Jason X

 

After the colossal misfire of Jason Goes To Hell, a movie seemingly patched together from random half-formed ideas and thrown on the screen with little care, the Friday the 13^th series was put on ice for a while. It was fair enough – they didn’t seem to know what they were doing with the series for a while, pumping out sequels with no real conviction or even understanding of what the fans wanted. A decade later Jason X was released, a continuation of the series that, instead of being a remake (ten years really is a long time between sequels), Jason X was a sort of sequel vaguely in spirit, and the first F13 movie made post-2000. You know what sort of movie was really popular in early 2000? Space movies. And thus we have Jason X, where Jason Voorhees goes to space. He’s not the first or only horror series to suddenly end up in an intergalactic adventure – both Leprechaun and Hellraiser ended up in space first – but there’s something inherently silly in seeing how taking Jason into space doesn’t change the formula up.

This is a seriously stupid movie, with completely ridiculous, impossible to take serious parts, but I like it in a weird way. It has a sense of humour about itself – it seems to know that it’s ‘Jason in Space!’ premise is ridiculous and it just goes ridiculous with it. It’s very much a F13 movie, but set in space, with Jason stalking and slashing his way through a spaceship. Since it’s a pretty cramped quarters, they mix things up a little and have everybody know Jason is on the prowl pretty much instantly. They even make attempts to stop him, not that they work. It’s a dumb movie but it seems to know it, and never attempts to take itself seriously. There are a lot of kills and a lot of Jason, and while it’s full of stupid stuff it is pretty fun overall. It seems to completely ignore most of the F13 movies, and just keeping to the general knowledge of what they’re about (an unkillable Jason slaughtering his way through teenagers). It’s again produced by Sean S Cunningham, the director of the original, who also threw money at Jason Goes To Hell for some reason.

 

It begins with footage of a hellish landscape full of flesh, chains and fire – this is actually the inside of Jason’s head. Bit weird, but we’ll roll with it. Military scientists are experimenting on a captured Jason (at the ‘Crystal Lake Research Facility’), trying to find the source of his immortality. After many failed attempts at killing him he’s scheduled to be cryogenically frozen by kickass lady scientist Rowan (our heroine) so he can’t cause any more mayhem. Another scientist (a cameo by director David Cronenberg) wants to postpone this for more experiments, and comes with a military escort to retrieve him, but Jason escapes and kills them all except Rowan who manages to cryogenically freeze Jason, at the cost of being frozen herself. Four hundred plus years later and an intergalactic field trip of college students from a spaceship arrive to an uninhabitable Earth and find the facility, retrieving the frozen bodies of Rowan and Jason. Back on board the ship (which also houses a bunch of soldiers) they revive Rowan (using a special nanomachine bench thing), who warns them to get rid of Jason’s body. But it’s too late, as Jason Voorhees has already thawed out and he’s on a murderous rampage on the ship. The survivors fight to escape Jason, and prevent him from leaving the ship.

Rowan is a more kickass heroine than the usual sort. In the opening she unloads a shotgun into Jason and manages to lock him in the cryogenic freezing tank. He stabs her through it, which causes a leak freezing both of them. When thawed she doesn’t seem to care too much about being frozen for 400 years, she’s still more concerned about Jason. Girl’s got her priorities. It is weird that she’s so immediately accepting and unconcerned about being in the future – the girl just rolls with it.

