Hellbound: Hellraiser 2

 

Hellbound is a bigger, grosser, nastier movie than the first Hellraiser (which is saying something), throwing up even more strange, horrific imagery. It’s also less coherent and makes less sense, with the decision to go broad with its ideas meaning there’s less consistency and clarity. While the first film was relatively small-scaled and self-contained, Hellbound is bigger, weirder and loosely plotted. It makes sense as to why: the film was rushed into production very shortly after the release and surprise success of the first film, which brought in more money than expected, and was released to cinemas the next year. Clive Barker no longer writes or directs this time: despite writing and directing the first film he didn’t retain the rights to the Hellraiser series, though he stays on in a producing role, and having a bit of influence on it (a lot of aspects have his touch).

Hellraiser 2 is a big, dumb movie full of nonsense. It’s strange, gory, sometimes horrifying and occasionally goofy nonsense, but it’s all weirdly interesting, even when it’s silly. This is a movie that’s almost like a house of horror attraction – you see a lot of stuff thrown around in front of you, and while it isn’t scary it’s still freaky. You can tell that they just threw anything they thought was creepy, disgusting or gruesome up here. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but the constant barrage of imagery and gore is appealing and gives it a horror rollercoaster sort of experience, at the expense of a proper story.

Hellbound attempts to go deeper into the Hellraiser mythos, concerning itself more with the puzzle box, the Cenobites and hell. Story comes second to going into these things. It must be said that going into the specifics and revealing some answers takes the mystique and terror out of a lot of it. Its story is weak and it lacks a good sense of pace. It’s mostly just a smorgasbord of horrific imagery and gore, throwing things at you through its length. It doesn’t have the simple but solid plot of the original, with this movie seeming to just be an excuse to throw as much stuff around and see how far they could go in terms of sex and violence. And they go pretty damn far.

 

At the end of the first Hellraiser, the puzzle box was returned to Morocco where it ended up in the hands of some poor sap. But Hellraiser 2 doesn’t follow up on that, but instead follows Kirsty Cotton in the immediate aftermath of the first film. It does begin with a pretty big and drastic revelation – the Cenobites used to be human. The film begins with Elliot Spencer (Doug Bradley), a Captain in the British Army circa 1920s, unlocking a puzzle box and unleashing hell, which torture and disfigure him, slicing a grid in his head and hammering nails into his skull, turning him into the Cenobite Pinhead.

Kirsty Cotton finds herself in the Channard Institute, a psychiatric hospital, being questioned by police about the gruesome events of the first film. Kirsty’s talk about demons and hell and her insistence that they destroy key evidence – specifically a bloody mattress her stepmother Julia died on - makes them believe she’s having a mental breakdown, and thus she remains there under the care of chief physician Dr Channard. Kirsty, at night, has a vision of a skinless man smearing a bloodied message on the wall “I AM IN HELL. HELP ME”. Believing it’s her father, Kirsty attempts to tell her story Channard, hoping somebody will believe her. Unfortunately she’s told the wrong person.

Underneath his seemingly warm personality, Dr Channard has a dark, sadistic side, using the patients as experimental guinea pigs for torture and surgery. He is secretly obsessed with the Lament Configuration and the Cenobites, having done extensive research on it. He even has a few of the puzzle boxes in his possession, one of which he’s given to mute young patient Tiffany who excels at puzzles. He manages to retrieve the bloody mattress and, a blood sacrifice later, Julia is revived as a skinless corpse. Promising to show him hell, Channard feeds Julia patients until she gets her strength back, and the puzzle box is opened sending the entire hospital to hell where the Cenobites are waiting.

 

Kirsty is back and angrier than ever, which makes sense. Surviving demons and killer stepmothers is one thing, but waking up in a psyche ward with everybody thinking you’re crazy would be pretty frustrating. Once again she’s not really the focus so much; she’s there to be the heroine but the film largely focuses on the other stuff going on. Weirdly they don’t do much with her. She never really tries to escape the hospital, and she does herself no real favours when she’s trying to convince people her zombie uncle and demons were responsible for everything. Besides being the main heroine, she doesn’t have much of a stake this time going around. Sure, trying to prevent Julia and Channard from unleashing hell on earth is a pretty good motive, but for the most part she’s involved just because she happens to be there. Her boyfriend from the first movie is missing, and instead one of the orderlies takes an interest at her, but he ends up getting eaten by Julia. Tiffany is barely worth mentioning. She opens the puzzle box, but remains largely mute and expressionless for most of the movie. She’s there to solve the puzzle box and close it to sort everything out at the end. It ends a bit too cleanly I might add, much the same as in the first film – simply closing the puzzle box seems to be enough to completely shut out hell and stop the villains.

