Following Jason Lives, the Friday the 13th franchise appears to have been written into a bit of a corner. Up until Part VI, Jason had just been some towering disfigured momma’s boy who happened to be very hard to kill. It wasn’t until this film that his decaying corpse was brought back from beyond the grave as an actual supernatural being. He was quite literally unkillable and could only be defeated by weighing him down to the bottom of Crystal Lake with a very heavy rock. How do you continue a franchise built upon a masked killer preying upon teenagers […]Read more »
After the misstep that was Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Jason Lives course-corrects the slasher franchise back into Mr. Voorhees’ hands with spectacular results. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives serves as the third and final film in what many consider the “Tommy Jarvis” trilogy of films, a series named for the protagonist that stars in all three. Don’t fret if this connection was completely lost on you, though. Had they not shared a name across the films, I would probably have never put it together because of how wildly inconsistent the portrayals are. As this film begins, […]Read more »
The fifth installment of the Friday the 13th franchise is subtitled A New Beginning probably because the previous one was intended to be The Final Chapter. Strangely enough, Part 5 acts as both a soft reboot to the franchise as well as a continuation of what people refer to as the “Tommy Jarvis arc” of films that center on the character first introduced in The Final Chapter as a child played by Corey Feldman. Jason Voorhees, who was finally killed at the end of the previous film is unsurprisingly back and is now tormenting an adult (teenaged?) Tommy (John Shepherd) […]Read more »
Just like the last one, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter picks up immediately after the end of the previous film. With Jason finally having been stopped (spoilers) his corpse has been taken to the local hospital morgue while the police sort out what happened. As you might’ve guessed he’s not actually dead and, also just like the last movie, he murders a couple of non-plot-related characters before peacing out to go hunt down some more teens. The first thing I noticed about this one is that the production seems much more scaled up than any of the previous films. […]Read more »
I thought I was beginning to figure the Friday the 13th franchise out. Upon starting Friday the 13th Part III I was greeted with a familiar recap of the last bit of the previous film, just as it had done in turn with the first film. You can’t expect people to remember what happened in a movie a whopping 15 months ago, can you? Then something happened. The opening credits began to roll. But they were different. They extruded out at the screen, one at a time, as if displaying some kind of cheap parlor trick. Oh god. I get […]Read more »
Friday the 13th Part 2 picks up not long after the ending of the first film. After a lengthy recap of the events that conclude Part 1, Alice (Adrienne King), the sole survivor of Pamela Voorhees’ bloodbath, is recuperating at home when she is brutally murdered by another unseen attacker. Almost immediately, the single remaining loose thread is tied up. The film then jumps forward to five years in the future and another group of counselors is assembling to attend a training camp at a different campground on the same Crystal Lake, a stone’s throw from the site of the […]Read more »