In short: Jason X (2001)

In the near future – and an undisclosed number of teen-murdering adventures after the last film - the authorities have caught up with good old Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder), yet still can’t manage to kill him. Their final resort is to have a team of scientists around one Rowan (Lexa Doig) freeze him cryogenically. Thanks to the usual super weapon shenanigans things don’t quite go as planned, and Rowan ends up badly wounded and just as frozen as Jason.

450 years later, the archaeological expedition of Professor Lowe (Jonathan Potts) finds the two and brings them on board  their space ship. Thanks to awesome plot-relevant characters only nanobot technology nobody will use on most of Jason’s other victims, Rowan is on her feet again soon after. Of course, Jason quickly follows suite – though he doesn’t need the nanobots - and has his work cut out for him. The spaceship, after all, contains a bunch of horny students, and only the crap space marines of Sergeant Brodski (Peter Mensah), and one android (Lisa Ryder) in a very anime-inspired relationship with her maker are standing between him and his favourite hobby. The future looks bright.

I’m the first one to admit that Jason V.’s detour into the realm of crap SF horror as directed by James Isaac is an outing of dubious quality, but unlike the last two films in the series it is at once thoroughly entertaining in its own brain-dead manner and does actually contain Jason Voorhees, which clearly gives it a leg up on its predecessors.

While this won’t be everybody’s thing, I really enjoy how Todd Farmer’s script seems to grow increasingly desperate to actually get up to length the longer the film goes on. So, after going through the expected Aliens motions (and truly, is there something more joyous than films ripping off the Cameron movie without ever getting even to a fraction of the impact of the film they’re trying to rip off?), if ones broken up by moments of idiotic comedy (the whole business about comic relief guy and his arm, or the sexual proclivities of Lowe is particularly embarrassing and so unfunny I found myself laughing at it quite a bit), Jason X soon arrives at androids reprogrammed to fight in latex and leather, Jason turning into a last minute cyborg the film’s titles honestly dub “Uber Jason”, and last but not least Jason’s adventures with holodeck technology.

It’s probably not a script that’ll get much praise in film studies courses, but watching this, I found myself giggling and cringing at every idiotic one-liner, nodding happily at various gory deaths, shaking my head at the film’s attempts to get another plot twist out of what we can only call SPACE SCIENCE(!), marvelling at an honest to gosh David Cronenberg cameo, and having what I believe is called a good time among earthlings. Or I have watched so many Friday the 13th films in so short a time I’ve now arrived at Slasher Sequel Stockholm Syndrome, but hey, it’s the last Jason outing for me for now (unless I’ll do Jason’s meet-up with Freddy Krueger, a film I’ve grown to love over the years later in this act of cinematic masochism).

Next up on my journey into slasher hell, Halloween IV.

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Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

Warning: spoilers are inevitable with this one

Clearly, new Friday the 13th owners New Line Cinema did want to forget about the eighth film as much as anyone else who watched it; this film’s beginning doesn’t fit the ending of any of the other movies either, though, so make of Friday the 13th continuity what you want. I for my part will try not to have too many sleepless nights about it. So Jason (Kane Hodder) is undead and well, and killing people around Crystal Lake, at least until, right in the film’s very first sequence, a minor army of FBI people sets an oh so clever trap and blasts our hero into quite a lot of pieces.

This time, that should truly be that, yet the script writing gods – or rather Dean Lorey and Jay Huguely whom nobody will actually mistake for the gods of scriptwriting – decide that the coroner responsible for the autopsy develops a sudden and intense taste for Jason’s hypnotically beating heart, and begins killing people while making his way to Crystal Lake, at least until his body is worn out and the parasite thingy that seems to be the real Jason takes over the next host.

Jason the worm is out to catch, kill and take over either his sister Diana (Erin Gray), Diana’s daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan), or Jessica’s baby, for only the body of a Voorhees can be a long-time host for the thing. Why? I have not the faintest idea, and I don’t think the script knows. On the plus side, another Voorhees will also be able to destroy Jason forever with the help of – of course – a random instant magical dagger. Diana’s getting offed by Jason rather quickly, but Jessica – with the help of her ex-boyfriend Steve (John D. LeMay) and crazy expositional bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams) – just might be able to put up a fight against her uncle.

