Killer mommy...
No
other series truly defines the slasher genre quite like Friday the 13th. Unlike its siblings, the Friday series never produced a truly
great movie like the classic first Halloween
and Nightmare on Elm Street, but what
it lacks in class, it makes up for in sheer entertainment value. There can be
no defense made of the series’ seedier elements other than just how much damn
fun it is. And he may be a rather obvious Michael Myers clone, but Jason
Voorhees has survived throughout the decades, eventually developing a style
that has kept us coming back for more, even when we should know better.
12. Friday
the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
Many
fans are quick to dismiss this one due to its lack of Jason, but that’s
honestly the least of the film’s many, many problems. Tommy Jarvis returns this
outing, albeit older and committed to a house for troubled young teens. For the
majority of its running time, the film wants us to believe that Tommy is the
killer, thus following up on the least successful element of the last
installment, and already the filmmakers shoot themselves in the foot before
they can even begin. When you make your lead character into a murder suspect,
it makes it hard to care what happens to them in any way, shape or form. Not
helping matters are the film’s other annoying characters, most of which are
introduced only to take off their tops (if they’re female) and then promptly
die. The success of each Friday film
truly relies upon assembling a likeable cast of goofy-yet-endearing teens,
something that can hardly be said about the yahoos gathered here - when these
morons bite it, it’s almost a relief. And as for Not-Jason himself, it’s an
interesting direction to take the franchise, returning the series to its
“whodunit” roots of a mystery killer on the loose. But even the first Friday couldn’t pull off that type of
story successfully, so of course the fifth installment also falls prey to the
same kind of cheap and lazy reveal of who the killer is at the end.
11. Jason
X
Leprechaun 4… Hellraiser: Bloodlines… There is no greater death knell for a
horror franchise than to take it into outer space, and Jason X is no different. The idea of Jason stumbling around a
spaceship and picking crew members off one by one doesn’t sound like the worst
direction for a series on its tenth installment to take, but the problem here
lies entirely in the execution. I realize that the movie was likely short on
time and money, but surely the filmmakers could have come up with something
better than what we get here, which looks like an especially gory episode of Power Rangers. The CGI was bad even by
2002 standards, and it’s not hard to see why New Line sat on this movie for
over two years before finally giving it a (baffling) theatrical release. Of
course the movie’s not all bad: the opening scene is rather genuinely creepy,
and the futuristic space setting allows for some especially creative kills
(although not as many as you’d hope). But by the time Android Lady shows up in
a leather corset with giant guns that seem to be swiped from a Syfy original movie, pretty much all
hope is lost. I’ll say this for Jason X:
it features the involvement of the absolute best director to ever be involved
with the series… too bad he was only in front of the camera instead of behind
it.
10. Friday
the 13th Part III
You
might think that Friday III would be
one of the better entries, being that this is the one where Jason gets his
iconic hockey mask and the Friday
formula is truly established. But much like the how and why of the moment Jason
gets said mask, the film is little more than a confusing series of events that
barely hang together. A big part of the problem this go-round are the main
kids. The first and second Friday’s
may not have been great cinema, but they got a lot of mileage out of populating
the films with likable young actors. The characters here stretch the limit of
the audience’s patience with their idiocy, the chief example being the wannabe
actor (and possible future Men’s Right Activist) Shelly, who is constantly
acting like a dumbass with his moronic pranks. You might think that watching
these annoying kids get picked off by Jason would make the film worthwhile
after all, but while this entry has some good kills, much of them are ruined by
the film’s constant need to remind you that it was shot in 3D by hurling shit
at the camera every five minutes. Also, the formula of killing off the entire
cast and leaving the main girl to be chased by Jason for the remaining thirty
minutes had really started to wear thin by the time this third entry rolled
around. You’d think the filmmakers would have figured out that is the worst
possible way to break the tension, as we all know that the girl’s going to win
out over Jason at the end and thus have to suffer through endless “He’s finally
dead now” fake-outs, but whatever. Throw in the completely useless sub-plot
about the biker gang, and you have one of the worst entries in the whole
series.
