heroine of the first film, Alice, being killed in her home by Jason, who presumably found out where she lived and tracked her down to her house. I just want to point out that, in retrospect, this is actually really strange. From this point on, barring the last few entries in the series, Jason never ventures outside of his haunt at Crystal Lake. Also a bit ridiculous is the fact that, before Jason appears and kills her, Alice finds Pamela Voorhees’ severed head in the fridge because Jason has kept it the entire time.

Speaking of Jason, this is when we finally see the series’ iconic killer (not counting him as zombie nightmare dream boy at the end of the first film). Unfortunately you get the impression they were short on ideas of what he’d look like since he doesn’t come across as particularly menacing. This film was before the iconic hockey mask, so Jason just wears a burlap sack with a hole on it on his head. It’s not particularly menacing, especially since he’s wearing plain old overalls throughout the movie.  Towards the end the sack comes off and you get to see his messed up face. He’s slightly deformed and looking a bit ghoulish. If anything he just looks like an inbred redneck mountain man, the sort seen in other horror movies like The Hills Have Eyes (original and remake) or the Wrong Turn movies. Weirdly this is the only time you ever see him with hair. He doesn’t have much, but he has some, with several tufts of long, black hair coming out of his head. Weird detail, but it’s there.

Part II retcons a few thing about Jason. Most importantly, Jason didn’t drown after all; he survived and lived in the woods around the camp for two decades. He was there at the end of the first film and saw his mother get decapitated, which is what made him snap and is why he stalks and kills anybody who comes to Crystal Lake. This is a bit silly, since it means that for twenty years he was in the woods and nobody ever found him, least of all his mother, who you’d assume he’d seek out. It’s also means that he never killed anybody until he saw his mom get decapitated, which turned him into a full-on serial killer.

The ending twenty or so minutes (essentially a quarter of the film) is basically a massive chase/fight/struggle between Ginny, camp supervisor Paul and Jason that takes them through seemingly the entire camp, eventually into Jason’s den, where he keeps his mother’s severed head on a shrine. Ginny momentarily tricks Jason by putting on his dead mother’s sweater and pretending to be her, despite not looking or sounding like her at all. It’s stupid (and doesn’t work), but this sort of tactic will show up again in one of the later movies. I will say that Jason gets the crap kicked out of him a lot here. He’s not an unstoppable killing machine yet, so he gets kicked and beaten down a few times, and Ginny even buries a machete into his shoulder, seemingly killing him.

Ginny survives, and it’s unclear as to whether Paul does too, since this ends in a similar way to the first film. They think they’re safe after ‘killing’ Jason, but he suddenly bursts through a window and grabs Ginny (in slow motion no less) and then suddenly it cuts to Ginny in the hospital with the police, making it unclear if it’s another nightmare ending or not. It worked in the first film, but here it’s forced. The whole ‘sudden nightmare, then hospital and the police’ twist ending will be repeated a few more times before they finally cut it out.

The film feels beholden to the original in a lot of ways. Barring the opening ten minutes, it strictly sticks to the established structure of the first film. It doesn’t really try anything different, except maybe towards the end, so it’s pretty stuck in its ways. The same crazy guy who warns people not to go to the camp from the first film shows up again, but he gets murdered pretty quickly. Another thing beholden to the original is the use of theme music, notably what I call the ‘spooky intrigue theme’. It’s those few discordant spooky notes that make things seem a bit uneasy. The problem is they play it every few seconds here, even when nothing is happening. It gets old.

The gore is far less impressive this time around (no Tom Savini). It lacks blood, but worst of all it cuts away from the violence very quickly (possibly edited for violence, which has happened to a fair few F13 movies), so while there are a few more deaths they’re less interesting and nowhere near as memorable. Wheelchair guy getting a machete to the face and then rolling backwards down the stairs is pretty cool, but otherwise a lot of the kills don’t have too much of an impact. There is a bit more nudity here though.

Part 2 is pretty unremarkable overall. It’s mostly just more of the same, and doesn’t really improve on anything or do anything different. It has a few memorable parts, and seeing the first real Jason movie has its charm, but it isn’t mind blowing. It was the first film to bring us Jason, but even then he’s fairly unremarkable and not the unstoppable killing machine he’ll later become.

Friday the 13th

It’s October, which means Halloween is coming up in America – a time where people dress up like monsters, children roam the streets searching for candy, adults have parties where women dress like slutty cats and everybody gets drunk and in the interim everybody watches horror movies. We don’t celebrate Halloween in Australia – it’s not something that ever caught on. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the general attitude of the people, but besides some stores selling decorations that’ll never be bought or used there’s no Halloween spirit here. It’s a shame, because that means we tend to miss out on the best part of the holiday, the viewing of horror movies.

Well I’m not one to miss out on spooky nonsense, so for October (and possibly past it) I’ll be looking at horror movies. I feel like that’s something everybody with a poorly edited blog with zero views does at some point, and now it’s my turn. And what best way to do it than go directly for the series everybody already knows about? So I’ll be starting by reviewing the Friday the 13^th series, aiming to do one film every day. So here we go, starting with the first, the film that sparked a series that’s over ten films long. Here’s ‘Friday the 13^th’. 

This is the movie that started the massive franchise, and also had a big influence on the slasher film genre. Of course the movie itself took massive influence from an even earlier slasher, John Carpenter’s Halloween, but this still had a big influence on many of the tropes and conventions of typical slasher films. People tend to forget that this one is still a pretty effective slasher. It might be slower paced than some of the later films in the series, but it works well.