First things first, after the horrors of Jason Takes Manhattan, (of course not the) Final Friday can only be an improvement but then, so would the Star Wars Christmas Special. Adam Marcus’s movie is a curious thing, really. I understand the new producers’ impulse to want to “fix” the Friday franchise, to find a viable way to not have to tell exactly the same story at best in a slightly different place (though I’m still holding out for Jason Heats up Antarctica) but the actual thing they want to replace the core of the series with seems even less useful in the long term as what they had at the beginning, particular in the random and under-explained way the script introduces and uses it (instant magical dagger!). Or how exactly is a cheap rip-off of the Terminator just with demonic/alien (the Antarctica expedition crate in the Voorhees cellar suggests the latter, the whole getting dragged to hell business and the magic dagger the former) body snatchers any better than the very basic slasher set-up of the series thus far?

Then there’s the little fact that this whole retcon approach to Friday the 13th as a series leads to another entry that lacks the actual iconic element of the whole franchise, Jason the hockey-masked killer, replacing him with a series of possessed people that just don’t have an ounce of the big guy’s menace and are just as desperately lacking in originality as he is. I suppose a more clever script, that is, one that either really went for broke with the moments of comic book grand guignol a few of the film’s better scenes aim for, or one that had thought through the whole parasite possession angle (I can’t believe I’m asking for more exposition here, but I kind of do, don’t I?) a little better, could have gotten away with it. As it stands, however, a random series of possessed people involved in a long series of chases that are only broken up by sub-plots that are prematurely ended via character deaths (see Jessica’s evil TV personality boyfriend) does not a new, improved Friday the 13th film make.

If I’m trying to look at it as a series independent film – change the names and take away the hockey mask and you’re already there, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the script wasn’t initially meant to be a Friday film – Jason Goes to Hell is a bit more palatable, the kind of early 90s low budget horror that has competent direction, some icky and fun special effects but not enough brains to be either dumber or cleverer, the sort of thing you can spend ninety minutes on without railing against the universe afterwards and that is decent enough entertainment if you manage not to think about it.

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

This, the last Friday film under the auspices of Paramount, is generally treated as the worst among a bunch that’s all over the place in quality and disliked on general principle by most anyhow. And the general horror public’s right on the money here, because honestly, I have a hard time imagining how any of the following films could be worse than Jason Takes Manhattan.

Plot-wise, we see Jason revived by an anchor that doesn’t act like anchors actually work hitting an underwater electricity cable that also doesn’t work as these things do that electrocutes Jason’s body which has been hanging around down in Crystal Lake after the end of the last movie, and revives him. Because getting our slasher back to the surface via the local officials finally wanting to drag all those dead bodies out of the lake (can’t be good for the water quality) would have been too clever, I guess. Anyway, for reasons only known to the script, Jason sneaks onto a cruise ship/ferry/whatever – commanded by an Admiral, no less – full of late teens going on a school field trip to New York, which is a thing US small town classes do, I’m sure. Just as obviously, he begins doing what he always does, this time around imbued with slasher teleportation powers so heavy they are actually happening on-screen, and making snoring noises from time to time. Can’t blame him for the latter.

A few survivors actually manage to escape and land in the promised Manhattan for the final thirty minutes of the movie or so, so Jason can continue his thing on some damp New York street sets probably located in Vancouver where most of this was shot.

Yes, this Friday really is so crummy, even its title is more or less a lie, probably because “Jason burns down a cruise ship and wanders around Manhattan a bit” wouldn’t have had quite the right commercial ring to it. Now, I’d be perfectly alright with a lying title, if anything of the stuff that happens on the cruise ship had any kind of impact on any level, but nothing that happens there – or in New York, for that matter – is in any way, shape or form scary, or horrific, or exciting, or even very funny. Well, if you’re really straining for inadvertent comedy, you might get a kick and a half out of Jason dying by drowning in the toxic sludge that is nightly flooding the New York Sewer system at midnight (because that’s how sewers work on the planet this mess takes place on, hooray) and turning into little Jason again when dead.

