friday the 13th retrospective: part 8 jason takes manhattan

This is the low point of the series, but I told you that I would watch all these, so here I am. I’m doing this so you don’t have to. That said, here we go!

It’s graduation time. A local group of high school students are planning a trip to Manhattan, The Big Apple. Lucky for us, two of the graduates decide to take a houseboat from Crystal Lake to the spot where the boat is leaving. Again, lucky for us, they drop their anchor to have sex.  Their anchor gets stuck on a large power line that just so happens to have been laid over Jason’s body. So as the boat pulls on the anchor the line breaks and jolts Jason back to his old self. He disposes of them and rides the boat to the same dock where the rest of their classmates will soon be leaving. Jason “hops” on the boat and away we go!

There are a couple of main characters that the “story” revolves around, but who cares. This is another one where you just want Jason to kill all the characters off. There isn’t anything new here. A couple of people make it to Manhattan and Jason chases them there. It ends in the sewers where they catch Jason with a nightly toxic flush. When it’s over he is left there as a boy crying on the ground.

Part 8 doesn’t do it for me. They try to make Jason funny at points, but its not. If you are looking for more Jason kills then you might enjoy it, but if there is one movie you have to skip, this is the one.

Rating: 1 Machete (No, it doesn’t even deserve any blood)
Body Bags Needed: 19
Non-Jason Kills: 2
Survivor(s): Rennie and Sean

friday the 13th retrospective: part 7

In case you missed them: retrospective intro, part 1, Part 2, part3, part 4, part 5, part 6

For anyone who hoped that after the sixth movie they would really try harder to make a decent movie, I’m sorry. Notice I didn’t say good movie, but decent (I’m willing to be realistic).

I’m not really sure what they where thinking at this point. The plot revolves around Tina. She has telekinetic powers (I know, I don’t get it either). Her parents have a cabin at Crystal Lake. As a child, she saw her father hit her mom and was so pissed that she took a boat to the middle of the lake. Her father came after standing on the dock, but this just escalated her anger. While her father was on the dock, her fury unlocked her telekinetic powers, destroying the dock and drowning her father.

Now as a teenager, her doctor takes her back to the cabin to face her fears, but all the doctor wants to do is study her powers. Frustrated, she goes to the lake to use her skill in hopes of bringing back her father. Guess what happens instead? She brings Jason back instead. Again, there are some teenagers in a nearby cabin for Jason to kill, and he does so.

This also marks the first of four times Kane Hodder plays Jason. I’m not a fan of his Jason. People say that he brought personality to the role. But I don’t think that turning his head quickly compared to his slow moving body is much of a personality. All Jason needs to do is look big and beat the crap out of people, period.

Back to the story, Jason has a bazillion fake deaths in this movie and it is more annoying than Tina’s freakouts. So finally, they are back at the lake and Tina summons her father from the dead and he pulls Jason back down with him. The end.

Rating: 1 Bloody Machete
Body Bags Needed: 16
Non-Jason Kills: 1
Survivor(s): Tina and Nick

friday the 13th retrospective: part 6 jason lives

If you missed them: Retrospective Intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

Ok, this one is bad, so lets make it quick. Tommy and his friend from the mental institution go to incinerate Jason’s body to end his madness once and for all. They go to dig him up during a lightning storm. Tommy freaks out, rips a rot iron pole from the fence and stabs Jason’s corpse manically. Guess what happens next, the pole gets struck by lightning multiple times and reanimates Jason.

Then the opening credits start where Jason walks out and spoofs the James Bond opening where he shoots the camera. When did Friday movies spoof other genres? The movie goes down hill from here. People die, they change the lakes name to “Forrest Green,” and a bunch of other worthless things happen.

What they tried to do was for this movie to make fun of itself. There is a couple of times it works, but other times I’d rather pee on my face, seriously. Why would anyone think people wanted this to be a comedy? Case and point, the entire paintball scene defecates on the entire series. Like in part 3, we return to rooting for Jason because you hate the characters.

It ends with Tommy figuring out he must take Jason back to his original resting place. He does by wrapping a bolder with a chain on one end and Jason on the other. I guess Tommy didn’t catch that he has to be dead for it to work because he is quite alive at the end of the movie.

Rating: 1 Bloody Machete
Body Bags Needed: 16
Survivor(s): Tommy, Megan and the camp kids

friday the 13th retrospective: part 5 a new beginning

If you missed them: Retrospective Intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6

WHAT! Another one? I guess they made too much money for Jason to just die off. This Friday starts with a dream sequence. Tommy, the slayer of Jason, goes to his grave and finds two idiots dig up Jason to find that he is not dead. Tommy wakes up, looks to be twenty-ish, and is on his way to halfway house for kids his age. At the house, we meet some kids. The only kid who really matters is the fat annoying kid who gets killed by another resident.

We notice quickly that this isn’t the same Jason we’ve loved and hated. The Jason look-alike has different markings on his mask. Instead of the red triangle on the forehead there are two blue marks over the cheekbones. Tommy does have some visions of Jason in his mask as a reminder. Tommy hasn’t handled life well post Crystal Lake. He isn’t the fun talkative boy from the forth movie; he only has 15-20 lines in the whole movie and a short fuse too. He whips out some type of martial arts a couple times, which makes me wonder. Why would anyone let a kid with anger issues take karate lessons? Just sayin’.

