Jason goes to New York, Jason goes to Hell, Jason goes to Outer Space and finally Jason gets rebooted. What's missing? Well, the battle between Jason and Freddy. It's on the list, but I haven't got hold of it yet. However, I have been able to borrow all 8 Nightmare On Elm Street movies, so by the time I finish those hopefully I'll have got a chance to see the crossover between these two colossal horror franchises.
Friday The Thirteenth Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
The poster above gives the impression that the whole film takes place in New York, but actually most of the runtime is spent on a cruise liner. Some teenagers are celebrating their graduation with a cruise which finishes up in New York. Even once they get to New York, Jason doesn't seem to be interested in massacreing the population there, but seems mainly concerned with the teenagers he was terrorising during the cruise.
That thing he's holding is an electric guitar. Oh yeah!
This installment has a clear step up in budget. It looks a lot better than previous installments did. There's even an arty side to it with the regular visions of Jason as a child received by the main protagonist: a nerdy girl who is afraid of boats due to a, later revealed, childhood incident. I'm not sure the visions work terribly well, but at least the movie is trying something different. The deciding factor would be whether these visions led to an interesting payoff at the end and I don't think there was. The aforementioned childhood incident that might have explained the visions (but doesn't really) is ridiculously badly placed straight after one of the teenagers has been accidentally killed (i.e. not by Jason), but instead of mourning the death or running for their lives, our protagonist starts ranting about some event she's just remembered in her childhood.
Also, while the film might look good, it doesn't have the sense of timing that we found in Part VI so while I can point to a number of cool moments in the film, not only are they few and far between, but they aren't generally done in a way that pulled me in. For example, one character is shown to be a good boxer (due to a random boxing match on the ship), so he decides he's going to defeat Jason with boxing. He punches Jason twenty or so times in a row and we watch as Jason does nothing but stumble back a step every now and then. This scene is great when recounted afterwards, but within the movie itself it was rather boring. Still, it ends with Jason finally taking his own shot, and boxing his opponents head clean off their body and into a skip. This is the sort of thing I could imagine being really impressed by in Part VI, but in Part VIII the execution (no pun intended) seemed to be lacking.
It practically screams 80s, doesn't it?
The beginning and the ending are both a problem. (Don't worry, I'll be reasonably vague on the ending.) The beginning shows us scenes from Manhatten with VERY 80s music playing in the background. I found myself reminded of Crocodile Dundee 2 (and no, that isn't me making random connections. Cheesy pop music with saxophones = New York during the 80s.). It's a very odd beginning for a Friday The 13th movie. If that was the only problem with the beginning though, I could probably have forgiven it. After all, this movie will inevitably be a product of its time. However, the next scene is of an enormous yacht in Crystal Lake. It drops anchor (seriously, how big is Crystal Lake?) and the anchor hits a massive power line running under the lake (what... the... hell?) and the electricity reanimates Jason (um... yeah so there's precident for that, though I hope no one skinny dippers are being electrocuted while this is happening). We are also informed that this yacht is intended to sail to meet up with other teenagers who are getting onto a much larger cruise liner, so that presumably means that this lake is supposed to have some kind of access to the sea (but in the previous movies we've seen people walk all the way around the lake!). Jason, presumably sails the boat to where the cruise liner is setting off, but how the hell does he know where to go?
Okay, so, the ending. As if the beginning wasn't ludicrous enough, it turns out that New York is littered with barrells of toxic waste and the local authorities flood the sewers with toxic waste every night. Was this supposed to be a joke? It's certainly not true and it's a bizarre bit of poetic license to say the least. Naturally this point can't become relevant until they actually get to New York, which doesn't occur until towards the end, but it was clearly the biggest wtf element in that final section of the film.
