Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Friday Week: A killer buried but not dead


FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD

1988
Directed by John Carl Buechler
Written by Manuel Fidello and Daryl Haney

Spoilers: moderate


I've posited these past few reviews that one of the core strengths of the Friday the 13th series was actually the very small number of narrative possibilities it presentedthat across several movies, this had allowed the franchise to serve less as an ongoing story than a sort of unacknowledged anthology, or series of remakes, driven by an ever-inconsistent ritual legendry that's almost as much a fiction inside the movies as it is on the outside, yet ritual legendry always cobbled together, slightly differently, from more-or-less the same few components.  That's what makes the series special; but for that very reason, we cannot now act surprised that it did, in fact, run out of narrative possibilities.  Pamela Voorhees killed random campers to avenge her dead son Jason, concluding in her own death; her son Jason was never dead, or did die, but in any case returned to kill random campers to avenge his mother; Tommy Jarvis killed Jason; Jason definitely died, for sure this time, but came back anyway, both as a mantle to be worn and as an explicitly supernatural force, and, having earned his archenmity, Tommy laid him to rest, again.  And there's not really anyplace obvious to take it after that.

That's okay.  That already slightly-confused-sounding capsule of the Fridays so far doesn't encompass a fraction of how loose the series had proven it could be within its constraints, and by Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Jason Voorhees had transcended into pop culture iconography anyway.  It's correct to acknowledge that The New Blood exists solely in order to exploit a franchise until it stopped making money (which was coming sooner than they thought).  And yet this is true of many things, and in the old days, this could be where things got weird and fun, as an IP of obviously declining but still extant value was subjected to the rough creativity of desperation, and since that had kind of been the Fridays' whole modus operandi as soon as they did a Part 2, it's certainly of interest to see what happened once it had really gotten worn out.  The clearest path forward was a trail blazed long before by other horror series that had reached an impasse: the monster mash crossover.  So, much as their forebears at Universal or Toho, Friday honcho Frank Mancuso Jr. and producer Barbara Sachs sought precisely this, albeit with the additional obstacle that they had to look beyond their own studio, Paramount, to find a fitting partner.  They saw one in Freddy Krueger, and reached out to New Line Cinema, whose Nightmare On Elm Street series had shaken up the slasher formula so significantly that I only consider them "slashers" under duress.  They pitched Freddy Meets Jason, and, unsurprisingly, Robert Shaye told them they could keep their tired old blood, thanks.

I can safely assume that you know where that eventually leads, but for now, Sachs was apparently dejected, and so spent her time workshopping a Jaws knock-off about an unscrupulous land developer in Crystal Lake awakening Jason as a spirit of anti-gentrification or something, which sounds very elevated and incredibly terrible, and Mancuso felt likewise.  But the crossover idea stuck around, and screenwriter Daryl Haney had an idea, perhaps recalling that, around the same time that Halloween was prompting its knock-offs (such as, for instance, Friday the 13th), there was another 70s horror superhit that, for a brief spell, begat its own spurt of knock-offs, though this had since gone dry in the face of the less-expensive and more-flexible slasher film.  Haney's idea was broadly along the same lines as Freddy versus Jason, but achievable: what if one of those teens Jason was always trying to kill was Carrie?  Not Carrie-Carriedon't be silly, she's deadbut the uncopyrightable concept of Carrie, the troubled teen with psychokinetic powers, a Carrie.


And why not?  The first Friday's bizarro nightmare ending was already an homage to Carrie.  They ran with Haney's idea, and it's simultaneously so junkily inspired that I can't help but love it, and something of an unhammered nail in the main run of the series that makes it feel awkward and difficult to negotiate.  Knowing that upon their post-Paramount relaunch the Fridays continued to embrace this kind of nonsense helps, but I wish the next film were, for example, Jason fighting a werewolf, so we could say "this was the silly era, it was simply how things were at the end."  It's just a little strange to think that there are two and only two supernatural things in this universe right now, Jason Voorhees and Not-Carrie White, each pretty distinctively "supernatural," at that.  Not to say this is some major problem.

Indeed, The New Blood (a title that has no meaning outside of the extrinsic fact that it was consciously intended to shake up the series) doesn't have so much as one genuinely major problem.  It's the best Friday the 13th in a while, though to temper your expectations, just because it never finds any serious lows doesn't mean its highs are usually very high.  It is, even so, refreshingly back-to-basics outside of its "the Final Girl has superpowers" hook: the variety show comedy filler of A New Beginning and Jason Lives is overthrown, and 80s teen sex comedy filler restored (accordingly, rather than the dozen apiece of the previous two films, we have only two fully random victims wandering into the slasher film this time); death is serious again, with even the dumbest stuff treated with sincerity (even Jason killing somebody with an uncharacteristically very loud lawn implement, some kind of motorized bush trimmer, which is obviously a joke, is at least not called out as such); and while the MPAA had their awful, degrading way with the film, a measure of gore has made a comebackand nudity, too.