Julia is back from the dead as one of the antagonists. I think it is fine, if a bit too convenient. A complaint I had last time was that she didn’t look particularly sexy, but they’ve managed to change that a bit here, seemingly just by changing her hair and clothes. With long hair and a dress she’s looking much more appealing than the stark evil stepmother from the first film. Of course at first she lacks all of that, being a fleshy meat person for a while. Channard, as a doctor, at least wraps her in bandages (then makes out with her, which is gross). Julia eats a whole lot more people than Frank did in the first film, as Channard feeds her patients he steals from the hospital. She kills enough to completely revive, whereas Frank ended up having to steal his brother’s skin. She’s smarter and more confident here, no longer being used as a pawn but using others (Dr Channard) to get what she wants. She even gets revenge on Frank in hell (a smart call-back – of course he’d be in hell). She gets taken down pretty easily by Kirsty though, who manages to pull her skin off completely (a bit too easily; she just gives it a tug really) and sends her flying into a chasm.

We get something of an ‘ultimate evil’, but it’s a bit underwhelming. Leviathan, the ruler of hell, is a giant rotating crystal lighthouse thing that shoots beams of black light around hell. It’s a bit weird (compared to the fleshy torture of the Cenobites, a giant stone isn’t exactly scary), but it is consistent with the sort of thing Barker does in his books. In a cool little detail if its dark light hits you, you see all the sins of your life. For Dr Channard it’s a flashing series of horrible surgery images suggesting he’s been messed up since childhood. Leviathan then takes Channard and turns him into a Cenobite, who begins to wreak havoc on his hospital, massacring his own patients. It must be said that apart from transforming Channard (and possible controlling him on his rampage) Leviathan doesn’t do much. It just rotates there. When hell is being close at the end it transforms into a puzzle box for some reason, but it’s never particularly malevolent. The stupid upside down monster from the first film was more dangerous than this.

Channard is our villain this time, sort of. As a human he’s got that dark side, but it comes across more as curiosity than actual evil. It’s a bit unclear as to why he’s interested in going to hell, and he seems a bit freaked out by it once he gets there. He’s not much of a negative presence to Kirsty or Tiffany until after he transforms into a Cenobite. Before that point he’s just standing around the hospital. Sure, what he does with his patients is messed up, but he’s not portrayed as sadistic or maniacal or psychotic. Once he becomes a Cenobite that changes, as he becomes this sort of ridiculous murder machine, cackling wildly as he kills everybody he comes across. That seems to be the extent of his intentions. He’s pretty silly and lacks the menace the Cenobites originally had, especially when he’s basically flying around cackling like an idiot.

Pinhead and his Cenobite posse are back (though the actress for the female Cenobite is noticeably different). They still look good, but they’re barely in it again. They’re also not quite villainous, just sort of hanging around. When they start taunting Kirsty it comes across more like bullying from the cool kids gang. Since the film was rushed into production so quickly, they didn’t seem to realise that the Cenobites were probably the most popular thing about the first movie, which would explain why they’re barely here. Pinhead and the other three original Cenobites also go down like chumps. It’s so disappointing and completely ruins their threat and effectiveness (the first film had the same problem), but they all get killed within seconds. They show up to torment Kirsty, who manages to make them remember that they used to be human (pretty much just by yelling “you used to be human”). Then Channard Cenobite shows up and just kills them all in about ten seconds by shooting barbs at them. They don’t even do anything (Pinhead tries his hooks but they don’t work), they just stand there and get killed before reverting back to their human forms (fat guy’s a fat guy, girl’s a girl, chatterer is a little boy though which is weird). The issue here is that the ‘Cenobites were humans’ thing doesn’t have any real impact or meaning (big deal, so what?), and then they just weakly die. What was the point at all? Channard Cenobite also ends up going down like an idiot. His finger tentacles end up getting stuck in the ground and when the giant tentacle attached to his head tries to move him it accidentally rips his head in half.