Yeah sure there were cheesy stereotypical characters, but I could live with that. Heck, I wanted this film to be fun and lot of elements really were. It wasn't always done very well, but it was clearly trying to make things fun. But then when they go to New York there was one element that wasn't fun at all. I don't know why they thought this was a good idea, but "Jason Takes Manhattan" has a rape scene. Sure, Jason isn't doing the raping (and the rapists are possibly the only New Yorkers that Jason seems to feel worthy of machete-death), but it's a clear example of how the filmmakers aren't taking consideration of the mood of the audience. Nothing pulls the laughter out of the room like a woman being held down, crying and being forcibly injected with drugs to keep her docile. And yet it's pretty soon after this that we have the aforementioned "boxing" gag.
Jason Takes Manhattan is a very flawed movie, which showed some real promise but, in the end, doesn't deliver. In spite of all its flaws it's still not as awful as Part V.
D-
Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday (1993)
This is the second movie in the series to claim to be the last. Interestingly this film is the first since the original to give Sean Cunningham (the director of the first movie) "producer" credits. In fact, I've heard some try to claim that the drastic changes to the franchise this film introduced were Cunningham's way of burying the franchise for good. In fact, far from ending the franchise, this film is clearly preparing for a match-up with Freddy Kreuger. While this might sound odd, the last Nightmare on Elm Street movie had also claimed to be the final one in that series, meaning that the symmetry between the two would actually lead quite neatly into the crossover. Unfortunately those plans were delayed by Wes Craven's decision to make the movie "New Nightmare".
In actual fact, "Jason Goes To Hell" ties in yet another franchise, since within the Voorhees house it turns out there is a copy of the Necronomicon from the "Evil Dead" series. Though I haven't read the comic, I understand that within it Jason is a deadite (one of the undead monsters that possess the dead and feed on their souls).
I was expecting "Jason Goes To Hell" to take place in hell, but actually it refers to Jason's final destination. We've known for several movies at this stage that Jason cannot simply 'die', so this entry in the franchise serves to answer the question of how he could possibly survive if completely destroyed. In this movie it is revealed that Jason is not simply a man, but is actually a demon. We discover how, when utterly destroyed, Jason can continue to live, and a mysterious bounty hunter named Creighton Duke claims to have the solution as to how he can be killed forever (which turns out to be rather reminicent of "The Omen").
"She's only your girl 'cause she ain't had a taste of the Duke yet."
A major criticism of this movie is that it isn't a Friday the 13th movie. I beg to differ. This movie still takes place at Crystal Lake, Jason still wanders around in his mask and no previous elements in the series have to be ret-conned for the plot to work. It seems to me that the only argument against this as a Friday the 13th movie is if you think that the new additions to Jason's mythology are daft or betray the spirit of the franchise. Personally, I'm not convinced that they do.
I think it helps that this movie has a sense of humour. In fact, it seems clear to me that the best entries in the series always have a sense of fun to them and that includes part II and even (when bodies start falling out of trees) part I. So when things get a bit silly in this movie, I see it as a very worthwhile attempt to keep things interesting. When the series starts producing new rules and upping the stakes, I also think this is not only a good but wholly necessary way to make sure things don't get stale. By my reckoning Part IV was too by-the-numbers and Part VII introduced a new idea but took too long building it up. Part IX gets straight to business and never lets up the pace.
For me, this might not be better than Part VI, but this ninth entry, "Jason Goes To Hell", seems similarly engaging, entertaining along with a genuine urgency and drama to it. One of the deaths in particular seemed particularly impressive since the effects budget is unlikely to have been that big. One of the most entertaining entries in the series. Loved it!
A-
Jason X (2001)
Nearly every poster seems to reveal a particularly cool revelation towards the end of the movie, so I've picked a fan-made poster without it featured. (Not that you'll have much chance of renting this movie without seeing that spoiler at some stage.) Jason X is the tenth movie in the series, but the name is generally said as Jason ecks, rather than Jason ten. This is because this is the sci-fi entry.
In the beginning, we are told that, like in the Alien franchise and also Frankenstein, Jason needs to be studied by greedy scientists who don't understand what they are dealing with. Meanwhile our protagonist wants him cryogenically frozen so that he can't cause any damage. Through a series of events, our protagonist ends up with Jason in the future.
