Blog Archives
Friday in Gautham Part X: Jason X (2002)
In 1991, New Line Cinema decided to kill Freddy Krueger with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. Around this time, they acquired the rights to Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th and wanted to bring the two monsters together. However, when they asked Wes Craven if he wanted to be involved, he said no, but said he had an idea for a possible seventh installment. New Line jumped at the chance to have Craven back to helm a Nightmare film. Friday the 13th co-creator Sean S. Cunningham thought it would be a good idea to do with Jason what had been done with Freddy and officially kill him off, while also hinting at the long-desired team-up movie. New Line agreed and 1993 saw the release of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. You know this because I wrote about it in the last essay.
Jason Goes to Hell did all right at the box office but not as well as they’d hoped. New Line was eager to see what Wes Craven’s return to the dreamscape would do to revitalize interest in Freddy Krueger. Unfortunately, when Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was released in October 1994, it failed to live up to expectations. Interest in making the long-awaited team-up were put on the back-burner. At least until a different Wes Craven film, Scream, was a huge hit. Suddenly, New Line wanted a Freddy vs. Jason movie and even promised one for 1998. There was a major problem with that promise: They didn’t have a script.
A flyer that was released to theater owners in 1997 promising a Freddy vs. Jason movie in 1998.
Time passed and script after script was written, director after director was attached, and it kept falling apart. It seems that every year between 1994 and 2003, Robert Englund would tell an interviewer that they had a new script and there should be a movie within the following year. And each year would pass and nothing would happen.
Sean S. Cunningham didn’t like this. He was afraid that people would forget about Jason Voorhees. So he went to New Line head Michael De Luca and asked about a tenth Jason movie. Writer Todd Farmer pitched the idea that Jason goes to space and De Luca, he who co-penned the cinematic masterpiece Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, greenlit it.
Jason. In. Space.
Oy.
Though the film was supposed to be released in 2000 or 2001, it was eventually released in April 2002. I didn’t see it then. Seeing now for this essay was one too many times.
The Day
David Cronenberg appears in cameo role. Until Jason (once again, Kane Hodder) kills him. It’s always a surprise to see a director that is considered very good make a cameo in a less-than-stellar movie, and here it’s downright shocking. To think that the man who directed one of the best horror films of the 1980s, The Fly, would appear in this horror (I use the term loosely) movie is shocking. But it’s fun for the What the FUCK?! factor.
Hey! Isn’t that–what the fuck?!
The escape ship explosion was another nice touch. The set-up is typical horror movie stuff. A girl who is freaking out locks her friends out of their safehaven, in this case, the spaceship that will allow them to escape. Despite them banging on the door (or whathaveyou), she decides to leave the main spaceship without them. Typically, this is where Jason would suddenly appear to kill her. In this case, her own stupidity does her in and it actually surprised me. So did the spaceship’s crash into another safehaven, a space station, earlier in the movie.
The special effects are surprisingly good. I’ll give them credit. For a movie with a fairly small budget, the effects mostly came off.
The Night
Jason looks funny in this movie. His head isn’t malformed enough and he had a strange buzz-cut thing going on. His hockey mask is different. His clothes are different. And that’s before the Uber-Jason at the end. Uber-Jason is one of the worst monsters I’ve ever seen. The costume looks like something from a bad SyFy Channel movie. I understand that Jason has looked different in each movie, and there’s certainly a Who Gives a Shit? attitude about that, but this Jason just didn’t do it for me. I think there was too much of Kane Hodder present.
I have nothing. Put your own goddamn caption.
The acting is some of the worst in the series. But I can only blame them so much, because–
The story is ridiculous and full of clichés. I’ve read or heard somewhere that the movie was better before the studio watered down the script. Who knows? The very idea of putting Jason in space is stupid. At best it can only be a low-rent version of Alien. Add to that the most obvious one-liners and scripted dialogue, and we’re talking a disaster of a movie.
This isn’t a 1980s action figure, it’s Uber-Jason. Yes, that’s what they name him in the credits.
The Saturday After
Look, these have been some of the most negative essays I’ve written, and I know fans of the series are used to that sort of thing from non-fans. I almost feel bad about these essays, but I have to call it like I see it. Whether they made money or not, these movies just keep getting worse. The box office for Jason X was also lackluster.
But that was okay, because in 2002, news broke that horror nerds had been hearing for a looonnng time. And this time, it looked like it might actually happen….
Burbleburbl–CRASH!