Meanwhile, the Carrie thing is an honest novelty, serving as the framework for our tale.  So: years ago (from the standpoint of the main story, anyway), a young girl named Tina Shephard (presently Jennifer Banko) runs crying out of her house on Crystal Lake to escape the sight of her alcoholic father (John Otrin) beating her mother Amanda (Susan Blu), but some familial concern persists in the abusive bastard and he runs after her.  (As for the minor problems we get, then, what comes next should have plainly recommended an exigence of far less severity than "an explicitly long-running pattern of spousal abuse," or, in the alternative, a much thornier and more complicated set of emotions for Tina later, because with this foundation, grown-up Tina should be conflicted, and that is just... not what we get.)  Well, if only he knew she had the power: Tina, hopping onto a boat and ignoring her father's entreaties, wishes him dead and she gets it, sending him and the crumbling dock around him to the bottom of the lake.

A decade or more passes, and Tina's guilt and horror have only compounded over the years, enough to put the young woman (now Lar Park Lincoln) in an asylum where she's endured a certain Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser), who very poorly pretends to be interested in her personal case, and fair's fair, when she accuses him of caring more about her psychic powers than her psychic trauma, I had the thought, "of course he is, I'm surprised you aren't," though I suppose one can see her side of it.  He has brought her and her mother back to the place where it all started by the side of Crystal Lake, nominally for the therapeutic purpose of confronting her with her past.  His true goal, to trigger the same rage that killed her father, is barely concealed, but even we may not guess (and the film only ever implies) that his master plan was to invoke not only the psychic energies of her dead father but of all those who have died upon these most unfortunate shores.


So, as nearly every Friday has done, this one engages with the legend of Jason Voorhees, and it is the supreme expression of it: we don't actually begin with little Tina, we begin with a clip show (that feels as much like a trailer for a movie than part of one), narrated by Walt Gorney, Crazy Ralph himself, the original Friday prophet of doom, though since Part 2 just one more of Crystal Lake's ghosts.  It's nice and overripe and loveably rambling, and this, and the emphasis on Jason's rotting body at the bottom of Crystal Lake, states all-but-aloud that Tina wasn't even born when these atrocities occurred.  She lives exactly where Jason died (the second time) yet knows nothing of that (her mother seems to know nothing of that), and, at a minimum, Tina's age means we must already be in the 21st century, but for the memory to have faded so completely suggests multiple decades have passed, so that, writing in 2024, I can't say The New Blood has "happened" yet; or, you can take the opposite tack, which may be wiser, and say that The New Blood (obviously) occurs in 1988, and everything else simply happened that much longer ago.  Either way, the effect's the same, of pushing that legend ever further into an immemorial past, all of it true, and none.

We require something more than mere folkloric backdrop, though, and thusto Crews's annoyancethe house next door has been occupied by rowdy kids holding a surprise birthday bash for a guy named Richard (William Butler), though neither he nor his girlfriend Jane (Staci Greaso) will make it.  They number fully ten: rich Russell (Larry Cox) and his playfully golddigging girlfriend Sandra (Heidi Kozak); couple Ben and Kate (Craig Thomas and Diane Almeida); stoner David (Jon Renfield); Robin (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Maddy (Diana Barrows), competing over David's affections; Eddie (Jeff Bennett), an aspiring sci-fi writer whose constant recourse to moronic fake space opera references would make him a solid candidate for "most irritating Friday the 13th character" if he were in the movie any more than he is; Michael's cousin, Nick (Kevin Blair), who barely likes any of these people and is only here for his relative's sake, and who therefore finds more of a connection with Tina across the way; and haughty, wealthy Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan), the one Nick likes the least, which only motivates her to ever more grating attempts to get his pants off because she can't stand being ignored, hence likewise making her a giant, giant, giant bitch towards her rival Tina.  Unluckily for all of them, Tina, despondent over her situation as it's thrown into sharp relief by the normalcy of her neighbors, heads down to her father's watery grave and wishes he were alive again.  She never learned that she, above all others, needs to be careful with her wishes, and she wishes so hard that she does, indeed, resurrect something.