You won’t remember most of the cast, but they’re a sillier lot than usual and they all have weird names. There are a lot of them, mixed between the students (of what exactly?), the soldiers (why are there even soldiers there?) and the crew. While the military folks are completely forgettable (barring the commander, who played the same role in ‘Resident Evil’), the teens are so freaking weird. Their costumes look like something form a cheap early 2000 sci-fi kids show. Of them there are only a handful of memorable ones. Snarky girl is memorable because she’s snarky – it’s weird but it kinda works for her. The android is memorable because she’s an android, and the nerd guy who seems to be in a relationship with the android is memorable because that entire aspect is really creepy. I guess the idiot professor is memorable because he’s an idiot? It’s very unclear what they’re all students of. Their professor seems to just take them to scavenge Earth for stuff he can sell, which leads to our tiny side plot: he wants to sell Jason’s body to a collector for big money. That means he ignores Rowan’s warnings. In a pretty strange, WTF scene he’s in a woman’s negligee while the snarky girl uses tongs to twist his nipples (to ensure a top grade of course). It comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with anything and is just so freaking strange.

There’s a fair amount of space stuff thrown in here, with the usual nonsense talk of federations, credits, space travel, space technology and the sort. Apparently everybody knows what nanomachines are but nobody has a clue what a hockey mask is. They have space technology like virtual reality videogames and holodecks (both of which Jason doesn’t seem to understand – he just kills anything even if it isn’t real). There’s even an android girl. She acts in an android-like fashion. In one of the weirder scenes, the android’s creator/lover attempts to give her featureless breasts some nipples because she wants them because she’s jealous of the other girls (don’t ask me, it’s weird). So we get robot boobs. In the finale she ends up being decked out with weapons and takes on Jason, blowing him away. When Jason revives he cuts her head off, but since she’s an android she’s fine. She’s one of the few to escape safely (well, relatively at least). One issue with the spaceship setting is that it’s almost impossible to tell where anything is. The place is made up of tight corridors, tiny rooms and then a cargo hold/engine room/mechanics room with giant drill (?). Jason is one the loose but who the hell knows where he is or how he’s getting around.

Jason is looking pretty good here. He’s got a familiar look, which is fine with me. You see him without his mask early on in the film, and he’s looking pretty dead by now. It’s basically mashed up meat under the mask at this point. He can still stalk and slash like the best of them, but the biggest thing that happens is Jason becomes a super-powered cyborg. Towards the end Jason is ‘killed’ by the android girl, now kitted out with a bunch of guns. He has some limbs blown off and his head is blown in half. He just so happens to land on the magical nanomachine healing table, which brings him back to life as a part-cyborg monster, referred to as ‘Uber Jason’. This only happens in the last fifteen or so minutes of the film – for the most part it’s just regular old Jason hacking his way through everybody. I do find it confusing that the nanomachine table made him metal instead of flesh. It was meant to repair human bodies, and it certainly didn’t turn Rowan into a cyborg. Anyway Uber Jason is a bit of a silly design, with a new mask and bulky robot muscles. The most notable aspect is probably his bloodshot eyes. They have fun with Jason as an icon. A frozen Jason manages to slice one of the student’s arms off when he falls forward, his raised machete slicing it right off. I love the stupidity of Jason being so deadly that even incapacitated he’s capable of slaughter. A scene of two of the teens having sex is intercut with Jason coming back to life, as though he can sense horny teens. On the whole the movie understands the goofier side of the franchise and caters to it.

There are some cool bits. One kill, probably the absolute best, has Jason shoving a girl’s face into liquid nitrogen and then smashing it against a table where it shatters. It’s the best kind of gory nonsense. The most memorable part is easy – at the very end, as the survivors are attempting to flee Uber Jason, the android momentarily traps him in a hologram simulation of Camp Crystal Lake. Two nubile girls come up to him and offer him beer, marijuana and pre-marital sex before undressing and eagerly getting into nearby sleeping bags. A few seconds later it cuts to Jason swinging one sleeping bag girl into the other, in a sort of joke reference to the sleeping bag kill in Part VII. Snarky girl gets killed when a breach in the spaceship causes a vacuum that pulls her out of a vent, but it’s not as gory as you’d expect.  