9. Friday
the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Numero
Ocho finally gets Jason out of Crystal Lake and into the Big Apple… or at
least, it does in the last twenty minutes or so. Before then, we’re subject to
a bunch of partying high school seniors celebrating their recent graduation on
a yacht trip to Manhattan, where they are terrorized by everybody’s favorite hockey
mask-wearing, unstoppable killing machine. Certainly a movie featuring Jason
set loose in the big city have been preferable (as was promised in this film’s
rather excellent trailer), but Jason on the high seas isn’t a bad route to go,
either. The problem with this outing, as it is with all the lesser Friday movies, are the characters. I
mean, the series was never exactly known for its searing insight into the youth
of America, but the ones that work do so through one simple reason: they give
you characters to care about, even if their capacity for logical thinking is
sometimes not always optimal. For this outing, it seems as though the
filmmakers just completely gave up. Take our main heroine Rennie, who is
conveyed to us in only the broadest strokes, like the fact that she wants to be
a writer, although we never once see her express any interest in writing
outside of her introduction. All the characters are given this treatment, but
most annoying of all is Rennie’s uncle Charles, who exists as the ultimate
asshole naysayer so everyone else around him can look smarter and therefore not
as much of an asshole. He gets what is coming to him, albeit bloodlessly, like
most all of the kills this time out (as was the series’ heavily-censored nature
at the time). To be sure, the film does make good use of the maybe five minutes
of screen-time they actually shot in New York, as the awesome shot of Jason
traipsing about Times Square will attest, but the film is so half-hearted
everywhere else it’s hard to put much of a care into any of it as a viewer.
8. Friday
the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Billed
early on as essentially “Jason vs. Carrie,” The
New Blood has a lot going on in its favor, but ultimately just doesn’t
quite cut the mustard in the end. The biggest reason would have to be its
severely-edited nature: the MPAA was always on the Friday series’ ass since the beginning, but by the time part 7
rolled around they really put their foot down, forcing director John Carl
Buechler (a make-up artist turned horror director) to trim out essentially all
of the gore in order to get that all-important R rating. With most of the good
stuff taken out, that leaves us to focus on things like plot and character
motivation, which is just all over the place. This has got to be the single most
schizophrenic movie ever made - characters express one view in one scene only
to then state the complete opposite in another, making the film seem as if it
was pieced together randomly from different takes where the actors where trying
every possible angle on the scene. It’s a shame, as there’s some stuff here
that would have made for a fascinating movie - most especially the doctor
character who is treating our lead heroine for her psychosis/telekinesis/precognition
(just go with it), but who is only acting in his own interests by coaxing out
her abilities. Had he been ultimately revealed as the main villain, with Jason
just a random hurricane thrown in to stir the pot, we could have had something
special here. But alas, the film keeps to form and fills the movie to the brim
with what feels like twenty young, horny kids who get only the most perfunctory
development before being picked off in one bloodless kill after the next. But
even with those faults, the film still has a good bit going for it: this was
Kane Hodder’s debut, the most famous Jason of them all, and watching him here,
it’s easy to see how he achieved that fame. Hodder isn’t just some burly
stuntman to walk in scenes and intimidate the audience with his sheer size, but
is a legitimate actor, and imbues Jason with a type of performance we haven’t
really seen from the hockey mask-wearing killer yet… one he would continue for
another three films.
7. Friday
the 13th Part 2
The
second film was rushed into production after the enormous success of the
original, and certainly feels like something made up on the fly at times. But Friday Part 2 is a bit of an oddity, in many ways improving upon the first
film whilst still being a lesser offering overall. The movie’s in trouble right
from the very start, as we open with a replay of the last film’s ending that
eats up at least five minutes of the screen-time. From there, we catch up with
Alice, the “Final Girl” of the last entry, and waste probably another ten
minutes on her death scene, where she walks around her apartment doing menial
tasks in an attempt to build “tension”
before getting a screwdriver to her temple. This opening serves no purpose
whatsoever - take it out, and almost nothing changes. The film improves once
the story starts in full, introducing us to a bunch of kids out at Crystal Lake
and participating in a camp counselor training program (…whatever). Once more, this is a mostly likable group of
kids, and the film benefits greatly from spending a little time with them
before they’re brutally murdered by what would become the series’ defining
character, the potato-sack wearing Jason Voorhees himself. Everything is
properly set-up, unlike with the previous chapter, as the characters all trade
stories about the masked psycho who stalks the woods in search of revenge for
his dead mother. It’s a great set-up, but the film starts to unravel as the
kids get picked off and whatever hint of a story was previously there goes out
the window completely. Characters disappear (without being killed, mind), logic
is challenged, and there’s a gotcha ending that’s possibly even more confusing than
the first one, tying up nothing the film set up previously. It’s a shame, as
there’s some nice stuff along the way - the wheelchair kill, Jason’s shrine to his
mother, etc., but those moments come as too little, too late.
