A new beginning was needed after A New Beginning, as that ass-tacular wreck identified all of the stupidest elements of the Friday the 13th series. Seriously, that movie is wretched! Frank Mancuso, Sr., went into damage control mode, dictating that a new Friday must have ONLY the following: Jason
Otherwise, this was carte blanche. Mancuso selected one Tom McLoughin to write and direct, owing to his unusual career dichotomy of horror directing (One Dark Night) and comedy writing (Dick Van Dyke specials, assorted spec scripts). Yup, it’s lighter-and-fluffier applied to Friday the 13th. For a series whose only attraction is often its exploitation, this could be seen as a massive miscalculation. Or it could be seen as the franchise’s most important turning point, completely reimagining mute, personality-free psychopath Jason Voorhees for the better! Foregoing undue reverence to its own predecessors, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (though sometimes that subtitle gets place of preference) would be more at home in Toho or the Universal monsters pantheon.
…And also James Bond.
Stabbed, not slashed.
Somehow, from Parts 2 through IV (the ones where Jason headlines and offs heads) Mr. Voorhees was a mortal. Machete to the shoulder, axe to the freakin’ face, he kept livin’, powered by the sheer momentum of sequels. But incontestably dead now (and ixnay on the emationcray in A Ewnay Eginningbay), any Jason resurrection would carry the series into the overtly supernatural. While this sacrifices the tenuous sense of slimy reality the series (and slashers as a whole) trafficked in during the early ‘80s, it’s in keeping with the overall evolution of the franchise. A Nightmare on Elm Street proved a thoroughly unrealistic premise needn’t undermine a slasher flick’s effectiveness, as verisimilitude is traded for entertaining fantasticalism.
To this end, McLoughlin presents Jason 2.0 (ex-Army bouncer C.J. Graham, aping the T-1000 ahead of schedule) as a sort of Frankenstein monster, even using lightning bolts as his means of resurrection. (It’s no accident; name-dropping Boris Karloff – alongside more recent horror directors, in that still-then-new horror in-joke – undeniably ties Jason Lives in with Bride of Frankenstein and its like.) Actually, the opening scene is a good litmus test for how you’ll take this new iteration. Again Jason-killing Tommy Jarvis is at the center of this mess – now as played by Thom Matthews, of Return of the Living Dead, as Jason Lives wishes to possess NO connection to A New Beginning. In the midst of a thundering, hyper-cinematic rainstorm (on a budget), Tommy, driven by his own psychosis (and a truck), elects to dig up Jason’s grave. His intent is to destroy whatever remains of the body, which is considerable owing to the lazy maggot population of Crystal Lake – er, sorry, Forest Green. They’ve renamed themselves! Rather, one misplaced fence pole invites a lightning strike, and Jason lives again!...And murders Horshack from “Welcome Back, Kotter.”
Oh, and there are jokes strung throughout this segment. Just want to keep you aware, Jason Lives is a horror-comedy, like Matthews’ Return of the Living Dead, or like Night of the Creeps, or hell, even Gremlins, as much as the premise allows.
This makes Jason Lives my favorite of the whole bunch, same as with many viewers. It also completely infuriates a separate set, so decide now if you prefer to be sickened or delighted by decapitations.
Not that Jason himself is ever the butt of the joke, though the gags do edge up right within machete’s reach. Rather, Jason remains a threat, and a repurposed threat at that: He’s a zombie! No, no, Jason ain’t bitin’ folks and propagating other Jasons, for as astounding as that’d be. His lone hobby remains finding unique means of destroying human bodies with sharp instruments. But Jason flat out cannot be hurt now, which changes the whole climactic dynamic when we get to it. And satisfied with his newfound indestructibility, it’s only now that our buddy takes up the habit of slooooowly walking everywhere. The “running Jason” vs. “walking Jason” argument has its parallel in the zombie genre, if you favor dread or panic. At Part Six, we’re way too far in to start making Jason frightening, but he gains an iconography! Brute, simple, disengaging as a personality but intriguing as a force of nature. He’s Godzilla!
