Michael May's Blog, page 40

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Tommy isn't around anymore and after the watered down version of him in Jason Lives, I'm not sorry. I hope he found a good life and lived it. Meanwhile, the series replaces him with basically its version of Stephen King's Carrie and I'm not sorry about that either.
It's especially cool to me that "new blood" Tina is played by Lar Park-Lincoln, whom I formed an enormous crush on the year before in House II: The Second Story. If I'd known she was in New Blood, I would have hurried to see it sooner. 
Not that she's an amazing actor in New Blood, but she's got a great look and is at least as good as anyone else in a Friday the 13th movie outside of Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover. Terry Kiser might give her a run for her money as Tina's psychiatrist, but I'm importing a lot of fondness for him from his performance as Bernie in Weekend at Bernies. 
The story goes that Tina's psychic powers manifested themselves during a summer trip to Crystal Lake when her father got drunk and hit her mom. From the accusations and apologies, that apparently wasn't the first time and Tina wished her father dead. Unfortunately for her, her wish came true when the covered dock he was standing on collapsed, seemingly in response to her emotional outburst. Now, years later, she and her mom have returned to the cabin with Tina's doctor to face her demons in the next step of her guilt-ridden recovery. At least, that's what Dr Crews claims. His motives become less clear and pure as the story unfolds.
And of course there's a neighboring cabin with a bunch of young people gathering for a birthday bash.
Jason is still chained to the lake bottom after the last movie and it's apparently not as voluntary as I speculated at the end of that story. I guess those chains are more strong and tight than they look. He's accidentally freed by Tina though after a particularly harrowing session with Dr Crews and Tina also begins having premonitions of various people's deaths.
I mostly enjoyed New Blood thanks to Park-Lincoln and Kiser and just the addition of a supernatural opponent for Jason. The party neighbors are all generic stereotypes though and Jason's activity is pretty uninspired. But there's some good stuff in his final showdown with the last few survivors, especially once Tina gets some control over her powers and starts using them. 
Sadly, Jason's ultimate defeat is lame, with Tina animating the corpse of her dead father to recapture Jason and chain him again to the bottom of the lake. That sounds awesome on paper and it might have been if Tina's dad was as decayed and zombie-like as he should have been. I'm imagining a longer battle between two zombies, one of whom is controlled by Tina. I would have loved that. But Dad looks like he's been in the water for about twenty seconds and the showdown is over almost as soon as it starts. 
I suspect that this is the last we'll see of Tina, but if that's true it's too bad. She goes on the list with Ginny, Trish, and Pam as Jason survivors I'd love to see in some kind of monster hunting secret society.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

I'm a bit ticked off at Jason Lives for how much it ignores the continuity of Final Chapter and New Beginning. It continues using the character of Tommy Jasper, but completely ignores the fact that New Beginning ended with Tommy's about to murder his halfway house mom, Pam. Pam is never even mentioned, nor is Tommy's sister Trish (though to be fair, New Beginning never brought her up either). And just as frustrating is the change in Tommy's personality. He was super traumatized in New Beginning and I felt horrible for him. In Jason Lives, he's basically Dr Loomis from Halloween: a little unhinged and very ranty about the dangerous killer on the loose, but otherwise functional, even to the point where he can grin and banter with the female lead.
Part of me wants to come up with my own explanation for what happened at the end of New Beginning. Tommy clearly did not kill Pam since the sheriff in Jason Lives knows who Tommy is and doesn't have a murder warrant for him. So maybe Tommy's putting on Jason's mask and picking up a knife in New Beginning was just one last bit of trauma working itself through him, but he realized what he was doing and stopped it before Pam even noticed. Who knows? I don't really care, because obviously the film series doesn't. But it's disappointing.
I like that Jason Lives gets back to the summer camp setting and especially that it ups the stakes by having actual children campers present. I think it kind of cheats in dealing with the kids, but at least it shakes up the scenario some. As much as I like that though (and the counselors Sissy and Paula are likable), I never really got into the rest of the movie. It's impossible to take seriously with its wacky paintball combatants or the cartoony relationship between the sheriff and his daughter. 
And then there's the weird, Frankenstein way that Jason is brought back to life. I buy that Tommy wants to dig him up and cremate him to stop the nightmares. But there has to be more to Jason's resurrection than just a lightning strike. We need some magic or demonic possession or something. I'm curious to see if future installments try to explain any of that or if we're just supposed to be so happy that Jason's back that we don't need a cause for it. If the series doesn't offer anything in the next movie or two, I'll come up with something on my own. Probably involving Pam and Trish, because where are they?!
Finally, there's the ending in which Tommy decides that the only way to permanently destroy Jason is to return him to the bottom of the lake where he was thought to have drowned as a kid. Because why? It's a rubbish theory born of desperation and makes Tommy look even more ridiculous than he already does. 
To the movie's credit, it doesn't even suggest that the theory works. Tommy gets Jason into the water, but Jason is explicitly shown to still be alert and active down there. His hands are free and there's only a loose chain around his neck holding him to the lake bottom. I don't know how much time passes between Jason Lives and the next movie, but if it's more than ten seconds it's only because Jason's voluntarily taking a little break.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