 

Kirsty finds out that it’s not her father stuck in hell, it’s Frank, which actually makes a lot of logical sense – he is stuck in hell, his fate sealed due to opening the puzzle box (and also all the murder and being a horrible tool in general). He wants to get out of hell, or to just hurt Kirsty. It’s more a call-back to the first film and doesn’t really change much. He’s not particularly threatening this time, especially when Julia turns up and kills him as revenge. It does brings up a question about the mechanics of dying in hell though – do you just come back to get tortured? Frank died twice in the first film and came back both times, so does that mean that Julia, Channard and the Cenobites are just going to come back despite their ‘deaths’? We never get an answer.

In the first film the character’s motivations, actions and decisions all made some sort of sense within the film’s context. This time people do crazy stuff for no real reason. Channard’s plan is unclear, Julia’s intentions are unclear (is it revenge? if she wanted to escape hell, why did she return there? She says she’s working for Leviathan, but what does that even entail?), Leviathan just sort of rotates around (can a giant stone pillar have motivations?) while the Cenobites seem to just hang around and don’t do much – they don’t even seem to know what’s going on in hell. And if Leviathan was controlling Channard then why did it let him kill the other Cenobites? At one point towards the end, Kirsty puts on Julia’s skin and wears it like a suit to fool Channard (kinda like how Frank stole Larry’s skin in the first film). It’s absolutely stupid and makes zero sense whatsoever – how the hell did she slip it on, dress and all? And why does she actually look like Julia and not just like somebody with horribly stretched and torn flesh wrapped around them? It’s a really dumb plan.

It’s much gorier than the first film, with more blood and gore than before and a nastier edge. Some of the violence is hard to watch. The most horrible part is when Julia is revived – Channard brings a psychotic patient to the bloodier mattress Julia died on and gives him a razor blade. The patient, paranoid that bugs are crawling under his skin, then begins to slice himself up. It’s bloody and horrible, cutting between him slicing his flesh and fighting off worms and maggots. It’s really uncomfortable to watch. Other gore is par for the course – people are cut apart, have hooks dug into them, get stabbed by tentacles – it’s all pretty wet and meaty. Some of the effects are poor or laughable though. The scene of Channard’s transformation is funny as silly monster hands wrap wire around his face. Channard himself looks ridiculous, being carried around by a giant monster tentacle attached to his skull. Where the tentacle leads is a mystery, since you never see what it’s attached to, even when Channard ends up indoors (I think it’s meant to be Leviathan maybe?). The weakest special effects are Channard’s ‘fingers’, shown as stop-motion snake-like tentacles with mouths that open to reveal knives, eyeballs and other nonsense (at one point a flower and a beckoning finger). Hellbound was released only a year after the original and it has an odd feeling that they rushed it out to strike while the iron was hot, which might explain some of the cheaper, rushed-feeling special effects.

 

Hell is given a very strange, almost abstract portrayal here, a labyrinth comprised of a lot of winding corridors, staircases and chasms over a stark, empty void-like surrounding. A lot of its architecture is vintage Barker. Then, further in, there’s areas that seem to be made of just generic horror imagery, such as a demonic carnival with a clown juggling his own eyeballs. At times it’s like horrific nightmares. Some of the stuff is pretty weak, while other stuff is pretty freaky. As said, it’s like a horror ride – some stuff works, some doesn’t but it overloads you with a bit of everything. Compared to the large voids and nightmare-logic nonsense, I prefer the demonic abattoir version of hell that appears when the Cenobites are around. I do like how sex fiend Frank’s version of hell is full of women writhing in orgasmic ecstasy that he can’t see or touch. In this respect, and with the Cenobites, the film attempts to offer more explanations to the Hellraiser mythology, but it also just opens up a bunch of questions. There are also apparently a whole lot of puzzle boxes, more than the one that Frank had in the original. The films to this point still haven’t gone into their origins, but Channard didn’t seem to have any difficulty in stockpiling a bunch of them.

Hellbound is interesting to watch to just see all the visual creativity and nonsense. In that respect it’s a fun time, but it lacks the solid, pure nature of the first film. It’s worth watching, if only for the ridiculous sideshow of horror sights and sounds. There aren’t many films like it. The story and characters suffer as a result, but as sheer horror spectacle it’s pretty good, though I prefer the first film. In the end Julia, Channard and the Cenobites are all dead, Leviathan transforms into a puzzle box itself and the gates to hell are closed away as Kirsty and Tiffany escape and survive. Some men investigate Channard’s house sometime later and find the bloodied mattress, one is dragged inside and a horrific torture pillar emerges, with a lot of the gruesome and terrible aspects of hell trapped within, including Pinhead. This is a really weird way to end the movie, but they somehow make it work for its sequel, which marks where the Hellraiser series fell into American hands.

