Precursors: Friday the 13th VII-X

Nick Schager — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

After six grisly films, Jason Voorhees’ modus operandi had become so ludicrously predictable – crush a guy’s head, throw a body through a window, stab a sexpot through a bed mattress, etc. – that the only way to keep the franchise alive was through pure, unadulterated outrageousness. And as this week’s third and final recap reveals, there was plenty of ridiculousness to go around in Friday the 13th’s last four chapters.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Following Part VI’s no-seriousness-allowed lead, The New Blood concentrates on a psychically powered teen who, as a kid, accidentally used her abilities to drown abusive boozehound dad in Crystal Lake. Years later, she tries to resurrect him with her mind but (oops!) winds up reanimating chained-underwater Jason instead. It’s a hilarious Freudian-infused set-up, but the paint-by-numbers script rarely exploits its paternal-hang-ups premise for sufficient laughs or scares. Rather than an inventively kooky battle-of-the-paranormal-titans, what the visually well-framed film mainly offers up is scene after scene of dimwits getting perfunctorily slaughtered (usually pre-, during or post- sex) either in a cabin or while running around the forest at night. Kudos, however, to an ending that seems to relish its own amusing preposterousness, and to the filmmakers for recognizing that, if they could no longer make Jason frightening, they could at least force his victims – namely, Susan Blu as the psychic girl’s mother – to sport some truly terrifying ‘80s hair.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Is Part VIII’s decision to predominantly set its action on a boat rather than in NYC meant to upend expectations in a way Jason’s killings don’t? It would be nice to think so, though Rob Hedden’s film is so uniformly chintzy that the real reason for the story’s delayed arrival in Manhattan is likely due to an apparent $67 production budget. After an eternity spent watching electricity-resurrected Jason dispatch party cruiser passengers, a girl who once escaped little Jason’s underwater clutches and a boy with daddy issues make their way to the Big Apple (via rowboat!), which – full of leather-jacketed hoods doing drugs, mugging people, and then tossing their empty wallets into rat-infested trash cans – looks like something out of Street Smart. That a junkie injects the film’s heroine with heroin is a humorous touch. Less sensible, however, is giving Jason the power of teleportation (how else to explain his movement from one shot to another?), or the idea that coating the serial killer in shit – in a fitting finale, Jason is drowned in sewage – might somehow magically turn him back into a little boy.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

The first Friday the 13th not made by Paramount, Jason Goes to Hell has the distinctive feel of (as well as a gloved-hand cameo from) New Line’s trademark horror franchise, Nightmare on Elm St. Ignoring the fact that, when last we saw him, Jason had morphed into a nude child, this “final” Friday commences with Jason getting blown up and then magically possessing a number of host bodies in order to reach Crystal Lake and be resurrected through his last living relatives: sister Diana (Erin Grey), niece Jessica (Kari Keegan), or Jessica’s baby. The notion that Jason can only be born again through, or killed by, his kin is explained by a bounty hunter (21 Jump Street’s Steven Williams) who’s randomly well-informed about this suddenly made-up mythological guideline. A mortician chowing down on Jason’s beating heart expertly kick-starts the gore, but far too much body-jumping, unmasked zombie villains, and shots of spirit-energy flying into or out of Jason make this the series’ second worst installment after Part V.

Jason X (2002)

Unlike his prior two outings, in which Jason barely visits Manhattan and never kicks ass in Hell (respectively), the supernatural fiend spends most of Jason X where advertised: in space! After being cryogenically frozen, Jason is thawed out 450 years later aboard a spaceship and immediately commences his usual slicing and dicing of young adults. Continuity gaps the size of a small planet regularly crop up, yet prove no more distracting than the intergalactic crew’s penchant for spouting 2002-era colloquialisms (“Know what I’m sayin’?”). A fembot eventually blasts Jason to smithereens, mainly so the filmmakers can have him rise again as a cyborg, a sci-fi turn of events that pushes the series about as far as possible from its modest kids-murdered-in-the-woods origins. Still, upon closer inspection, Jason’s transformation into a literal killing machine actually makes perfect sense, given that the Friday the 13th franchise’s defining characteristic always was its mechanical approach to hack-and-slash horror.