In the end almost everybody gets killed, a space station habitat thing full of thousands of people (who we never see) gets destroyed and the ship explodes as our survivors, Rowan, the nerd and the android’s head, escape to safety. Uber Jason, floating through space, is grabbed by the military commander (in a space suit) who thrusts both of them into Earth 2’s atmosphere (there’s another Earth apparently). They’re both burnt up on arrival, like meteors, with Jason’s robot mask landing in a lake and floating to the bottom. The end? Well, yeah, for another decade at least. Jason X was essentially the end of the Friday the 13^th series, which had it’s ridiculous ups and downs and strange detours over the three decades of its original run. Jason X stands as a pretty fun one, mostly because of its dumb space setting and understanding that it’s space setting was really, really dumb. Cyborg Jason is such an adorably stupid idea it sort of grows on you, even if he’s only in the last ten or so minutes of the movie. It’s a lot more fun than a lot of the other sequels.

The F13 series reached ten films with Jason X (not counting Freddy vs. Jason, which is another beast entirely). But it didn’t end there, they made, as they do with most things these days, a remake. But was that remake any good? Find out next time.

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday

This is the part where things get really weird for the series. When your horror franchise has gone on long enough you tend to get strange with it, and they do here. While Jason has been a zombie since Part VI, and in Part VII there were psychic powers into the mix, JGTH goes way further with the supernatural aspect than you’d think. Interestingly, it’s the first F13 movie not given the Friday the 13^th title, and it isn’t referred to as Part IX either. It’s ‘Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday’.

It’s probably fitting that there’s a title change because for the most part this is nothing like a F13 movie, taking a massive departure. It does a similar thing to Part V, in that Jason isn’t the one doing the kills for most of the movie. But whereas that film simply had a Jason impostor, JGTH takes things in a much weirder direction. It’s still a slasher, but it could honestly be a different movie. It’s a bit hard to determine whether JGTH acknowledges any of the previous movies at all. Jason’s obviously undead, but whether he went to Manhattan or not is up for debate. This is another one of those movies promising the death of Jason. Considering he'd already died in Part IV and been melted in acid in Part VIII it doesn't really mean much.

JGTH is a baffling mess. It’s all over the place; a rushed, cobbled together mash-up of ideas and plot holes that feels made up on the spot, as though they knew they had to make a movie but had no plan and just went with whatever new idea came first. It’s a baffling sequel, not seeming to know, understand or care what the F13 fans like, and instead just going in a strange direction. It’s barely a F13 movie at all really. Funnily enough, it was produced by the director of the very first Friday the 13^th movie, Sean S. Cunningham. He had nothing to do with the last seven F13 movies, but this mess is what he came back for?

Jason Voorhees, stalking a girl at Crystal Lake, is ambushed by the heavily armed FBI and killed, his entire body blown to pieces. A coroner examining the remains at the morgue finds that Jason’s heart is still beating and is compelled to eat it, absorbing Jason’s evil spirit (shown as a worm monster). With Jason’s unholy essence within him and decaying the body from within, he begins a murderous, body-hopping rampage as he slashes his way across the country, switching to fresh bodies as he tracks down blood relatives of the Voorhees family. Jason can only be resurrected if his essence is passed into a relative, thus those possessed by Jason’s evil hunt down his sister Diana, his niece Jessica and her child Stephanie. Bounty hunter and Jason Voorhees expert Creighton Duke knows this, and tracks down Diana and Jessica to warn them and try to use them to stop Jason; only a Voorhees can kill Jason for good by destroying his heart with a magical transforming dagger. Meanwhile, Jessica’s ex-boyfriend/Stephanie’s father Steven is arrested for murder after one of Jason’s hosts kills Diana, and after meeting Duke he’s determined to save Jessica and his daughter.

Jason is looking pretty monstrous here. By this stage, in the brief moments you see him at the very beginning and very end of the movie, Jason’s mask has fused to his face and he looks like he’s been abusing steroids. He’s got a particular swollenness about him. Of course there’s really not much Jason in this movie at all. He’s on screen for less than ten minutes all up. The explosion at the beginning is pretty cool. The FBI shoot him up with bullets, then suddenly there are explosions (I think they’re meant to be grenades?). Almost everything explodes apart from his head. When the coroner is investigating his heart he notes that it’s twice the size and malformed, and doesn’t pump blood. Then it starts beating and he can’t help but eat the thing.