Hellraiser

Now that we’ve had a little break, it’s time to continue our Halloween horror festival by looking at another horror franchise. We go from one horror icon to the next, and it’s one of the stranger ones: Hellraiser. Hellraiser was created by British horror author Clive Barker, who also wrote and directed the first film in the series. Barker, tired of seeing awful adaptations of his works, decided to cut out the middleman and do it himself. To this end he wrote a short novella with the express purpose of bringing it to the screen personally. That novella was ‘The Hellbound Heart’, a slim volume barely over a hundred pages in length that got right to the point. It’s a decent read, but it’s very simple and even feels written for the screen. What’s interesting is how Barker managed to pull it off pretty well.

Hellraiser is a unique movie, gruesome, imaginative and horrific; it definitely had a substantially different look and feel to other horror movies of the time. It had its own influence on the horror genre and even fetish fashion, spawning eight sequels and a lot of comic book adaptations. The series has always been in an odd place; it’s never been quite as successful as the other franchises. They’re also messier films than most in more ways than one, with the series as a whole being a pretty jumbled mess. The first entry at least is a mostly solid little slice of British horror.

 

Frank Cotton, a narcissistic, world-travelling hedonistic asshole, completely bored with earthly pleasures, gets his hands on a mysterious puzzle box in Morocco that is said to summon angels to transport one to a realm of unimaginable pleasure when solved. He takes the box to his abandoned childhood home in Britain and, in the attic, manages to solve the box. When he does it summons the Cenobites, demonic beings that kill him and drag his soul to hell for an eternity of torture and suffering.

Sometime later Frank’s brother Larry decides to move into the seemingly abandoned house, bringing his second wife Julia with whom his relationship has strained. While Larry is attempting renovations on the house, he accidentally cuts his hand, his blood sinking into the attic floorboards. The blood is enough for Frank’s lingering soul to begin to resurrect, reforming as a gruesome skeleton in need of more flesh and blood to pull him out of hell and fully revive. He manages to convince Julia, who he’d had an affair with, to help by luring men into the attic and killing them. Larry’s daughter Kirsty, suspicious of her stepmother Julia, begins to investigate, getting her hands on the mysterious puzzle box.

It’s a pretty simple plot all things considered, and very close to the book, but it works pretty well for what it is. It’s also a more unique sort of horror movie, as there wasn’t much like it at the time. It’s more adult orientated, since at its core it’s a story about infidelity. Also murder, but infidelity is also definitely a theme. It’s actually a pretty good adaptation of the book, keeping the story and themes and only changing a few details. For one, Kirsty wasn’t Larry’s daughter but a close friend who was secretly in love with him. The change to her being his daughter feels like an attempt to be like a lot of other horror movies – teenage protagonists in horror movies were seemingly more popular than adult ones at the time. I think the change works fine actually – the creepy stepmother thing works, and having Larry be Kirsty’s father gives a better excuse for her to start staking out the house and investigating what was going on.

There are a lot of things that couldn’t translate well to film though, like how the puzzle box compels you to open it, the exact nature of the Cenobites or how the box works at all (it just seems to do things). The origins of the box (the ‘Lament Configuration’ in the book) are never delved into. It’s also never referred to as the Lament Configuration here, it‘s just referred to simply as ‘the puzzle box’. The book went into more detail with it, but I think the movie gets the point across, though the actual mechanics are unclear (when Frank opens it he’s instantly torn to pieces by hooks, when Kirsty opens it a doorway to hell opens).

Considering it was made by a first-time filmmaker, it’s a surprisingly well put together movie. You can tell Barker wanted to put his own spin on things and give his movie a bit of class. Thus it starts with, of all things, an overture. It’s pretty good, grand and sweeping, but it’s not memorable. The ‘Hellraiser theme’ is not something that I can bring to mind. The filmmaking is decent, though there is room for improvement evident. There are a few issues with the pace and progression of the movie. The beginning is so sudden there’s no real time to think – Frank buys the puzzle box, summons the Cenobites and is torn to pieces within about two minutes and with almost no dialogue. At one point a flashback occurs so suddenly it’s almost jarring, especially as it’s cut and interspersed with footage from the present. Some cuts are a bit odd as well. It’s a decent looking movie, not amazing but well done, but it has its own feel. What it lacks in technical brilliance it makes up for with creativity and gruesome gore and special effects, which Barker throws a lot of the focus on.

