Yay! It’s Ari Lehman’s birthday!
Who, you my be asking, is Ari Lehman?
Well, you’ll definitely recognize him in this scene that I love from the original Friday the 13th!
That’s right! Many actors have played Jason Voorhees but Ari Lehman was the first!
And today is his birthday.
Happy birthday, Ari Lehman!
Over the previous two weeks, I reviewed all 11 films in the Friday the 13th franchise. I reviewed the final film, appropriately enough, on Friday the 13th. Now that I’ve sat through all 11 of these films, I’d like to provide just ten thoughts in conclusion:
1) Have you seen Cabin In The Woods yet? While that brilliant film is obviously influenced by a lot of films, the Friday the 13th influence was especially obvious, right down to the crazy old man trying to let everyone know that they were doomed.
2) As for the Friday the 13th franchise itself, what is left to be said? I think my interest in these films comes from the fact that even though their critically reviled and utterly dismissed by many, they’ve managed to survive and they’re still being watched by viewers (like me) who weren’t even born and/or weren’t old enough to see the majority of them when they were first released in theaters. Like it or not — and again, this is a point that should be obvious to anyone who truly appreciated Cabin In The Woods — these films appeal to something primal in human nature.
3) The most frequent complaint made against the Friday the 13th franchise is that the films are anti-female. I don’t agree. I think that, unfortunately, a lot of people who watch these films are anti-female but I don’t think that the same can be said of the films themselves. Quite frankly, if I was ever cast in Friday the 13th, I would rather play a victim than a survivor because the victims are the ones that are remembered afterwards.
4) Instead of seeing the Friday the 13th films as some sort of attempt to punish women, I see them as simply being updated bits of American folklore. Those famous urban legends — the escaped mental patient with the hook hand, the vanishing hitchhiker — are about as close as America can get to having its own mythology and the Friday the 13th franchise (and similar horror films) are a reflection of that mythology.
5) Much like the scary story told at slumber party or around a campfire (not that I’ve been near a campfire though I have been to a few thousand slumber parties), Friday the 13th is meant to be a communal experience. It’s a chance to admit that we’re all scared of the dark. We scream and jump because, ultimately, it’s fun to do that in the safety of a theater or your own home.
6) Friday the 13th, as a franchise, was at its best when it kept things simple. As you may have noticed from my reviews, I struggled more with the gimmicky later films in the series than I did with the originals.
7) The first two Friday the 13th scenes are both excellent examples of how to use a low budget and a largely unknown cast to your best advantage. There is a lesson there for all aspiring filmmakers.
8) Having now rewatched the 11 films in the franchise, I have to say that I think that Part 4 is the best, followed by Part 2. Part 3 remains the worst while Jason Takes Manhattan is perhaps the most pointless. Ted White was the best Jason but Kane Hodder is a close second.
9) When I was reviewing these films, Peter M. Bracke’s book Crystal Lake Memories proved to be an invaluable resource. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in film, horror, or both.
10) Finally, did you all enjoy me devoting two weeks to reviewing one film franchise or were you thinking to yourself, “Oh my God, Lisa, give it a rest already!” I enjoyed writing them but, to be honest, I’m really in the mood for a romantic comedy now.
Well, that does it for Friday the 13th. Again, I hope everyone enjoyed revisiting this franchise with me and I hope that everyone will enjoy revisiting the James Bond films with me in October. As always, stay supple!
Last night, Jeff and I watched the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th.
Why Was I Watching It?
For the past two weeks, I’ve been reviewing the 12 films that make up the Friday the 13th franchise. This is the last installment so far and, appropriately enough, I’m reviewing it on Friday the 13th. (No, that’s not just a coincidence.)
What’s It About?
It’s a reboot! That’s right — forget about every other Friday the 13th film because, apparently, they never happened. Instead of trying to figure out some new gimmick to try to get audiences to watch Jason Voorhees kill yet more teenagers, producer Michael Bay and director Marcus Nisepl have simply gone back to the beginning and started all over again. (I think I saw something similar in an episode of Futurama once.)
Basically, this is the first four films all rolled into one. The film starts with a young Jason Voorhees watching as his murderous mother (Nana Visitor) gets beheaded by a camp counselor. 30 years later, Jason (now played by Derek Mears) is living in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake. A bunch of obnoxious campers come up to the Lake because they’re looking for a marijuana crop and Jason, being the culture warrior that he is, responds by killing all of them except for Whitney (played by Amanda Righetti), who he just kidnaps.
A month later, Whitney’s brother Clay (Jared Padalecki) arrives at Crystal Lake to search for his sister. Upon arriving, he runs into yet another group of obnoxious campers who have decided to take a vacation up at Crystal Lake. Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) agrees to help Clay look for Whitney and while the two of them are off searching, Jason shows up and starts killing everyone else.
What Worked?
One reason that I’m using the What Lisa Watched Last Night format to review this film is because, to a large extent, it’s pointless to get all nitpicky while reviewing a film like the reboot of Friday the 13th. This is not a film you watch because you’re looking to see something that’s going to redefine cinema. This is a film you watch so that you can scream, laugh, and grab your boyfriend. And, on all those fronts, Friday the 13th succeeds well enough. Director Marcus Nispel obviously understands the slasher genre and he provides everything that we’ve come to expect from a film like this.
Also, I have to admit, I always scream at the end of the film even though I know what’s going to happen.
The victims are all very disposable and forgettable but Aaron Yoo is funny as the token stoner.
What Did Not Work?