Many people rag on this Friday. There are several reasons I enjoyed this one. First of all, they bring back the Jason POV shots in the woods, and an overall go since of suspense. They learned their lesson from the previous outing and realized that the “gotcha” scares work better if there is a little suspense to go with them. The other reason is that the first time I saw part 5 I was convinced that Tommy was the new Jason. So much that the second time I watched it, I thought that Tommy was Jason. I remember when Jason was in the barn with Tommy, and I still thought something was going to happen where Tommy was Jason. The writer thought it would be better for it to be a random EMS worker who’s son was killed at the beginning of the movie. Oh don’t forget that fat kid said that he didn’t have any family. If he only knew he had a stalker for a father, things would have been better.

There were three things that they could have done to help the series out. One, make Tommy a Jason 2.0. That’s what everyone wanted anyway. Two, make the kid who killed the fat kid Jason for the day. It wouldn’t have been good but it would have at least made more since than the actual killer. Three, not make the sixth movie . . .

Rating: 3 Bloody Machetes
Body Bags Needed: 18
Non-Jason Kills: 18
Survivor(s): Tommy, Pam and Reggie

friday the 13 retrospective: part 4 the final chapter

If you missed them: Retrospective Intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, part 6

All right, here we have it, the final Friday. After a too long intro recapping the previous movies, we pick up where the third movie ends. Jason’s “dead” body is taken to a hospital morgue. Of course he isn’t dead, so he kills a couple of people and gets back to stalking his woods. We next meet the Jarvis family, Mrs. Jarvis, Trish and Tommy, who own a house in the woods near Crystal Lake. Tommy, played by a young Cory Feldman enjoys making masks of scary creatures. The house across the street is being rented by a group of teenagers for the weekend. They are a typical teen line up, ready to be hacked and slashed. Rounding out the cast of the teens is everyone’s favorite “insecure guy,” Crispin Glover. And you thought just having a Corey was great.

The odd thing about this Friday is that it seemed like they need more bodies to kill, so they threw in three more random characters. Normally, this would seem like a bad idea. But here they actually pulled the story together. The extra characters are the two twins and Rob. The twins are bad characters, but the plot point were one tries to steel a boy from the main group movies the story along nicely. Rob seeks revenge for the death of his sister Sandra, who died in the second movie. It sounds like a lame throw in, but his scenes develop Tommy and Trish’s characters nicely. The movies strongest point is Tommy and Trish. I really liked these two people, and the movie is stronger for it.

The story moves along as expected. Jason picks off each person one by one. They really brought back the suspense and gore for the final Friday. This time around they really gave us what we wanted. A contributing factor to this is you never feel safe. When one person leaves the pack you feel something bad is going to happen.

Eventually, only Tommy, Trish and Jason are left. In a moment of sheer brilliance, Tommy shaves his head to look like Jason’s when he jumped out of the lake. Tommy barely saves Trish from Jason’s wrath. After a swing and a miss by Trish, Tommy sinks the machete blade into Jason’s skull. Jason falls on the machete further dividing his brain. The siblings hug in relief. Then Tommy sees a twitch in Jason’s finger. Tommy snatches the machete and manically hacks at Jason’s dead body.

There are a few things to note in this Friday. One, here is also a strange amount of things getting thrown through windows. Two, it has the most horrific scene, not just for the Friday series, but in all movies that have been released and will ever be released. That scene is Crispin Glover’s dance scene, SCARY!

Rating: 5 Bloody Machetes
Body Bags Needed: 13
Survivor(s): Trish and Tommy

friday the 13th retrospective: part 3

If you missed them: Retrospective intro, part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5, part 6

After two successful movies, the Friday series got a bump in the budget. What better way to blow the budget than to move Jason into the third dimension? Answer: None, in theory.

The story takes place right after the second movie. We have a group of teens and two pot-smoking adults heading up to a cabin. Our main character is Chris. We soon find out she wants to go to the lakeside cabin because she was attacked there two years prior. Remember, that was only three years after the events of the original Friday. I’ll give you two guesses who the attacker was.

That’s where the story stops being interesting. The characters are pretty weak. I found that I wanted the characters to die just so we wouldn’t have to suffer through scenes with them in it. The acting isn’t that bad, but the characters feel like cardboard. Even the character development they had was where the true horror came out. We find out Chris’ back-story all in one scene. She hints that things had happened to her before she dumps her sob story on us, but it was annoying every time. I’m not trying to over analyze the movie, it’s just that bad. It probably would have been better if they cut it out all together. I wont even comment on the story of the fat, curly haired kid. No one went to see the movie for character development. So why bother? There are a million other reasons to get six people to go to a cabin near a serial killers stomping ground.

The movie is just blah. It’s not scary or fun, just bad. Unfortunately, it wasn’t bad enough to make it good. They also seem to forget how awesome the POV shots from Jason’s eyes where. It would have been great in 3D too. Have the window or foliage in the foreground and the prey in back. No instead we get yo-yo’s dropped on us.

There has to be something good? What was the best part of the third Firday? What do you need to know from this chapter? Jason gets his mask. That’s it.

Rating: 2 Bloody Machetes
Body Bags Needed: 12
Survivor(s): Chris