New Friday the 13th Rocks the Box Office

A while back, the makers of the new Friday the 13th re-boot said they had a sequel green-lit, unless the movie tanked. To date, the movie has taken in more than $45 million domestically, and compared to its $19 million production budget, it is safe to say it is a success. Whether you like the movie or not, I contend this is good news for horror films in general. Hollywood bases production on past returns, and a successful Friday the 13th can only encourage them to make more genre films.

Friday the 13th (2009)

Last Friday night, I was at the sold-out 11:00 o’clock showing of the new Friday the 13th. Through a complicated process, I was with a good friend who hates horror movies, and having watched all eleven prior movies in two weeks left me babbling F13 trivia like an idiot, but my friend is good natured.

Any time you remake a movie with legions of fans, there are going to be some people you can’t please. If you just redo the exact same movie, you get panned for being unoriginal; if you re-imagine it, you take flack for straying too far from what the fans love. I thought Marcus Nispel and the rest of the people behind this did a good job of presenting something new while staying true to the spirit of the original movies.

The movie condenses the first three films of the series into one. A prologue tells what happened to Jason’s mother, the catalyst for his actions from the first one, and through the first half of the movie, he wears the sack on his head, a la Part 2. There are also two groups of victims. The first are campers who get attacked by Jason when they wander onto his territory. The second are a group of college kids staying at a rich kid’s lake house, and Clay (Jared Padalecki), whose sister was in the first group, and who is now trying to find her, or at least what happened to her. If there is one great flaw, it is there are too many victims for a 97 minute movie. You don’t really have a lot of time to get to know them before Jason does, and that hurts the impact of the movie somewhat. An exception is the rich kid (Travis van Winkle), who is a total asshole, which makes your anticipation of his eventual demise pretty sweet.

Nispel also directed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, and his Friday the 13th has a very similar tone, which may be off-putting to some. Here Jason is much smarter and faster than in previous films, setting traps for his victims, using tools more effectively, and killing just those who encroach on his territory. Kane Hodder does not return as Jason, to the disappointment of me and many others, but Derek Mears does a good job. Jason has also dropped his supernatural aspects, and is portrayed her as just a man, albeit a very effective killer and outdoorsman. Padelecki makes a likeable protagonist, and most of the rest of the cast does what they can with somewhat underwritten roles.

There are a lot of little details filled in on background shots if you look for them (and care). When Padelecki and one of the young ladies goes down Jason’s tunnel, you can see behind them a wheelchair, which represents one of the victims from Part 2. I mentioned earlier Jason’s uncanny skill with killing devices which starts in Part 3, and here he makes a difficult shot with an arrow to skewer one of the kids. If you look closely, this is explained when the campers go through his house, and you see archery trophies.

A neat trick was presenting us with two possible Final Girls (since the movie is an amalgam of several installments). I picked the wrong Final Girl, so it was a slight shock when she didn’t make it. The ending was a little too predictable, but not enough to spoil things.

As I mentioned, the show was packed, and it was a very animated crowd, jumping and screaming during scare sequences, so it seemed to be effective. I was very surprised when my non-horror-watching friend told me how much he enjoyed it. This is a definite thumbs-up from me, probably a 7.5/10 (and I’m a hard grader).

One last aside: I’ve read a lot of interviews with cast members in genre magazines like Fangoria and Rue Morgue, and I was impressed they talked about how much they liked this sort of film (especially Padalecki). That;s a refreshing change from the early films, which seem to have embarrassed the actors who appeared in them.
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Jason X

A bittersweet day, as we reach the end of our journey through eleven Friday the 13th DVDs. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry…

If you are a traditional fan of the series, you might prepare to be shocked Although Jason X (often referred to as Jason Goes to Space) is the most maligned installment in the franchise, the one that everybody hates, it is my favorite Jason Voorhees movie. Why is this? Maybe it’s because of the visual gags and humor in the script or the incongruity of having such an old-school horror icon in a sci-fi setting. Maybe it’s Lexa Doig. I’m not saying having Lexa Doig in a movie automatically makes it a good movie, but it does earn it some points.

