1986
Written and directed by Tom McLoughlin
Perceiving an end to his iconic killer's natural lifespan, for the fourth Friday the 13th film, unambiguously titled The Final Chapter, Paramount producer Frank Mancuso Jr. saw to it that Jason Voorhees would die and that makeup artist Tom Savini would make it pretty hard to argue that he hadn't. Then the series went on anyway, Mancuso apparently trapped along with it, and less than a year later Paramount released the next Friday, A New Beginning, born out of a Marvel-Studios-before-Marvel-Studios-style intention to refashion Jason's own destroyer, traumatized Tommy Jarvis, into the heir to his murderous legacy. As "Marvel-Studios-style" implies, it took an entire damned movie to get there, setting up the prospect of Tommy's villainy in a manner simultaneously both incredibly lazy and tediously labored, only for it to never matter again anyway, since once they realized they'd made a hash of it, Paramount was sent scrambling to bring back their marquee star, which was easier here, at least, since "a suitably large and menacing stuntman" is always more readily available than "Robert Downey Jr." So whether it had ever been a good idea or not, the fan response to the movie that wasn't even about Tommy Jarvis but the completely random dude donning a hockey mask to kill people had been vehemently negative. I hold that if A New Beginning had done its job correctly, maybe those fans wouldn't have seized at the most obvious "flaw" of the film, that it didn't have Jason, as the reason it sucked. I'm split about it myself: on one hand, any Friday the 13th after the original probably should have Jason in it, that just seems self-evidently correct; but I at least say I want originality and wild, crazy swerves, too.
But, fortunately, there's no use wondering what we'd have preferred, because that decision was made for us years ago, and so we have it—Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, or, possibly, Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, if you read title cards like a normal person, in the order of the words' appearance on the screen. I'll let it slide as a stylization, as it's, sort of, even a defensible one: this movie desperately wants you to know, and so uses the biggest font it can to announce it, that JASON does indeed LIVE. And I appreciate, in a sort of woozy way, just how blatantly aggressive its rejection of A New Beginning is: it would be too much to say that the entire movie is writer-director Tom McLaughlin's hostile remake, but it's hard not to feel like it's an angrily revisionist statement of purpose when it begins with practically the exact same scene, sending (adult) Tommy (now Thom Matthews) once again to Jason's grave, with two men ready to dig up his corpse (the other one is Ron Palillo) only to discover to their shock that no grave can hold this body down if you help him out of it first, except this time it's no dream, and this time Tommy's the one exhuming his hated enemy, aiming to destroy his remains with fire, and, I suppose, in this scene the rain doesn't start till halfway through, and the cemetery set that McLoughlin and production designer Joseph T. Garrity have had built is much more elaborate and gothicky, and Jason's corpse is rotting and maggotty and appropriately gross. (Plus, this time, Jason was not buried in his mask: Tommy has, conveniently, but rooted enough in his psychology, brought the mask with him as a memento of his experiences, presumably also to destroy it.) The movie's not a remake, I say, but I find it quietly very funny that McLoughlin's screenplay at least has enough of a sense of what was wrong with the previous film's structure that when Jason does rise again, he does a better job of framing Tommy Jarvis for mass-murder by accident than the hazily-defined killer of A New Beginning did on purpose.
So that kicks things off: Tommy has either been recently released from the loony bin or is technically still a patient—it's unclear who Palillo's friend-of-Jarvis is, and I'd had the impression he was a nurse or doctor but I don't think that checks out—but, regardless, in his insane obsession, Tommy's done the exact opposite of what he intended, so that instead of eradicating Jason's evil, resting peacefully all these years, he's woke it up worse than ever (no one will ever call him on this, nor will craziness or guilt ever slightly inform Matthews's performance). He's done so by means that are probably a little sillier than they needed to be, and indicate that for some reason McLoughlin thought his touchstones for his Friday the 13th film should be movies from the 1930s (you can hear that from his own mouth), insofar as Tommy jams a fencepost into the corpse that becomes a lightning rod when that storm starts up, whereupon a thunderbolt mystically returns Jason to the flesh.