The scenario this setup yields is astoundingly rich. Jason, reborn way the hell off in some cemetery, makes the long, victim-strewn walkabout across the forest back to his beloved Crystal Lake. It’s a simple motive, walk from A to B, for a psycho so often given to lurking around one setting until plot conditions demanded he start killing people. The nature of the victim pool thus changes. Jason, through convenience or sixth sense, encounters totally random people on his travels. He kills them. Some lament the obvious body count-padding this engenders. But if you read Jason’s latest shenanigans not as the personalized offings of a standard slasher, but as a rampage akin to an invasion movie, these moments stand as fun set pieces unto themselves.
Tommy is equally driven throughout. For once we have a legitimate protagonist in our Friday the 13th, someone who knows Jason is loose the entire time. This eliminates a lot of the molasses-like twenty minutes with jerks we usually get. But Tommy’s mission (get to Crystal Lake, defeat Jason, prevents deaths – by genre necessity, he’ll fail at this last one) is rather too simple – I mean, he easily outpaces Jason, as Tommy doesn’t travel at a casual saunter, or brutally dismember every person he meets.
Rather, Tommy first goes to the police, to Sheriff Garris (David Kagen). For as genre savvy as Tommy is in regards to Jason’s slasherific habits (as are even some of his victims, in good proto-Scream style, for as little good as it does ‘em), Tommy has apparently not seen other horror movies like The Blob and its ilk – say, the similarly comedic late-‘80s Killer Klowns From Outer Space. If Tommy were, he’d know the cops never listen to “punk kids.” So after a rich, full day resurrecting the corpse of a mass murderer, then starting a war against it, Tommy gets thrown in the slammer.
Repeatedly – almost as if in a holding pattern – Tommy escapes from the police, and races off to find Jason. Shortly thereafter, the cops capture Tommy, and haul him back to prison. This repeats itself, like a Looney Tunes routine in the midst of a body count epic, throughout. If it all sounds a little atypical for the franchise – and it is – that’s not even mentioning the car chases it creates! Is this even still a slasher movie? No matter, there’s a continuous propulsive momentum to it all, something most slashers never even think of providing.
Structurally, this isn’t a whole lot like the rest, as such a story barely provides for the usual tale of teens holing up in a camp, then dying one-by-one. Even so, McLoughlin still throws in a camp, with a reduced counselor roster. And for once, I can’t really fault these victims for setting up shop on the site of some fifty or so previous murders. For the killer is D-E-A-D, as far as they’re concerned – and possibly even just a “legend,” because it’s not a Friday the 13th without some notion complicating the series timeline.
There’s even kids at this camp. Holy bucking convention, Batman!
This means a wholly new dynamic once Jason reaches Camp Forest Green, which is precisely where he wishes to loiter. After killing whomever is already there. Actually…there’s no telling what Jason might do with children present. Surely, he tried his damnedest to destroy Tommy back when he was a prepubescent Corey Feldman, so we can assume he means the same potential childicide tonight. Not that Jason’ll get the opportunity – Seriously, it takes a far darker movie than Jason Lives to offer up shameless child mass murder. Rather, Jason contents himself with the counselors – and to preserve time until Tommy finally arrives, Jason now resumes his old patient stalker routine when earlier in the day he’d been decapitating people three-at-a-time!
And about those counselors (because I guess there must always be a character rundown in these Friday write-ups)?
Well, Jason’s already run into literally half of the counselor corps(e) during his bucolic hike. So Cort (Tom Fridley – John Travolta’s nephew), Darren (Tony Goldwyn – the baddie in Ghost) and Lizbeth (MRS. Tom McLoughlin) are not only already dead (alongside five paintballers, and assorted other riffraff), they’re already in police body bags – and coincidental timing lets Garris and his men forever think Tommy’s committed these deeds, on his many excursions outside of their useless custody.
That just leaves, for Jason’s perusal, the following:
Sissy (Renée Jones, due up like the vast majority of Friday players for an acting career in daytime soaps – “Days of Our Lives” for her). She’s black, she’s sassy (“sassy Sissy” being no doubt an intended joke in this gag-heavy gorefest), she’s just had her head twisted off.