In the near future, Jason has been captured, but the government doesn’t know what to do with him. They’ve executed him by various means, but he just keeps regenerating and coming back. A scientist (Doig) has come up with a plan to place him in cryogenic stasis until such time as they can figure out how to exterminate him. At the last minute, a government scientist (played wonderfully in a cameo by David Cronenburg) steps in to take Jason so the military can do research on him. Doig protests to no avail.

You know this isn’t going to work out well.

And it does. Jason breaks free and slaughters Cronenburg and the soldiers. Doig manages to lure him into the freezing chamber, but just before he freezes, Jason manages to rupture the chamber, and Doig freezes with him. I am sad at this.

450 years in the future (the movie can never keep straight how long it has been, so it is best not to pay any attention to the timeline) a group of students on a field trip discover the cryogenic facility. It seems the earth is now unliveable, and visitors just come to plunder things. They discover Jason and Lexa, and take them back to their ship. Noticing how hot she is, they revive Lexa, but aren’t stupid enough to do so with Jason. No need, he wakes up all on his own, and before you can blink, the body count is rising (Jason kills more people in this movie than in any other). The deaths are fairly imaginative, a head dunked in liquid nitrogen, a soldier impaled on a giant screw in order to set up a pun, and a lot of traumatic amputation.

Things look grim for the future folks, when one of the geeks modifies his nipple-less android (Lisa Ryder) into a fighting machine(Geeky nit-pick: He says he’s given her an “upload”, but he means an “upgrade”). She kicks Jason’s ass, and leaves him dead and in pieces on a table. Well, that’s that.

Except the table Jason lies on is the medical table, where they use nanobots to rebuild tissue. Uh-oh. The nanos do their stuff, and Jason is reborn. Where they were short tissue, they used metal from the ship, giving us a sort of Mecha-Jason, even more deadly and hard to kill. After a totally illogical explosive decompression scene that lasts for a couple of minutes (it’s explosive decompression, it would be over in a flash, and if not, it wouldn’t be powerful enough to send people flying through the air), everyone decides to just leave him.

The best part of the movie is a scene set in a virtual reality simulator much like the Enterprise’s holodeck. To distract Jason, Doig programs a replica of 20th century Crystal Lake, complete with giggling, topless coeds asking Jason to have premarital sex (You know Wesley Crusher did shit like that all the time). This causes him to go wild trying to kill girls who aren’t even there.

So anyway, that’s it for the old Jason movies. Barring family complication, I should have a review of the new Friday the 13th up by early next week.
Ki-ki-ki! Ma-ma-ma!

Freddy vs. Jason

There are decisions we have to make in life that define us. Which school to attend, who to marry, when to start a family…important things that have long-lasting consequences. Here we have one of those decisions: Should the next movie watched and reviewed in the Friday the 13th series be the next one filmed (Jason X) or the next in the chronological storyline (Freddy Vs. Jason)? I decided to go with Freddy Vs. Jason, for reasons which will be revealed in the Jason X review.

Before getting to the movie itself, a few words about movie reviewers themselves. When this movie came out, it received a lot of negative reviews from writers who claimed it was just a gorefest, nothing more than two movie monsters fighting. The name of the movie is Freddy Vs. Jason, what the hell did you expect? To watch this movie and then complain it wasn’t as deep as Proust is ignorant. Movies should be reviewed for what they are supposed to be, not what you think all movies should be. Legendary film reviewer Pauline Kael (probably the most famous in her field of all time) freely admitted she hated science fiction and horror movies, yet she kept on reviewing them. If you know you hate something in advance, don’t go see it, and a title like Freddy Vs. Jason should be a good tip-off of what to expect.

As those of you who have been following along know, at the end of the events in Jason Goes To Hell, Jason was in hell. Again, notice the title. Also temporarily out of the picture is New Line’s own slasher, Freddy Krueger. Freddy’s still around, but he derives his power from being feared by children, and all of the kids in Springwood who remember him have been institutionalized and drugged to prevent dreaming. His solution? Resurrect Jason, who will instill fear in the minds of Springwood kids, some of which will be blamed on Freddy, and he will be powerful again.