What I've had a hard time figuring out both times I've seen it, though I think I've cracked it, is why this isn't a more investing human story.  I mean, "it's a slasher film, to which I must evince my superiority," is the pat answer, but that's not it, and it's not by any means Park Lincoln, who is working hard and mostly succeeding against a script that wants her to feel only the one feeling about accidentally killing her drunk wifebeater daddy, offering us an expressive face, and an interesting face, at that, with the kind of pointy eyes that'll also prove pretty good at evoking telekinetic combat later.  (She's putting on arguably the second-best Final Girl performance in the series after Part 2's Amy Steel, potentially beating Part VI's Jennifer Cooke by virtue of not being anchored down by an unreasonably shitty male lead.)  So neither is it Tina's relationship with Nick, nor Park Lincoln's chemistry with Blair, which is warm, if undernourished.  It's not even the meatbags: notwithstanding Melissa, they're anonymous, even by Friday standards, but then, not being anonymous has its own pitfalls.  The New Blood is noticeably replicating the structure of The Final Chapter (possibly intentionally, as the last Friday to make great money), but also fixing it, by remembering that maybe a protagonist should actually meaningfully interact with her secondary cast.  It finally hit me: it's Crews.  At some point during the drafting stage they should've realized that this mad scientist (played with no distinction by Kiser) is completely superfluous to any recognizable goal here.  Carrie does not have an exploitive authority after Carrie's powersThe Fury does, Firestarter does, and there is not one Goddamn person who thinks those are better.  Carrie has a mean bitch.  The New Blood, also, has a mean bitchta-fuckin'-da.  (Not to even mention, you know... Jason.)  Crews is a timesink where more and better scenes of Tina tentatively trying to be a whole person, to coin a phrase, could have gone.  He's also the one who dies by bush trimmer, which isn't even good enough in the deleted footage to make the character or the dumbness of his death worthwhile, particularly when it's first-principles obvious that, if he had to be here, he ought to have been killed by Tina.

There's that slasher, though, and I have modestly praised it for bringing some nastiness back; The New Blood has a reputation as being wholly neutered, which I find overblown, though having now seen the two gnarliest kills through the blur of a workprint, it's certainly a shame.  The signature kill, entailing one of those two randos caught in her sleeping bag and slammed against a tree, is still good in the movie we got, hugely better in the workprint where she's slammed into the tree many times and obviously rupturing inside it, and still shouldn't overwhelm anybody who's seen what it's riffing on, Frankenheimer's The Prophecy; so more damaging is what happened to Ken's death, which was originally a sickeningly drawn-out and well-designed shot of Jason crushing his head in his hands until it's just red pulp.  The thing is, though perhaps Jason Lives lowered my standards, I appreciate that it still always indicates gruesomeness, even in the cut we've got.

The New Blood
 was directed by a makeup effects man, John Carl Buechler, and that still comes through, with a sense of how to present what gore he could get away with to still create an impact, and the most damaging aspect of the censorship, probably, is that it compelled him to reconceive at least one entire sequence, which you can tell doesn't flow with the rest of it (and which, furthermore, replaces a giant man holding a lover's severed head with history's stupidest fake cat scare).  Though maybe you couldn't tell: Buechler's inexperience comes through in some bad ways, too (though it's better than his sole previous directorial effort, Troll).  Once Jason's murder spree begins in earnest, the geography of Buechler's scenario completely outstrips his ability to keep track of it or pace it out, to a degree that's annoying for the kind of violent thriller where, as Steve Miner taught us twice, geography and pacing are at least as important as lovingly-designed gore.  (Especially if the gore doesn't even make it, while the closest to nerve-wracking thrills is a bit in a shed involving multiple walls that still feels more like a gesture at nerve-wracking thrills.)

Going on twenty minutes, we get a complete physical and temporal mess of characters traipsing back and forth through woods and houses, presented in surprisingly badly-staged shots that photographer Paul Elliott is erring so hard towards "readability" with that I think we just have to call them "severely overlit."  Buechler, as a makeup artist, is also far too proud of his maskless Jason ghoul cartoon, so we see him too quickly, too clearly, and too much.  (There is, in fairness, that one stunner of a shot of Jason, having recently arrived via window, arising menacingly amdist grimly-arrayed party balloons; and I must mention the new blood of the score, Harry Manfredini working in tandem with Fred Mollin.  It's frequently doing Buechler's job for him, with old cues"ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma" gets its best workout since the original, and The Shining's backas well as new, notably some beautifully mournful choral elements over the end credits.)