With Jason apparently really, finally dead at the end of Final Chapter, Paramount had to figure out a new way to continue the series. A New Beginning is a shaky start to the next phase of the Friday the 13th saga, but it works for me for a couple of reasons.
I like that it jumps forward in time to put Corey Feldman's character Tommy in his twenties, still traumatized by the events of Final Chapter. There's no mention of where his older sister has ended up, but Tommy has been in a psychiatric hospital and is now being transferred to a halfway house. He's haunted by dreams of Jason's coming back to life though and is generally withdrawn and skittish.
When people start being brutally murdered at the halfway house (it's in the woods, presumably in the Crystal Lake area, but I don't remember that that's ever specified), New Beginning leaves the identity of the Jason copycat killer a secret until the very end. The film throws a lot of suspicion at Tommy, making sure that he's absent when the murders take place, but I enjoyed stubbornly refusing to believe that it was him. I had no idea who else it might be though, with my totally illogical guess being that maybe it was the guy who ran the halfway house, because he disappears halfway through the film and only turns up again towards the end when someone discovers his murdered corpse. Unfortunately, the actual identity of the killer is out of nowhere and underwhelming. It makes sense, it's just not revealed in any interesting way. But I still like that there's so much focus on the mystery of the killer's identity like in the first film.
That was my overall experience with New Beginning. I like about as much as I don't like. And that includes the pool of potential victims. The halfway house's cook and his grandson Reggie are both super charming and cool. I also really like Violet, who's into New Wave music and dances a great Robot. I would have so had a crush on her in 1985. The couple who run the house are great, too, and I mostly like the resident Jake up until his awkward scene trying to get another resident to have sex with him. I also really, really like Tommy and don't want to believe he's hacking people up.
On the other hand, sex-crazed Tina and Eddie are obnoxiously one-dimensional as are the house's hillbilly stereotype neighbors. The final resident Robin is just bland. So New Beginning has some characters and elements that I like and a bunch of stuff that I don't. And also in the negative column is the cliffhanger revelation that thanks to the combination of Final Chapter and New Beginning, Tommy actually has finally been traumatized to the point that he's ready to pick up the mask and machete himself to be the series' new villain.
Knowing that the title of the next movie is Jason Lives and not Tommy Attacks, I'm hopeful that it retcons this development, but by now in the series I'm ready for anything.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