So Freddy pulls Jason up out of hell and sends him to Springwood, where he begins to slice and dice the locals, most noticeably at a cornfield rave. The plan works, and soon Freddy is back to full strength. His new problem is Jason is not inclined to step aside and leave the slaughterin’ to Freddy. To most people, there would be plenty of potential teen victims to go around, but Freddy doesn’t want to share, and soon Freddy is in Jason’s dream world, kicking his ass. He does this by exploiting Jason’s fear of water, a fact that overlooks the little detail that Jason has spent half his frickin’ time in the previous nine films underwater without being bothered by it. I suppose they have to give Jason a weakness, since Freddy’s whole act is based around exploiting people’s fears.

A few survivors of the ongoing massacre realize what’s going on, and come up with a plan: They’ll transport a drugged Jason back to his home base of Crystal Lake, pull Freddy out of the dream world into reality the same way it’s done in every other Freddy movie, wake Jason up, and let them battle to the death. This more or less works. If you want to know who wins, watch the movie.

A few things of note:

New Line wanted to make this movie as far back as 1987, but had problems, first with securing the rights from Paramount, then with coming up with a workable script.

Because director Ronnie Yu wanted a taller actor to play Jason, or because they thought Kane Hodder would be in some way difficult (take your pick, both stories have been published), Freddy vs. Jason uses Ken Kirzinger as Jason instead of Hodder. Kirzinger does a good job, but count me as one of those who thinks Kane Hodder is the definitive Jason Voorhees. Hodder’s great comment on the casting change: “I guess they wanted Jason to be a skinny bitch this time.”

When you watch a series like this in sequence, you notice an interesting trend in casting. In the early slasher films in the 80s, the cast was generally unknown actors who would compile few credits after their appearance in a genre film. Part of the fun of watching them was catching a to-be-famous actor like Kevin Bacon or Johnny Depp paying the bills in one of these movies. It was considered bad for your career to make a slasher film in 1980, so name stars tended to avoid them. In the post-Scream era, these movies have a certain “cool” cachet, and attract a cast of more promising young actors. This one includes Monica Keena and the criminally underutilized Katherine Isabelle (the Ginger Snaps series). Isabelle is an actress who deserves to be seen in many roles, better than the one she got here.

I thought the biggest problem in integrating the two series was the marked difference in tone between the two. The Friday the 13th series is mostly a grim slasher series, while the Nightmare on Elm Street series was just as gory but with almost cartoonish violence. I think they mostly succeeded here, but it seems that people who are more Friday the 13th fans like myself feel the movie is too much of a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, while fans of the other series feel exactly the opposite. I dunno, maybe that means it worked.

Tomorrow: The big finish!
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Friday the 13th Part IX: Jason Goes To Hell

By the time the eighth Friday the 13th movie had been released, Paramount believed they were in a cycle of diminishing returns, and decided not to proceed further with the series. Instead New Line acquired from them the rights to make subsequent Friday the 13ths. New Line’s master plan was to eventually pair Jason Voorhees with New Line’s own horror icon, Freddy Krueger. A variety of difficulties, mostly revolving around the script, prevented this from happening for more than ten years. But in the meantime, New Line decided to proceed with a movie that would set up the eventual showdown, 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell, the ninth installment in the series.

It had become traditional to begin these movies with Jason right where we left him at the end of the previous one, and come up with a plot device to revive him. Unfortunately, at the end of Jason Takes Manhattan, he was a dead little boy covered in sewage, which presented some real obstacles. So they did the right thing: They ignored it. (There is supposedly a comic book that bridges the gap between the two films, but I haven’t seen it.)

We open with a young woman at a cabin in the woods. She takes a shower, and we know the hang-up Jason has about boobies. Jason attacks and she runs for her life – at which point lights come on, and soldiers come from everywhere (even rappelling out of trees for no good reason) and start shooting Jason repeatedly. It was all a trap. They blow Jason into little pieces, and the series finally comes to an end. Fantastically enough, this movie was less than eight minutes long, so it’s perfect for those with short attention spans.