With this film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Conan The Barbarian, Nispel shows that while he may understand how to make a genre film, he also doesn’t seem to be capable of adding anything new to them. This isn’t a problem if you’re just looking to be entertained but, for true fans of the original films that have been rebooted by Nispel and producer Michael Bay, it’s hard not to wonder just why exactly these franchises needed a reboot as opposed to a sequel. Watching a film like Friday the 13th reboot, it’s hard not to feel as if the filmmakers simply gave up trying to bring anything new to the equation and instead rather cynically decided to just capitalize on the earlier work of filmmakers who, as opposed to Nispel and Bay, aren’t in the current mainstream of the Hollywood establishment.
The main difference between a reboot like Friday the 13th and the original films in the franchise is that the reboot cost a lot more to make. It’s a lot slicker (and therefore, you never really buy into the reality of the horror) and, with a few exceptions like Aaron Yoo, it’s full of bland actors who are recognizable from TV and who seem to be going out of their way to “act like characters in a slasher film” as opposed to at least trying to give actual performances. It almost feels as if Nispel, Bay, and the cast are specifically going out of their way to wink at us and tell us, “We’re so much better than the movie that you just paid money to see.” It feels incredibly condescending.
The film’s attempt to shoehorn the original first four films of the franchise into one 97 minute movie results in a film that often feels rather rushed.
“OMG! Just Like Me!” Moments
Oh, a lot. I would be so dead if I ever wandered into a slasher film.
Lessons Learned
From rewatching the entire Friday the 13th franchise, I learned several lessons: Don’t have premarital sex (or probably not even marital sex for that matter, Jason has got some issues), don’t drink beer, don’t smoke weed, don’t snort cocaine, don’t skinny dip, don’t go commando, don’t go in the wood, don’t go camping, don’t walking into a dark room, don’t say, “Is there anyone here?,” don’t shower, don’t sleep in abandoned cabins, don’t help out strangers, don’t hitchhike, don’t flirt, and … well, don’t do anything and you should be just fine.
However, what fun would that be?
Well, this concludes my series on the Friday the 13th franchise. I’ll be posting a few final thoughts on the franchise as a whole later tonight or on Sunday but for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these reviews as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. Stay supple and don’t go wandering around in the dark. Happy Friday the 13th!
(This review probably contains what some people would consider to be spoilers.)
Today, as part of my continuing series reviewing the films of the Friday the 13th franchise, I take a look at Freddy Vs. Jason.
After spending 15 years in development Hell, the film Freddy Vs. Jason was finally released in 2003. With this film, New Line Cinema brought together the stars of their two best-known horror franchises, Jason Voorhees (played here not by Kane Hodder but by Ken Kirzinger) and Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund.)
During the time that Freddy Vs. Jason was languishing in development Hell, a huge number of potential storylines were pursued and a lot of scripts were written. Some of those scripts are surprisingly good and one of them (the one with the enviromental message) is hilariously self-important. Most of them are just terrible and can be found online via a google search. The main problem was how to convincingly bring both Jason and Freddy together when the two of them essentially epitomized two radically different subsets of the slasher genre. Especially when compared to some of the other ideas that were considered, the concept behind FreddyVs. Jason is actually pretty clever.
As the film starts, Freddy is trapped in Hell because he’s been forgotten by the teenagers of the world. They’re no longer scared of him and, as such, they’re not having nightmares about him. Freddy’s solution? He tracks down Jason (also hanging out in Hell and having dreams that neatly parody his whole image of being a murderous defender of purity) and, by disguising himself as Pamela Voorhees, he convinces Jason to resurrect himself in Freddy’s old hometown. Jason promptly starts killing teenagers and Freddy is blamed. Soon, people are having nightmares and Freddy has his gateway back into the real world. Unfortunately for Freddy, Jason keeps killing everyone before Freddy can get to them. Freddy sets out to kill Jason and it all leads to one “final” battle between the two of them.
I have to admit that when I first saw Freddy Vs. Jason, I didn’t care much for it. Of course, at that point in my life, my view of whether or not a film was good or bad was largely based on the type of night I was having when I saw it. I saw Freddy Vs. Jason with a guy who 1) thought proper date attire was shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap and 2) who apparently thought my right breast was just an armrest there for him to lean on whenever he got bored. Bleh. Beyond the company that I saw the film with, I was also upset that the character I most related to, Katharine Isabelle’s Gibb, was rather brutally killed off while boring old Monica Keena was allowed to survive. My initial response to Freddy Vs. Jason was that it had to be bad film because I had a bad time while I was watching it.
However, I recently rewatched it again with my BFF Evelyn (who always dresses up and is pretty good about not feeling me up every three minutes) and I actually enjoyed Freddy Vs. Jason a bit more the second time around. I think it also helped that, in between the two viewings, I got a chance to see all the other Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films along with a lot of other horror films and was now able to see how scenes that seemed pointless the first time around were actually meant to comment on the history and the conventions of both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. The 2nd time around, I could better appreciate the perverse parody at the center of Robert Englund’s performance as Freddy Krueger. While the human characters are never all that interesting, the “final” battle between Jason and Freddy is genuinely exciting. When I first saw it, I thought that the film’s final scene (with Freddy’s decapitated head winking at the camera before laughing) was incredibly stupid but now I appreciate it for what it is — a deliberately campy homage to the over the top exploitation films of the 70s and 80s.
As opposed to the previous few films in the Friday the 13th franchise, Freddy vs. Jason was a huge box office success. It was the first (and, come to think of it, only Friday the 13th film) that I saw in an actual theater and it actually did give me nightmares (mostly because I foolishly chose to relate to the obviously doomed Katharine Isabelle). With that type of success, it was inevitable that there would be another film in both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. Those two films, however, would not be sequels. Instead, they would be (bleh) reboots. We’ll take a look at the reboot of Friday 13th (and finish off this series of reviews) tomorrow.