Friday in Gautham Part IX: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
With the lackluster performance of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan in 1989, and with the urging of series co-creator Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures sold the franchise to New Line Cinema, whom they’d attempted to “rent” the Freddy Krueger character and situations from a few years prior. This would prove a major coup for New Line because now they could finally set up the Battle of the Ages: Freddy Krueger versus Jason Voorhees. The sale in the early 1990s came at just the right time because 1989 wasn’t a good year for Freddy, either. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, released a year after the highest-grossing Nightmare, earned the lowest amount for the franchise at that time. Hoping to cash in one last time, New Line released the final Nightmare movie, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, in 1991, and it made a good amount of money. The purchase of the Jason Voorhees character and Friday the 13th meant they now had the two most popular monsters of the 1980s and could finally put them together.
Robert Shaye knew Sean S. Cunningham would be on board since he’d been trying to get the Jason/Freddy project off the ground for years, but decided to ask Wes Craven if he had any ideas. As it turned out, Craven did have ideas…only not for a monster mash-up. Excited by any Craven involvement in a new Nightmare film, New Line Cinema went ahead with his idea for a seventh movie. This gave Cunningham and the studio the chance to do what the eighth Friday the 13th movie couldn’t do: Put an “end” to Jason and set up the eventual Freddy/Jason movie.
With a screenplay by Dean Lorey and Jay Huguley, from a story by Huguley and director Adam Marcus, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday was released on August 13th, 1993. I remember watching it when it came on Cinemax about a year later, when I was either a junior or senior in high school. I was interested in watching it in and of itself but the real reason I wanted to see it was because, by that point, Fangoria had reported the surprise ending….
The Day
The acting is slightly better in this movie than in the previous Friday movies. The script gives the actors a little more to work with. That said, the stand-out performance for me was Erin Gray’s. Now, it could just be the nerdboy in me talking, except that I never saw her in Buck Rogers (because I never saw the show, not because I couldn’t see her, that’s weird of you to think), I only knew her from Silver Spoons. But she brings real pathos to her role. John D. LeMay as Steve Freeman is also pretty good. He also starred in Friday the 13th: The Television Series, only he played a different character.
She’s pretty…
I know I write this often in these essays, but I feel like I’m often grasping at straws, so my apologies for repeating myself, but the fact that the screenwriters tried to move into a totally different direction with Jason (Kane Hodder) and the series needs to be applauded. They truly leave the idea of Jason terrorizing teenagers/young adults behind and take the movie into a new direction. Jason is now a known enemy to the United States and a task force has been employed to destroy him. Playing with horror as a genre, they reference the Evil Dead films and give a reason for Jason’s supernatural ability, as well as a way to destroy him. They also give him a larger family that changes the way he can be viewed.
If you’re into these movies for the gore, then you’re in luck. Whatever shenanigans that kept gore out of the eighth movie seems to have gone away for this one. It’s ridiculously gory. So if you’re into that, that would be a plus.
Freddy! Yeah, you must’ve known I was going there. At the end Jason is dragged into hell by monsters. There’s a close-up of his hockey mask. He’s dead. And then Freddy’s gloved arm shoots up, grabs the mask, and drags it into hell, with Freddy’s signature laugh. Of course, the arm looks strangely muscular (Kane Hodder provided the arm) and the blades of the glove bend when they hit the dirt, but it’s Freddy.
Everybody has their demons…
The Night
While the overall acting is slightly better in this movie, there are still some horrible performances. For me, the most surprising of these bad performances was given by Steven Williams as he played bounty hunter Creighton Duke. Williams has had a long, good career. I first knew him as the boss on Fox’s hit 21 Jump Street, which starred A Nightmare on Elm Street alum Johnny Depp. Williams was also a nerd favorite on The X Files as Mr. X. He’s a pretty good actor who is terrible in this movie. Maybe it’s not the right role for him. I don’t know, but it’s bad.
The story is real bad. That’s the problem with the Friday the 13th movies (or the Jason movies, as I guess they should be called for the next few essays), even if it’s the best written one, chances are likely that the movie is still shitty. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is no exception. It begins with Jason stalking a young woman who turns out to be part of that federal task force I mentioned earlier and ends with him being dragged to hell by some of the silliest monsters I’ve ever seen (though less silly than the Dream Demons from Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, I’ll give Jason the point for that). And then a young family walks into the sunrise. What? Yeah, you read that correctly. There’s a baby in this movie, and family issues, and a love story, and stereotypical foul-mouthed fat ladies, and more plot holes than I have time to list. And, the biggest problem by far is–
Where’s Jason?! New Line Cinema acquires their biggest horror competitor. They want to do a Freddy vs. Jason movie. They’ve already killed off Freddy (and it won’t be an issue that he returns for Wes Craven’s new Nightmare movie, which will be released the following year). And here we go with killing off Jason and…we’re going to keep Jason out of most of the movie.