Crucially, however, Buechler did bring with him a colleague, Kane Hodder, conensus's pick for best Jason despite being in very few (even only one) of Jason's best movies, likely more because he's the "most" Jason, with four turns in the rolebut why shouldn't he be?  (He does help clarify that the truest difference with Michael Myers is anger.)  The more important part here is Hodder's stunt coordination background, which along with a Final Girl who outmatches her adversary, allows a never-more-dynamic Jason, thrown down and through collapsible stairwells (and coming out of the closet below is such a terrific grace note), set aflame in a record-breaking firesuit sequence, and having most of a house dropped on him.  The last twenty minutes are a well-packaged stuntshow borne on Tina's powers (and on Park Lincoln's performance; she'll eagerly tell you this was youthful foolishness, but, trying to match Hodder, she bravely pursued many of her own stunts), and it climaxes with a surprising beat that I, personally, like a great deal in broad concept (it's frankly baffling how literally folks treat this event, in this movie about a psychic).  It does as much to tie up an emotional arc as any Friday's ever managed, though the "wait, that was actually the end?" denouement bothers me on some undefinable level even while it represents an agreeably interesting swerve.  (There was supposed to be a callback to the original Jason jump scare.)  So maybe The New Blood isn't doing anything all-time great, beyond having such a weirdo novelty for its set-up.  But it's at least the sum of its parts, and those parts are good.

Score: 7/10

14 comments:

  1. "What I've had a hard time figuring out both times I've seen it, though I think I've cracked it, is why this isn't a more investing human story."

    You are answering questions I never even knew I wanted answers to. You're on a fucking roll here, my man.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If I actually get done by Halloween, though, I will be amazed.

      Delete
  2. Honestly that "Jason kills the gentrifiers" idea doesn't sound bad on its own. It's basically an expansion of a F13 movie in general, which are usually about a bunch of obnoxious out-of-towners getting knocked off due to their own stupidity, and the survivors tend to have some ties to the local area.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I’m not going to lie, if FRIDAY THE 13th is ‘Slasher Film Franchise as told around the campfires’ then one of the talespinners thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool if Jason fought CARRIE who is also FIRESTARTER?” is a fairly logical inspiration.

    Given the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET connection, I’m now wondering how Evil Dream Freddie Kruger would fare against Our Hero from this particular scenario (and Vice Versa).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alice did pretty well, though I'm not sure how telepathic Tina is supposed to be.

      Re: the timeline, looking at his old F13 reviews, I think Tim was much more conservative than me, but he was still putting it around 2000! In the spirit of offering credit, I owe Brian Fowler the smart idea of potentially reading every previous entry as being notionally pushed back into time, so that the original maybe happens in the 60s.

      Delete
    2. And right now anyway AE is down, which is troubling.

      Delete
    3. - SCUTTLES BACK IN FROM OFFSTAGE -

      Oh ****.

      Delete
    4. Well, it was a little worrying, given the slight possibility that the problem might've demanded knowledge or credentials only Rob Jarosinski possessed, but Tim (or somebody) fixed it.

      Delete
    5. Thank goodness!

      Delete
  4. Incidentally, one of the more intriguing articles from the old ANTAGONY AND ECSTASY blog (Which might still be hosted on ALTERNATE ENDING) is Mr Tim Brayton’s
    Effort to put all the FRIDAY 13th movies on a a single timeline - if nothing else it’s fun to wonder what the films might have looked like had they been made in the years in question.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Agreed with Daf, this has been a fun "week." "Sum of its parts" is what I remember as well. Really cool final girl sequence especially.

    Where have you been getting your info on the production history? I had no idea that a Freddy vs. Jason was pitched this early, and only covered it in my Jason Goes to Hell article.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just Wikipedia mostly. The Freddy vs. Jason article itself offers what looks like a pretty robustly-sourced and extensive breakdown of the false starts, beginning in 1987 (bear in mind that Dream Warriors came out in February, and that represented a big turnaround for the Nightmare franchise commercially), leading eventually to the 2003 film. (Now, I am speculating--and, yes, having fun--to say Robert Shaye dismissed Frank Mancuso with derisive laughter, because I'm sure he did not do so literally or to his face; but it certainly seems like Mancuso was initially more interested and, until the 90s, that New Line calculated that the downsides to a crossover were far more salient than the upsides, except to the extent that some folks at New Line, apparently especially Michael De Luca, thought it would be cool.)

      Delete
    2. "Agreed with Daf, this has been a fun "week.""

      And, also, thanks. :]

      Shame that I actually almost made it by Halloween. Got way closer than I'd have expected.

      Delete