Post by No Personality on Mar 2, 2010 8:04:14 GMT -5
By just about anyone's standards, Friday the 13th is long in the tooth. One would think it'd take a truly epic story to keep something going for 8 entire movies, each being at least 86 minutes a piece. But as I explained before, what kept this thing going seemingly without any end in sight (other than box office returns) is that it's the same one movie just made over and over again each time by someone new. I think that's why I've remained such a huge fan. I wouldn't be as attracted to this franchise if it were one long, continuous story. Each feeling it's essential to carry on the last movie's characters and finish off their story. With most horror movies, the end is meant to be the end. A Horror Movie story begins and ends with the movie itself.
Otherwise it would be more like television. Where people want to come back more for the characters and less for what happens to them. In Friday the 13th, the characters seem to come from a stock factory. And if you have no experience with this series, that probably sounds very peculiar. And don't worry, if you are well acquainted with this series- I'm not about to start talking like Robert Englund and insist that it's really about something. Like the slaughter of the American dream or the devastation of the youth or corruption of innocence. At most- I only suggest things. To hopefully put these movies in a certain context. A time and place. To put a certain kind of cloud over watching them. Because watching these movies is a very special thing.
There is nothing else like Friday the 13th. And there never will be again. I still think they were a class unto themselves in the slasher genre. Most people, when they really think about it, would have to grade them below the average. But, when I think of the alternatives- I think of movies like Halloween II which just feels like it wants to be Friday the 13th in a hospital. At best, it's a different kind of style for nothing more than expanding the diet. You're still getting the same thing you got from this series. I still prefer to go to McDonald's (read the spotlight for Part IV: The Final Chapter). Burger King can never compete with classic Mick'e'D's. Not for my money. Of course, I also owe Friday the 13th for being one of my first introductions to R-rated horror.
Of course, in this case, that means working backward from Unrated (this isn't the time to get into it - not just yet - but some of my first horror movies were those Troma splatter films and they were all Unrated). Back on the subject of television- I like the movies and my television separate. Although you watch movies on TV. I've never been much for going to the movie theater. I've always been keen on concentrating as hard as I can on seeing the movie for exactly what it is. I think a lot of other people, the kind you can read online at horror fan review sites, rate horror movies and base their opinions of them on what other people might think. Not me. I've even gotten into heated arguments online because I refuse to agree with any 'status quo'.
I do things my way. I always have. For example- watch any 80's movie. If I let other people tell me what's good and what isn't, they might reject all low budget movies from the 1980's just because they're cheesy or trendy for that time period. I like some (if not most) of the trends in low budget horror from the 1980's. I dislike plenty of 80's movies, but overall- I'm much more attracted to these kinds of movies. It's fun. God help me- at least it's different. Everything coming out now all feels the same and I don't think it's charming. Or has any novelty value. Apart from perhaps loud surround sound, bass that booms so loud- you have to freaking fiddle with the volume level instead of paying attention to the movie, CGI, stupid new trendy "Buy These Jeans!" advertisements.
In the 80's, you could watch movies like this and they might make you think this is the way everyone looked and dressed- but they weren't selling you brand names. In fact, go back to the 70's and 80's. Movies like this couldn't afford to make deals with Pepsi and Coca-Cola and etc. Look at all the beer cans- they're generic. Most of the sodas are as well. These movies could take place millions of miles away from any world you could recognize and as long as the makeup and special effects weren't too crappy or cheesy - and I'm talking when it gets into sci-fi, I'm talking way out there - it was still fun. If people today expect movies today to look and feel like life really is, and the trends I see in movies today are the trends people really are into...
Give me the 90's, 80's, 70's any day! In the eyes of most, all these decades had their stylistic drawbacks. But either I really could like and respect the characters in the movies or I was really attracted to where the movies took place. The worlds in movies like these looked more interesting. They still do. The world in The New Blood is bright, white, overcast (the day scenes, at least). Sort of dreary. Dreary because it's not raining but everything looks like it's just been rained-on. This is interesting. It usually takes a month to film a low budget movie. That these weather conditions could last for almost an entire month- I don't know. Though I can imagine. And that's what I like most about Friday the 13th- it allows me to imagine.