6. Jason
Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
Jason Goes to Hell has probably the best
opening out of all the Friday’s, and
possibly one of the best scenes in the entire series. It starts rather typically,
with a beautiful young lady taking a bath all by her lonesome out at Crystal
Lake, only to then be chased by the big guy himself. But it turns out the
situation was all a ruse: the lady in question is actually an agent on an FBI
sting, the end of which sees Jason blown to pieces in a spectacular scene. It’s
a scene so great, the rest of the movie is constantly trying to keep up with
its convention-breaking nature, to somewhat middling effect. Director Adam
Marcus is not short on creativity, surely, and as a result this entry feels
like it might be something approaching an actual
movie, with character arcs and everything. But large swathes of Jason Goes to Hell still suffer from a
lack of focus. The “ground rules” for Jason were never firmly established (and
certainly changed from film to film), but having him be an evil worm that
passes from one host to the next feels like a step too far, and the whole “The
only person who can kill a Voorhees is another Voorhees” equally doesn’t feel
like a natural way to wrap up the story, but rather a contrivance shoe-horned
into the plot because they needed to end the movie somehow. That said, it is a
fiendishly clever movie at times, and thus one of the series’ better entries.
5. Freddy
vs. Jason
While
it’s true that this long in the works mash-up leans more heavily on New Line’s
first bastard son that it does the adopted step-child, there’s still plenty of
Jason goodness on display to appease Friday
fans. Jason gets all the best kills, with the cornfield rave scene being an
all-timer. It’s those such scenes that forgive the movie the rest of its many
sins. Maybe every word that comes out of Kelly Rowland’s mouth might as well be
nails on a chalkboard. Maybe Jason Ritter can’t deliver any line of dialogue
without having some stupid grin plastered to his face. Maybe the Jason Mewes
lookalike stoner dates the movie far worse than its horrid, Nu-metal laden
soundtrack. But when it comes to the big two themselves, the filmmakers
understand just what the fans want to see, and give Freddy and Jason to us in
all of their blood-spattered glory.
4. Friday
the 13th
It’s
generally accepted that the first entry in any horror series is usually the
best, but Friday the 13th
isn’t just any old series. The original has its charms, and certainly many of
the series’ hallmarks began right here, but this first Friday isn’t really representative of the series as a whole. Part
of the problem is the rather weak reveal of the killer at the end, Ms. Pamela
Voorhees. The film seems to be setting up a murder mystery, but by the time we
get to the halfway point and nearly the entire cast is murdered, there’s not
much suspense to be found in trying to figure out the “whodunit,” making the
reveal that this strange middle-aged woman in a blue sweater who just shows up
and is the killer kind of cheap (and speaking of cheap, while it is one of the
great cinematic jump scares, the ending with Jason literally comes out of
nowhere and makes no sense whatsoever). It might have worked if the story of
her son Jason drowning had been properly set up early on, but when Pam Voorhees
shows up at the end, we don’t know her from Adam, robbing the moment of any
sort of dramatic heft. The whole movie is likewise thinly put together, taking
place over the course of one night as one camp counselor after another is
picked off during a particularly harsh thunderstorm. The counselors themselves
are pretty enjoyable, but we don’t get to know a whole heck of a lot about them
before they start dying off, which seems like a waste of an otherwise able
young cast. The thinness of the story also might have been forgiven had the
film been skillfully made, ala Halloween, but Sean Cunningham is no
John Carpenter. All that said, the film still works, in its own, weird way: Tom
Savini provides some of his best work ever in the elaborate death scenes, and
there is a certain energy on display that remains undeniably creepy even to
this day.
3. Friday
the 13th: The Final Chapter
From
the very expensive looking opening with cop cars, ambulances and helicopters
flying overhead, we can tell already that this supposed “final” installment of
the Friday franchise will be quite
unlike the others we had seen thus far. The Friday
movies were always cheap, but The
Final Chapter is probably the first to feel like an actual production.
