Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives (1986)
It's been a while since I wrote one of these so let me remind you... The series was supposed to end on Friday the 13th: The Final Friday, which was part 4. The very next year Paramount brought the series back to life with Part V: A New Beginning, which featured a regular homicidal guy wearing a hockey mask sort of copycatting Jason. Well, that didn't go so well with fans that were expecting Jason back. You always give the fans what they want, so come the next year, it was decided that Jason had to come back.
The studio hired Tom McLoughlin, who had made a PG rated horror film three years before to write and direct. He decided to inject humor into the by now clearly dying series, and to cut down on the gore. What he created was the last good Friday film until the 2000s. The film is so markedly different from the films that came before and come after it that it of course stands alone. The story sort of picks up from Part V. Tommy Jarvis escapes from his mental institution and feels the urge to go to Jason's grave to make sure he's dead. So he and his reluctant friend dig up Jason's maggot infested corpse and he sees he's truly dead. However, as he's not mentally well, Tommy takes an iron stake from the fence lining the graveyard and decides to stab Jason repeatedly with in when, what do you know, lightning strikes it and gives Jason life again. So now Jason is a superhuman zombie that's even more powerful than he was before. For instance, the first death he commits is punching the friend through the chest and grabbing his heart as his hand punches through the guy's back. And that's probably the goriest part of the film.
McLoughlin decided he wanted to go for a classic Universal Monster/Hammer horror film with this one, so what we get is less blood and gore, but more atmosphere. They filmed the installment in Covington, Georgia instead of up north as the prior films had been, so the camp has this humid feel to it. There's lots of fog, the camp is noticeably different from the past films... even the woods look different. And I love the fact that the film is the first to not take the series seriously. Take for instance the very scene I referred to earlier with the heart punch. And the way that scene ends... With a Bond tribute?!
It's pretty certain from there that you aren't getting the same type of Friday film that you've come to accept. This one is just out to have fun. Oddly enough, though this is supposedly more tame than the prior films, this is the only Friday film to have kids actually at the camp when the murders take place. And it actually adds to the humor. In fact, the filmmakers here used the humor, a lot of it self-referential, to disarm the MPAA. They already cut out a lot of gore, there's no nudity here, only one (clothed) sex scene and little language. In their place you have car chases, gunfighting, and more inventive kills. There's little machete action here, as part of the way they played the MPAA was having Jason do kills that regular people couldn't imitate. For example, there's folding someone backwards til their spine breaks, the aforementioned heart punch, chopping 3 heads off in one swing of the machete, twisting someone's head off, etc. This way there would be less pushback about possible copycats.
The humor is great here, and the film never lets up on it. There's a moment when the graveyard caretaker sees that Jason is gone and his grave dug up. He knows he'll get into trouble if it's found out, so he just re-covers the grave mumbling to himself. Then he turns directly towards camera and says "Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment." Or there's when a couple (one of them the wife of the director, the other the sleazy bad guy from Ghost) is driving through the woods and sees Jason in front of them holding the iron fence stake from earlier blocking their path. The guy doesn't see him at first and asks his wife why she stopped. "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." So with this film, postmodernism came to slashers a good ten years before Scream.
This is probably my second favorite Friday the 13th film after Part II. It's just a lot of fun. It's got a great original screenplay, and is competently directed. I don't really miss the huge amounts of gore from the prior films, as the humor and atmosphere make up for it. I'd feel comfortable showing this one to a 13 year old, it's that tame. Also, this one's got two or three songs Alice Cooper wrote especially for the film, and that's too cool. I do highly recommend this one. Can't say that about the next one, however....
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
And here's where everything goes to shit. After such a good movie like Jason Lives, they go kind of back to formula for this one, but bring in a telekinetic teenager. (Yes, lame.) If you thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel before, well... The teenagers in this film are for the most part horrible people that you want to see killed unlike the last film. The story here is that Tina accidentally killed her father with telekinesis after he hit her mother when she was younger. Now her fame-seeking manipulative doctor has decided that she needs to go back to the scene to "deal with her grief", but really he wants to bring out more of her abilities by making her an emotional mess. Well, she gets there and accidentally brings up Jason out of the bottom of the lake, and of course he kills the teenagers who are partying next door one by one. And thank god for that, because they are the worst ones in the series. Honestly, only two have redeeming qualities. Even the nerdy guy who writes science fiction stories is a jerk. In a way, this film is a semi-remake of Part IV. You have the family and the partying teens next door, and you want most of those teens to die. Sadly, Part IV was much better. Even the acting, as the acting in this one is some of the worst in the series.
Whereas the last film tried to tone down the gore, sex, language and nudity, all four are back in full force here. (Or at least the filmmakers tried to bring the gore back. More on that later.) There's ample sex, the language is.. okay, there isn't much language, but there is a bit of nudity. However, no one in this film is good enough looking for a nude scene in my opinion. The kills are also not as inventive here. There's another punch through the chest (without the heart this time), and a cool death that's remembered by everyone. That's right, the one with the woman in the sleeping bag being thwacked against a tree! However, most of the deaths here are severely trimmed, due to the MPAA. You see a quick shot of something happening, and you see the after effect. Now, on the DVD you can see what was trimmed, but that's in very bad quality. Sadly, this fact makes a bad movie all the more worse. And Jason's "demise" at the end of the film is probably the worst in the series. It's too unbelievable even for a Jason film. And like a few of the other films, this one takes place near Crystal Lake, but not at the place.
The one thing some people like about this film is that it introduced the most famous Jason. Or rather the guy who played him. Kane Hodder plays Jason in this film and the next three, being the only actor to ever portray Jason more than once. He's actually a stunt guy, which means he's more bulky and better suited to be put through all sorts of painful stuff. I'm actually not a huge fan of his tenure, as he starred in some of the worst entries in the series, and seriously, he's just a big lumbering lug to me. Not much to do there. Although he did do the longest uninterrupted on-screen body burn in history, which is shown towards the end of the film. Now, there is one actor very good at what he does. That's the character of Tina's doctor, Dr. Cruz. He's so hateable, and he can actually act unlike the rest of the cast. I don't think I've hated a character this much in a Friday film, so kudos to him. He even uses Tina's mom as a human shield when confronted with his eminent death by Jason. The director of the film John Carl Buechler hasn't had a great career since the film, mainly doing direct-to-video films. Before this film he directed Troll, which is actually a lot of stupid fun and is mainly known for it's sequel which has nothing to do with Troll.
Absolutely not recommended. For some reason this film did better than the last one did, which led to Part VIII, which we will get to in the coming weeks.
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