Last night, my friend Evelyn and I stayed up way too late and we watched the 10th film in the Friday the 13th franchise, 2002’s Jason X. I was watching it for a second time because I’ve been reviewing the Friday the 13th films for this site. Evelyn was watching it for the first time because she’s my BFF, we were having ourselves a girl’s night in, and she’s willing to watch anything with me because she has complete faith in my taste in movies .*
Anyway, after the end credits rolled, we both immediately agreed on one thing: Jason X sucks. Seriously.
Jason X is yet another one of the Friday the 13th gimmick films. This time the gimmick is (all together now): JASON. IN. SPAAAAAAAAACE! However, before we get into space, the film opens in the “near future” of 2010. Apparently, there is now some sort of underground, government controlled lab underneath Lake Crystal Lake and being held prisoner there is Jason Voorhees (played, for the last time, by Kane Hodder). Apparently, the government has spent the last two years trying to figure out a way to kill the bound Jason but his cells keep regenerating. (No mention of demonic slugs for this film!) Government scientist Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig) wants to freeze Jason but another scientist, Dr. Wimmer, wants to use Jason as a weapon. We know Dr. Wimmer is evil because he’s played by David Cronenberg.
Anyway, while Dr. Wimmer and Rowan are arguing about the ethics of exploiting an undead serial killer, Jason manages to escape and kills everyone in the underground lab except for Rowan. She manages to freeze him in a cryogenic pod but gets frozen herself in the process.
Nearly 500 years later, Earth has been abandoned because Al Gore was right (yawn!) and the planet is now too polluted to live on. Humanity had relocated to Another Earth. However, students occasionally conduct field trips to the old Earth and one of those field trips comes across Jason and Rowan, still in deep freeze. The students take the two of them back to their spaceship, thaw them out, and — needless to say — things don’t end well for the majority of them.
Jason X was made, of course, because Jason Vs. Freddy had spent the previous 9 years languishing in development Hell. Jason X was New Line’s way of reminding people that they owned the Friday the 13th franchise and it certainly managed to do that, though it didn’t bring that many people to the theaters. (Jason X is the second-lowest grossing film in the series.) The reviews, at the time, were scathing and it’s easy to see why: the special effects looked incredibly cheap, everything about the film’s vision of the future (from the garish set design to the ugly costuming choices) felt tacky, and the acting was terrible. Lisa Ryder, who played the perpetually cheerful robot KM 14, had a role that should have been actor-proof but she still managed to give a memorably bad performance, the worst moment being when she let out a weak-sounding “Yeah,” after it was incorrectly felt that she had killed Jason.)
The one exception: Kane Hodder. In this unworthy little film, Hodder probably gives his best performance in the role of Jason. Here, Jason is less an undead serial killer and more just an old man who is sick of kids wandering across his lawn. He kills less because he’s evil and more because he’s just frustrated at being surrounded by so many stupid people.
And after watching Jason X, ever though you still can’t sympathize with him, it’s harder to blame him.
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* Evelyn has requested that I make it clear that the main reason she ended up watching Jason X with me was because she was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
(This review contains major spoilers. Please don’t whine about them.)
Today, continuing my series of reviews of the films in the Friday the 13th franchise, we take a look at 1993’s Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.*
After the disappointing box office performance of Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount Pictures sold the right to the Friday the 13th franchise to New Line Cinema. At that time, New Line was best known as the home of the rival (and far more critically appreciated) slasher franchise, A Nightmare On Elm Street. As detailed in Peter M. Bracke’s Crystal Lake Memories, several attempts had already been made to create a Freddy Vs. Jason film and it was felt, as a result ot New Line acquiring the rights to the F13 franchise, that film would be much easier to make. However, before Jason could fight Freddy, he had to be 1) reintroduced to film audiences as a special effects-dependant New Line monster (as opposed to just a stodgy old Paramount slasher) and 2) Jason had to go to Hell.
As I’ve mentioned previously, the last few Friday the 13th films were all “gimmick films” that attempted to breathe new life into the franchise by pairing Jason’s usual camper stalking with some new element, like a psychic adversary or Manhattan. In Jason Goes To Hell, the gimmick is that Jason (again played by Kane Hodder) isn’t just a zombie serial killer but he’s also some sort of demonic slug that, even after his outer Jason shell is destroyed, can still slither into other people and possess them.
Yep, that’s what it does alright.
Anyway, Jason Goes To Hell starts out brilliantly, with a typical slasher movie victim wandering around old Camp Crystal Lake so she can take a shower and then turning out to be a decoy who is part of an elaborate sting effort that results in Jason being literally blown into little pieces by the F.B.I. I love this opening because it basically reflects what would probably happen if Jason ever showed up in the real world. It may have taken 9 films but apparently, people in the Friday the 13th world are finally using some common sense.
Except, of course, they’re not.
Jason’s remains are sent to the local coroner and it’s here that we get our first clue that the New Line Jason might be a little bit different from the Paramount Jason. See, Jason’s heart — despite being rather violently removed from Jason’s body — is still beating and the local coroner proceeds to eat it and soon, he’s possessed by the aforementioned demonic space slug.
Now, the space slug may sound a little bit silly but it actually makes more sense that, after being killed at the end of The Final Chapter, Jason was reanimated by a demon worm than that he was brought back to life by a random bolt of lightning. It would explain why, following Jason Lives, Jason can not be killed (or apparently even slowed down) regardless of how much punishment he takes. (It can’t explain the end of Jason Takes Manhattan but then again, what could?) So, the demonic space slug actually makes sense.
Except that it doesn’t.