It’s a different sort of horror movie than most at the time, gory violence aside. It’s got a decidedly more adult bent than most. Interdimensional torture demons and blood-hungry revenants aside, it’s a film about infidelity, with the twisted Frank/Julia relationship making up the crux of the plot. It’s essentially a movie about sex and lust (and demons and murder). It’s a boundary pushing movie as well. The early sex scene flashback between Julia and Frank is more graphic than you’d expect (you even see his dick). Compared to movies that dealt mostly with murderers killing teenagers, this is a big change of pace.

This is a gorier movie than most, full of some awesomely gruesome effects and gory kills. The effects work is good though a bit dated at times, but for the film’s budget it’s still really violent, creative stuff. The gore is all physical effects, using prop work and make-up. Julia uses a hammer to kill off the men she lures to the house, and it’s enough to crack heads and break jaws. Once Frank gets his hands on them they become emaciated husks, their mouths spewing maggots. The version of hell here is an industrial room full of hanging chains and hooks with chunks of flesh hanging off of them. Speaking of hooks and chains, Pinhead’s weapons of choice are hooks that fly out from seemingly everywhere to skewer and tear apart his victims. It’s all pretty gross stuff.

The scene of Frank’s resurrection is fantastic, even if the effects are a bit dated. It starts simply, floorboards creak and puddles of liquid appear. Then his thin, fleshy limbs pull his malformed, barely physical self out of the ground as his bones, veins, muscles and brain start to pull themselves out from nothing. The effects work is gruesome. It might not be the best effects work, but it’s still effective and cool looking. The various versions of undead frank are pretty cool as well, as he progressively gains more flesh, bone and muscle with every corpse he ingests.

The most iconic effects work is for the Cenobites. There are only four here, but they’re memorably gross and decidedly different from the usual sort of monsters and murderers seen at the time. They’re a mixture of flesh and fetish attire, their outfits made of leather, hooks and chains threaded into their flesh and muscles with exposed wounds on display. There’s the girl Cenobite with her throat pulled open, a fat Cenobite with his eyes stitched closed and, a fan favourite, the chatterer (no eyes, nose, ears or lips and he champs his teeth together). But the most iconic of them all is easily series lead villain Pinhead, notable for the metal pins sticking out of his head. His eyes are black and he has grid-like markings on his skull. Actor Doug Bradley portrays Pinhead, and learnt to do his make-up himself, something that took six hours to apply. It looks good. He’s got some great lines, taken from the book, which are pretty memorable (“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering”).

It’s funny to note but Pinhead isn’t actually named that here (none of the Cenobites had names) he was called that fans who watched the film, and Clive Barker personally hated the name (he thought it cheapened the ‘elegance’ of the character). But the name stuck, and he’d be referred to as Pinhead in following movies and comics (the Hellraiser series has a huge run in comic books). Barker’s pseudo-follow up to Hellraiser and a bunch of other stories, ‘The Scarlet Gospels’ (a long delayed book released earlier this year) refers to him as ‘the Hell Priest’, suggesting Barker didn’t really know what to call him. The Cenobites are visually iconic and creepy, but they’re not really in the movie that much, only appearing on screen for maybe five minutes tops. The focus of the film is very much on the villainous Frank and Julia. It does give their eventual appearance more weight, as the creepy outside force appearing from hell make their appearance in the finale. They don’t last long though, as Kirsty and the puzzle box sends them back to hell fairly quickly in the finale.

Now to the characters. The movie is actually very focused on its characters. Demons and hell aside, this is a pretty small-scaled affair, mostly set in the confines of a small British household, meaning the characters are given more focus, particularly the villainous ones. Julia is a horrible bitch, but that’s kind of the point. She doesn’t seem to give a shit about Larry at all, to the point where you question why she married him in the first place. She’s also a sort of borderline evil stepmother character, and really seems to have it out for Kirsty for no discernible reason. She’s also obsessed with Frank, or at least idea of him, a roguish man who takes what he wants (even her) who is the complete opposite of her proper, ordinary husband. It explains why she’s so determined to please him that she’d willingly resort to luring men into the house and killing them just because he asks her to. It also sort of weakly explains why, at the sight of a meaty skeleton Frank she doesn’t just shriek her head off and get the fuck out of the house. One issue I have is that she’s not particularly attractive; I think the clothes and hairstyle have a lot to do with it (she’s more ‘evil stepmother’ than ‘seductive serial killer’ here), but considering the book had described her as being beautiful this version doesn’t work so well.