Not Jason.
Jason appears at the beginning, as I mentioned, until the U.S. government blows him up. Then his remains spout some creature that then goes around possessing people. We’re told by the bounty hunter that Jason the person has long been dead, but the evil entity in him takes his evil essence and finds new hosts for him. The idea is that Jason has been different people all the time. Forget the fact that almost every Friday the 13th movie showed him return from the prior movie’s resting place. The only other time we see Jason until the very end when he finally returns (plot hole alert), is in the mirror whenever his hosts stand in front of one. Instead of seeing Jason kill, which is all his fans pay to see anyway, we’re given a variety of characters committing Jason-style violent deaths.
Which only highlights what I’ve been saying throughout these movies: the true reason for the horror of a horror movie isn’t even being attempted, not even for laughs. The movies have devolved into a slaughterfest meant to do nothing but make powerless adolescents laugh at gruesome, horrible deaths. The fact that this is the ninth movie of this is a horrific happening unto itself.
Oh, and let’s talk about Jason himself in this movie. He looks stupid. His head has somehow inflated to twice the normal size, he’s regrown hair, and he’s not even close to wearing what he wore in the last few movies. If this is because he’s in a new body, how did the head come to look like a watermelon-sized meatball? He’s lame.
Meatball head.
The Saturday After
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is a new day for Jason. New Line was able to make it more supernatural than the character (and story) had been but ultimately failed to do anything interesting with the movie. It’s essentially a 90-minute prologue to Freddy vs. Jason, which they hoped to make after the new Wes Craven Nightmare was released. As a teenager, I thought the movie was okay. As an adult, I’m shocked by how bad it is compared to my memory of it.
The movie did okay and it certainly promised fans what they’d been hoping for for nearly a decade. With all the pieces in place, what could possibly go wrong?
Freddy! Er…I meant: Boo!
Friday in Gautham Part VIII: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Though the box office for Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood wasn’t as high as some of the previous installments, it was still in the ballpark enough for Paramount to greenlight an eighth movie. This time around, longtime producer of the franchise Frank Mancuso, Jr., was out. Taking on writing and directing duties was Rob Hedden.
According to Hedden, he was one of the people who pitched for a Jason vs. Freddy Krueger crossover and was also a writer for the Mancuso, Jr.-produced Friday the 13th: The Television Series that ran on syndication at this point. The chance to write and direct the next film was something he couldn’t pass up.
Once again, Paramount gave permission to the writer/director to create a story in any way he wanted so he pitched taking Jason Voorhees out of Crystal Lake and bringing him to New York City. Paramount loved the idea and pre-production begun. However, even before production began, problems arose, mostly regarding budget.
This was, I believe, the second Friday the 13th movie I saw, again it was on Cinemax. My best guess was 1990 or 1991. I remember the teacher (Barbara Bingham) giving the star, Rennie (Jansen Daggett), a pen that she said she believed Stephen King used when he was a student. I also remember the boxer (V.C. Dupree) that Jason (once again, Kane Hodder) decapitates with a single punch to the head. There were other things I remembered faintly, too, that came back upon rewatching this movie.
The Day
Jansen Daggett as Rennie is attractive and likeable, though she’s not the best actress. She is also very 1980s. This is fun.
Jason likes her, too.
The attempt by Hedden to take the franchise to a new place, both metaphorically and literally, is to be applauded. He didn’t want to do yet another Jason-stalks-kids-in-the-woods movie. Taking Jason to New York is thrilling in many ways. First, just the What The Fuck? Factor of seeing Jason in Times Square is fun. And this is 1989 Times Square, so it’s not yet the full neon, crazed, carnival it is today. It still has a little of the old Times Square danger to it. Seeing Jason in back alleys and the like is also fun.
There’s a billboard in Times Square for 1989’s Batman, starring Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton. That’s fun to see. Now digital effects would have replaced the ad for the Warner Bros. film for a billboard for a Paramount movie, or maybe even something else entirely. Yeah, this has nothing to do with the story, I’m grasping at straws here.