Because yes, writer/director Rob Hedden wasn’t even competent enough to understand the really very simple mythology of the Friday the 13th films; you can’t even call it a retcon, because retcons generally are supposed to have a point beyond putting in hallucinations of young Jason drowning, and are generally made by people with a working knowledge of the stuff they are re-jigging. Speaking of Hedden, he does at least manage to produce a pretty slick looking film, but when that’s combined with a script too dumb for even a Friday movie, something so dire it makes me sorry to have criticized the writing of Part five, and no visible talent at all for making an actual horror movie, it still results in a film very much worth avoiding with utmost care.

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

Her psychiatrist Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser) and her mother Amanda (Susan Blu) bring Tina Shepard (Lar Park-Lincoln) to Crystal Lake (now called Crystal Lake again after the unfortunate Pleasant Green episode, it seems) help her get over the psychological consequences of a tragic event of ten years ago. When she was a girl, Tina killed her father with her uncontrolled telekinetic powers; his body must still be down under the lake somewhere. It is pretty obvious to anyone but Tina’s mum though that Crews isn’t all that interested in helping Tina as much as he is in invoking her telekinetic powers again and again and again. And since her telekinetic powers mostly work when she’s under strong emotional pressure, Crews is more or less concerned with the exact opposite of helping his charge.

When Crews provokes a particularly big telekinetic sulk, Tina goes to the lake and mentally drags a body to the surface she believes to be her dead father. It is – surprise? - instead Jason (now embodied by fan favourite – and for once the fans are right, because he really gives Jason a personality, not just a body - Kane Hodder), who must have been gnawed at by fishes for a few years since last we saw him, and looks a bit over-ripe by now. Obviously, Jason is quickly back to his old ways again, and in an incredible stroke of luck, there’s a cabin full of teenagers right next to Tina’s!

Not surprisingly, neither Crews nor her mother believe Tina when she tells them what happened, and they don’t exactly become less sceptic once the young woman begins having visions of Jason’s murders. It is only a matter of time until our telekinetic heroine and Jason will face off, and this time, being an undead killing machine might actually make one the underdog in a fight.

The New Blood continues the attempts to provide the increasingly rotten corpse of the Friday series with some fresh new meat, or ideas if you’re less food obsessed, and not making the same damn movie again and again. For my tastes, John Carl Buechler’s entry into the series is one of the strongest and most enjoyable ones, seemingly born out of the idea that, seeing as how the Friday the 13th films take place in a horror comic book version of reality, you might just add other pieces from comic books too, so what about a mutant? “Jason versus Carrie” has a certain ring to it, too, doesn’t it?

Well, at least that’s how I imagine the thought process behind the film’s main concept to have gone. There might also have been something about the sweet, sweet scent of money involved, but no matter, because Buechler’s film is – and that’s the first time I would say that about a Friday movie since part 2 – not just good for a Friday the 13th film but actually a good horror film. A film with an actual plot that mostly (as long as you don’t think about Dr Crews’s motivations and behaviour for too long, or at all) makes sense if you buy into its basic concepts of undead serial killers and emotional telekinetic. Also a film graced with a director who actually knows how to stage a stalk and slash sequence in a suspenseful, though not necessarily a logical, manner, and who actually manages the melodramatics surrounding Tina quite well too. As I’ve said before, melodrama and horror, like melodrama and action, are genres that work very well together if the right people are involved in front of and behind the camera, the genres of heightened emotional and physical states being so obvious siblings I’m always surprised when films don’t use the opportunity to cross these genres.

I’m a big admirer of Park-Lincoln’s performance here too, the way she just throws herself into the sulking, the screeching hysterics and the determined braveness of the final girl sequence. It’s probably not great acting from a perspective more interested in technique than mine, but it is one that turns Tina into the first Final Girl of the Friday films since Part II’s Chris I found myself really rooting for. Turns out, rooting for a slasher film’s actual heroine instead of the killer makes a film much more effective and suspenseful. Who’d have thunk? (Not the directors and writers of many other slashers, that’s for sure).

And again, like with the – inferior yet still fun – Part VI, New Blood can really delight through a lot of minor details, like Hodder’s initial “what the fuck!?” body language when Tina first attacks him telekinetically, or the way Jason becomes increasingly angry the more often Tina thwarts him, or the inspired final dispatch of our beloved killer that doesn’t make much logical sense but really closes the story in its melodramatic guise nicely, and pretty much comes out of nowhere too. But then, I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

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