The series not only gets back on track with the misnamed fourth film; it ramps up in a big way with a pretty great story and a more expensive production that includes actual actors. I kept blinking during the opening credits as one recognizable name after another popped on the screen like Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, and Erich Anderson (whom I know as Felicity Porter's dad on the TV show Felicity).
All the actors - even the one's I didn't already know - are much better than the casts in the previous films. Glover is especially watchable as the spazzy Jimmy (his dancing scene alone is worth whatever you pay to watch the movie) and Gremlins-era Feldman is a charming, nerdy kid who also feels like a real person. 
It helps a lot that all of these characters are pretty well defined and don't just fall into archetype buckets the way the Part 3 cast especially did. The plot is mostly driven by the old trope of having a bunch of young people vacation in the forest, but this time it's got characters I actually like. For example, all the Friday the 13th movies have an obnoxious "wild and crazy" guy who's super overt about how horny he always is, but Final Chapter's Ted is also revealed to be extremely lonely, precisely because he turns people off. I feel sorry for him even though he brings his misery on himself.
The established couples in the group also have their own dramas instead of being cookie-cutter hook-ups. Samantha and Paul have been together long enough that they're possibly too comfortable with each other and Paul messes things up by becoming interested in one of a couple of twins the group meets up with. The other couple, Sara and Doug are at the beginning of their relationship and sweetly realizing how much they actually like each other. Seriously, I could watch a straight-up murderless drama about all of these characters working through a weekend together.
(Incidentally, I thought Doug looked familiar, but didn't recognize actor Peter Barton as the guy from The Powers of Matthew Star. It's been too long since I watched any Matthew Star and I'd also completely forgotten that it also starred Amy Steel, who was Ginny in Friday the 13th, Part 2. Funny world.)
Final Chapter also adds another layer by having the group's rental house be next door to a home owned by a single mom and her two kids, Trish and Tommy (Feldman). So there's all this going on even before Jason arrives. 
Not that the movie waits that long to show Jason. After all, he was supposedly dead at the end of Part 3, so Final Chapter picks up immediately after with all of the corpses from the previous movie being taken to the morgue. It turns out that Jason isn't quite dead yet though, so once he dispatches a couple of hospital workers, he's back into the forest in search of more victims. 
That axe in Jason's head looked pretty bad at the end of Part 3, but my suspension of disbelief is high enough to let me buy that he was only mostly dead. The dude doesn't have a lot of higher thinking anyway, he's pretty much just a murder machine at this point. So if you tell me that Chris' axe was able to put him into deep shock for a while without actually killing him, sure, I'll bite. I'm not a brain doctor.
Another cool element in Final Chapter is Erich Anderson as a mysterious woodsman named Rob. I feel like we're supposed to be worried that he might be another killer for a while, but that doesn't make any sense and I never believed it. And there's enough secrecy around him to make him a compelling character even if I'm not afraid he's going to use that machete on Trish and Tommy. As it turns out, Rob is the brother of a character who was murdered in Part 2, so he's actually out looking for Jason to take revenge. I love that addition of a monster-hunter character and that the movie's paying attention to continuity with the rest of the series.
Since Final Chapter isn't set at a camp, but just in the woods surrounding Crystal Lake, it makes me retroactively more comfortable with Part 3's also abandoning the camp setting. With these last two movies, the setting has opened up a bit and I'm okay with that. Part of what bothered me about Part 3 was that the water on the property looked more like a creek than a lake, but I guess it could have been a tributary of Crystal Lake or just a little arm of it or something. I don't know. I still don't like Part 3, but being able to move past it to Final Chapter makes me feel a little more generous towards it.
I learned that Part 3 was originally supposed to be the final film to create a trilogy ending in Jason's death, but I'm not shocked at all that Paramount decided to make another one. What's shocking is that they expected anyone to believe that the fourth one was actually the final chapter. I remember even in 1984 and as a total outsider to the series thinking, "Yeah, right." 
And boy do they ever want to suggest a sequel. Jason may be dead (or maybe not, I don't know how this goes), but it took Tommy's making himself look like Young Jason to confuse Adult Jason long enough for Tommy to get close and do some hacking. That physical transformation combined with the trauma of the evening apparently does a number on Tommy's psyche, so when he's hugging his sister at the end, he's got a super creepy expression. The question the movie is asking is clearly, "Is Tommy going to become a new Jason?"
I know just enough about the lore of the following films to suspect that that's not the case (I mean, it's Jason's name, not Tommy's, in the titles of future installments), but I've got no idea what really happens. I'm super into the series now and understand why it's so popular. Really enjoying this.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