But wait! It continues. The soldiers carry the Jason chunks to the morgue for an autopsy. During the autopsy, the coroner stares at Jason’s barbequed heart. Mmmm tasty, he thinks, and before you can say WTF, he is eating the heart. This apparently allows Jason to jump into his body, and our hero has acquired a brand new supernatural ability. The coroner, by the way, is black, so Jason is now a brother. This is justice, when you consider how many African-Americans have been dispatched by the original in the course of the series. The new Jason goes on a, you guessed it, killing spree, making his way to Crystal Lake.

Apparently Jason still has a sister living in the old hometown, and he needs her. Although he can jump into new bodies, the new bodies wear out fast. Only by jumping into the body of another Voorhees can he be truly reborn. The flipside is only a Voorhees can truly kill him. There is a bounty hunter hanging around to explain these things, fortunately. Oh yeah, when Jason is in another body, mirrors reveal who he really is, which makes it the reverse of vampires, I suppose.

Anyway, Jason needs to get into the body of his sister (played by Erin Gray, now estranged from Buck Rogers), her daughter, or granddaughter. Much carnage ensues.

One of the notable things about the movie for horror fans is the number of in-jokes related to other horror movies can be seen. A character looks through the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies, in the cellar we see the crate from Creepshow, and most famously, at the end, Jason’s mask is swept underground by the razor-bladed glove of Freddy Krueger.

The biggest problem with the movie is how little we actually see Jason himself, since he is busy jumpng from one body to another. This is a shame, since Kane Hodder has nailed the character, he should be used much more.

And just for trivia’s sake, Jason Goes To Hell was very profitable, and Paramount almost immediately regretted their decision to let the franchise go.
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Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

By the time we reached the eighth installment of the franchise, the producers were faced with steadily declining box office (although the series was still profitable) and running out of ideas about what to do with the series. The formula of campers getting murdered in the woods seemed exhausted. So, the producers thought, why not send the big guy to the big city? Thus Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

When last we saw our hero, he was once again resting comfortably at the bottom of Crystal Lake. His sleep is disturbed when the anchor of a boat being used by two teens to make out (what were the chances?) snags an underwater power cable. This is a very fragile cable, and one whose insulation is more conductive than the cable itself, surprisingly. The anchor tears into the cable, the electricity is transferred to the slumbering Jason (we’ve already established that electricity revivifies him, strengthening the idea he is the modern Frankenstein’s Monster), he wakes up, kills the kids, and relaxes while he drifts with the currents.

The boat finally reaches ground at a dock where the local high school is about to go on a cruise. Seeing the usual collection of school kids (the local high school must have a higher mortality rate than Sunnydale), Jason stows away and starts to pick the kids and crew off in his usual fashion. Included on the boat are a young Kelly Hu, who would have put up more of a fight if she had her adamantium claws,* and Jason’s typical nemesis, a girl with psychic powers, although this girl’s power doesn’t really seem to be useful or relevant.

After most everyone on board is killed, the survivors, including Jason of course, reach New York City. Just how a boat can sail from Crystal Lake to New York is never explained. There, Jason runs into street gangs, the indifference of New Yorkers, and the lights of Time Square. He meets his end this time in the sewer, in the most bewildering climax to any of the films. Sewage washed over him which…reverts him to a child? WTF? I suppose he could have been taken out a long time ago if someone had thrown a full chamber pot at him.

Although the subtitle is Jason Takes Manhattan, most of the action actually takes place on the boat, which is a good thing, because those sequences are much stronger than the ones after he reaches the city.

The best thing about this one, in my opinion, is Kane Hodder really nails his portrayal of Jason Voorhees. It’s here where he starts the performances that have made him the definitive Jason. Faced with having to bring a character to life which wears an expressionless mask, Hodder projects menace by his pattern of deep breaths and the sudden, sharp motions of his head. For an example of how hard this is, see the Halloween series, where Michael Myers never really overcomes the limitations of his mask.

As a trivial note, the man Hodder throws into the mirror in the diner scene is played by Ken Kirzinger, who would take Hodder’s place (amid great controversy) in Freddy Vs. Jason.



*This is an X-Men 2 reference.

Friday The 13th, Part VII: The New Blood

For many, many years, fans of the laconic Jason Voorhees yearned for the day when he would square off against another horror icon, Freddie Krueger. What a lot of people forget is that he had already fought a big name in horror years before, when he came up against Carrie. Well, okay, she wasn’t called Carrie, but that’s basically who Tina from Part VII really is.