It's always important for a movie to engage my imagination. To let it run wild. One thing I like to think about, at least subconsciously, when I watch a movie is- what happened to all the little objects that we see scattered around in the background. Actually, I don't spend that much time thinking about that specifically. The point is it does cross my mind. Book shelves are filled with things, sometimes completely random objects. Usually- it's books. In the 90's, it might have been VHS's. In the 00's, it might have been DVD's (if you believe that nobody reads anymore). And of course- houses. Buildings. Decorations. The kind of fancy stuff you might have seen in, for example, the snooty couples' place in the Christmas Vacation movie.
The style back then is hard to describe, but it all looks like plastic. A lot of transparent black sheets (not tall enough to be walls). And cubed edges. One of the reasons I think this sort of thing preoccupies me is that people have never been all that interesting to me. I'm still not talking philosophically (you're safe). You can't count on other people to care about the things that go on inside people either. What seems to last the longest is what people are convinced is the newest trend. Corporations. Advertisers. They're like an unstoppable force. Like they've always been here. I don't pretend it's a result of intense greed. It's something else now. Hard as it is to believe, this has been a lead up to me actually talking about this movie.
I think I heard that the crew on The New Blood actually had to build the house we see. I don't know about the outside, but the inside looks cheap as hell. Of course, I like that. I think it's pretty unique to this movie. But my God, those doors... And the crummy wallpaper. And, this is actually not part of this assessment- it just seems rather convenient when you consider how cheap those doors look: all the wicker furniture. Even the mirrors have wicker lined around them. Desks, chairs, I think a bed or two might have wicker around or outlining it. This would be more charming outdoors than in. I will admit, this is a quite funny style choice. And not one a real decorator would probably make. I just find it amusing.
The logs of this big lodge-like cabin look like typical logs, but the wooden staircase of the party-kids' cabin looks like it was just finished (you would probably notice this yourself were you watching this in Blu-Ray or something; I don't have a Blu-Ray player and this movie hasn't been released on Blu-Ray yet). The thing that made me think about half of these things is the sequence with Robin alone, looking for everyone, going through their empty rooms. It's when she knocks on that door. They must have been shooting with real sound instead of filling in the cue of her knocking on that door later in post-production or ADR / looping. When I was a kid, I lived in a trailer that was sort of reconstructed to add twice the size of the existing rooms- it was made into a house. And the doors of that little trailer weren't this thin.
You can't watch this movie and without taking note of things like this. At one point, the crew even built... land. They put a section of ground - dirt, mound, grass - over a section of water and had a car drive over it. I would have been paranoid about that (my child mind again, hard to convince it of anything parallel when it's made up its' mind) were I the actress who had to drive that car. I always thought the dirt in this movie looked very strange. Like the forest in the paint balling sequence from Part VI: Jason Lives. Like burnt toast. Or black spray paint- which is in fact what they used on the forest in Jason Lives to make it look black and burnt. What I was thinking here is that the ground looks like damp, wet mulch or sawdust. Something like that.
I still like movies to take me away to some place radically different from the world I live in. I gather after all the defenders I've come across of today's shitty "realistic" survival horror that most people use books for fantasy (or, God help us- Hollywood adventure CGI movies like Night at the Museum or Where the Wild Things Are; NO THANK YOU!) and want movies to be more realistic. But still- we're talking about horror. What people call horror today, the movies being made today, are just thrillers with graphic violence. Thrillers are supposed to be realistic. The Firm is supposed to be realistic. Drama. Crime films. Detective movies. War, gangster, street fighting, courtroom procedure stuff. You know. With all those genres being slaves to reality... why can't I have fantasy in my horror?