Well that went downhill quickly.
Part 3 opens by reshowing a big chunk of the end of Part 2, but actually has almost nothing to do with the previous movie. A character watches TV and sees Ginny put into the ambulance, but the report is all about how there's a homicidal maniac on the loose (fair enough) and doesn't mention whether or not Paul survived. That's too bad, but I guess it leaves me free to create my own ending to Part 2 and say that Paul survived and chased Jason off. It seems unlikely, but it's also probably the best way to explain Ginny's surviving.
What Part 3 is interested in (outside of super dumb, comin-at-ya 3D effects complete with popping popcorn and a yo-yo) is just having Jason roam the countryside murdering people in overlong sequences before settling into clearing out a bunch of young people on vacation at a farmhouse. 
One of them has some history with Jason, though it's nothing from either of the previous films and she remembers very little of it. It's most interesting to me as an explanation that Jason has been active in the area before the events of Part 2. But it's weird, because all the woman remembers is being captured by Jason and dragged off. She blacked out after that. She obviously wasn't murdered, but there's also no mention of her being raped or any other horrible thing that Jason could have done to her. So that supports my theory that even though he's been around all these years, he maybe didn't get a taste for murder until he took his revenge on Alice at the beginning of Part 2.
The other important element in this movie - just from a legend-building standpoint - is that it's the origin of the iconic hockey mask. It's a lame prop used by one of the vacationers to draw attention to himself, so when Jason kills the kid, he takes the mask to replace the sack that got pulled off him in Part 2. 
And that's almost all the interest I have in Part 3. The acting is horrible, the dialogue is worse, and I care about none of the characters. It has nothing to do with a summer camp. It's just a random incident with disposable victims. The only other thing worth mentioning is that Jason is apparently killed at the end, so Part 4 will have some explaining to do to undo that.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

After the first movie with Mrs Voorhees as the killer, I speculated that the sequel would introduce her son in some kind of supernatural way. The end of the first one leans hard in that direction (although out of nowhere, in contrast with the relatively mundane murder mystery of the rest of the film), so I imagined that Mrs Voorhees' deep, emotional connection with her dead son would cause him to be resurrected in some way. But I couldn't figure out how he'd go from being a small, teenage boy to the hulking monster needed to drive the rest of the series.
Part 2 answers that question by rejecting any supernatural premise at all. Jason's potential resurrection was all in Alice's imagination. The truth is more grounded, if no less unlikely. Since Jason's body was never recovered from the lake, legends persist that he never actually drowned at all, but now roams the woods around Crystal Lake as an adult. And that turns out to be the actual case.
It doesn't make a lot of sense at first thought. Mrs Voorhees goes on a murder spree because she thinks her son drowned. She wanders those woods a lot, so how come she never encountered her son alive before? Part 2 reveals that he clearly knows about her, but he's never approached her? 
There's a possible explanation though, which is that she does know that he's still alive, but is no less angry about the negligence of the camp counselors who almost caused his death. And then there's the fact of Jason's deformity as revealed at the end of the film (he spends most of the movie with a sack over his head; not yet the iconic hockey mask). Was Jason deformed before he drowned and that's part of why his counselors wanted nothing to do with him? Or was his deformity somehow the result of drowning and being abandoned in the woods for so long? What affect do both of those options have on Mrs Voorhees' insanity? Was she already pretty close to snapping before the "drowning" and it didn't take Jason's actual death to push her over the edge? So many questions. But I don't need clear answers to enjoy the movie. There are possible answers, even if they're muddy, so I can move on and let the story unfold.
After Jason tracks Alice home and takes revenge for her killing his mom, he returns to Crystal Lake and goes quiet again for a while. But that only lasts until camp season opens and another summer camp starts training counselors near the site of the previous one. 
The other camp seems to be already established, but maybe I missed something and it is in fact brand new. It doesn't really matter. Even if it's been around for a while, there's an explanation for why Jason hasn't bothered it before. Local legends aside, we don't have any evidence that Jason ever killed a human being before taking revenge on Alice. Maybe that awakens something in him that compels him when he sees activity at the new camp.
The new camp is run by a guy named Paul and his assistant Ginny, who's also his girlfriend. He's not building his camp from scratch the way Steve was in the first film, so rather than cleaning, hammering, and painting, Paul has gathered his counselors for a training session in first aid and wilderness survival. And there are a lot of counselors. I was shocked by how many potential victims the movie introduces right away and couldn't figure out how I was supposed to keep that many straight in my head.
But then the movie surprises me again by having most of the staff go off to town for a last hurrah before the serious training begins the following day. A handful of counselors stay behind and there's our real victim pool for the movie. And while Paul and Ginny initially go to town with the other celebrants, they come back early to discover what Jason has wrought and to face him themselves.
It's a cool, different take because rather than just having a Final Girl, Part 2 gives us a Final Couple. Even though Paul is dating an employee, he's not super creepy about it. I don't love the guy, but I like him just fine. He's clearly trying to find the balance in his relationship with Ginny, but their fondness for each other overshadows any issues around power or authority.
None of the actors in Part 2 are very good and that includes Amy Steel as Ginny, but I like her a lot anyway. She's super pretty, so maybe that's why, but I also like that she's a grad student in psychology. That ends up being just a way to throw in some theories about why Jason might be doing what he's doing, but it's still cool that Ginny is smart and holds her own next to Paul (including beating him in chess). If they defeat Jason, they do it as a team.
The movie is ambiguous about whether Jason is defeated at the end. In another surprising move, it fades to black as Ginny goes unconscious while Jason and Paul are still fighting. Ginny wakes up on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance and neither she nor we the audience know what happened between Jason and Paul. Is Paul okay and still in the cabin? Is he dead and Jason has disappeared again into the woods? Hopefully Part 3 will give me those answers.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th (1980)