When Tina was a young girl, she and her parents went on a vacation to Crystal Lake, probably taking advantage of the cheap rates (as the franchise will move away from Crystal Lake in the next installment, this may be the last time I can use that joke, so I’m milking it for all it is worth). Tina’s bad-tempered dad gets into an argument with Mom, and Tina flees into a boat in the middle of the lake. Dad comes out to the pier to get Tina to come back to shore, when she kills him by pulling the pier down around him. With her freakin’ mind.

You know she’s gonna have issues.

Years later, Tina is nineteen and under psychiatric care. Her doctor brings Tina and her mother to Crystal Lake to relive the incident. They think he’s doing this to help her, but the doc just wants to prove Tina is telekinetic so he can write a book. Bad doctor! I hope he gets what’s coming to him.

At the cabin next door, some kids Tina’s age are throwing a birthday party for a friend, so there are some extra victims people for Tina to pal around with. Meanwhile, Jason is still at the bottom of the lake where we left him last time, enjoying the peace and quiet. Until…

Tina senses a presence in the lake, thinks it’s her dad, and uses her power to raise him. It turns out to be Jason, and Tina is officially the Tommy “my stupidity got everyone killed” Jarvis of this movie. Jason predictably goes amok, and soon the party next door is getting less crowded. The evil psychiatrist does get his.

Eventually, we have the showdown, as Carrie Tina and Jason face off. It’s a pretty decent fight, until Tina cheats and raises ol’ Dad out of the lake. Dad grabs Jason and pulls him back to the bottom of the lake. I couldn’t understand why they never retrieved dad’s body after he drowned, but maybe they were Protestants.

Two key things about Part VII:

Although this installment is generally disappointing, it is the first to feature stuntman Kane Hodder as Jason. He will remain in the role for the next three movies, and to most Friday the 13th fans, remains the definitive Jason.

Every Friday the 13th movie made in the 80s had trouble with the MPAA over violence and gore, and they were all forced to make cuts. Part VII suffered more than any of the others, and was cut to the point of being bloodless. If your Sunday-School teacher granny ever wants to watch one with you, this is the one to choose.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

The sixth installment of the series marks an important change in the Jason mythology. Starting with this one, no longer would there be any pretense that Jason Voorhees was just a masked psycho. From here on, he is clearly a supernatural creature, a resurrected, unkillable zombie. This may be the reason that some of my favorites in the series come from here on out.

Seeing gruesome murders in Part IV sent Tommy Jarvis to a series of mental institutions, but apparently, seeing another set of killings in Part V canceled that out, and he’s released and cured at the start of VI. Based on the timeline of the movies, Jason has been dead and buried for about ten years, so the smart money would say to let him lie. But Tommy decides the best thing to do would be to dig him up and burn the body. There’s no logical reason for this, but maybe Tommy had been smoking peyote. That shit will fuck you up. Any way, he gets Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter to go with him to the cemetery to do the deed. However, lightning strikes the metal post Tommy has used to impale Jason, and this wakes him. He kills Horshack, and departs to pick up where he left off.

Tommy has well and truly fucked up.

Tommy makes his way to Crystal Lake (which has been re-named Forest Green, so the fifty or so murders have finally started to catch up with real estate prices) to warn them of the danger. No one will believe him, of course.

Meanwhile, back at Crystal Lake Forest Green, it’s time for summer camp (surprise!). We see a truly amazing thing: Kids arriving for camp. Although summer camping is the recurrent theme in these movies, this is the first time we actually see kids attending camp. A lot of deaths occur, which are all Tommy’s fault when you think about it, before Tommy lures Jason out to the lake, and drowns him, leaving him chained to the bottom of the lake, where he was when the series started. Tommy has now survived his third Friday the 13th movie, and will retire.