Suddenly there’s freaking mythos to Jason Voorhees.  As Creighton Duke says: In a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn and only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die. Jason can only be killed by a blood relative, and only if he’s stabbed with a mystical dagger (that Creighton Duke just so happens to have). I really don’t know why the magic dagger was necessary but apparently it is. It all feels like something for a completely different movie. Jason’s demonic essence thing is piss weak though, a scurrying little worm monster puppet. There are a few call-backs to other horror movies with some props and callouts. The Necronomicon from ‘The Evil Dead’ shows up. The exact same one (it might even be the same prop or maybe a replica since the drawings are the same). At one point there’s a crate marked ‘Arctic Expedition, Carpenter’, a reference to ‘The Thing’. I’m not sure why these are here actually.

 

The characters, much like the loose plot, are very loose, with uncertain personalities. Steven, our hero, is ok I guess, though his character is a bit unclear. He’s determined to save Jessica and his daughter, but he’s also a bit of an idiot, since almost everything he does makes him look like a crazy murderer (knocking out cops, kidnapping people, running around with a gun). Jessica only really becomes our heroine towards the very end, with most of the focus being on Steven. She’s not particularly likeable either, spending most of the movie yelling at Steven (makes sense since she thinks he killed her mother, but doesn’t stop it being annoying). When she stops doing that then she’s refusing to help stop Jason, even when he’s stalking her and Creighton Duke makes it abundantly clear that she’s the only one who can stop him. Diana is an idiot because she seems to know that Jason is coming for her and that Creighton Duke is right, but she doesn’t cooperate with him and she ignores his warnings. Instead she seems to think being in denial and doing nothing is the best thing to do, so it isn’t long before she gets killed. Then apparently her body is just lying around in the basement of the house because that’s where Jason’s demon worm thing finds it in the end.

Creighton Duke is a bit of a wacky character that seems completely out of place. Besides his bounty hunter persona and cowboy hat, the dude also has some ridiculous lines. When asked by a reporter what Jason makes him think of, he replies: “a little girl in a pink dress pushing a hotdog through a donut”. What the hell does that even mean? Also I find Duke’s credentials a bit suspect; he’s a Jason Voorhees expert but hasn’t actually ever come against him. He also seems way too prepared with his hands on supernatural items. He’s also a bit of a dick, refusing to tell anybody how to defeat Jason and doing everything he can to antagonise people (he ends up getting arrested for being an asshole).  He demands five hundred thousand dollars to kill Jason, and only gives Steven information about Jason if he lets him break his fingers for some reason (which Steven, that idiot, lets him do).The rest of the cast are just there to get killed. They mostly act like idiots though (the police force is really inept).

Despite the body-swapping central gimmick they never bother trying to bring any doubt as to who is possessed. One would think they could go for some tense paranoia but they just don’t since you always know who the host is and it’s always obvious (if it’s a guy covered with blood killing everybody then it’s the host). This in particular feels like missed potential.

 

In the end, after a body-hopping massacre of pretty much everybody in town, Jason’s revives when his demon worm spirit gets to Diana’s corpse (which apparently the cops left in the basement of her house). It’s a bit of a cheat (and one of several plot holes) considering they’d spent the entire film saying Jason needed a living blood relative, only to pull this shit right at the end. It’s also gross because it seems that the parasite enters from the vagina (it does a POV of the thing heading right between her legs). I do find it completely hilarious that when he does finally resurrect, his hockey mask and clothes resurrect as well somehow. The entire transformation happens off screen, but it does bring to question of how exactly it was meant to work (are the clothes and hockey mask part of his ‘evil essence’?). Also, since he possessed the corpse of his half-sister, does that mean he’s a girl now?