A bounty hunter named Creighton Duke (Stephen Williams) pops up in Crystal Lake and explains that the demonic space slug can bring Jason back into existence if it manages to enter the body of a relative. Apparently, the demonic space slug is somehow linked to the Voorhees family tree and that would suggest that Jason was possessed by the demon worm even back when he was just living in that shack in Part 2. Was Pamela Voorhees possessed by the cosmic serpent back in Part One? Creighton doesn’t bother to say but he does explain that apparently, Jason can only be killed by a magic dagger and he has to be stabbed by a member of his family and again, you really have to wonder why whoever created the space slug and the dagger made everything so overly complicated.
Creighton Duke, by the way, also takes the time to explain that — even though we’ve never seen him before — he’s been pursuing Jason for several years. It’s somewhat odd that random teenagers have no trouble coming across Jason but apparently, a trained bounty hunter hasn’t been able to track him down.
Anyway, the Jason slug is now hopping from person to person because he’s trying to track down his half-sister Diane (Erin Gray) and his niece Jessica (Kari Keegan). Creighton and Jessica’s ex-boyfriend (played by John LeMay) are in pursuit of the demon slug but eventually, the slug does manage to get inside a relative and Jason is not only reborn but he’s reborn wearing his hockey mask so I guess that was possessed as well. Anyway, Jason is eventually stabbed by that super dagger and Jason finally goes to Hell (with Freddy Krueger’s clawed glove coming out of the ground to grab his hockey mask).
And then the movie ends.
Much as I’ve always wanted a time machine so I could go back to 1941 and experience an audience seeing Citizen Kane for the very first time, I wish I could go back to August 13th, 1993 and see how audiences first reacted to the revelation that Jason Voorhees was just a demonic slug. How did audiences react to seeing a Friday the 13th film that, for all essential purposes, wasn’t really a Friday the 13th film? Probably not well, considering that Jason Goes To Hell was the third-lowest grossing film in the franchise.
Seen today, the main problem with Jason Goes To Hell is that it’s just not that much fun. Seriously, there is no excuse for a film about a space slug to be boring but yet somehow, Jason Goes To Hell manages to be just that. I think a large part of the problem is that the iconic hockey-masked Jason is absent for much of the film. Instead, his spirit simply possesses one random passerby after another and the end result is rather bland.
I’ve read quite a few reviews that have argued that Jason Goes To Hell is the worst installment in the franchise but I disagree. It’s close, but it’s marginally better than both Part 3 and Jason Takes Manhattan. It’s saved from being a total disaster by that clever opening and likable performances from John LeMary and Kari Keegan. Though the character eventually becomes somewhat annoying, Steven Williams has a lot of fun going over the top in the role of Creighton Duke.
After Jason Goes to Hell, the franchise lay dormant for nearly ten years as various screenwriters and producers struggled to come up with Jason Vs. Freddy. In 2002, Friday the 13th returned with it’s biggest gimmick yet — Jason in space! We’ll take a look at Jason X tomorrow.
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*By the way, I think I deserve hazard pay for actually sitting through this movie.
Continuing my review of the Friday the 13th film franchise, today I find myself reviewing the 8th film in the series, 1989’s Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. As opposed to my previous reviews, this is going to be a short one because, quite honestly, there’s not that much you can say about this film.
As I discussed in my reviews of both Jason Lives and The New Blood, Jason Takes Manhattan is the product of Paramount’s attempts to revive the Friday the 13th franchise by adding in a gimmick. This time, the gimmick is pretty much spelled out in the title. Jason leaves Crystal Lake, goes to Manhattan, and maybe even get a chance to make his Broadway debut in a revival of Forever Plaid. Seriously, you look at that title and you imagine that Jason going up agaisnt the Taxi Driver and or maybe taking Al Neri’s place as Michael Corleone’s personal bodyguard. Unfortunately, as is detailed in Peter Bracke’s excellent book Crystal Lake Memories, any plans for truly having Jason take Manhattan were abandoned when it became apparent just how expensive it would be to film in New York. As a result, this film is less Jason Takes Manhattan and more Jason Floats Around Aimlessly Until He Somehow Ends Up In Times Square For Two Minutes.
And, in the film’s defense, Jason Takes Manhattan is a catchier title.
As Jason Takes Manhattan begins, we find Jason (played again by Kane Hodder) once again coming back to life as the result of his corpse floating into an underwater power line. Or something like that. To be honest, it’s kind of hard to figure out just why exactly Jason has come back to life. All that matters is that Jason comes back to life and ends up stowing away on a cruise ship that is carrying the graduating class of Lakeview High to New York City. Needless to say, Jason is soon killing everyone on the boat, most of whom apparently die off-screen. (Either that or Lakeview High had a graduating class of 12 students.) The few who survive the massacre (including aspiring final girl Jensen Daggett and her boyfriend Scott Reeves) end up in a row boat and float around aimlessly until they arrive in New York. But guess who is waiting for them in the city that never sleeps?
Several critics consider Jason Takes Manhattan to be the worst Friday the 13th of all time. While I still think that Part 3 is the worst of the series, Jason Takes Manhattan is still pretty bad. Among the film’s many flaws: 1) characters that are underwritten even by the standards of the slasher genre, 2) bloodless kills that, for the most part, fail to make much of an impact, 3) very little of the action actually takes place in New York, and 4) this film features perhaps the most ludicrous and nonsensical ending to be found in a series of films that were famous for their refusal to make sense.
Still, Jason Takes Manhattan is not a total disaster. Jensen Daggett and Scott Reeves make a cute couple and Kane Hodder, as always, makes for an intimidating Jason. As well, even though very little of the film takes place in New York, just the idea of Jason actually taking Manhattan is amusing enough to be occasionally effective. If nothing else, the title inspires you to imagine a better film than the one that you’re watching.