Thus begins the now-revived, now-even-more-powerful killer's rampage, starting with Tommy's friend, and Tommy, overmatched, sees no other option but to at least try to warn the authorities. It's his misfortune that his reputation thoroughly precedes him, and almost as soon as he's made Sheriff Garris's (David Kagen's) acquaintance, the cop throws him in a holding cell until such time as he can either get Tommy's asylum to come pick him up, or at least escort him to the county line. Tommy's further efforts to convince the sheriff are just as counter-productive, but the sheriff's daughter, Megan (Jennifer Cooke)—happening to saunter in along with her colleagues Paula (Kerry Noonan), Sissy (Renee Jones), and Cort (Tom Fridley) to report that their bosses (Nancy McLoughlin and Tony Goldwyn), head counselors at the restored and rechristened summer camp, have not yet shown up for work—takes an immediate interest in Tommy and his case. More as a lark than anything else, Megan breaks Tommy out of her own dad's jail, and by the time she realizes that every single thing he said was true, every member of the cast I've so far named and more is already dead at Jason's hands, except for her and Tommy, and to stop him they must return him to where he died—the bottom of Crystal Lake.
To be clear, I have affection for Jason Lives, which is doing several things very well, not even just "effectively erasing A New Beginning." Its relationship with continuity is one of those things, however, and rekindles my ongoing delight at this franchise's customary looseness. I'm not sure if nothing from A New Beginning happened (even the semi-ambiguous nihilistic ending would not be entirely impossible to square), and McLoughlin's script assumes something like it must have, just to set up what is surely one immensely distant sequel to The Final Chapter. Here, Crystal Lake isn't even Crystal Lake anymore—not merely the camp but the whole town has changed its name (to "Forest Green") to help it forget the legend of Jason, allowing Jason Lives to now make explicit the folkloric undercurrent coursing through much of this series. Forget A New Beginning, it's hard to understand from this how any of the previous films could have happened as depicted, if such an intensely true crime story as this—a national outrage!—could possibly have faded into rumor and denials. (Megan practically acts like it happened before she was born, so maybe it even did. The never-affirmed intention probably was "1985's A New Beginning's never happened but 1984's The Final Chapter did," but then they cast Matthews, and Matthews hadn't been Corey Feldman's age since 1970, as is quite apparent. The already chronologically-soft A New Beginning was set in ~1990, and we honestly could be in the 21st century here.) Yet the version of the tale that Megan extolls in Jason Lives is, counter-intuitively, something like the rationalization of Friday legendry: Jason was always a supernatural revenant now, emerging to kill, receding when he was done, and whether there's a body in a grave with his name on it or not, doesn't that actually make more sense? (Though I'll note that we see his still-human eyeballs way too much in this one; I prefer to envision those eyeholes as black pits.) It's all very cool, anyhow, and even if Jason still works more-or-less the same, it's a nice place to finally arrive at. (Jason is embodied, this time, by locally-sourced Atlanta-area restauranteur and Jason Voorhees stageshow cosplayer C.J. Graham, with some footage left over of stuntman Dan Bradley, who wasn't working out.)
It also has, in Megan, a terrific pseudo-Final Girl, which is an achievement, given that the "pseudo" part is predominant (it's Tommy's movie, after all) and their barely-above-par Final Girl sequence requires them to work in tandem. But we're accentuating the positive now, and most of that achievement, I believe, comes down to Cooke, who's seizing on the threads McLoughlin has spun out for her if not really seen fit to follow, as an extremely off-type rendition of the chick who doesn't die in a slasher movie. Glomming onto Tommy the instant she sees him with a one-sided magnetism, Cooke's tipping her into outright imbalance, a bored, spoiled, and impulsive young woman fascinated with the handsome nutbar because he represents a potentially exciting interaction rather than because she's actually heeding his dire warnings. When she gets him out, it's to have a fake adventure, relatively secure in her belief she won't face any consequences, but, though Cooke's given the smallest space in which to have it, Megan's confrontation with the true reality of her quest is even harrowing. She's dynamic in a sense that no one has been in this series since Ginny Field—and Megan still seems like more exciting company. So it's a pity Cooke's up against not merely a script that's going to have trouble prioritizing her as a real co-lead, but against Matthews himself, who's terrible as this franchise's off-brand Sarah Connor, just unaccountably bland, even when he's shouting, and cursed with resting smug face. He's rarely convincing as somebody desperately pursuing a superpowered zombie, or even that he's in any particular hurry to be anywhere, so I half-wonder if Megan's quip about how he's not even driving out to Camp Blood with any sense of urgency was just a well-observed ad lib.