The gore effects are pretty gruesome. Jason exploding is cool, and the make-up and props work for the various corpses is awesomely gruesome. A lot of the kills are pretty violent as well, with a lot of blood and brain matter splattered around. The coolest stuff would have to be the Jason hosts -they continue to decay and take damage, eventually melting down into decaying, gooey messes, meaning he has to constantly switch bodies. He does this though passing the parasite from host to host via an open mouth kiss. This is less impressive, as the actors (usually two dudes) seemingly pass a rubbery slug prop between their lips. It's gross.

 

The ending is the most memorable part – Jason, finally defeated (with the mystical dagger thrust in his heart), is dragged down to hell. Giant rocky hands burst out of the ground and drag him into the earth until only his mask remains. Then, as a final stinger, the clawed hand of Freddy Kruger bursts out of the ground and grabs the skull and pulls it down, with Freddy laughing maniacally. It’s what sets up and eventually led to Freddy vs Jason (something that wouldn't happen until well over a decade later).

 

Jason Goes To Hell is a bafflingly bad movie. I have no idea what the thought process was behind the making of it, or if there even was a thought process. It feels like they got the F13 franchise and didn’t know what to do with it so they just filmed whatever came to mind and left it at that. It almost feels as though they didn’t want to make a F13 movie at all, what with the way they basically sideline Jason for the movie. It’s such a weird entry in the series, yet also so straightforward and familiar (body-hopping aside, it’s just about a guy who wanders around killing people). It's baffling as to why it was made at all actually. The movie did badly with everybody, so much so that it would be a decade before another F13 movie would be made. And that’s where things get astronomical.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

 

The last few F13 movies tried to change things up in various ways. Some changes were drastic, like zombie Jason, while others weren’t. Part VIII made a pretty drastic change by taking things in a new direction by displacing everybody’s favourite undead killing machine; Jason leaves Crystal Lake and ends up in New York City. The title is a bit of a lie though. Jason doesn’t really take Manhattan, he just visits briefly. He only spends the ending thirty minutes of the film there actually. For the most part it’s ‘Jason Sets Sail’ as the masked murderer hangs around on a cruise ship, slashing teens and ship hands.

This is usually considered one of the worst F13 movies, but I actually like it. It’s got a goofy sort of charm to it, the change of locations is interesting and I find it funny overall. It’s just so eighties it’s ridiculous. It changes things up in silly ways, with Jason stalking on a boat and stalking the Manhattan streets being a definite change of pace for the film, the move away from Crystal Lake being a breath of fresh air. The strangest thing is that the filmmakers must have really hated New York because they present it as an ugly, dirty, dangerous slum city full of punk muggers, trash, rats and sewage.

This is the most 80s F13 movie there is. It starts with a narrator talking about Manhattan, then a try-hard late 80s rock song plays over footage of Manhattan, here shown as a trash ridden hell hole. Most of the footage is mundane stuff, like people sitting in a diner, people on escalators and then you get stuff like street punks doing crack and heroin. Everything about it, from the setting, the fashions and attitude, even the fact that the teens do cocaine are all late 80s/almost early 90s; it’s just completely ridiculous overall.

 

Jason, trapped at the bottom of Crystal Lake, is revived when a passing houseboat accidentally clips some underwater power cables that electrocute him, bringing him back to life. Jason then gets seaborne somehow when the houseboat (its owners now dead) floats away from Crystal Lake to the harbour somehow (since when was it connected to the ocean? I thought it was a lake?). Boarding a ship at the harbour is a graduating high school class going on a school trip to Manhattan. Amongst the classmates is Rennie, a bright student (and our nice, wholesome, forgettable protagonist) who is afraid of water, going on the trip despite the objections of her uncle/foster parent, the English teacher/trip organiser McCulloch. Unknown to the teens, Jason sneaks onto the ship as it’s leaving, and begins stalking and slashing the ships’ crew and the teens until the boat sinks and they reach Manhattan, where he chases the fleeing survivors through the city streets.

