Recognize the title? Say is out loud… it’s the noise that was associated
with Mrs. Voorhees and Jason when they would lurk in the shadows in the Friday
the 13th movies.
I have to admit that for a while I was a bit ofa horror movie junky. I
have no idea why, I just was. Maybe it was because every once in a while in the
life of the series they would have a very interesting movie.Granted, at this
point in my life they all kind of blend together so I’m not sure which ones had
which plot any more.
The original scared the hell out of me. What do you expect, I wasn’t even 10
years old yet. My brother Donald was watching the original Friday the 13th in
the living room and very responsibly evicted me from the room. Now, I was (and
probably still am) a spoiled little shit so I snuck in to the room just at the
end of the movie where the girl is in the middle of the lake on the row boat and
suddenly little boy corpse Jason jumps out of the water and pulls the heroin
under water. That visual scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t easily go to
sleep for weeks!
The second one just kind of wallowed in lameness. They take the little boy
from the ending, suddenly accelerate him in age, he walks from the lake to
avenge his mothers death (and his own if you follow the lore) and after killing
the heroin from the first one and then heads back to Camp Crystal Lake to
increase the body count. Yawn…
3D didn’t really impress me either. At least the 3D resurgence was fun and
interesting… hell, I think the final Nightmare on Elm Street was in 3D… but
the movie was just body count and crazy teenagers.
Four was interesting, it was supposed to be “The Final Chapter” (little did
they know). Once again everything is up at the lake, Jason is still wandering
around some how (I don’t believe they had definitive death scenes for him in 2
and 3), and this time it is a group of teenagers and some nice divorced woman
who is mother to a teen girl and Tommy Jarvis (played by a young Corey
Feldman). It juts so happens thatTommy is a movie monster makeup and mask
freak and has a collection of all these things. Some how, in the course of the
movie, he finds out about the lore of the series and by the end of the film
shaves his head and makes himself up to look just like Jason as a little boy.
This confused our evil presence enough for him to be stabbed to death
byTommy himself. End of movie, interesting little side story to make this
film stand out a little more.
Next we take a trip in to Lamesville and Friday the 13th Part V: A New
Beginning happens. Turns out we are up at a camp for troubled teens, where
anolder Tommy Jarvis has been sent because his killing of Jason has really
messed up his mind. Unfortunately for him one of the other campersis just
plain nuts! He takes on the persona of Jason and has a slice and dice fest until
he his beat down at the end. Nothing stellar and no real reason to watch it
(even at the end where suddenly Tommy takes on the Jason persona
apparently).
Things get interesting again is Part VI, Jason Lives! Turns out the Tommy
Jarvis is all grown up and is now a very troubled man. He has to put his demons
to rest and returns, with a friend, to the site of Jason’s grave to burn the
corpse to ashes. After they dig up the grave Tommy flips out at the site of
Jason’s corpse, grabs a broken piece of steel fence, and starts stabbing the
dead body. Just so happens a lightning storm is happening and WHOOPS lightning
strikes the steel rod and brings Jason back to life. Let the wackiness ensue!
(By the way, in the end Jason gets tied to a big rock at the bottom of the lake
with a chain around his neck I think)
Now, with VI being interesting you’d think VII would suck, but it didn’t! In
the next installment it turns out that a young girl who used to live on the lake
has telekinetic powers and accidentally rocked the dock her dad was on and
killed him. This then blocked her powers. She’s now a teen and her mom and
psychiatrist have brought her back up to the lake under the guise of finally
clearing up her mental problems, although her shrink really wants to push her in
to more trauma to unleash her telekinetic powers (why I don’t know). Some how
her powers, while reliving the trauma of killing her father, awaken Jason and
unleash the beast! The one shining moment of what I think depicts real human
emotion in this film is when Jason is coming at the mom and shrink with some
type of really nasty saw blade/weed whacker and in an attempt to buy himself
more time the shrink throws the mom at Jason so he starts to weed whack her to
death while he runs. Not very noble but a sure sign of a pure weasel. Oddly
entertaining film except that in the end her dead father somehow resurrects
himself and pulls Jason under the water to his final (yeah right) resting
place.
Part VIII was “Jason Takes Manhattan”. Should have been called Jason Takes An
Entire Movie to Get To Manhattan. I won’t go into how bad this film was but I’ll
just point out that an underwater power cable is what brings Jason back to life,
he torments a high school senior classes boat ride to Manhattan and in the end
is killed by toxic waste that apparently is regularly pumped through the New York
sewer systems. Ugh.
I never saw Part 9 but apparently they pretend (like we all did) that Part
VIII never really happened. “The Final Friday” begins as a special FBI taskforce
has tracked down Jason Voorhees and blows him from here to kingdom come. Is he
really dead? In the words of famed serial killer bounty hunter, Creighton Duke,
“I don’t think so”. Creighton Duke is the only man a live who knows how to get
rid of Jason once and for all.
As the government attempts to do an autopsy on the remains of
Jason, the coroner is possessed by Jason’s spirit and a new rampage of death and
destruction begin as he makes his way back to Camp Crystal Lake. One problem,
Jason’s spirit can stay in a person’s body for only so long before it damages
beyond use. So Jason is consistently jumping bodies and you never really know
where he could turn up.
Creigton knows what Jason’s plan is, so he tries to track down
Jason’s only sister (Erin Gray), but he gets to her a little too late. He knows
that , “through a Voorhees he was born, only through a Voorhees can he be
re-born and only a Voorhees can kill him.” The fun continues as Jason continues
to jump bodies trying to get close to the last surviving relatives he has, his
niece and her daughter. The really cool parts about this movie is that the
“Necronomicon” and dagger from “Evil Dead 2” show up. The Necronomicom is
founded in the Voorhees’ home and the dagger is actually the weapon of choice
for killing Jason. Well, Jason get re-born (its really cool how they work it)
and he doesn’t battle with his niece, who finally sends him back where he
belongs….HELL. ( taken from http://www.houseofhorrors.com/fridayreviews2.htm)
So, as you can see there is some interesting stuff and some not so
interesting stuff. Turns out that there might actually be a Jason X movie in the
works where they find Jasons frozen body some how in the future and thaw him out
or some such nonsense. We’ll see if it actually gets made.
Man, I know a lot of useless information.
-WW