But let's continue accentuating the positive: Jason Lives can look just Goddamn splendid. It's difficult, as we'll see, to say it's directed well, as a matter of scenes working together in concert and everything else you'd want from a writer-director, but McLoughlin knows how to use depth and framing elements, and while it's often not his goal for some reason—again, as we'll see—he demonstrates real facility for horror filmmaking, as in a spine-tingly stalking sequence that uses all those aforementioned skills, tracking with doomed Paula, who's barely unaware that Jason is watching her, and matching her trajectory outside the cabin, the former only just occluding the latter, and the latter being only just out of focus behind the frames of the cabin windows.
So what I mean by "splendid" comes down, principally, to cinematographer Jon Kranhouse, who carved out a niche in A-level productions as an aerial photographer, at the cost of depriving us of a seemingly prodigious talent as a proper DP. Jason Lives has atmosphere, and to the extent McLoughlin really was inspired by old-time horror, that inspiration's at its most effective in its aesthetics. There's a beautiful hyperreality to the nighttime exteriors here—spotlit moonlight, piercing through the forest veil and much dry ice fog—but what gives it force is the constant sense of movement to the light and shadow, a combination of leaping firelight and treelimb shadows (presumptively puppeted and too fanciful to be really-real treelimbs, even) that grab at the characters like evil clawed hands, plus, crediting McLoughlin where it's due, there's that full-scale battery of wind machines, blowing the holy hell out of the actors and sets and all those dangling onscreen light sources and rustling leaves dancing around Jason's feet. (There's a fantastic optical illusion that short-circuits my brain when it hits, with those clawing tree-shadows sliding across a wall behind the sheriff in a way that makes it look like the wall is moving, and it's awfully well-timed to coincide with his own world-shifting realizations.) Kranhouse affords it the most deeply-felt "real movie" sensation of the series so far, an achievement it would've reached even if McLoughlin also hadn't smashed a Jason-infested RV in an incongruously-large-scaled stunt. (And Jason Lives sounds good, too, albeit less honorably: series stalwart Harry Manfredini has now updated his references to The Shining, and he'd like you to know just how big fan he is of Wendy Carlos's best-known cue. By contrast, the closing credits boast an awesome Alice Cooper song specifically about the movie we just watched, expressing the corporate ethos of Jason Lives with wonderful succintness—"he's back! the man behind the mask"—which couldn't help but leave me in a good mood when it was over.)
But not everything is so fit-to-purpose; we can't accentuate the positive forever. I've covered our male lead—A New Beginning's John Shepherd wasn't that much better, but he at least had greasy intensity—and Matthews isn't even the biggest problem. In Jason Lives, a bunch of crap is named after contemporary horror filmmakers like Mike Garris and John Carpenter (also Boris Karloff); in his commentary, McLoughlin drops a rather different name, which is Frank Capra. It's not exactly Arsenic and Old Lace, but it kind of encapsulates its whole deal: McLoughlin seems like a nice guy who wanted to make a nice Friday the 13th, hence this one, a comedy with virtually no gore. The last time that someone is properly slasher-flick murdered is Palillo's inaugural victim, his heart punched out of his torso by Jason's superhuman strength, and McLoughlin still cut part of that. There's always the MPAA to consider, but there's a triple decapitation that McLoughlin cut of his own volition. Amongst the most brutal kills—if not, even in these circumstances, bloodiest—is Nancy McLoughlin's head counselor, N. McLoughlin acceding to her husband's wish that she be impaled with her whole head submerged in a muddy puddle. That's squirmy, but it shouldn't be a top three death here.