Jason has a slimy look this time, like the waterlogged corpse he is (after all he’s been under the water for a while now). It’s actually pretty cool. Jason looks awful without the hockey mask though, with a face resembling a cheap rubber mask that’s melted a little. It’s a massive step down from his ghoulish appearance in the preceding film. New to this movie is Jason being seemingly able to teleport (or at least move very quickly when off screen). A few times somebody will see him, turn and run away only to run into him again. He’s also apparently one hell of a swimmer. When his nautical killing spree hits its peak the small band of survivors get into a dinghy and row away for a long time (presumably a few hours if the fade away is any indication) before they reach New York. Shortly after Jason emerges from the water, so he must swim like an Olympic champ.

Rennie is another nice, wholesome, forgettable girl, this time with a traumatic childhood incident. In a very much forced little twist, it turns out that Rennie is afraid of water because, as a child, she was almost drowned by a young Jason Voorhees while vacationing at Crystal Lake. It’s dumb and needless, and just like what happened with Chris in Part III. It’s also revealed that she was pushed into the water by McCulloch who was trying to teach her how to swim in the most asshole way imaginable. Rennie also keeps seeing ghostly visions of child Jason attacking her. He appears almost everywhere – in the water, in windows, in mirrors, even just in the middle of the room. She even sees blood spewing out from some taps for some reason. The strangest thing is that her dog seems to see the visions as well, which makes no sense if they’re meant to be in her head? It’s never explained anyway, unless it’s meant to somehow tie in with the weird ending.

In a weird bit of silliness, Rennie is attacked by rapacious thugs who shoot her up with heroine in New York (because it’s a scum bucket apparently), and Jason actually saves her…so that he can continue to try and kill her. Rennie also must be an addict because she barely seems to react to the drug – she’s still able to drive a car (though she crashes it into Jason) and never acts high. If anything this would have been the perfect point to start having her see the visions of Jason, as drug-induced hallucinations. In another weird bit of silliness, Jason actually ignores a whole bunch of people while stalking Rennie at the end. She runs down a busy street with dozens of people standing around, and Jason just walks by all of them. He doesn’t even attempt to murder any of them, though he does take off his mask to scare a few punks away. Why is he so intent on killing Rennie specifically? I thought his whole deal was that he killed anyone and everyone.

 

The group of teens are pretty exaggerated, with the requisite number of bodies to be slaughtered, but beyond all that this group actually contains a few characters with their own personalities (no matter how superficial or simple) beyond the usual random teens. There’s the bitch (who wants to blackmail McCulloch), the geek with a video camera (who wants to impress the bitch), the Asian girl (no other defining features there), the ‘rocker’ chick, the confident boxing guy and Shaun, the guy whose dad is the captain (who doesn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps), along with a few others – they almost all get murdered. There’s also the creepy ship hand who does the whole “You’re all going to die!/This ship is doomed!” thing, warning the teens cryptically. They all assume he’s the killer when the bodies start showing up, at least until his body shows up as well. The silliest thing is that he knows Jason is on board before they set off, so why the hell would he stay on the boat? It makes no sense. He also starts running around armed with a knife – they already think he’s the killer, this just makes it worse.

The kills are all over the place. Some are fairly straightforward – rocker chick gets hit in the head with her guitar, the bitch is stabbed with bits of a broken mirror, Asian girl is strangled to death etc. Some are awesomely silly. A guy in the sauna has hot sauna rocks jammed into his stomach (the effects don’t quite do justice for how horrific that would be). Mean English professor McCulloch is drowned in one of the garbage bins full of sludge that are just lying around Manhattan. Probably the funniest and best-known is the boxing kid who attempts to fight Jason in unarmed combat (not a good idea). Jason delivers a single punch that knocks the guy’s head off and sends it flying into a garbage bin. There are a lot of them actually, but the gore has been noticeably tuned down compared to some of the earlier F13 movies.

