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

friday the 13th retrospective: part 2

If you missed them: Retrospective intro, part 1, part3, part 4, part 5, part 6

So what’s worse than an overprotective mother? Her son rising from his lake gave to avenge his mother’s death. Jason doesn’t waste any time starting his rampage. The movie starts off two months after the original. He ties up the loose ends and disposes of Alice.

Fast-forward five years. Paul Holt decides to open up a new camp. Don’t worry it isn’t at Camp Crystal Lake. Jason’s favorite summer spot has now been condemned. So Paul just opens his camp farther down the lake (still within walking distance of Camp Blood). Right away, you notice that there are a few more councilors for Jason to prey upon. This works well for the audience. We know that part two will just be more of the same, but the larger cast adds a mystery to who will die. That’s pretty much where the excitement ends.

The fun POV shots of the killer from the first movie don’t seem as potent. The reason we watched the movie was to see Jason. What did he look like? How old was he? These are the things we wanted to know. We can tell pretty early that he is more man than boy, but we don’t get to see his head for a good chunk of the movie. Then we see it, he’s got a pillowcase over his head. WHAT? Lame, not scary. From there they go back to not showing Jason’s head, but his feet just aren’t scary anymore, we want to see how crazy messed up his face is.

At this point, half of the councilors have left the camp to booze it up. Jason’s pickings are pretty slim now, and he makes quick work of the six left. Paul and his assistant Ginny head back to camp and find the aftermath of Jason’s handiwork. Paul gets beat down pretty good. Then there’s a nice little chase scene Jason vs. Ginny, that leads to Jason’s cabin. Ginny stumbles upon Jason’s shrine to his mother, including her decapitated head and her favorite blue sweater. Putting her child psychology to good use, Ginny puts on Mrs. Voorhees sweater and tricks Jason into thinking she is his mother. Jason isn’t fooled when his sees his mother’s head and blocks Ginny’s fatal blow.  Lucky for Ginny, Paul isn’t dead and comes to distract Jason long enough for Ginny stick Jason in the shoulder with a machete. Paul helps Ginny to her cabin and they think they are out of the woods until Jason makes a surprise appearance, mutilated mug and all.

Ginny wakes up, while she is being carted off to and ambulance. It isn’t clear if the cabin scene was a dream or not. Nether is the fate of Paul. Although some people think he is dead so I don’t give credit here. Jason, if you want me to count it they have to be fatally wounded or dead on screen.

Overall, this doesn’t hold up well to the original. There are a couple of redeeming factors. There is a shot where one of the female characters is at a dresser with her back to the camera. She ducks out of frame momentarily, and reemerges facing the camera. The shot gives off a creepy weird feeling. Another great moment is where we see the dog, Muffin, walk up to Jason’s feet, then the camera cuts to a close up of hot dogs on a grill. Finally, the best part of the movie takes place during the Jason/Ginny chase. She finally gets away from him and hides under a bed. Jason comes in the cabin and starts looking around. A rat scurries under the bed, to give Ginny some unwanted company. This is a great moment of suspense that is one of the best moments the series.

Rating: 4 Bloody Machetes (Out of 5)
Body Bags Needed: 9
Survivor(s): Ginny, maybe Paul, and all the other councilors who were smart enough to go get drunk instead of staying around to have sex.

friday the 13th retrospective: part 1

If you missed them: Retrospective Intro, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

Here it begins, Camp Crystal Lake. Steve Christy thought it would be a good idea to open back up the family camp. What he failed to tell the new help was that back in the late fifties, two councilors were killed there. Also, every time someone starts the camp back up, more people die. So guess what happens now, more people die.

This will go down as one of the greats in the slasher sub-genre. The strength of the moves is its tone. In the beginning, the characters (including good ‘ole Kevin Bacon) give it a carefree tone, but once the killing starts its all business. When horror movies are driven from scare to scare, they tend to ease off of the audience. This Friday never gives you that safe feeling. Even after countless viewings of the movie I always feel as if the killer is in every scene waiting, watching. For the first two-thirds of the movie we only see point of view (POV) shots of the killer. Once the killer is revealed the POV shots can be seen through the victim’s eyes. These shots are what make the climax of this movie so great.

Back to the plot, it seems that the year before the two councilors were killed a young boy named Jason Voorhees drowned. Guess who also had a crazy over protective mother, Jason Voorhees. Pamela Voorhees decided that she would punish anyone at the camp, from that point on. In the end, Alice lops Mrs. Voorhees head off ending the camp terror, hopefully. Not surprising, that’s the only plot point you need to know.

Rating: 5 Bloody Machetes (out of 5)
Body Bags Needed: 10
Survivor: Alice

Friday the 13th Retrospective

Ok, so I’m a closet horror fan. There were many nights in High School where I would get off of work and dash over to Blockbuster. I would grab a couple of old horror films to finish the night. I had a good fill of 80’s horror in those days. Over the years, I have become more and more disappointed with the state of the horror genre. My excitement mostly comes from other countries or from 3D. When it was announced that Friday the 13th was due for a reboot, I pushed up the bridge of my glasses and smiled. Little did I know that Michael Bay was going to give me one of the best birthday presents ever and release it on MY birthday!

To celebrate the return of Jason Voorhees I’m going to re-watch the series and give you a quick refresher of the Friday story. Spoilers are in full, but if you haven’t seen these movies yet, you probably aren’t going to. The rating system will only include these movies. They will be ranked from one to five bloody machetes. So don’t get your panties in a bunch when I give any of these moves the same rating as your beloved indie/cult film.

Part 1, Part 2, part3, part 4, part 5, part 6

Does it matter? Digital vs Film

Earlier this month, Roger Ebert wrote on his blog about his views on digital projectors. Im going to write on his coattails about this.

Recently, the film studios have decided to help fund digital projectors our theaters. This is due to the fact that many more movies are jumping on the 3D bandwagon. So to cash in on their investment the studios have decided to help front the bill.

Before I read Ebert’s blog, I would have told you that digital projectors where a nesssary evil for me to get my 3D fix, but outside of that it was a degression to the format. Why? Because I have a tendency to be an elitist and nostalgic. I felt fine with my view till I read Ebert’s thoughts. I have seen a couple of movies on digital that weren’t 3D, and I could tell a small difference. The titles on the screen were sharper and there was a small “difference” in the picture. I couldn’t tell you why, or what the small difference” was, or if it was something i just wanted to see. All i know is that halfway through the movie I had forgotten about the “diffrence.”

What may be the true loss in digital projectors is the magic. This may be totally cerebral, but there seems to be a magic about a series of pictures being projected through film, onto a screen. Does this really affect my theater expriance. I can’t hear the projector. Can i really see the flicker of the projector? Id like to thinks so, but who knows.

I think what it comes down to is that good movies will still be good in digital and bad movies will stil be bad. My only concern is if older movies will be converted to digital. I recently saw Back to the Future at a local theater that shows older movies, on the weekend. As a kid, I wore out this VHS tape. There was something about seeing it on the big screen for the first time. I cant put it in words, but it was an experience that I had never had with that movie before. The only diffrence was the theater. So, as long as I can crowd into a theater with total strangers and the smell of stale popcorn, I think I’ll be ok.