Jason Takes Manhattan was the lowest grossing of the Friday the 13th movies. It’s disappointing box office performance would lead to Paramount selling the franchise to New Line Cinema and to a major change in the character of Jason Vorhees. That’ll all be dealt with tomorrow when I review Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.
Hi, did everyone out there have a good Easter? I did! My entire family got together up at my Uncle’s place. There was a big Easter egg hunt and me and Erin smuggled in extra Easter eggs which we then “helped” our niece and nephew discover. Usually, going to my Uncle’s place means a day spent laying out near the pool in a bikini and trying to work on my tan. (Though, to be honest, I’m a redhead so I don’t so much tan as I just burn.) However, this Easter, it rained so most of the day was spent inside and watching figure skating with my sisters and cousins. I hope everyone else had a good Easter as well and I hope you’ll forgive me for being a little late with my latest review in my series looking at the Friday the 13th franchise. In this post, I review 1988’s Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
(Minor Spoilers Follow)
As I mentioned in my review of Jason Lives, The New Blood was the first of what I like to call Friday the 13th’s gimmick films. In these films, Paramount Pictures (and later New Line Cinema) attempted to revive the franchise’s declining profits by adding a gimmick. No longer would it be enough for Jason to simply show up and stalk unfortunate campers. Previous installments had their gimmicks (such as Part 3 being filmed in 3D) but they all stuck with the same basic story and structure. However, from now on, Jason would no longer just be a silent antagonist in a communal cinematic nightmare. From now on, he would fight psychics and Freddy Krueger and go to both outer space and New York City. (And don’t even get me started on the film where he was revealed to actually be some sort of weird space slug. Not yet, anyway…)
The problem with the gimmick films is that, along with dealing with the gimmick, they still had to deal with the business of killing summer counselors and other random campers. Whereas previous film made at least a little effort to provide the viewers with interesting and/or attractive characters, the gimmick films are distinguished by a real laziness when it comes to characterization. Ironically enough, surrounding the gimmick with such weak material only served to remind the viewer just how gimmicky the gimmick ultimately was. That is why the gimmick films are my least favorite of the franchise.
That said, The New Blood is probably the best of the gimmick films. Anyone who doesn’t think that being called the best of the worst is much of a compliment has obviously never been in a community theater production of Little Shop of Horrors.
The New Blood of the title is a girl named Tina Shepherd. When we first meet Tina, she’s ten years old and living in a house that sits on the shores of Crystal Lake. (Apparently, the residents of Forrest Green decided to change the name of the town back to Crystal Lake sometime after Jason Lives. If nothing else, these two films convinced me of the importance of zip codes.) One night, as Tina listens to her father and her mother fight, she runs out to a nearby dock, gets in a canoe, and starts to float away. Her father runs out onto the dock and shouts at her to return. Tina yells back and suddenly, the entire dock collapses and her father drowns. As all of this is going on, we discover that Jason just happens to be in the lake, chained to a rock below the dock. (You have to wonder what having a zombie serial killer chained up a yard away from your house does to property values. Nothing good, I imagine but then again, what do I know about real estate?)
Anyway, jump forward ten years. Tina (now played by Lar Park Lincoln) has just been released from a mental asylum and returns to Crystal Lake with her psychiatrist Dr. “Bad News” Crews (played by a wonderfully evil Terry Kiser). Dr. Crews claims to be helping her deal with her feelings of guilt but actually, he’s seeking to exploit the fact that Tina has latent psychic abilities. What all can Tina do? Well, that’s a good question because the film itself seems to be unsure of just what exactly Tina is capable of. As a result, Tina often seems to have whatever psychic abilities are most convenient for whatever’s happening on-screen at the moment. While most of the time Tina seems to be telekinetic, there are other times when she can see the future, set fires, and even raise the dead.
It’s this last power that gets everyone in trouble when, one night after getting annoyed with Dr. Crews, Tina runs out to the lake and attempts to bring her father back to life. While she fails to bring back her dad, she does manage to free Jason (played here, for the first time, by Kane Hodder) from his chains. By this action, Tina joins the long line of horror film heroines who are ultimately responsible for every death that occurs over the course of the movie.
That’s pretty bad news for the vapid collection of potential victims who are trying to throw a surprise birthday party in the house next door. Among those potential victims: nice guy Nick (Kevin Butler) who falls in love with Tina, evil Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan) who wants Nick, Eddie (Jeff Bennett) who spends his time talking about a sci-character called “Space Mummy,” and about a half-dozen other people whose names I didn’t manage to catch. Seriously, this is the most empty-headed and shallow collection of dumbfug toadsuckers ever! As opposed to previous installments (in which the actors at least had enough chemistry that you believed that they just might actually spend a weekend at the lake together), the victims in New Blood feel as if they were just randomly dropped in the house just so that Jason could kill them. They’re such a vacous, spiteful collection of people that, for the first time in the series, you truly find yourself rooting for Jason.
Anyway, the birthday boy never shows up for his party but that doesn’t really worry anyone at the house. As one of them puts it. “You know Michael. Guy probably got arrested for drunk driving and spent the night in jail.” (Sounds like a great guy, no?) No, Michael’s not in jail. Michael’s dead because Tina brought Jason back to life and soon, so is just about everyone else. It all leads to a final apocalyptic battle between Jason and Tina that manages to be both silly and exciting at the same time. It also goes a long way towards making up for what we’ve had to sit through in order to reach it.
One of my favorite chapters of Peter M. Bracke’s excellent oral history of the franchise, Crystal Lake Memories, deals with the making of The New Blood. Say whatever else you will about this film’s cast, they’re some of the most outspoken in the history in the history of the franchise. Reading their memories about making this film, three things quickly become clear:
1) Everyone was scared of Kane Hodder.