The ship setting is strange because I can’t tell what sort of boat it’s meant to be. They have skeet shooting, shuffle boarding, a sauna and a dance floor on the boat (the ‘S.S. Lazarus’), but the ship itself, with its cavernous engine room, salty crew and dirty little cabins looks more like a simple trade boat or something. If it is meant to be a cruise ship it’s a pretty atrocious one. Of interesting note is the camerawork – on the boat it gently sways from side to side, as though the boat is rocking. Coupled with the lightning and rain effects it does give the impression that it’s an actual boat at sea. It’s the loosest school trip ever, and everybody seems to have free reign to do whatever they want. Some are even wandering around in the engine room uncontested. There’s never a good idea of where anybody is, with several characters disappearing for lengthy stretches before appearing again.   The boat is a much more claustrophobic setting for Jason’s stalking (there’s not much room to get away from him when you’re stuck in tiny cabins). It’s not quite used to its full potential (there really aren’t any prolonged stalking scenes). The cramped quarters also make it confusing in how long it takes before anybody realises that Jason is on board and that people are getting killed. When they do, interestingly enough, they form a posse and actually try and hunt Jason down. It doesn’t work and the survivors end up abandoning the boat to head to safety.

Once we hit the streets of Manhattan for the finale, things get an odd feel. It’s comparatively more open, with intricate alleys full of street punks and dilapidated apartment blocks. Jason oddly seems right at home there, maybe because of his waterlogged, grimy look. The strangest thing pace-wise is that the switch from the boat to Manhattan sort of changes things up – instead of being trapped in a relatively isolated place, they’re now on the run in a big city. While moving through the alleys and streets, running from Jason, they encounter muggers, they get into a police car and try driving away, they take the subway (Jason does too somehow, and even gets electrocuted on the tracks – he gets better), they hit the ‘main drag’, a fully lit streets with passing cars and dozens of people (none of which phase Jason), until they finally head to the sewers for our ridiculous ending.

The finale is really stupid. By the film’s ‘New York is a horrible scum bucket’ logic, apparently the sewers underneath Manhattan fill with deadly toxic waste every night at midnight (!?). The surviving two teens (Rennie and her requisite love interest Shaun) lure him down there, throw toxic waste at him, then the clock strikes midnight, acid floods the sewer and he’s melted down to nothing, with Rennie seeing a vision of a little crying boy Jason. It’s confusing, and probably a misguided attempt at being symbolic or something, or at least continuing Rennie’s unexplained visions of Jason. It’s funny to note that, Rennie’s little boy vision aside, Jason is fully, completely dead at this point. His entire freaking body dissolves in toxic waste. Future movies will ignore this completely.

It’s a really stupid movie, but it absolutely owns it. It’s so oblivious to how silly it all is. I have to admit I’m a bit fond of it. It’s just so completely absurd. I have a million questions. Why is Manhattan some borderline-dystopic thug wasteland? Why does the ship have a sauna? Why does Rennie see visions of Jason? Why is McCulloch such a dick? Why the hell do the sewers under Manhattan fill with toxic waste every night? Where does the toxic waste come from and where does it go?

It’s usually considered the worst, but I really don’t mind it. It’s stupid and silly, but I found its faults endearing. I’m just so baffled by it all, the 80s fashion, the attitude, the way Manhattan is portrayed like the post-apocalypse. The opening, with its rock song, has a montage of muggers, street punks with syringes and crack, dirty cans of garbage, rats and dirty streets is so strange that it feels like it’s for a completely different movie. If the entire film was set in Manhattan then it would probably have been better. The movie didn’t do too well, which means that drastic changes were made for the sequel, which is where things get really freaking strange.

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.