Friday the 13th Retrospective Part 2

Time to continue the tale of Tommy Jarvis and check out the middle of the series! This is where everything starts to change, for good and bad, and is definitely the most interesting part of Friday the 13th. After this point no two movies are the same and premises start to get, well, weird.  As with Part 1 this review contains spoilers so beware!

Friday the 13th Part V A New Beginning (1985)

Directed by Danny Steinmann

 

An Unfairly Maligned Film That Takes The Series In A New Direction and Continues A Quality Plot.

 

In a lot of ways Friday the 13th Part V is the most maligned of any of the series, but I don’t think that’s a very fair judgement. I will get to why it is so hated at the end because saying it right now would be a bit too spoilery for this part. Our film begins with our eventual hero from the last film, Tommy Jarvis, several years older and in the back of a van operated by a mental institution. Having been mentally scarred by the events of Part IV, Tommy is being transported from a previous institution to a low security facility to receive treatment. Once Tommy arrives, it is clear that he is very different than the young Tommy we are familiar with, Tommy is now near mute, in excellent physical condition and is rather aggressive, responding to another resident’s juvenile prank on him by fireman’s carry style throwing him through a side table and beating him. Granted, the guy stole one of Tommy’s prized masks and used it to scare him, but it was still a really out of line action on Tommy’s part that reflected clearly on his worsening mental state.

To make matters worse, after Tommy arrives a series of murders begin happening around the institution, as well as the murder of a resident which happened before he arrived. The local sheriff notices a similarity between these murders and the murders perpetrated by Jason years earlier, and he suggests that Jason could have returned. Tying into that, Tommy often has visions of Jason appearing around the house, though it is purposely unclear if he is seeing reality or just another hallucination because of his fixation on Jason. Jumping off from the symbolism of Part IV, the movie starts suggesting that maybe Tommy has started to continue the works of Jason due to his fixation with him. It is very clever, especially because Tommy is absent for huge chunks of the plot, giving a realistic amount of unaccounted for time when Tommy could be doing these things. Tommy is clearly now capable of violence and is physically able to perform them so it can’t just be brushed off as a possibility. There is of course also the option that maybe Jason is just back. He has seemingly returned from the dead in the past and the mayor of the town brushed off the sheriff’s concerns, firmly stating that he would not look into the matter of Jason’s corpse. It sounds like he has something to hide.

I really appreciated the direction this movie took to be more of a psychological slasher movie, and believe me there are PLENTY of great deaths in this one. There’s a lot of memorable side characters here too and overall it’s just a really fun addition to the series. Now we have to answer the question of why everyone hates this one so much. And that is tied to the ending. More and more people are killed until only one of the directors of the institution and the cook’s grandchild are left alive. They realize that a lot of people are dead and are soon attacked by a guy who looks an awful lot like Jason, hockey mask and all. Tommy isn’t there, so they have to try and get away without him. When this villain has them trapped in a barn they are eventually helped out by none other than the series’ best hero, Tommy Jarvis! Working together they manage to drop their attacker on a bed of spikes only to reveal that this isn’t Jason come back from the grave but the other director of the institution. They explain why he did it but the explanation doesn’t make a ton of sense. I forgive that because the movie around it is so good. A lot of people were enraged though because this is a Jason movie with NO JASON. That infuriated people and I can understand why, but it seems a waste to throw out one of the best entries in the series just because it tried something new that I think worked really well.

 

Friday the 13th Part VI Jason Lives (1986)

Directed by Tom McLoughlin

 

The Peak Of The Series. Things Start To Get Goofy Here But It Works Well

After the really solid last two entries we get Jason Lives, the capper to the Tommy Jarvis trilogy. The movie begins with Tommy Jarvis and an accomplice of his headed to the graveyard where Jason is buried. After digging up the coffin and cracking it open, much to the horror of Tommy’s friend, Tommy decides it is time to destroy Jason’s body and make sure he can never come back. But upon seeing Jason’s decaying maggot covered corpse he loses his cool and grabs an iron rod from the fence to attack the body. This backfires horrifically though because a bolt of lightning strikes the rod, electrocuting the body and resurrecting Jason. Jason immediately turns on Tommy’s friend and kills him by putting his fist through the guy’s chest and out his back, holding the guy’s still beating heart. This is a really cool moment not just because the death looks great but because it signals a real shift in the series.