2) Lar Park Lincoln didn’t like the majority of the cast.
3) The majority of the cast didn’t like Lar Park Lincoln.
In fact, quite a few really nasty things are said about Lar Park Lincoln but you know what? Outside of Kane Hodder and Terry Kiser, Lar Park Lincoln probably comes the closest to giving an actual performance than anyone else in the cast and I think it can be argued that she makes Tina into one of the few truly strong female characters ever to be found in a Friday the 13th film. Take it from a former community theatre ingenue: it takes as much talent to make a slasher film “final girl” credible as it does to play Margaret Thatcher. As for the rest of the cast of disposable victims, they’re some of the most forgettable of the series. In the role of Nick, Kevin Blair (who reportedly did not get along with Lincoln and who has absolutely no chemistry with her on-screen) is stiff but handsome and Susan Jennifer Sullivan has a lot of style as the bitchy Melissa. Otherwise, they’re a pretty bland group and director Buechler doesn’t seem to have much use for them other than to make sure that they’re in the right position to be killed by Kane Hodder.
The New Blood is best remembered for introducing Kane Hodder in the role of Jason Voorhees. Though I personally believe that The Final Chapter’s Ted White was the best Jason (he was certainly the most ruthless), it can’t be denied that Kane Hodder was the perfect embodiment of the version of Jason that came to dominate the last few films in the original series. Whereas Ted White’s Jason was a calculating killer, Hodder’s Jason is a machine that happens to be designed for killing and little else. He kills not so much out of anger or pain as much as he kills, like any good zombie, just because that’s the only thing he knows how to do. One reason why this film’s final battle is actually exciting to watch is because it’s set up as a confrontation between the literally cerebral Lar Park Lincoln and the overwhelmingly physical Kane Hodder. Hodder, famously, is the only actor have played Jason in multiple films and he earned that right with his performance here.
And make no mistake about it: Hodder gives a performance in this film and, as a result, The New Blood is a lot more watchable than it has any right to be.
(I would also suggest that if you do watch this movie on DVD, be sure to listen to Hodder and Buechler’s commentary track. Both of them seem to be having so much fun watching the film that it actually makes the film more enjoyable.)
While The New Blood did, ultimately, make more money than the previous Jason Lives, it still failed the match the box office success of the first few films in the series. Though Lar Park Lincoln apparently wrote a script for a sequel that would have featured Tina and Jason once again going to war (interestingly enough, it’s rumored that Lincoln’s script opened with Kevin Blair getting killed off), Paramount decided to try out another gimmick and abandoned the new blood for Manhattan. The end result was one of the worst films in the series but we’ll deal with that in my next post.
(Minor Spoilers Below)
Continuing my series reviewing the Friday the 13th films, today we take a look at one of the pivotal installments in the saga, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
Following the financial success of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, it was pretty obvious that there would be another installment in the Friday the 13th franchise. Mindful of the extremely negative reaction to the previous attempt to make a Friday the 13th film without Jason, Paramount hired director Tom McLaughlin to bring Jason back to life. In the process, they also abandoned plans to have the protagonist of the previous two films — Tommy Jarvis — turn into a psychotic murderer.
(Which, if nothing else, ensured that this would be the last Friday the 13th to feature a cameo appearance from Corey Feldman.)
Jason Lives opens a few years after the end of New Beginning. The residents of Crystal Lake have finally wised up and changed the name of their unfortunate little town to Forrest Green. Corporate executives spend the weekend playing paintball in the woods while blissful lovers safely picnic a few feet away. Even the old summer camp has opened back up and, for the first time in a Friday the 13th film, has managed to stay open long enough for actual campers to show up. Gruff Sheriff Garris (David Kagan) keeps an eye on the town while his rebellious daughter Megan (Jennifer Cooke) works as a counselor at the camp.
Yes, everything’s perfect until, once again, Tommy Jarvis comes to town and get everyone killed.
Now played by Thom Matthews, Tommy has apparently changed a lot since the end of New Beginning. No longer is he simply willing to silently suffer from nightmares and hallucinations. Now, Tommy is a man of action and his first action is to go back to where it all began, find Jason’s grave, and dig him up. Why? “Jason belongs in Hell,” Tommy tells us, “and I’m gonna see that he gets there.” Okay, whatever you say, Tommy. You’re just lucky that you look like Thom Matthews.
Anyway, Tommy, dragging his reluctant friend Hawes (Ron Pallilo) with him, tracks down Jason’s grave and digs him up. Apparently not remembering his pre-credits nightmare from New Beginning, Tommy does this on a rainy night when there’s lightning striking all around. Once Tommy digs up the coffin, he starts to stab it with a metal post and, before you can even say, “I knew that was going to happen,” lightning strikes the post, electricity surges through the coffin, and suddenly, Jason (played here by C.J. Graham) comes back to life as an unstoppable zombie. He also proceeds to kill Hawes, which seems a bit unfair since this was all Tommy’s stupid idea to begin with.
(Tommy Jarvis, in this film, is a part of that proud horror film tradition of heroes who do everything wrong and get a lot of people killed but are somehow never held responsible for their stupidity. Again, it’s a good thing that he looks like Thom Matthews.)