This is fairly cheesy horror/sci-fi comedy without really quite as many jokes as there ought to be. Still, the sense of fun is definitely there and Jason is still a badass. The plot is consistent, the dialogue is engaging and the characters are generally distinguishable from one another. Sure, the central protagonist fits into the future far too easily (and it seems like she was probably a fair way into our future during the opening sequence of the film too, since she apparently has no problem using futuristic guns) and sure, the characters are all pretty 2 dimensional stock characters. Still the pacing of the plot is good, even if the gags don't come quick enough and tension is almost entirely lacking.
Jason X is very enjoyable, though I wonder whether my fondness for the sci-fi genre explains why I seem to like it more than typical Friday the 13th fans. It's not brilliant, but it's a solid film and it stands up to a second watch. I had a good time with this film and found that it kept Jason relevant to the actions of the characters a lot better than Part IV or Part VII. In Part IV the campers barely seemed to notice Jason was there while they fought over who got to pair off with which girl and in Part VII there's barely any sense that the campers are being stalked at all. In Jason X the college students in space are very much aware of the threat Jason poses to them and are being stalked by this monster. Through the wonders of the holodeck, the film even manages to tie things back to the old Camp by the lake setting.
Good fun and a nice little piece of entertainment.
B-
Friday The 13th (2009)
Friday the 13th gets a reboot and, were it not for the poster, we'd all be wondering whether it will actually include Jason. So how do they get Jason in here? Well, basically we start the movie with the end of the first movie. Now admittedly I said that the only bit of the first movie I liked was the finale, but I need rather more than this.
We get a very short scene with Jason's mother gone mad and punishing a camp councillor. Mrs. Voorhees is beheaded by the last surviving camp councillor (though actually the audience has to work out very quickly that lots of other councillors were killed first) and then Jason turns up in the background and is told by the echoey voice of Mrs. Voorhees that he needs to survive on his own and kill them.
Confused? I was pretty confused and I've already watched ten movies in this series. This just seems to make the origin of Jason even more confusing than ever. We have no time to get introduced to Mrs. Voorhees. We have the dead Voorhees seemingly talking from beyond the grave or inside Jason's head, seemingly to a boy is supposed to be dead. Is the idea that Jason never died? But how does he survive for another however many years in the woods exactly?
The thing is that in the original movies there's something supernatural about Jason. Even in Part 2 we are introduced to a character who ought to be dead. In this movie, he's just a psycho and I don't think that works very well. Not only that but his motives are completely changed. The university-age kids camping nearby to Crystal Lake towards the beginning are camping there because they've heard that there is marijuana growing in the woods and they want to make a lot of money selling it. They aren't camp councillors who could be accused of being neglectful, so it's not obvious why Jason is targeting them. In fact the first death is right next to the marijuana plants, almost as if it belongs to Jason. Also some of the early deaths involve Jason strategically setting up a bear trap and using a rope to dangle a sleeping bag over a fire (while occupied). This is very different from the Jason who shares his mother's modus operandi and whose killings are brutal and instinctive.
What we have in this reboot is a mad psycho in the woods situation, plain and simple. Now I'll admit there are fans out there who wanted this to return to a super-strong psychopathic killer story rather than a supernatural monster story. I'm not amongst them though.
Still, in hating this movie, I don't think I am being closed-minded. Another problem is that the characters are boring. The minority characters are by far the most interesting and unfortunately they get some of the least screentime, particularly on the run from Jason. Arlen Escarpeta gets a chance to be a bit funny about black stereotypes messing with people ("I'm setting up a record label" "Oooh is it rap?" "What? A brother can't listen to Green Day?" "Oh sorry, what kind of music is it?" "... Rap :P" - Yeah sorry, I just spoiled the best joke in the film.) He has since appeared in Final Destination 5. Meanwhile Aaron Yoo is clearly the most talented actor in the cast, has great chemistry with Escarpeta and even manages to be entertaining when he is on his own in a dark toolshed. Unsurprisingly, he has a lot of other credits, mostly for stuff I haven't seen (21, Disturbia, Gamer).