Paramount hired the experienced exploitation filmmaker Joe Zito to handle the
proceedings, and the filmmaker brings a professional touch that the other three
movies never really attempted. As such,
what we wound up with here is one of the best in the whole series, a thoroughly
satisfying entry where all the elements at play are realized to their fullest
potential. All the sex and violence hallmarks of the series are there, amped up
considerably from the last outing (especially the sex - this has got to be the
perviest Friday movie of them all).
More importantly, the characters are all
pretty likable. This is a large cast, so not all of them get as much time to
shine, but the filmmakers seemed to understand that the success of these movies
truly lies in getting the audience to care about the film’s characters before
they’re brutally murdered. Thus, the film is mostly populated the film by
talented actors across the board, with an early Crispin Glover bringing a lot
to his role as an otherwise sex-starved dweeb, and Corey Feldman as the young
Tommy Jarvis, who is the closest thing this series has to a Laurie Strode - a
character who appears in multiple entries who has a personal connection to the
killer. Tommy’s a nice addition not only because he’s a genuine reflection of
the type of horror fan that eats this type of movie up, but also that he’s a
kid: for a series that has taken place predominantly at summer camps, it’s been
remarkably free of children, but little Tommy Jarvis’ presence adds another
layer of suspense previously unknown to the series. The return of Tom Savini
also helps - you don’t realize how much Savini was missed until you see his
ingenuity on display, as his work on this installment is arguably the best of
his entire career. The film’s only problem is the wackadoo ending, in which
Tommy shaves his head to somehow trick Jason into thinking he’s his younger
self… or something (the film is never clear on Tommy’s reasoning here)? It
feels as if the filmmakers were trying to make a comment by setting Tommy up as
a killer himself, but nothing that came before supports this out-of-nowhere
thesis statement. But the weak ending hardly matters - whether it’s due to
Crispin Glover dancing or Jason’s awesome slide down that machete, The Final Chapter remains one of the Friday series’ most enjoyable entries.
2. Friday
the 13th (2009)
Sometimes
all you need are the basics, something that the filmmakers behind this reboot
understand quite well. In that way, there is something kind of pure in Friday 2009’s intentions: you get
exactly what you pay for. The reboot covers essentially the same ground as
parts 1-4, taking what worked best and trimming out the fat, in the process
creating what might be the leanest and truest version of the Friday the 13th mythos yet.
Everything you could possibly want from one of these movies is on display here,
from the opening with Mrs. Voorhees to the sackhead Jason to the iconic hockey
mask, the filmmakers pick and choose their favorite elements of the series to
great effect. The kills (13 in all!) are even better, satisfyingly gory
and creative whilst also being rather tense and creepy at the same time (and
the kids are all fairly likable and hilarious in their own right, which doesn't hurt). And the
Jason on display here is a great force of nature, played by Dereck Mears not as
a mindless zombie, but rather more survivalist,
Rambo-esque take on the character. Horror remakes rarely surpass the
original, but in Friday 2009’s case,
they wound up with one of the best entries in the entire series.
1. Friday
the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
Iconography
- that’s what writer/director Tom McLoughlin pushes to the fore above all else
in his installment of the Friday franchise.
A horror buff himself, McLoughlin understands that Jason was at this point a
classic movie monster worthy of the ranks of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster,
The Wolf Man and all the rest. The opening where the corpse of Jason is
resurrected via lightning may seem silly to the uninitiated, but true horror
fans will know where the director is tipping his cap. The film is filled with
such winks, which may make the film appear to be nothing more than a lark at
first glance, but look closer, and you’ll find a skillful hand at play behind
the scenes. One thing the movie does right from the start is get rid of the
whole “Tommy Jarvis as the next Jason” thing, instead making Tommy into a more
traditional slasher movie lead. All the actors do a fine job, and are only
enhanced by McLouglin’s tongue-in-cheek style, with the sleaziness toned back
in favor of humorous scenes that are actually funny (seems like a no-brainer,
but so much of the “comedy” in this series is anything but)… Which is not to
say the movie isn’t without teeth. This is the only installment of the series
to feature actual kids on the campground, and while nothing ultimately happens
to any of them, having them in peril makes all the difference - the scene with
Jason walking amongst the sleeping kids’ cabin is creepy in a very classic,
Universal Horror way. It’s that perfect blend that makes Jason Lives the very best of all the Friday’s.
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