I'm not a slasher movie fan. I prefer my horror to be creepy and spooky and subtle. I love living in the tension of what might happen. Gore doesn't scare me, it just grosses me out. 
But I do love world-building and epic stories and I'm fascinated by the idea of slasher sagas like the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th films. They scratch the same itch that corporate superhero comics do. The business is propelling the story machine so that it has to keep rolling, so how do the storytellers accomplish that? It's often clunky, but equally as often interesting to me as a writing exercise. 
I already looked at the Halloween saga a long time ago and got started on (but never finished due to my lack of access to the movies at the time, not lack of interest) the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I need to go back and wrap up Nightmare at some point, but in the meantime, this year I want to finally see all of the Friday the 13th movies and how they connect to each other. 
SPOILERS BELOW

I've seen the original Friday the 13th two or three times before, but I always forget how good it is. It's super cheap and none of the actors are very professional (only Kevin Bacon would go on to have any kind of career), but the characters are believable, the story is extremely well paced, and it wisely keeps its killer's motives a mystery until the very end. It doesn't rely on jump scares and the gore is minimal. It spends a lot of time letting the killer stalk the victims. The murders also start right towards the beginning of the film and since the whole story takes place in a single afternoon and evening, it breezes through like summer wind through a stuffy cabin. That and all the red herrings around the murderer's identity keep me super engaged for the whole run time.
It's a common criticism of teen slasher flicks to say that they specifically punish sexual promiscuity and reward the purity of the Final Girl, but that's not always true and it's not for Friday the 13h. Jack and Marcie are the only characters to actually have sex. Ned is obsessed with it, but he's every bit as virginal as Final Girl Alice, who's right in there playing strip Monopoly with Brenda and Bill. And the film's first victim is Annie, who doesn't have time to do any kind of messing around with sex or substances. 
All that helps keep the movie fresh for me. These are young people alone in the woods doing things you might expect unchaperoned young people to do, but it's an overstatement to say that their fates are tied to their actions. That might be more true in the sequels or other slasher films, but I think it's cool that it's not in this one, which is arguably the prototype for the genre even more than Halloween is.
I've gone back and forth on how I feel about the ending and the killer's revelation of herself. On the one hand, it's awfully convenient for exposition's sake that she show herself and explain her motives to Alice. The audience needs to get that information somehow, but this seems like an inelegant way to do it until I realize that as insane as she is, Mrs Voorhees does have incentive for wanting someone to know why she's killed all of those people. She sees it as retribution/justice for the death of her child, but part of justice is having someone know that justice has been carried out. Mrs Voorhees obviously can't have everyone knowing that it was her or why she did it, but when she's down to her last victim and is about to safely get away with it all, I understand why she goes for it. (Speaking of her motives and insanity, I also love the reversal of Psycho with the mother creating a homicidal alternate personality of her dead son.)