The main protagonist in the film however is Jared Padalecki who is the younger brother in "Supernatural". I haven't seen much Supernatural, but I've always thought he was by far the less talented of the two central characters. He's certainly pretty wooden here. However, as always it's important not to rule out blaming the director if you have bad performances. Marcus Nispel's other directing credits include "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake and the recent widely-panned "Conan The Barbarian" remake. (He also did "Pathfinder" which I thought was fantastically laugh out stupid in a kinda fun way, albeit a little boring towards the end.) This is not a guy with a great track record.
Okay, now for some of the biggest problems with the film. Jason has built tunnels all around underneath the ground. Why? Well it turns out that he kidnaps people. Well, one person, though he might have done so in the past. Naturally he couldn't keep her in his run-down cabin. He needs to hide her in tunnels underground. (Wait a moment, if he can safely set up underground tunnels, why is his cabin run-down? Couldn't he fix it up?) Apparently he thinks she looks like his mother. (She doesn't, but she finds a locket-necklace with a picture of Jason's mother on it and another character tells her it looks like her, so it does.) She's kept in an underground cell for over a month and presumably she's fed (we never see Jason, her or anyone for that matter eating anything). But she doesn't seem to be malnourished and in fact she seems perfectly groomed as if she's been changing clothes each day and getting regular showers. It was annoying enough wondering why Jason is kidnapping people without having to wonder why they look impeccably dressed after a month of captivity by a mute psychopath.
Towards the end of Part II, Jason is stopped in his tracks by someone convincing her she's his mother. It works very well and is a very tense scene. Here Jason is shown the locket-necklace by someone he's just been chasing and there doesn't seem to be any good reason why he's stopped in his tracks. It just doesn't work in the same way.
My original thoughts were that this is nearly as bad as Part V. It doesn't look as cheap, sure, but then I remembered that I liked some aspects of Part V. The toilet scene in Part V, as stupid as the set-up was, is actually genuinely scary. There's plenty of gore in this reboot, but there's never really any tension. Though there is a jump-scare. Jason keeps his mother's head in a hole in the wall. When the head is revealed, the scare doesn't come from the head but rather from a loud annoying jump-scare noise. In Part V the sex scene is an annoying halt in the film. In the reboot it was possibly the only thing worth paying any attention to. Now sure, Julianna Guill is very attractive. However, when there's NOTHING more interesting than actresses getting nude, that's a REALLY bad sign.
So yeah, in conclusion I think this is actually the worst film in the entire franchise. Certainly while I was watching I was nostalgic for "Jason Takes Manhattan" (I'm not kidding). "Jason Takes Manhattan" had some annoying characters, some holes in logic, poor timing and a lack of tension, but it was clearly trying to do something interesting and it had a sense of fun. This reboot is a completely joyless experience, it's not particularly tense but its gory and horrible anyway. I would have loved to see someone getting killed by an electric guitar or taking on Jason with boxing. Instead, there's a real lack of inventiveness. Jason kills one character with a bow and arrow and then never uses the bow and arrow again. Why? Because that's this movie's approach to inventiveness. The methods of killing happen randomly in order to have something on screen. There's no reason behind any of it, there's no tension and, in the end, its extremely dull.
E-
Final Rankings of the Friday the 13th Series
1=. Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
1=. Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986)
3=. Jason X (2001)
3=. Friday the 13th: Part II (1981)
5. Friday the 13th (1980)
6. Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984)
7=. Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
7=. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
7=. Friday the 13th: Part III (2D version) (1982)
10. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)
11. Friday the 13th (2009)
Jason's ends (mild spoilers)
Part 1 - Appears out of nowhere. Probably a nightmare.
Part 2 - Randomly disappears.
Part 3 - Happily wandering around and waving at the end.
Part 4 - Defeated by a haircut.
Part 5 - Randomly possesses someone?
Part 6 - Defeated by large chains and a rock.
Part 7 - Defeated by a reanimated zombie.
Part 8 - Defeated by scandalous New York sewage system treatment policies.
Part 9 - Defeated by giant muppet hands.
Part 10 - Defeated by being pulled into outer space.
Reboot - Defeated by a locket-necklace.
X-posted to Halloween Candy