Gone are the days of Jason needing to sneak up on someone and ambush them with a weapon to have the upper hand, Jason is now officially supernatural and much more dangerous than he was before. Tommy flees the scene and goes to the cops, who are less than receptive to Tommy’s claims that Jason has returned and lock him up. Jason then goes on a killing spree on his way back to Crystal Lake with a level of bloodlust and vigor the likes of which has never been seen before while Tommy is escorted out of the county by the police. Tommy returns to try and stop Jason once and for all, teaming up with the sheriff’s daughter while trying to elude the police who believe Tommy is killing people and making it look like Jason has returned.

So I immediately loved this movie for two reasons, the first being that this is the conclusion to the Tommy Jarvis arc which is the best multifilm story of the series and the second being the addition of humor. Now, I hated the humor in Part III, that was terrible, but it feels much more appropriate here as the series is beginning to get a bit goofy, what with Jason being a zombie and all. This feels much more like a ‘fun slasher’ than the previous films and I like that quite a bit, it feels almost like a live action cartoon at times and there is good writing and comedic timing. The kills are better than ever, except for a really bad one where Jason lightly squeezes someone’s head until a blood squirt hits his mask.

The humor feels appropriate and Tommy Jarvis’ story arc has a really satisfying conclusion where through the power of teamwork Tommy manages to use a spell to trap Jason at the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake. All around it’s a ton of fun and while it may not be scary per se, it is a great watch. Probably the best of the series to be frank. Also the credits has the song ‘He’s Back’ (Man Behind the Mask) an awesome Alice Cooper tribute to Jason. Extra points.

 

Friday the 13th Part VII The New Blood (1988)

Directed by John Carl Buechler

 

A Brilliant Premise Just Wasted By Featuring Terrible Characters. Has Its Moments.

Wow, this series has been going up and up and up! What could possibly brings us down now? A sequel full of unlikeable characters and filler that’s only fun for about 15 minutes? Oh yeah…that could do it. That’s all the more depressing because the premise for this movie is absolutely brilliant. Here goes: as a child Tina was on Crystal Lake with her parents, but her abusive father upset her, quite reasonably, by hitting her mom. She went onto the lake to get away from this and her father gave chase, trying to convince her that everything would be okay. Young Tina didn’t believe him and used her growing psychic powers to collapse the pier he was on and trap him at the bottom of the lake where he drowned. Years later Tina and her mom return to their lakehouse, travelling with an enigmatic doctor who claims to be trying to cure Tina’s psychic outbursts. Nearby, a bunch of young people are having a party weekend and Tina begins getting to know one of the studly eligible bachelors there. Unfortunately, Tina’s emotions run high during this time and she accidentally unleashes Jason from his bondage at the bottom of Crystal Lake, allowing him to continue his rampage.

I will freely admit that Jason fighting an expy of Carrie is an amazing premise for a movie and the parts where the two fight are loads of fun. It is really interesting to see Jason’s still pretty new zombie powers put to the test against an opponent whose power could equal or exceed his own. That is great but unfortunately that part of the movie is only about the last 15 minutes.The vast majority of the movie is spent with an awesomely annoying cast of characters who embody every high school stereotype that the writers can think of. I understand why these characters are there, Tina’s psychic flare ups are important to the story and having a bunch of awful teenagers there to trigger them could work well, BUT only one of them ever has any real interactions with Tina is Melissa, a spoiled rich girl who wants the same man that Tina is romancing. Her disruptions and ploys trigger some psychic stuff from Tina occasionally, but the major plot points about Tina’s psychic stuff revolve around her relationship with the doctor, who as it turns out, is not trying to cure her but to trigger her psychic spells for some reason. To prove they exist I think?