Paula (Kerry Noonan) is a more interesting case, in Jason Lives’ persistent quest to upend expected formula. In any other entry, Paula’d be pegged as the Final Girl, for her studied virginity, sweetness, attention to the children. One almost feels bad that she instead receives the single most horrific kill in the film (arguably). Poor Paula, she did so much to warrant survival. However, she didn’t do the one most important thing…
Immediately side with Tommy Jarvis. See, the protagonist role is already covered (a Final Boy?!). As part of the general lightening of mood, it’s not just Tommy alone who’s guaranteed to live until the end credits. Nope, IV and V both allowed multiple survivors (and I’m not even counting the many, many unmurdered children Jason Lives traffics in, making this the easiest survived Friday of them all). Rather, by the time of Jason Lives, the Final Couple was the norm. As such, Tommy has Megan Garris (Jennifer Cooke) – “the attractive blond who survives” being Mancuso’s sole non-Jason demand – who makes it to the end despite characteristics more in keeping with the slut archetype. Warranted or not, upending the formula this much is surely unexpected, and most welcome when marathoning these movies.
It’s this general playfulness which sustains Jason Lives, even with a (MPAA-necessitated) lack of gore, or a director-dictated lack of nudity – the only series entry sans tits. Hell, I’d cite Jason Lives as the one to watch if you have no interest in Jason. It’s sort of the fundamental Friday, assuming both Jason’s preexistence, and his continued adventures afterwards. It really does feel like a mid-period Toho Godzilla flick. It’s fun!
“Fun” is the best word to describe Jason Lives, as much as anything with this many eviscerations can be fun. It’s the sort of movie that can pepper itself with Alice Cooper rock anthems, including the Jason-themed “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask).” It’s self-aware in obvious ways not many mainstream horror efforts had attempted before – there’s nothing revolutionary in its approach, but for a Friday it’s stratospheric. Horror-comedy can be a challenging tightrope to walk, but I think Jason Lives does a nice job of it – Jason always catered a certain amount of silliness (Part III, anyone?); doing so intentionally is a good way to head off many problems.
Even the characters are interesting, in their low-key way. They’re never remotely believable, but rather movie creations which function in that sense. Compare it to III, where a one-time proclamation of “I’m pregnant” substitutes for a consistent persona throughout. Hell, the jerks with 30 seconds of screen time prior to a be-Jasoning still read are more fully formed than the whole cast of, say, The Final Chapter.
It’s also the first Friday since the first Friday to unquestionably occur on a Friday (the Thirteenth)! Don’t know how that one’s escaped ‘em for so long.
And with all the upending, and the general loopy tone, zombie Jason cannot be offed in the usual desultory way, with a single stab wound at the appropriate minute mark. Hell, he weathers repeated point blank shotgun blasts, something The Final Chapter’s rifle-smashing Jason evidently couldn’t do. With the stakes thus upped, Tommy ultimately just stops Jason. Doesn’t kill him, stops him. The murderer gets chained to the bottom of Lake Forest Gr- ih, Crystal Lake, for awkward reasons (“The place Jason first died” really ought to be Tommy’s living room floor, unless we must again reassess the continuity of Part 2). As a meta choice – to preserve Jason in his most iconic form for the following sequels to treat as they will – it’s the perfect conclusion. And even the stinger ending, the oft-tiresome “he’s not dead yet” tag, is acceptable in such a context. Jason Lives is a part of a larger series, it knows it, and makes lemonade of that fact.
For all of the relative praise Jason Lives earns (critically, it was the first since 1980’s Friday the 13th to earn anything but negative notes), it’s a shame this was then the lowest-grossing of the series. It’s not McLoughlin’s fault; things were running pretty ragged, especially after A New Beginning’s dysfunctions (a nice little in-joke: McLoughlin names the lamest victim in Jason Lives ”Roy,” after that one’s killer – Hah!). Jason now finally walks the walk as a cultural icon, just when he was becoming more niche. It’s not even the sudden competition from Freddy Kreuger; horror was generally leaving the limelight, having only entered it around the time of Friday the 13th.
But even with low gross (I mean both it made little money, and it’s not disgusting), Jason Lives is hugely important to the series. It redefined Jason as a force of nature, an immovable object, rather than just a glorified psycho-killer. Always something of an ersatz Michael Myers, Jason gains distinction now by taking on certain Frankenstein monster characteristics. Everything from now on will be a struggle to recapture what McLoughlin achieved.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Friday the 13th (1980)
• No. 2 Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
• No. 3 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
• No. 4 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
• No. 5 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
• No. 7 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
• No. 8 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
• No. 9 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
• No. 10 Jason X (2002)
• No. 11 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
• No. 12 Friday the 13th (2009)
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