Tommy goes to Sheriff Garris and explains what happened. Garris responds by promptly locking Tommy in a cell and refusing to listen as Tommy tries to explain that “Jason’s still out there!” For once, Tommy is correct. Jason is still out there and he’s heading straight for the summer camp…
There’s a scene early on in Jason Lives that pretty much sums up the entire film. Alcoholic cometary caretaker Martin (played by Bob Larkin) mutters to himself, “Why’d they have to go and dig up Jason?” before looking directly at the camera and adding, “Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment.” In short, this is the comedic, meta Friday the 13th, populated with characters who have seen the previous installments of the series and who fully understand that they’re in a slasher film but who still manage to get killed anyway. This is the movie where Lizbeth (played by the director’s wife, Nancy McLaughlin) says, “I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that a weirdo with a mask is never friendly” but then tries to reason with him anyway. This type of self-referencing is pretty common in slasher films today but this is the first time that it ever showed up in a Friday the 13th film and it stands in stark contrast to the rather dark films that came before. When I first saw Jason Lives, I thought it was a little bit too jokey (though I loved the line, delivering between two frightened campers: “So, what did you want to be when you grew up?”) but, on my second viewing, I better came to appreciate what McLaughlin was going for. As opposed to other installments, Jason Lives doesn’t even try to be a horror film. Instead, it’s a communal experience that is specifically designed for an audience that wants to play along with the film. Jason Lives is the fun Friday the 13th.
Oddly enough, it’s probably also the most Christian. Along with containing no nudity, it also features Jason deciding not to kill one girl because he hears her praying and, finally at the conclusion, Tommy being brought back to life through a combination of CPR and prayer. (As opposed to the jokey nature of most of the film, the prayer scenes are played relatively seriously.) This is probably as close as the Friday the 13th franchise ever got to being family friendly and it stands in marked contrast to just about every other film in the series.
Jason Lives is a bit of an oddity in the Friday the 13th series and it was also the first installment in the series to gross less than $20,000,000 at the box office. Despite the fact that this film is as much of a comedy as a horror film (and despite the fact that Jason appears here for the first time as a zombie), Jason Lives is also probably the last truly Jason-centered film in the series. Each subsequent film would match Jason with a gimmick in an attempt to revive the franchise’s declining box office prospects and, not surprisingly, those subsequent films would suffer from a marked decrease in quality.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the first of the gimmick films, Friday the 13th part VII: A New Blood.
(Spoilers Ahead. So there.)
So, imagine that you’ve got a huge film franchise that was built around one iconic character. And guess what? In the previous installment of your huge film franchise, that iconic character was killed so graphically that there’s no possible way that he could just pop up and go, “It was just a flesh wound.” What do you do?
This is the problem that was facing Paramount Pictures when it came to making a fifth Friday the 13th film. The previous installment made a lot of money but it also ended with Jason pretty decisively dead. Paramount’s solution? Friday the 13th without Jason. Released (much like me) in 1985 and directed by Danny Steinmann, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning remains a controversial film among fans of the franchise. A lot of people claim that it’s the worst installment. Myself, I consider it to be one of the best.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning opens (like many great B-movies) with a cemetery in the rain. Wearing a yellow raincoat, Tommy Jarvis (played in a cameo by Corey Feldman) approaches a grave that is marked “Jason Voorhees.” Suddenly, two rather moronic gravediggers come running up. While Tommy hides in the nearby bushes, the gravediggers dig Jason up. “Yee-haw!” one of them shouts.
(I know this because I turned on the close captioning as I watched the film. It’s one thing to hear the dialogue in a Friday the 13th film being spoken. It’s another thing to see it actually written out at the bottom of your screen.)
Suddenly, Jason — complete with hockey mask and machete — pops out of the grave and kills the two grave robbers. He walks over to where Tommy is hiding, lifts up his machete, and — suddenly, Tommy(now played by a brooding and sexy John Shepherd) wakes up! It turns out that several years have passed and Tommy, after spending five years in a mental asylum, is now on his way to Pinehurst, a halfway house that just happens to be located in the Crystal Lake area.
A New Beginning has such a bad reputation that it’s often forgotten that this opening sequence is one of the few genuinely scary sequences to be found in the entire franchise. Everything from the ominous dark skies to the lushly green bushes that Tommy hides in to the artful way the lightning storm is used to punctuate the sense of danger contributes to making this sequence feel very ominous and genuinely nightmarish. It’s a bit shocking (yet undeniably effective) to go from the impressionistic lushness of Tommy’s dream to the rather harsh and grainy look of the rest of the film.
(For those of you who are familiar with Italian horror, it almost feels like the dream was directed by Dario Argento while the rest of the film was done by Joe D’Amato.)
Anyway, Tommy gets dropped off at Pinehurst where he meets the two liberal do-gooders who are in charge of the facility, Matt (Richard Young) and Pam (Melanie Kinnaman). He also meets “Reggie the Reckless” (Shavar Ross), the bratty little grandson of Pinehurst’s cook, as well as the other residents of Pinehurst. Pam and Matt inform Tommy that Pinehurst has no rules. Or as they inform him, “It’s an honor system.”
It quickly becomes apparent that they might want to reconsider that honor system because not only do Eddie (John Robert Dixon) and Tina (DebbiSue Voorhees) get caught having sex on the neighbor’s property but Vic (played by Mark Venturini, who was all sexy and dangerous in his 2 minutes of screen time) ends up hacking the annoying Joey (Dominick Brascia) up into little pieces with an axe.
(In Vic’s defense, he looked really good with an axe and Joey was really annoying.)
While Vic is whisked off to jail (Sadly, never to be seen again) two paramedics scoop up remains of Joey. One of the paramedics — Roy (Dick Wieand) — stares at the body for a long time and doesn’t seem to find his coworkers jokes humorous. Hmmm…wonder what’s up with that?
As tragic as the death of Joey is, it does lead to one of my favorite lines of all time when, the morning after the murders, the remaining residents of Pinehurst gather for breakfast and they notice that two extra places have been set for the dead Joey and the incarcerated Vic. Stuttering Jake (Jerry Pavlon) exclaims, “You don’t set a place for a dead person!” And you know what? He’s right.