And for all that it rejects the unwanted narrative specifics of A New Beginning, it somehow replicates all of its unwanted narrative strategies: it's less obnoxious, but structurally, this is barely any less of a bullshit variety show than the last one. Some of this was due to a studio demanding more kills and, thus, more victims, while the quality thereof remained negotiable, but much of it wasn't: the rather long "office workers and their lady boss in a paintball game" vignette suggests that not merely does Jason live, but tedious 60s zaniness does, too. Most of it isn't that bad, but even "the best," involving a member of our notional core cast in Fridley, is the best insofar as the stream-of-conscious dialogue got away from McLoughlin, and Fridley's yammering decays into riffing on how hot it'd be to watch his paramour (Darcy Demoss) take a shit and vice versa, so that, if nothing else, it counters the pitiful anti-sleaze of an earlier fully-clothed sex scene so imparsably bad I wish it was as offscreen as the violence.
Altogether, it's simply depressing to think of any slasher movie's murder setpieces as "filler." The flip-flopping around from Tommy's deadly mission to sketch-based nonsense is likewise an enormous headwind, as is the imposition of "rural cop" shrillness upon Tommy directly, despite Kagen making a heroic attempt to pull his sheriff back into something at least half-human from the caricature-as-written. Meanwhile, there's that famed meta current, slight but rankling, and at least mostly kept to ancillary characters like the annoyed gravedigger who chides us beyond the fourth wall about our "strange idea of entertainment." But that surprisingly-emotional climax to Megan's arc about discovering what her strange idea of entertainment entails? Well, that had feeling, which is bad, so now we'd better cut to a couple of random camp children making deadpan jokes about "what were you gonna be when you grow up?"—a very good joke, that's placed atrociously. The entire thing with having little kids at the camp feels cheap anyway: if it wasn't obvious from first principles, nothing about the tone (garbled as it is) was ever going to support a juvenile massacre—it would've taken a bolder filmmaker than McLoughlin comes off to even meaningfully threaten it—so what we wind up with is, basically, just a whole audience for Tommy and Megan's jointly-staged Final Girl battle and, in an unwelcome beat, gendered expectations for Megan to fulfill.
In theory, that battle ought to be something—an echo of Jason's original nightmare cameo, made fearsome by a burning lake and the blunt fact of Walsh's 250 pounds; the semiotically-satisfying concept itself, of redrowning Jason; and Megan's part of the finale, while neither gory nor seemingly in continuity with subsequent shots, gives you a twinge from the prospect of Jason having his face chopped up by a motorboat—but it's always more awkwardly-staged than it needs (and that fucking prop rock is just outrageous), and it frankly feels truncated and trivial by the standard set for this franchise by Steve Miner's awesomely-exhausting Final Girl sequences back in Parts 2 and III. Now, I enjoy this movie, and my habit is to frontload the bad and backload the good when I like something. And maybe it even seems odd, given my enthusiasm over the "living folklore" aspect of this series, to object to the injection of postmodernism here. But one thing the Fridays had traditionally excelled at was how, beneath the dumb characters and dialogue, they took death seriously. That Jason Lives often does not will never sit entirely right with me.
Score: 7/10
I’ve been thinking a lot about your thesis that the Fridays “take death seriously” (as you summarize it here) as I’ve read these and also watched some of the post Paramount entries this fall. I think there’s something to it though I think it’s a nuanced take. After all, the series popularized the way slashers use flatly typed teens as stabbing meat, their deaths often having a comic impact to their brutality (I think fondly of wheelchair guy flying down stairs with a machete in his head in part 2). I guess it never registered too much for me, hence why I didn’t much care how little death and danger there is in this one. But seeing how weightless some of these later ones are I do get it a little more — even if there’s not much emotional power in many of the deaths of the series, there is gravity and finality to them. Anyways I’ve enjoyed these, looking forward to your take on Carrie vs Jason
ReplyDeleteThanks Dan! The thing about it, I guess (beyond my awareness that I'm being pretentious about it and arguably even looking for a way to justify my enjoyment), is that most people even in the real world would look flatly typed if all you did was watch them dick around a lake for an hour, but they could still be good company and, generally, it would still be a bummer if they died. It really becomes apparent, I think, in the shift in filler comedy styles that the series makes (prefigured in Part III's and The Final Chapter's annoying prologues, and then coming to dominate the whole film in A New Beginning), and while I guess a lot of people find it invisible (or blotted out by the structural problems it causes), I perceive a pretty intense fundamental difference between the "oho, chum, I have suborned a tow truck driver to pull your car around a corner, thereby scaring you in a funny manner, for are we not relatable young adults? now we're all going to get laid!" 80s sex comedy of the earlier films and the "I'm an inhuman cartoon character, please come kill me, Jason Voorhees" 80s sketch comedy that's so much of the runtime in the fifth one and this one.