Click Here For Parts One & Two

The Rep Report: September 5--10

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives commences its salute to Jerry Schatzberg tonight with screenings of the director's firat features, the 1970 alienation-fest Puzzle of a Downfall Child (starring Faye Dunway) and the 1971 The Panic in Needle Park, costarring Al Pacino, in his first starring role, and Kitty Winn as a young couple of heroin addicts. Schatzberg, who seems to be more or less retired, had an erratic career, and to his other problems, he'll probably have at least one chance during his personal appearance at this retrospective to patiently explain that, no, he isn't Joel Schumacher. But as a filmmaker he had a broad curiosity about different milieus and kinds of characters, and his pictures have generally had texture and weight. Needle Park retains interest as a deep quaff of '70s New York at its most confoundingly ungovernable, and Schatzberg can boast of having directed Pacino in both his last performance before The Godfather made him a star and the first picture he made afterwards, the 1973 road movie Scarecrow co-starring Gene Hackman. When Schatzberg made the New York-set Street Smart fifteen years after Needle Park, he had to shoot it in Toronto, but once again he helped launch the movie career of a major star, this time someone who'd been working for decades and would turn fifty the year the picture was released: just a couple of years earlier, Morgan Freeman had been reduced to holding down a job on Another World, but his terrifying performance as a pimp who emerges like a monster from the id to turn pampered reporter Christopher Reeve's life into a pretzel earned him his first Academy Award nomination and a long-belated measure of the industry stature he'd long deserved. Also showing: Honeysuckle Rose, a 1980 country music remake of Intermezzo starring Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon, which introduced Willie's theme song "On the Road Again," and "Reunion," a sadly overlooked 1989 film starring Jason Robards, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Raindance, the British company responsible for the Raindance Film Festival (which opens October 7, by the way), is bringing its educational program to the New York Film Academy. Aspiring filmmakers looking to drop a few bucks towards their futures might want to check out Elliot Grove's "99 MInute Film School" on Tuesday, September 9 and the "Lo to No Budget Filmmaking" seminar on the weekend of September 13 and 14, which bears a recommendation blurb from director Christopher Nolan, whose most recent film, The Dark Knight, has been well-received. This marks the first time the Raindance people's first venture into America, and it might be nice if it wasn't their last, so for God's sake, behave yourselves.

LOS ANGELES: Every Thursday in September, the Silent Movie Theater hosts "Word Is Born: Hip Hop at the Movies, 1979-1984". Included are Hollywood exploitation jobs such as Breakin' and Beat Street, the solid period documentary Style Wars, and on September 25, Beat This! Hip Hop Rarities, winner of this month's Rep Report Award for Promotional Copy That We Have No Intention of Trying to Re-Word: " We've dug even deeper for our closeout night, and we're bringing you some of the rarest cuts in a fantastic mix of rarities from the old-school hip-hop era. Watch them one after the other, obscure odds and ends from the Golden Age, ending with Beat This! A Hip-Hop History! Yup! It’s the history of hip-hop! And it was made in 1984! And it’s all in rhyme! And it’s vocoderized by Afrika Bambaataa! And it’s sci-fi! And it stars BS-ing punk-impresario-turned-double-dutch-promoter Malcolm McLaren in all his patronizing glory! And it was made for Granada TV! And they forced director Dick Fontaine to slip in McLaren against his will, but he couldn’t do anything about it!"

SAN FRANCISCO: Sean McCourt of the Bay Guardian has the dirt on this weekend's Lebowski Fest.

NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth Hi Mom! Film Festival, festuring an international, family-friendly selection of fifty-one animated and live-action shorts, runs this weekend starting tonight, at the Art Center in Carborro. Please note that the outdoor screenings planned for Chapel Hill have been moved indoors due to a "strong threat of rain."

The Screengrab : street smart

Precursors: Friday the 13th VII-X

The Rep Report: September 5--10