Frank is gross and creepy, with both human and undead Frank having a slimy, rapacious feel. You can tell that he’s a selfish, manipulative asshole, though as an undead he’s comes across as a bit cartoonish and exaggerated, but I guess considering he has no skin it’s understandable. It sort of sells how Julia would willingly fall for him, though the few flashbacks do a good job of showing how manipulative/forceful living Frank was. You feel a bit sorry for Larry, who just seems like a bit of an idiot struggling to understand why his wife doesn’t love him anymore. He’s ineffectual, and acts like an ordinary guy (he likes watching the boxing on TV, he jokes with his friends and he worries about how his wife is so distant without knowing how to remedy the situation). He’s happy to pour out his feelings to his daughter, which does make him seem like a bit of a chump.

Kirsty is ok I guess. She isn’t much of an original character (final girl who is determined and braves the horror? Though she’s a bit angrier and aggressive than most) and doesn’t really get much screen time or attention, but then again it’s not really her story. She’s there to be the heroine, and since a lot of popular horror movies had teenaged girls as the hero she’s one too. She’s can scream with the best of them (she’s very loud and certainly can shout), and can get right into the thick of things as necessary, making a deal with the Cenobites and managing to get the hell away from them at the end (though that was more the box doing its thing). She can be a bit grating with her loudness and determination. I do think that having her be Larry’s daughter is a nice compromise – while it does do the teenaged girl hero thing we’ve seen a thousand times before, it gets rid of some of the creepier aspects of the book’s version of Kirsty, who was a mess of jealousy and obsession over Julia and Larry.  

Some of the acting is a bit suspect though. Most of the main cast are fine, particularly Julia, and Kirsty is ok if a little loud. It’s the extras who are a bit off with oddly emphasised dialogue (maybe it’s a British thing?). The most noticeably weird is Pinhead, whose line delivery is strange. His deep voice is creepy and he has some great lines, but the way he actually says them is so weird, taking weird breaks in the middle of his sentences or emphasising seemingly random words. Instead of saying “Don’t do that!” he says, “Don’t…do that?”.

There are parts of the movie that are cool but make no sense, where creativity and special effects take over but sense and reason don’t apply. Early on Kirsty has a freaky nightmare that doesn’t have anything to do with anything (looks cool though). Kirsty, in hospital, accidentally solves the puzzle box, which summons a corridor to hell. She wanders down it a little until a giant, upside down demon monster thing start chasing her. It looks completely ridiculous, has no explanation, wasn’t in the book and while it appears again at the end it’s never exactly clear what it’s meant to be. Nobody talks about it or mentions what it is and it never shows up again in other movies. There’s also a vagrant who stalks Kirsty through the movie, following her, watching her from afar and, at one point, eating a bunch of crickets for some reason. At the end of the film he shows up to retrieve the puzzle box, then transforms into a giant flying skeleton dragon monster thing. It looks cool, but what the hell was it?

 

In the end, Kirsty unwittingly unlocks the puzzle box and summons the Cenobites who appear to take her to hell. She manages to convince them that Frank is alive, and they let her head back to the house for proof. Frank has already killed her father and stolen his skin and in the ensuing fight, Frank kill and absorbs Julia (and really doesn’t give a shit), before the Cenobites come and dozens of hooks tear him to pieces in one of the series’ most memorable scenes (you only see a glimpse though). Kirsty uses the puzzle box to send the Cenobites back to hell and escapes. She tries to destroy the box, but a demon retrieves it. The puzzle box ends up where it was right at the beginning of the film as the movie ends on a near identical shot as the one it began with, of the box on a table in Morocco as some poor sap buys it.

I like Hellraiser. It’s a small-scaled affair with big ideas, and while its ambition might exceed its capabilities it’s still a pretty well put together little movie and the gruesome creativity and gore effects are great. The Cenobites are awesome though we don’t see much of them, and the very different look and feel to everything is pretty fresh. It’s also a very good adaptation of the book, all things considered, especially since it was Barker’s first real foray into film. The movie ended as a pretty self-contained thing, but it made money and gained fans and thus a sequel was made where things got bigger, gorier and far less coherent.