Outside of the general cheapness of the production (the motorcycle cop is especially hard to believe), my only complaint about Friday the 13th is its wanting to leave open the question about whether or not Mrs Voorhees' son Jason is still a threat there at the bottom of the lake. The dream sequence with him attacking Alice in the canoe is fine, because it's a dream and it feels like the kind of thing she might be afraid of after the night she's had. And I don't care too much about her vocalized fear that "he's still there." She's in shock and it doesn't have to mean anything. 
Except that the movie clearly wants it to mean something with its focusing on the surface of the lake right after her declaration. It's clearly setting up a possible sequel, but there's no rational reason to believe that Jason is anything but a resting corpse at the bottom of the lake. Up to then, this has been a straightforward mystery about a mass murderer. It's only at the very end, after the climax, that it decides to introduce a potentially supernatural element. I don't like that.
I don't actually remember if I've ever seen Part 2 before, so if I have, I definitely don't remember how it handles Jason's resurrection or how much it explains. But I can imagine a scenario in which Mrs Voorhees' deep connection to her dead son would allow her spirit to possess his corpse and bring it back to murderous life. I can also imagine an explanation in which she never really created his alternate personality on her own, but was actually possessed by him. But that's not as cool to me.
Of course, Mrs Voorhees' possessing her son's corpse would only give her a teenaged body to run around in and that's not very threatening, so I expect something completely different for the next movie. I'm looking forward to seeing what that is.

AfterLUNCH | Hocus Pocus (1993)

There are a few classic Halloween family films that I've missed over the years and one of them is 1993's Hocus Pocus starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, and Thora Birch. So when Kay brought it up on a recent AfterLUNCH episode and Rob revealed that he hasn't seen it either, it felt like a natural thing to finally cross off our lists. Kay returns to help us debrief over the experience: what works, what doesn't, and how many times does a movie need to say the word "virgin"?
 Download or listen to the episode here.

15 Favorite Horror Movies: The Wind (2018)

Being a fan of both Westerns and certain kinds of horror movie, I'd hoped to enjoy The Wind. But I was shocked by how good it is. It uses the isolation of pioneer life to create a scary, atmospheric, Western gothic. It's beautifully shot, it's psychological, and above all it's super spooky. 
I also love the title, because a huge part of the film is about using wind as a symbol of something dark and sinister. You know the old horror trope of someone getting spooked by a noise and someone else trying to reassure them by saying, "Don't worry. It's only the wind." What happens when it really is the wind, but that's not a good or comforting thing?

15 Favorite Horror Movies: Marrowbone (2017)

Marrowbone is an excellent gothic chiller that further proves that Anya Taylor-Joy knows how to pick horror films.
It takes place in the 1960s as a woman brings her four children back to her childhood home in an attempt to escape something horrible that's recently happened to them. When she grows sick and dies, the kids (two of whom are played by Mia Goth and Stranger Things' Charlie Heaton) have to try to carry on as normal so that they're not split up by foster care, all the while working through and fighting against something deadly from their past.
Taylor-Joy plays a local woman whom the oldest sibling meets in town and falls for, dividing his attention and weakening his commitment to his sister and brothers. Their house is super creepy, the mystery is great, and it all works together in an exciting, satisfying way.