Of special note to me is one of those things I find funny (there is an increase in humor in this installment, which will remain from this point on) but no one else does. Among the victims are a group of executives in the woods for a bonding paint ball game. Jason slaughters them, but when he faces the last of the group, the paint-baller shoots him – with his paint ball gun. Jason does his classic reel back motion when he gets shot, then slowly lowers his head and looks at the paint splatter on his chest. This cracks me up, for some reason.
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Friday the 13th News

We're still almost a week away from the new Friday the 13th movie, but according to internet reports, the movie is generating such positive feedback, another F13 movie has been greenlit, for release in late summer 2010. If this is so, the movie would be the...13th in the series.
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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

I’ve gotten behind on the Friday the 13ths, and I wanted to be finished before next Friday the 13th (obviously). So we move on to the fourth installment, entitled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which as the title indicates was the last in the series. Ha ha! There are actually seven more to go, counting Freddie vs. Jason (and I do). At the end of the previous movie, Jason was dead, so this starts with his body being taken to the local morgue, where he gets better, kills a couple of people, and hoofs it back home, although his injuries in the previous installment have caused him to revert to 2-D. Meanwhile, a group of young people, one of whom is played in an early appearance by Crispin Glover, has booked a house for a party. Once again, I hope they got a deal on that, all things considered. The house next door is occupied by Mrs. Jarvis, and her kids Trish and Tommy (Corey Feldman, in his child actor days).

The kids are happy to see the party-goers move in, Trish to have someone her age to talk to, and Tommy because he gets to spy on one of the girls getting undressed. (Tommy celebrates this by jumping and slamming his body into the mattress, which is one of the oddest and most painful-seeming masturbation techniques in history) Soon things are proceeding in a familiar fashion, the girls responding to the nearby lake by getting naked and swimming, Jason by indiscriminate killing.

The increasing body count takes its toll, and we are quickly down to just Trish and Tommy. Jason is getting ready to deal with Trish when Tommy shaves his head, except for some long tufts, and confronts him. Jason can handle being shot, stabbed, electrocuted and drowned, but the sight of a poorly shorn Corey Feldman stops him dead in his tracks, as it would anybody. Trish and Tommy use the surprise to get the drop on Jason, and Tommy beats him to death maniacally. And he’ll stay dead an extra long time, but more on that in the next installment.

Incidentally, when the movie was first released, no one believed it would be the last one, and the common consensus was Tommy would be so broken by the ordeal, he would become the new killer. That didn’t happen, and Corey Feldman didn’t end up taking the place of Kane Hodder down the road.

Friday The 13th, Part 3-D

Ahhhh, the 80s. The last time before now when 3-D came into vogue and the third installment of every franchise was made in good ole headache-inducing anaglyphic 3-D. In 1982, it was Jason Voorhees’ turn. This adds an extra layer of comedy to watching it in standard presentation, as characters go to great lengths to poke things at the camera lens.

Apparently, although Jason was dead at the end of Part II, he got better, since he is back, as we see in an early scene where he attacks the mom-and-pop owners of a small store. Meanwhile back at Crystal Lake, a group of friends have gathered for a weekend because one of the group, Chris, was attacked by a mysterious man in the woods two years earlier. They bring her back either to confront her fears or maybe just to fuck with her. Included in the group is a total loser named Shelley, who likes playing jokes and generally annoys the hell out of everybody. It’s a mystery why they would let him tag along, but as we will see, he has a greater purpose than the rest.

First, Shelley and Vera go into town, where they have an altercation with the smallest and most gender and ethnically diverse biker gang in history (black guy, black girl, white guy). The gang follows them back to the camp to wreak some fairly lame mayhem, and to up the body count. But they don’t get the chance to get even with Shelley, who assumes his important place in the Friday the 13th pantheon when he is killed in the woods by Jason, who takes his…hockey mask. That’s right, this is the part where the iconic image of the hockey-mask wearing killer first appears.

Blood and body parts fly, and the bikers and campers are eliminated one by one, until the filmmakers steal the ending of the first movie and Jason goes to his final rest. Or…..does he?

We not only get the hockey mask for the first time in this episode, but Jason is beginning to evolve towards the supernatural. He has more strength than a normal human (as seen in the scene where he crushes a guys head until his eyeball pops out (for a 3-D effect). He also has the power of being instantly adept with all forms of weapons, including knife throwing and firing a speargun. Although it’s doubtful that Jason has had much opportunity to do any deep-sea diving, he is able to fire a speargun across the lake right through a girl’s eye. This movie is really hard on the eyes. {rim-shot}

Nothing in Part III will particularly surprise use, but if you like slasher films, it’s certainly good enough. Supposedly, it’s about to be re-issued in 3-D, which I will have to check out.