The Night
All right, in the last essay I wrote that I wasn’t a fan of Jason’s makeup. Well, this movie’s is even worse. First off, it’s a step backward. Where Jason looked too withered and falling apart in The New Blood, in Jason Takes Manhattan, even though he’s been under water for however long between movies, his shirt has somehow come back together and some of his flesh seems to have regrown. Oh, and it’s changed color, too. And when they take the mask off, it’s the worst makeup of the series. Jason looks like a poorly drawn smiley face. And the mask, which had black fabric covering up the left eyehole through most of the series suddenly has both eyeholes covered, so no eyes remain. I always felt that seeing Jason’s eye(s) somehow made him scarier.
Have a nice day!
The acting is typically bad. The story has a bunch of teenagers going on a cruise from Crystal Lake to New York City for some school thing in biology class and there’s a hell of a lot more kids than it seems we ever get to know. And the ones we do get to know are the normal stereotypes that we never get the chance to care about. Even Jansen Daggett’s Rennie is little more than the typical quiet girl who will survive this horror movie through her cunning and innocence.
And while I applaud Hedder for attempting to take Friday the 13th in a new direction (how often have I written that or something like that in these essays?) it fails. Part of it isn’t his fault. Some of it was the budget. Some of it was, no doubt, the MPAA.
At $5 million, the budget for this movie was higher than any of the previous installments, but it still wasn’t enough. Apparently, the original script had most of the movie set in New York City, but Hedder was told that it was too expensive to shoot there. And even with shooting some of New York’s settings in Vancouver, time in the city (and on location) kept getting shorter and shorter. In the end, he had two days in actual New York and only the last third of the movie was set there.
The MPAA surely hurt the movie. By this point in the 1980s, Tipper Gore and other watchdog types were actively going after horror movies and heavy metal and anything that could seem too much for children. This is because R-rated adult entertainment is something that children regularly see. Well…maybe…but I digress. This movie is actually pretty tame compared to the previous movies (and those that follow). Most of the deaths happen offscreen. Jason comes into frame, lifts his arm, brings it down, and then we see the body at some point. There are exceptions to this, I already mentioned the fate of the young boxer on a rooftop. Compared to the crazy gore and gratuitous violence of, say A New Beginning, Jason Takes Manhattan is pretty tame. People don’t watch Friday the 13th movies for tame, though. They watch for over-the-top violence and gore.
Y-you mean…this is R-rated?!
Even with the constrictions brought on by budget and censorship, Hedder must take most of responsibility in the failure of this movie. From beginning to end, very little fits logically with the story within the franchise or even within the movie itself. Rennie sees the little boy of Jason throughout the movie, and he only slowly grows to look like how he did in the original. The way Jason is brought back to life is also odd. He’s electrified again, which isn’t so odd, by a giant electrical cable that runs under Crystal Lake, which gets frayed by a yacht. How does a yacht fit on this lake? Is it one of the Great Lakes? Or perhaps a great lake in its own right? Anyway, this cable–which is out in the open under the water–is frayed by the yacht’s anchor (which is light enough to be carried by the lake’s current but strong enough to break this huge cable) and the electricity goes up the cable to where Jason is under the broken dock from the last movie. It brings Jason back but not the girl’s father from the previous movie. His body isn’t even there. So not only do Jason’s clothes somehow repair themselves (as does his skin) but the father also disappears magically. At the end, Jason is essentially turned into the little boy, which is also weird and doesn’t make sense. His choices in direction aren’t always the greatest (the POV of the boxer’s severed head is stupid, because the boxer can’t see because he’s dead).
And let’s not forget how Jason suddenly appears in places. There have been jokes as long as these movies have been out how the killer will walk after his victims and always seem to get them. For Jason, the walking after victims really began in the fourth movie. In this movie, though, Jason begins to appear whenever needed. One example is on the cruise ship to New York. Jason is stalking a victim and the victim turns away, runs up some steps, only to be confronted by Jason, who somehow managed to get from the deck to the stairs without passing his victim. Now I can only assume that this was done because of Freddy Krueger. Freddy is known to do this trick throughout his film series, and this makes sense because he’s in a dream. Jason may now be supernatural, but he’s still in the real world and should adhere to at least some of the physics that we all live with. Yikes.
Start spreading the boooos.
Saturday the 14th
What might have been a fun jaunt to the city with a popular monster is a lame movie. The attempts at humor fail. There’s nothing particularly creepy or scary in the movie. And the one thing that the Friday the 13th movies always did well–gory death scenes–are trimmed to the point of nearly being safe for network TV (of the time, anyway).