Anyway, the point is that too much of the movie is spent with characters who really don’t add anything to the plot and whose deaths for the most part aren’t that interesting. What saves the movie is the super over the top finale where Jason confronts Tina and the zombie slasher versus psychic fight is a ton of fun and almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. The ending in particular is cheesy and amazing, Tina lures Jason out onto the lake and then she reanimates her dead father, whose corpse was never taken out of the lake I guess, who jumps out of the water and chains Jason up, dragging him to the bottom of the lake and trapping him just as Tommy Jarvis did at the conclusion of Jason Lives. The ending saves the movie but on the whole things should have been a lot better from the start.

 

Friday the 13th Part VIII Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Directed by Rob Hedden

 

Another Great Premise That Never Got Off The Ground. Just A Strange Movie That Tried To End The Series.

Oh boy. This one is legendary. Everyone kind of already knows that this one is the joke of the series but why not beat that dead horse a little bit more! After being inadvertently awoken by a passing boat, Jason stows away on a cruise ship headed towards the Big Apple. Don’t worry about how Crystal Lake is suddenly connected to a river that leads to open waters or that this boat ride to Manhattan would take all night or that the boat itself is super empty because the graduating class was like 10 people. Don’t worry about any of those things because this movie sure as hell doesn’t care about them!

Now the main problem with this movie is that we spend an a full hour on the boat before we get to “Manhattan,” and very few interesting things happen on this boat. The weirdest of these things being the occasional visions that our leading lady sees of a young boy, Jason presumably, drowning. This really resonates with her because she too is afraid of water for reasons she can’t remember. She spends this boat ride with her dog, who is allowed on board for some reason, and nothing happens for a long time. Jason just skulks around murdering people and that’s fine but what is confusing is what is even supposed to be happening on this boat. They frame it like a graduation party but no one is ever just partying in the place where the party seems like it should happen, the dance floor, and everyone is just showering or filming music videos in the bowels of the ship or having unsupervised boxing matches, it just all feels wrong. Like this was all supposed to be happening at a camp but the the setting was changed at the last second and they didn’t bother changing anything else in the script.

So eventually Jason kills enough people that they can’t operate the ship and they all have to go on a lifeboat and float to Manhattan. Immediately after walking off the dock the group is mugged by ambiguously brown criminals who also kidnap the main girl and then inject ambiguous ‘drugs’ into her and then they plan to rape her. Jesus. Thank god Jason is there, and his much more wholesome plan is to just kill everyone. There’s the same problem here as there is on the ship, everything is empty, nothing really happens and the Jason teleporting thing that everyone jokes about is in such full force that it starts to make scenes feel more like parodies than actual death scenes.

The only bright spot is one really wacky death where the boxer guy tries to fistfight Jason, punching him barehanded over and over again in his facemask. The mask that protects his face. From blunt damage. Jason retaliates brilliantly, letting loose one punch that rips this guy’s head clean off his shoulders and rolls it off the roof where it falls into a dumpster. Then the dumpster slams shut. It is absurd and wonderful. Apart from that everything is just wasted potential. Sure there are a few fun scenes of Jason IN Manhattan, but 90% of the movie is void of anything fun or scary or cinematic. It never really feels like they are in Manhattan except for one brief sequence when Jason chases our heroes through “Times Square”, it looks like an okay approximation and leads to a funny scene where the proprietors of a diner are initially nonplussed about the large threatening madman who just walked in, like this is just another day for them. There’s just so much more iconic NYC stuff they could have done but so much time was spent on the boat that they never got around to doing it.

The most baffling part is the ending where Jason is caught in a sewer system tidal wave of toxic waste, which apparently floods the sewers every night in Manhattan, and he is transformed back into a boy. I have no idea what they were going for with this ending, this was probably supposed to end the series because the continuity between this movie and the next is nonexistent. Also the dog survives. In case you were curious.