DeleteIirc, The New Blood actually wrenches this back, and I am also looking forward to it. (And I know that in Jason Takes Manhattan, the pendulum swings back again. But happily I need not review that again, though before I re-jigger the old review I'll watch it out of... my notes say "integrity" but that can't be right.) At present time, I'm most *excited* about getting to the new-to-me Nightmares, as Freddy's Revenge really made it seem possible that the non-Craven entries in that franchise have been badly undervalued.
I think I know what Hunter's getting at with the "the others took death seriously and this one doesn't" assertion, and it's all part of the general apathy the movie has toward the series (frankly at times I feel like it's more outright contempt, but Tom McLoughlin does give the impression of a genuine good sport) and why I never cared for this one. Like, Part 3-D was also a self-parody, but at the end of the day it was still a proper slasher. Part VI never does satisfy as a slasher movie (or horror movie, period), it's a comedy through and through. And the worst part is that sometimes it actually feels like it might be trying.
DeleteThe bit that really exemplifies this for me is that totally blood-soaked room (that they show twice for some reason): that's pretty far and away the goriest shot of the series at that point, and the movie does indeed treat it with horror, but with a sort of "business as usual" attitude, there's no sense that painting the walls red is pretty gnarly even for Jason, and moreover it's not being intentionally over-the-top for comedy purposes. You can just feel the movie saying, "This is what you slasher folks like, right? A bloodbath?" Well, yeah, but there's a sense of style or something that's missing. Like there's usually bodies arranged in weird ways and shit, I dunno, but just having tons of blood all over the room feels off, like the movie doesn't *get it.*
And yeah, I don't necessarily need boobs in a Friday the 13th movie, but that fully-clothed sex scene feels downright pathetic, like the movie simply couldn't stomach doing it sincerely. The "hide your face in my crotch" gag was a much better way of going about kind-of-raunchy-but-don't-want-to-be-as-gratuitous-as-the-rest, in my opinion.
Agreed re: blood room and sex scene. For the latter, I dimly perceive "parody" as the intention, but if they wanted it to play they needed a concept, not just bad blocking, maybe "we have sex tantrically with our minds" or something.
DeleteI actually never got the impression this one was meant to supersede Part 5, mostly because 80s movies just didn't really do that kind of thing: as noted, their idea of "respecting continuity" was more to fudge and take things as loose as much as they needed to, often to ridiculous degrees, but keep everything "in canon," whereas more modern notions of "respecting continuity" is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start over if you have to change even one stupid little thing.
ReplyDeleteTo be more specific to this film, just the fact that it keeps Tommy Jarvis as a protagonist and gives a resolution to his mental issues (and specifically hallucinations and fits of violent rage, at that) feels like a sign of deference (can't think of a better word) toward Part 5 when it had no obligation to, and moreover the sheriff's suspicion and almost complete lack of sympathy toward Tommy only really makes sense if it'd been known Tommy had some history of being dangerous. Even the similar graveyard opening came off to me as a reference rather than a replacement, it made sense to me that he would want to destroy Jason in his grave because he kept having nightmares about Jason rising from the grave. I think it would've been interesting if John Shepherd had reprised the character here.
I'm not trying to argue or seriously change your mind about this, just noting a different perspective on how it plays.
Hey, that's fair enough. I'm actually still wondering what got Tommy thrown in the asylum in the first place. I assume he stabbed a goalie? Man, I kind of wish they'd gotten Corey Feldman to do that.
DeleteLol! By the way, did another one of my comments get caught in spam? Cause one hasn't posted here, and unfortunately this time I don't remember what it was I wrote exactly
DeleteIt did, published now.
Delete