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan no doubt caused more eyerolls than anticipation when the trailers first hit theaters. The film did the least business than any of the other movies in the franchise, earning a measly $14.3 million dollars. Its release date didn’t help any. Released on July 28th, 1989, it was smack-dab in the middle of one of the biggest summers the movies had seen. Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, and Ghostbusters II were all released that summer. Even the better-faring Freddy Krueger movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (released in August) failed to do the business its predecessor of the prior year did; $22 million compared to $49 million.
Between the poor audience reception, the fact that it was the eighth movie, and the fact that the horror bubble was beginning to collapse all around, Paramount decided that Jason’s trip to New York would be his last resurrection for awhile.
You knew I was going to do it…
Friday in Gautham Part VII: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
With the Friday the 13th movies still making money but straining a very thin premise, Paramount and producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. were looking for something new to do with the franchise. Sean S. Cunningham was also interested in possibly doing something new with the franchise, especially now that there was a new kid on the block. The block happened to be on Elm Street in a sleepy town called Springwood.
In 1984, the fledgling New Line Cinema released a film by Cunningham’s protégé Wes Craven called A Nightmare on Elm Street. The movie was scary and had become a sleeper hit. The villain of the film, Fred Krueger, portrayed by the classically trained Robert Englund, sliced his way to the top of people’s Favorite Villains list with a concept unlike any that had been done before. New Line went ahead with a sequel even though Craven refused and 1985 saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. While the critical and fan response to the second movie was much less favorable than its predecessor, the movie earned more than the first movie, securing another sequel. In 1986, filming was underway on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. With the return of Wes Craven, along with his writing partner Bruce Wagner, on the story and script (along with Frank Darabont and director Chuck Russell), anticipation was high. Freddy Krueger was already being mentioned alongside Jason Voorhees as one of the best monsters of 1980s horror.
Cunningham saw this as an opportunity to revitalize the series he co-created and pitched the idea of putting the two maniacs together in the style of the old horror movies. So began talks between Paramount Pictures and New Line Cinema. Paramount wanted to “rent” the rights to Freddy Krueger, Elm Street, and the rest. Being an old movie studio, it was in a position of power. Except that New Line’s new horror villain was the “It” Monster at that moment. Freddy had a sense of humor, ran around, and got people in their dreams while Jason just shambled about. So New Line proposed “renting” Jason, et al. Neither party would budge and the deal fell through. Still, the movie was pretty close to happening.
So with the Jason and Freddy match-up off, Paramount and Mancuso, Jr., went ahead with plans for a seventh Friday the 13th. Still, the idea that Jason had a formidable opponent was forefront in their mind, so writers Manuel Fidello and Daryl Haney gave Jason a psychic/telekinetic teenage girl to fight. It reminds me of that famous quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “I asked for a car, I got a computer.” Paramount asked for Jason vs. Freddy, they got Jason vs. Carrie.
This was the first Friday the 13th I believe I saw since it came on HBO/Cinemax the year after its release and by that point I was officially into horror. I liked it well enough at the age of 12, I guess. It was interesting, at least, the girl using her mind to move things. Since this was before I began reading Stephen King and hadn’t seen the movie Carrie, I didn’t have that as a frame of reference. That probably helped me somewhat like the movie back then.
The Day
Jason (Kane Hodder) looks like a monster, which is cool. Between the third movie and the sixth, he could just as well have been Michael Myers of Halloween–a dude with a mask killing late-teenagers/young adults. Somewhere he even got a jumpsuit like Myers. With this movie, director John Carl Buechler decided to really have Jason look like he’s been through the wringer. While the previous movie zombified him, this movie went all out. He’d been in a lake for years and now looked it with his clothes in tatters and bones visible. It also made Jason different from the other famous monsters of the 1980s.
Teeth!
The attempt at something different should also be given a nod. It would have been real easy to just have the kids be at a camp all over again and Jason inexplicably come back to life and kill them one by one. This time, there’s a telekinetic teenage girl named Tina (Lar Park Lincoln). There was a hint of spousal abuse that could be brought up and a doctor (Terry Kiser) who seemed to be taking advantage of his patient for personal gain. Tina’s powers are a little silly at times (try not laughing when a TV flies through the air when she’s upset at the doctor and her mother) but the fights with Jason are almost interesting and somewhat entertaining.
Terry Kiser is good in this movie. His is a face you would recognize as he was in so much in the 1980s. I mean, he was Bernie in the Weekend at Bernie’s movies! He has a quality about him that’s just kind of slimy and he pulls off the Doctor-Up-To-No-Good thing so well.
Trust him…he’s a doctor….