Friday the 13th (2009 Remake)

 

And we come full circle. It’s remake time! Once a popular horror franchise has existed for a while, they stop making sequels and start making remakes. It’s an easy way for filmmakers to cash in on nostalgia and name brand recognition; remaking a movie doesn’t require as much thought or creativity as making a completely new one, and the fans are already there. That’s essentially what’s happened here with Friday the 13^th remake. They didn’t try anything new or different; they just made a slasher under the F13 brand. It’s a Platinum Dunes film, a production company that specialises in remaking horror movies that was created by, of all people, Michael Bay. They’ve produced some good ones (the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake is actually pretty good) and a lot of garbage (the Nightmare on Elm Street remake is horrendous). Friday the 13^th sits in the middle. It’s bad, but not as bad as it could have been. Compared to downright awful nonsense like the Nightmare on Elm Street remake (a film so entirely joyless and tedious it probably could put you to sleep), Friday the 13^th Remake is at least watchable and fulfils its purpose as a slasher. It’s just full of annoying characters, bad writing, dumb plot points and other nonsense that drags it all down.

Interestingly enough, this movie is essentially a remake of the first three Friday the 13^th movies, with its first twenty minutes (before the title even comes up) being a quick run through of the main points of the first two movies. It begins instantly with a girl being chased through the woods by Pamela Voorhees, who has just massacred a group of people at Camp Crystal Lake as revenge for the apparent drowning death of her son Jason. The fleeing girl manages to fight back and behead Pamela. Some thirty years later, a camping group of horny college kids head to Crystal Lake, ostensibly to seek out a fabled marijuana field. While there they come afoul of Jason Voorhees, who slaughters the group, with the exception of Whitney, a girl who resembles his mother, who he kidnaps. A title card and several weeks later, a group of college kids are heading to a summer home on Crystal Lake to hang out and have fun. Also in the area is Clay (played by one of the guys from the TV series Supernatural), searching for Whitney, his sister. But Jason is lurking around and begins another massacre.

 

The characters suck. It’s true. They’re horrible, boring or annoying. The writing is absolutely atrocious with bad dialogue as well. The first group of characters who get hacked through in the first twenty minutes have nothing going on, and the main group suck. Besides Clay, who is boring with ‘I need to find my sister’ being his only character trait, and his love interest Jenna, who is boring and only exists to be around Clay, we’ve got the Asian stoner, the black guy, the slut, the asshole (more on him soon), and the two blonde idiots who disappear and get killed early on and nobody notices or even tries looking for. Whitney isn’t a character so much as a plot device, and she’s only around for maybe five minutes tops.

The biggest issue is with how badly the characters work together as a group. They don’t come across as groups of friends, they seem more like are strangers who happen to be around each other. The crux of the problem is Trent, the asshole alpha-male dickhead asshole character. It’s his family’s summer home they’re going to, and the guy is just a total fucking prick to the point where he spends the entire movie being an unreasonable asshole to everybody. It brings up a question you’ll be asking a million times over; why is anybody friends with him? He openly hates everybody, nobody has any good, natural interactions, and all he does is complain about them being in his summer home. Why did he invite them? For what reason? Boring, wholesome heroine Jenna (who suddenly gets killed in the last five minutes, her death having no impact because of how boring she is) is dating Trent, but once again you have to question why since he’s obviously such a dickhead, to the point that he cheats on her with the slut because she dared to talk to the guy who is looking for his missing sister.

From a technical perspective for the most part it’s seemingly alright actually. It’s mostly dark and atmospheric and Jason really is an imposing figure. The lake looks like a lake, the woods are wood-like, and when we eventually head to Camp Crystal Lake it looks and feels like an abandoned camp. The set design in that respect is pretty great. Unfortunately at times the film messes things up a bit. The atmosphere drops in some parts due to just how clean and produced it can be. It also has issues with light and dark – the stalking and killing during the day aren’t scary or atmospheric, and at night it’s far too dark to tell what’s going on.