The story is simple, and is essentially the plot skeleton of almost every other F13 movie. A group of teenaged camp counsellors head to Camp Crystal Lake to prepare it for some fifty children campers arriving in the summer. When they arrive they learn Crystal Lake has a nasty reputation – known by the locals as ‘Camp Blood’, twenty years earlier a young boy had drowned there and a pair of counsellors were murdered the following year. While the teens fool around at the camp they begin being stalked by a killer who picks them off one by one.

The killer is revealed to be Pamela Voorhees, the former camp cook whose son, Jason, was the boy who had drowned twenty years back. She snapped, blaming the negligent camp counsellors who were having sex when they should have been supervising Jason, and killed them in revenge. Now, twenty years later and on Jason’s birthday, she’s returned to kill again. Surprisingly, these days some people seem to not know that Pamela was the killer - after all, Friday the 13th is pretty much synonymous with Jason Voorhees, but here, in the original, his mother was the killer.

 

Our heroine here is Alice, a nice, wholesome, completely forgettable girl (because they’re almost always nice, wholesome, completely forgettable girls). Actually one thing the film does well is portray the camp counsellors as actually potentially being camp counsellors. They still act like horny teens, and do the things we’ve come to expect – mess around, have sex, get high/drunk, wander around alone in the dark for no good reason, etc. – but I could see them as actual camp volunteers. They do all fit the traditional horror movie stereotype roles (like the goofball, the cool guy, etc.), something this movie, while not the first slasher, certainly helped solidify. Alice is the sole survivor in the film and manages to behead Pamela Voorhees in the finale after a pretty lengthy chase/fight.

The ending is iconic. After decapitating Pamela Voorhees, an exhausted Alice is in a canoe peacefully drifting in the middle of the lake when suddenly Jason, looking like a zombie, bursts out of the water and pulls her out of the boat. She wakes up in hospital with the police who saved her, who remark that they didn’t see anybody in the lake with her. It’s all just a dream though, but it’s still a freaky, memorable ending.

The film pretty much set the formula and structure the future F13 movies all basically follow from that point on – a bunch of teens go to Camp Crystal Lake, somebody will try and warn them off, somebody will mention the story of Jason Voorhees, they’ll mess around and have sex and then they’ll start getting killed off one by one until the survivor/s confront Jason Voorhees and seemingly kill/stop him.

The film is a bit odd in terms of how it handles its killer’s reveal though. You don’t know who the killer is until the end, but from the cast to that point there really isn’t anybody it could be – barring the few random townsfolk and the resident crazy guy who warns people not to go to Crystal Lake (a recurring character type in F13 movies, and far too silly to be the killer) there isn’t anybody else around. The only signifier of the killer is that they drive a jeep and a POV scene that shows they wear a large ring, so you absolutely never get the feeling that it’s one of the counsellors. It lacks that sort of ‘who could the killer be?’ mystery a lot of other slashers tend to have.

It’s what makes the Pamela Voorhees revelation both surprising and absurdly obvious – she shows up out of nowhere near the end after almost everybody is dead, talks at length about her son Jason who’d drowned at the camp and then suddenly she’s trying to kill Alice. She and Jason hadn’t been seen or mentioned in the film before then (there was only a passing mention of ‘the boy who drowned’), so her appearance at the very end is pretty strange, obvious and a bit blatant. It is a surprise to see what seems like an ordinary, seemingly nice little lady being the slasher though. Not many other slashers had done it, especially since then.

 

It’s a nice looking movie, and one of the best strengths is that Camp Crystal Lake actually looks and feels legit. The camp looks like a camp, complete with logging shed, cabins and an archery range, and the lake actually looks like a lake – it’s impressive in size and has dual jetties and a canoe shed and everything. These are things a lot of the sequels miss completely, and this is one of the rare times the camp has actually looked like a camp (it helps that it actually was filmed at a real-life summer camp). In terms of filmmaking, the most memorable stylistic choice was the scenes shot in the killer’s POV as they stalk/kill their victims. It’s wasn’t a new idea though. Halloween began in Michael’s POV as he killed his sister, but more importantly the Italian ‘giallo’ horror movies of the sixties and seventies employed that tactic all the time.

The gore and kills are simple but still hold up well, which makes sense since it was done by make-up maestro Tom Savini. A few throats are slashed, but more memorably a girl gets an axe in the face and Kevin Bacon gets an arrow through the throat. Those are some of the most iconic kills in the entire franchise.

 

There are some odd things in the script that don't quite work. The ‘Camp Blood’ stigma thing with the townsfolk doesn’t really work because the time period is way too long and the tragedy is way too minor. Twenty years is a long time for something as relatively minor as one drowning and two murders to cause a place to become ‘cursed’. While after this point the stigma will make sense (a whole lot of teens are going to be killed there from this point on), this time it’s pretty minor, especially since there were twenty years where nothing bad happened at all, so telling the kids they’re doomed because of something that happened two decades ago is ridiculous.

And that’s the first film, a slasher seemingly only made to attempt to follow on the success and popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween that managed to be a surprising success of its own, spawning a massive franchise that has extended from films to books, a TV series (yes, it exists), comics and even videogames. While it owes a lot to films that came before it, (notably Halloween, but also others - scenes shot from the killer’s POV were a staple of Italian ‘giallo’ horror movies from the 60s and 70s), F13 offered its own mark on the slasher genre, helping to solidify the various tropes and elements the genre still uses to this day. It also helps that it’s still a fun movie. Next up we get the sequel, which capitalised on the success of the original by basically being the same.