Well, I still can. With my DVD's of Friday the 13th. It's still unfortunate that one of the things that built this series' legacy is also what's cursed it. It made a lot of waves in 1980 for being too violent. Because as I brought up in Jason Lives, politically- violence was more of a faux pas than sexuality. Technicually. You know what I mean. Even in the Reagen years, these movies never seemed to skimp on nudity. At least not to me- but I don't really notice that. Not as much as you might think. However - we all, being horror fans, notice the violence. The gore and the over-the-top death scenes in these movies was meant to be its' calling card. These movies were notoriously more gory than you see them now. But the gore footage was forced out by a psychotically-restrictive MPAA censor board and then just mostly lost forever.
Extra gore footage from maybe 4 of the 8 Paramount films has finally resurfaced all these years later (in some cases- almost 30 years). Not all of it even has sound. It's even more of a shame when you consider what today's franchises like Saw and "homage" (if you can call it that) flicks like Hatchet are able to get away with. And historically, people don't even really know who's to blame for losing the extra footage. Most people think it's Paramount. That they took the gore and just threw it away or something. Which then leaves no explanation for how the gore to the first movie and The Final Chapter have resurfaced. It's worse than sad. It's like a horrible mystery that will never be solved. Who had the missing gore? Where and when was it last seen? It could drive a person insane.
And that's why I focus more on things other than the graphic violence. And I was a kid. Kids can exaggerate things. In my mind, I see most of these movies like I did when I was first seeing these movies. Back when I was 11-12-13-14. My memory is pretty bad (I'm 27 years old) and it tells me 1993 was when I saw my first Friday the 13th movie. That's a believable year. The year Leprechaun came out. I remember my old Cinemax days like you wouldn't believe. Well... not like they actually happened, more like a wave of nostalgia. I'm still piecing things together. It was summer. In June 1993, I would've been in...3rd grade. I'll never forget certain things about that time though. It was the beginning of what made me obsessive. I couldn't rely on people. I relied on things. Movies were reliable.
By this time in the franchise, things were wholly materialistic. So, you'd better like it cheap. Otherwise don't waste your time watching this sequel. Or my time bitching about it. I know again, most people know how to take these sequels. But I have encountered a few who will reject a movie entirely just because Tina in this movie is too much like Carrie in their eyes. I saw Carrie, I'm not stupid. That movie was really about religion and repression. The fact that she had amazing supernatural abilities wasn't born from itself, from the novelty idea that it would be scary or something watching a movie where there was like a teenage boogeyman (or woman) who used their mind to get you. It was born from the family she grew up in.
Other fans will pan this movie because Jason's 'still a zombie'. I also mentioned opportunism in my last Spotlight. And how important it is for Jason to come back. Michael Myers is a shadow. He's the boogeyman. Jason Voorhees is our Terminator. Destined to just keep coming back and killing counselors (this is just a stand-in word now) and teenagers because when you think of it from the point of view of a writer (not that I'm saying this is true for this whole franchise) who has come to terms with this series as a slaughterhouse kinda thing: there is an endless supply of both. Just keep writing them up. By default, this movie's story is about an outcast and how very few people will understand that she's not a freak just because she's different. She's just...different.
The acting has gone beyond the jittery, freezing-cold line readings of the first couple movies (I'll go into that as much as I can when I get to the first movie). The actors here are very sure of what they're saying. The dialogue desperately needs some touch-up work. But, though everything separately is sub-standard, when you put it all together it's a damn entertaining blend. Some of the death scenes would be better with the extended gore footage reinserted. But I think most are better with it removed. Some "kills" are merely the victims of bad choices or a lack of ideas. David's is perhaps the most disappointing (and Jason's using Michael Myers' token weapon here too). There are no new story ideas in terms of characterization. And Fred Mollin is brought in to do a new music score. The Manfredini tracks you hear are recycled from previous movies. His work is generally inferior to Manfredini, but the piece used for the end credits is excellent, as is the one that is used as the theme for Nick and Tina's romantic scenes together.