Friday The 13th, Part II

The first Friday the 13th film was a big success, and therefore, the filmmakers were eager to make a sequel. Their first big problem was coming up with a way to continue the story, since we last saw the killer (Mrs. Voorhees) being decapitated at the end of the previous flick. To take up the slack, they decided to make the villain Jason himself, which proved to be a lucky choice, since he would grow to be an iconic horror movie character.

The movie opens with the first movie’s Final Girl living in a city/town…somewhere. You can assume it’s near Crystal Lake, since Jason, making a rare trip to town and away from the lake, shows up to kill her. Nice to see him out and about, he won’t take in the bright lights again until Part VIII.

Jump forward five years, and Crystal Lake is being re-opened as a training school for camp counselors. (They train people for that?) I would imagine the new owner got a deal on the real estate. In short order, the counselor-wannabes are being stalked by Jason, who still has issues over watching Mom’s head go flying. Mayhem ensues, the body-count rises, and a new Final Girl turns the tables on Jason by pretending to be his mother.

One of the interesting things about the series is the evolution of the Jason character. By the end of the series, he will be an unkillable supernatural creature, able to heal from any wound. (He can also teleport, but that seems to be more from a laissez-faire attitude to continuity than any real talent). Here he is just an ordinary human being, albeit one with a penchant for skewering people with sharp objects.

Although Jason becomes the series’ continuing character, he does not yet have his signature hockey mask. He’ll get it in Part III.

Part II establishes one of the physical laws of the Jason universe: When a young girl is alone late at night near a dark lake, she will strip naked and go for a swim. This does not appear to be true in our version of reality.

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Friday the 13th

About every five years or so, I go back and watch the Friday the 13th movies in order. The sometimes good, sometimes kitschy series was part of my childhood, and I get a kick out of re-watching them. The five year gap is just enough for me to forget which ones are bad so I won’t skip them. I have started the cycle anew, so over the next couple of weeks, I hope to go through all eleven movies in order, which should be enough to convince me if you have sex, a maniac will split your skull with a machete.

Before I start with this dumb idea, I’d recommend to you the site http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/ if you want to learn more about the series. It’s pretty comprehensive.

When Halloween came out in 1978, it broke box office records for an independent film, raking in the dough after costing little to produce. The motion picture industry is nothing if not imitative, and other producers figured the formula was (Holiday name) + (Mad Slasher) = $$$$. So, with the only truly sinister holiday name already taken, Sean Cunningham chose Friday the 13th for his 1980 release. You don’t exactly need a complicated chart to diagram the plot: Some teenager camp counselors at Camp Crystal Lake are picked off one at a time, until Final Girl finally turns the tables at the end.

A few things strike you on re-watching the movie. First off, it is very ordinary. The acting is fairly bland (the only notable cast member was a young Kevin Bacon, but he has little to do in the film but die) and the murders are not very dramatic. If you didn’t know how it would end, you would think you were watching a whodunit, but of course the murderer turns out to be someone you haven’t seen until she shows up at the end to kill Final Girl. And for those of us who think of the Friday the 13th movies as being a hockey-mask wearing Jason Voorhees wreaking carnage, he won’t really show up until Part II (and the mask won’t be in place until Part III).

There is one thing in the film that works very well: The famous scene where a decomposed Jason comes out of the water to grab Final Girl (in a dream). I saw the movie when it first came out in the theater, and I can tell you I, and everyone else there, jumped out of my skin when it happened. I remember my date left fingernail marks in my arm. Even watching it at home in 2009 and knowing what was going to happen, I flinched. Maybe it was the effectiveness of that scene which enabled the producers to expand a ho-hum feature into a long-running series.

A couple of trivia notes:
Academy Award winner sally Field auditioned for the Final Girl role. She didn’t get it.

Betsy Palmer, who played Mrs. Voorhees, didn’t want to be in the film (she called it a “piece of shit”), but she was broke and needed to buy a car. She got $10,000 for the ten days she worked on the movie.