The Night
The acting has gone back to being uninteresting at best. Some of it is horrible. Most of it is forgettable. Lar Park Lincoln does her best with the material but it just falls flat. I almost wonder if a better director, or better script, would have helped her. The rest of the cast fits into stereotypes, one way or another.
Though the look of Jason now distinguishes him fully from Michael Myers, I was distracted by the make-up effects for him. You can see his teeth and jaw exposed on the left side of his face and his ribs and spine on his back. Yet, they never feel like they’re in him, but rather on top of him, which they are. It was a valiant effort that ultimately fails and actually distracted me.
The beginning and ending are lame. The movie starts with young Tina running out of a house on Crystal Lake (where we see Jason floating beneath the surface, looking like he did in the previous movie). Young Tina climbs into a boat and rows away from the dock. We’ve heard the sound of her parents fighting and her father hitting her mother. Then Daddy comes out and chases Tina, saying he’s sorry and that he’ll never hit Mom again and all that shit. In a moment of anger, Tina uses the Force to destroy the dock, which means Daddy falls into Crystal Lake, to his doom. When she comes back for “therapy” years later, Tina goes to the dock and senses a presence underwater (I think…this is never really clear). Then she uses her telekinesis to bring Jason back, thinking it’s her father.
At the end, the way Jason is finally “killed” is lame because Tina, once again on the dock, her new boyfriend with her, is being attacked by Jason (who we thought was blown up with the house). Tina uses the Force again to feel a presence under the lake and WHAMMO! Daddy comes out of the water, through the dock, and brings Jason down with him. Unlike Jason, though, who decayed underwater for almost a decade, Daddy is a little dirty but is otherwise the same guy we saw in the prologue.
Look intent…aaannnd ACTION! I said action. Oh, never mind.
And while we’re talking about Daddy here, let’s talk about how fucked up this movie is when it comes to women. Now, I know that the Friday the 13th movies tend to objectify women, but there are some strongish women in most of the movies. Or at least I think they’re supposed to be strong, because it’s almost always a woman who defeats Jason, or helps defeat him. But bear with me here. So in the prologue, we hear the mother get slapped by the father, who, moments later, tells his little girl that he won’t do it again, even though it seems he’s made this promise before. So she kills him. Now, she comes back in her therapy (which is really just the doctor using her powers to make a name for himself) to the location where Daddy met his fate. She is distraught at the memory that she killed him. Her mother tries to assuage her grief. There’s a photo of Dad on the wall in the house. She killed her Dad, she killed her Dad…waaaah! And then she uses the same powers she used to bring Jason back to bring him back to save her. Has she forgotten the reason she killed him? Has she forgotten that he beat her mother? I know that a child may feel guilt at this, and that guilt might carry over the years, but how can Mom be so understanding? Or am I just reading too much into this subplot?
While the filmmakers attempted something different, they fail. By now, it’s beginning to feel like gimmicks are being thrown together. Not that the whole series is anything more than gimmicks. Jason in 3D! Jason dies! A new killer! Jason lives! Jason fights…um…er…you said we can’t use Freddy?….um…Jason fights…[sees Stephen King’s Carrie on the bookcase]…a telekinetic girl! Here’s the thing with the Friday the 13th movies and the character of Jason Voorhees as he’d been presented up to and including this point: You can’t do much with him. He is a zombie who doesn’t eat his victims, who has superhuman strength, and always manages to find a machete. He’s just a machine that kills. So you could have him fight a telekinetic girl, Freddy Krueger, or the Harlem Globetrotters but the fact remains that he’s just going to shamble around killing people.
Now the Harlem Globetrotters’ theme is in your head but it feels like this.
Saturday the 14th
I realized while writing that last paragraph that it was becoming the wrap-up, so I’ll wrap it up. By the seventh movie in this franchise, Jason Voorhees is a bore. The sixth movie proved to be the exception that proves the rule. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood was made for $2.8 million and earned $19.2 million after its May, 1988 release. Compare that to A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master, which was released that August and cost $13 million (about $10 million more than the former) but made $49.3 million, more than any of the original Friday the 13th movies had ever made.
The only thing the filmmakers could do to keep him interesting was throw in different gimmicks. What would be next? Freddy was too successful on his own. Fight Michael Myers, whose own franchise had been rejuvenated based on the successes of Jason and Freddy? Have Jason fight Superman, whose movie career was over for a bit? Or maybe a change of scenery would be it. Something silly, like sending Jason to New York.
Yeah, right. Who would buy that?
Blllaaaahhh!
Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 