Soon, people all over town are getting murdered. The guys who talks to himself while snorting cocaine (played, in a rather funny performance, by Bob DeSimone) gets an axe to the forehead. The waitress (Rebecca Wood-Sharkey) who flashes her boobs at a mirror and goes, “It’s showtime!” gets murdered as she leaves work. Two Jersey Shore wannabes are killed when their car stalls. The Sheriff (Marco St. John) looks over one crime scene and says, “What the Hell’s going on here?” Roy, standing behind him, says, “You talking to me, Sheriff?” Hmmm…it’s odd how Roy keeps popping up in the movie for no reason…
The Mayor (played by Ric Mancini) confronts the Sheriff and demands to know who is killing everyone in town. “Jason Voorhees,” the Sheriff slowly responds. “Jason Voorhees is dead! He was cremated” the Mayor screams as he empties on ashtray on the sheriff, “THIS IS JASON VOORHEES!” This is probably my favorite scene in the entire movie because St. John underplays his entire role while Mancini overplays and delivers every line as if he’s in a community theater production of Lost in Yonkers.
That gets to the heart of what I really enjoy about A New Beginning — not only does this film have the largest body count of any film in the series, it also has the most genuinely eccentric cast of characters. Absolutely nobody in this film behaves like a conventional human being. It goes beyond just the normal odd slasher movie behavior. Instead, watching this film is like peering into some sort of parallel universe where some minor shift in the Earth’s tilt has caused everyone to go a little crazy. Probably the closest the film comes to a normal person is poor traumatized Tommy and he only says about ten lines in the entire film. (That said, John Shepherd did a really good job and had a lot of presence of Tommy. There’s an oddly eerie scene about halfway through the film where Tommy stares up at a neon sign and, as I looked at his face illuminated by the glowing blue of the sign, I realized that what I had always heard about good acting — that it all starts with expressive eyes — was true.)
(In a perfect world, Tommy would have eventually ended up with Vi — played by Tiffany Helm — the new wave girl who spends almost the entire movie dancing in her room. Seriously, they would have made a cute couple.)
Anyway, once our killer has gotten through killing random townspeople, he starts to kill off the residents at Pinehurst. After taking part in one of the most explicit sex scene in the history of the franchise, Eddie and Tina are rather brutally killed off. (That’s a shame because Voorhees and Dixon both had a really good and fun chemistry together and were both likable actors. Unfortunately, their characters were sex-crazed and you know what that means…) While Matt goes off to try to find the missing Eddie and Tina, Tommy, Pam, and Reggie go off to hang out with Reggie’s rather odd brother Demon (played by Miguel Nunez, Jr.) who wears more jewelry than I do and sings a duet with his girlfriend while he’s sitting on the most disgusting toilet in the history of film. (Seriously, I had to look away…)
Anyway, the remaining residents of Pinehurst are all killed by a seemingly resurrected Jason (however, Jake and Robin — played by Juliette Cummins — do get to watch A Place In The Sun before they die so at least something good happened to them that night) and Pam ends up spending almost the entire rest of the movie running around in the rain and tripping in the mud whenever Jason shows up. Jason eventually corners Pam, Tommy, and Reggie in a barn but then ends up falling out of a window and landing on some conveniently placed spikes. Jason’s hockey mask falls off and — surprise! — it wasn’t Jason after all. Instead, it was Roy, the weird Paramedic who kept showing up randomly and looking around kinda guilty-like whenever anyone mentioned anything about the murders. Wow!
One of my favorite films book is Peter M. Bracke’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. Taking on the series on a film-by-film basis, Crystal Lake Memories is a fascinating oral history that is full of all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes facts. Reading the chapter on Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, one is left with the impression that 1) everyone on the film was constantly snorting cocaine and 2) director Danny Steinmann is perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of the films.
In Crystal Lake Memories, depending on who is being interviewed, Danny Steinman comes across as either a maniac, a bully, or an underappreciated genius. Quite a few people claim that Steinmann was out-of-control. However, actress DebiSue Voorhees (who you would expect to have all sorts of unpleasant stories about the film since she’s the one who had to spend an entire shooting day laying on the ground naked in front of a bunch of strangers) is a lot more complimentary, saying that Steinmann was a “gentleman” throughout the entire shoot. What everyone seems to agree on is that he was the son of wealthy art dealer and that he got his start as a director by making a hardcore porn film before moving on to make two wonderfully trashy exploitation films — The Unseen and Savage Streets. Steinmann was apparently hired to bring a certain rough edginess to A New Beginning and he obviously did just that as A New Beginning had more violent deaths and more nudity than any previous installment of the series. Because of the need to get an R rating, a lot of bloody footage hit the cutting room floor but what was left is surprisingly effective. (Pictures of what was cut can be found on several sites online and yes, it’s all pretty gruesome.)
Unlike most people, I actually think that A New Beginning is one of the best films in the franchise, precisely because it is so ludicrous and over-the-top. What Danny Steinmann did with this film was that he took everything that one expected from a Friday the 13th film and he pushed it all to its most logical extreme. Everyone knew that, regardless of whether the film was being made by a major studio or not, the Friday the 13th films were meant to trashy, ludicrous, sleazy, and fun. Steinmann was just the only one who had the guts to admit it by making a film that not only admitted what it was but celebrated it as well. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the most openly grindhouse of all of the Friday the 13th films and for that, it deserves more credit than it’s gotten.
Despite upsetting a lot of fans (not to mention the critics), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was a box office success which could only mean that there would be another installment in the franchise. Coming tomorrow: my review of Friday the 13th: Jason Lives.
Through the Shattered Lens 