Friday, March 13, 2009

Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Written by Puño Estupendo

Oh man, I'm just going to throw out the stinker alert right now and get it over with. Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is not on my list of any horror movies I would recommend to a friend that asked me for suggestions on what to watch. Actually, I think it has now made my list of "films to never bother to watch again." Even if all you're looking for are the staples of formula that everybody makes jokes about, you're going to be very disappointed. People getting picked off, yes. Teenage sex, sort of. Counselors and Crystal Lake, yeah, it's got that too. But what this film absolutely doesn't have are naked people, any kind of scares, or (worst of all) any gore!

Tommy Jarvis continues his participation from Parts IV and V, heading for the cemetery that is the burial place of Jason Voorhees. He wants to know for sure that Jason is dead so he digs up the grave and proceeds to stab the body repeatedly with a rod from an iron gate. Look out though, there's a storm that's moved in. The fence rod that is stuck in Jason's corpse is hit with lightning, and damn if that lightning doesn't bring that guy back to life.

Jason's machine must also be coming up triple 7's because Tommy, and the pal he brought with him, also brought Jason's hockey mask with them. I'm telling you, if Voorhees had even given a shit, he would have bought a lotto ticket, bet on some horses, sat in at a high-stakes poker game, and had all the unprotected sex he could manage, cuz everything was coming up Jason that night.

Tommy escapes, his friend doesn't, and when he tries to warn the local yokel sheriff about Jason's return, he gets thrown in jail for his troubles. Add some camp kids and counselors, and a pretty hefty secondary cast of characters to kill, and you've got one pretty lousy movie. Nobody believes poor Tommy except for the sheriff's daughter. Yeah, the sheriff's daughter...the only thing that separated the sheriff and his daughter were about five years and a mustache. She frees Tommy from his imprisonment and they set out to stop Jason.

At this point, Jason has already built himself a sizable nest egg of kills, but they all sucked visually. Some of the set-up was okay for the deaths, but there was no gore at all! Boy did that piss me off. The only thing you could have enjoyed about this movie would have been the gore, but seriously, there is none. One of the few scenes where they actually showed something other than blood splattering on to the surface of something, it was a knife stuck in somebody's head. If it had been a throwing star instead, it would have matched the gore level of an old kung-fu flick.

There are also a bunch of little visual gags like Jason walking past the camp signs that say "virtue, friendliness, etc." This just showed me that even the director didn't take this shit seriously, so why bother watching it. There's kill scenes with no gore and sex scenes where people seem to manage to stay clothed. The acting is bad (even for a movie of this kind) and it just isn't fun in any ways I could figure out. Stick with the first four but leave part six alone. Tie a boulder around it's neck and drop it in the middle of a lake, only this time, make sure not to come back to it later.

Friday the 13th - A New Beginning

Written by El Fangorio

For all you sleazehounds out there, I highly recommend Part 5 (the one without Jason -- oops). It's directed by Danny Steinmann who did Savage Streets, which should be more than enough cred to those in the know. If that's not enough, the man is better known as Danny Stone, director of countless ‘70s porno films. And it shows in all aspects of this film (especially the dialogue).

This is also the installment that started the franchise's quick regression from showcasing bodycounts and gore to only showing the after-effects of each kill (if at all). After this one, the producers mistake their audience for people who just want to see Jason doing his thing -- which is basically standing in the rain looking a hundred pounds heavier than the last film.

But most importantly, this is the one that the producers, along with cast and crew, are most embarrassed about because of the atmosphere that Steinmann created on the set, which was much like a porno. While filming the sex scenes he be would standing off to the side saying, "Yeah. fuck her! Fuck her! Get her good!" It caused one of the actresses to stop the biz completely she was so traumatized by him.

In the end, you get absolutely no gore (not a drop -- all the kills are done off screen), and not even Jason. But you get a mom calling her son a "fucking dildo," you get the black kid that got joint-molested with Arnold on Different Strokes, and you have some really hot girls and boys that look straight out of the porn industry (I guarantee the dudes are from gay porn since they were the only ones with abs in the ‘80s). The lead, who was a born-again Christian, prayed for days before accepting the role, fearing it might not be the right thing to do. A born-again with abs in the ‘80s. Big surprise.

I just know that most of you will enjoy Part 5. Whereas the rest of the chapters just plain suck, this one is at least entertaining for all the wrong reasons and a milestone in that it changed the tone of the series for the rest of its duration.

All of my trivia is taken from the highly recommended book Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday The 13th by Peter M. Bracke in case you are looking for more.