 

The film has the requisite amount of nudity and gore. The sex and nudity is pretty blunt and silly and the tits are fake (always disappointing). The gore effects are mostly pretty good actually, seeming to be mostly physical effects and prop work. A lot of the kills are pretty bland or unimaginative though, even compared to many F13 movies. Most are rudimentary stabbings or impaling, the sort seen more impressive a hundred times before in other, better movies. This film was released in a post-Saw world, so there really needed to be a bit more gore and creativity in the kills. It does give at least one good one. Early on one girl is tied up into her sleeping bag and hung over a fire until she’s cooked to death – that was pretty freaky. Far lower on the quality scale is the awful, amateur film effects on the stoner's death - Jason jams an ice pick into his throat, but you can clearly see the pick going next to his neck and not into it. It's like a stage play's version of gore.

Jason gets a fair share of attention and he’s looking pretty good here. He’s human though, meaning he moves faster and can be hurt. In the first part of the movie he’s even got his burlap sack on his head, before he gets his hockey mask, and there’s a shrine to his mom’s severed head. Weirdly they’ve attempted to go deeper into his character a little, though I don’t know why. There’s a scene of Jason sharpening his machete (revealed to be the machete used to decapitate his mom) and at one point he uses a bow and arrow (why he doesn’t keep it is beyond me). The attempts also get weird, with Jason running at times, and having an angry tantrum while thinking about how his mom died. The film gives an explanation as to how Jason can seemingly appear anywhere at Crystal Lake: there’s a series of underground tunnels connected to his lair that reach across the entire campground area. This feels pretty damn stupid really, and the fact that Jason has Whitney chained up down here doesn’t fit his character at all. It also serves zero purpose other than to have Clay be looking around.

Besides the awful characters and writing, some parts smack of misguided attempts of pandering. At one point one of the girls is topless and neck-deep in the lake, hiding under a jetty from Jason. Suddenly a machete bursts through the jetty and into her head, and then she’s lifted out of the water so you can see her breasts before the blade is yanked away. It’s obvious, unsexy, unfunny and just feels like empty pandering to what they assumed the fans like, as though some committee of executive idiots said ‘F13 fans like boobs and gore right? So let’s combine the two’. A lot of the film is full of stupid crap that’s baffling as to why it’s there. There’s a hillbilly who starts making sex talk to a mannequin, the token black guy prepares to masturbate to an underwear catalogue and some of the dialogue is painful. In particular alpha male dude-bro dickhead Trent’s sex talk to the slut girl is laughable; “You have perfect nipple placement” he says in mid-coitus as though he’s detailing a car. Who the fuck wrote this crap?

I hate the ending since it seemingly only exists because they smugly thought they were going to be making a sequel. Jason has a length of chain wrapped around his neck and it’s dragging him head-first into a wood chipper. His head is just about to hit the blades and then Whitney, our last minute heroine, stabs him in the chest with a machete and turns the machine off. What in the actual fuck? Then the two survivors, Whitney and Clay, drag Jason’s ‘dead’ body to the lake and push him in and, for extra dumbass points, also throw in his machete. About two seconds later Jason bursts out of the water to attack them and the film ends. It’s a crap ending for a remake that should have known better than to pull that tired shit.

 

The movie doesn’t have a sense of humour, which is a shame. It’s serious the entire time which, coupled with the awful characters and terrible writing, takes the fun out of it. A lot of remakes tend to try for the serious, gritty route, trying to ‘scare a new generation of fans’, but it rarely ever works. It certainly doesn’t work here, since the movie isn’t scary. It lack any good jumps, doesn’t know what to do with its atmosphere and all its attempts to scare are painfully obvious and clichéd. It’s not a complete wash, since the basic F13 slasher film formula still works fine in making watchable movies. Compared to some of the worse remakes, it’s at least watchable. A bunch of assholes get killed, and it works as a lukewarm slasher. Compared to the better remakes, it’s a waste of time. In terms of F13 movies however? It’s very ‘meh’, sitting in the middle I’d say. It's entertaining, but having watched all the F13 movies it feels pretty standard and safe.

While it didn't blow up at the box office it still made good money, but oddly a sequel hasn’t materialised yet in the six years since its release. There were rumours of a found footage Friday the 13^th movie being in the works, which is just about the dumbest thing ever, trying to cash in on mixing an unnecessary remake with a tired trend. A new Friday the 13^th videogame is also in the works, a multiplayer experience that has one player as Jason hunting down seven other players who have to try and survive. I doubt anything good will come from that either. So for now Friday the 13^th is done. It had its ups and downs (mostly downs). As a horror series it was fairly unremarkable for most of its run, only getting interesting in its weird detour, quality aside. The reason the series has lasted so long is simple: Jason is a memorable villain, even if only for his appearance.

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.