Post by No Personality on Apr 2, 2010 9:28:58 GMT -5
If you've never seen the movies before, you might have something of a jaded view of what it (Friday the 13th) is. Many of the rumors you've heard are true. About the sex, the drugs, and 'the guy in the hockey mask.' A few things everyone already know: it takes place at a summer camp and involves the slaughtering of a somewhat generous portion of 20-something or teen Counselors. The movies' plot(s) don't always take place on the grounds of a summer camp- sometimes a movie will take place at a nearby log cabin / lodge house with cabin-like rooms. And there are almost never actual children spending their summer there. For obvious reasons. Though that also goes back to the plot of the first film. Where the Counselors are working to fix up an abandoned summer camp before the kids arrive.
A couple things you may have heard - the cops never show up until it's too late (pretty much), and almost all the murders take place at night - a slasher film tradition. Since it takes place in a 'summer camp' town, it's real classic East-coast America. Small towns, peaceful setting, tranquil lakes, and lots of woods. The woods, at least before the Jason Voorhees character finally became a slasher icon when he donned his infamous hockey mask for Part III, was the glue element that held these films together. It's not just Jason's hockey mask that makes this franchise iconic- though we all know it's a big part of what made it so marketable. Factors like - yeah - the woods, the body counts, the first dose of Tom Savini's gore FX, and perhaps that such a big studio like Paramount was releasing these ultra-low budget, somewhat-gritty slasher flicks. Not usually considered their forte.
The way I look at this franchise though is from the point of view of a kind of mystery. Not like a puzzle, like an air of the unknown. This may relate to the fact that many of the early movies ended in dream sequences or with characters having hallucinated some of what they experienced. But if that's true, than some of that was sold to us in the form of advertising / merchandising. To turn Jason into a kind of ghost. Story time: my first real introduction to the basic plot of the series was through the Nintendo video game. So you can only imagine what was going through my head. Did the characters know about Jason? Were they actually on a kind of quest to save the kids? Were actual children characters massacred in groups in lone cabins? Were there actually like 75 cabins in this camp? And were there long scenes of characters going through cabin to cabin, looking for each other?
That game left me with dozens of questions. That only watching the movies could answer. And I was like 11 or 12 or something like that. And this was 1992 or around there. It's not like I could just pop out and rent the movies. My parents weren't freaks or anything. And I liked to keep my attraction for 'dark things' a secret from everyone but my younger brother and my best friends. But they were naive- my parents. I had a TV in my bedroom with full cable (including HBO and Cinemax) and I would just turn the volume down all the way, look at the guide magazine book that came every month to find out what new horror movies and trashy stuff was playing, and record them when they were awake... then... I'd watch them when they were asleep. So by age 11, 12, 13- I was watching some of the nasties, sleaziest stuff a kid could hope to see and completely uncut (far as I knew).
I waited for each movie to come on HBO / Cinemax and I got lucky with 3 of the 8 original movies. The rest I had to watch butchered on USA and TNT (thank you, Joe Bob Briggs!) but at least I got to see them. The three I were able to see in their R-rated glory were Part III, IV (The Final Chapter), and VIII. Of course watching the movies was a very eye-opening experience. One of the things that should have struck me immediately is how there were almost never any returning actors or reoccurring characters from movie to movie. There was no continuity. And even within one movie, I still didn't really know what was going on. Usually in the case of the earlier films, where they would end with a dream sequence. Watching the first movie maybe 2 years later shattered my brain. I couldn't figure out anything. What happened to that girl in the rain? Wasn't there a guy in a plaid shirt who was someplace but then disappeared?
Is there something I missed? So, I would rewind and fast forward through the tapes (recorded edited versions of parts 1 and 2 from a marathon they had on the USA network, back in the heyday of the Weird Science and Duckman series- you remember that era right?) looking for what I missed. I had no patience. So some characters would just disappear from the screen. And for years, I had no clue what had happened to them. A question I think me and my friends had was, if you didn't see them die- maybe they were still alive. At the end, we would sorta quiz each other on where we thought we saw their corpses lying around. That's the only guide we had to tell us what had happened. This is most perplexing when you get to Part IV: The Final Chapter and the scene with the mother. Who just stands outside, sees something that shocks her, and doesn't even scream while she's onscreen.
What the hell happened to her? Well... to find out, you'd have to watch the deleted alternate ending on the DVD. The vagueness to these disappearances was probably the only real movie link to the hazy quality of the video game. Because the game would feature a lot of throwaway references to what it probably thought were in the movies, like zombies or a Medusa-like floating severed witch head. Makes you think the designers of the game probably just had someone describe the basic plot of the movies: guy comes back from the dead to kill Camp Counselors and can't be killed, no matter what. In the game there's also the element of the children in danger. Which is only hinted at in Part VI: Jason Lives. The only movie other than the sorta prologue in the first movie that actually features young children at the camp grounds.
Even the names of the Counselors that you're able to play as characters in the game are kinda different from the movies. For example, "George" was black but was a much older man and not a Counselor (from Part V: A New Beginning, his character a kind of rip-off of the black cook from 1983's Sleepaway Camp). "Chrissy" (Part III) was not actually called Chrissy. She was just Chris. There's no "Laura" in any of the 80's films. The guys' names are pretty much on-the-money though. Love their spunky faces on that map though. No real maps throughout the movies, though I believe the dialogue in Jason Lives, the scene with Darren and Lizbeth, mentions there having been a map at some point. And arrows on road signs along the way. Which evokes one of my favorite things about the movies, a sense of movie travel. A space and place the characters have to get used to and aren't by the time they have to start running for their lives.
This is perhaps the biggest difference between Halloween and this franchise. That some summer camps would set-up map areas. I in fact remember that from some of the camps I went to. More the RV / camper-van parks you might go to with your family (family trips usually sucked!). A fairly elaborate looking thing encased in glass, stuck on the end of a pole, maybe placed underneath one of the lamps / lanterns hanging around. So people could see it at night. To me, Halloween's suburban streets used the black night background to feel tighter. Michael Myers as the boogeyman is certainly scarier than Jason Voorhees. But Friday the 13th's area is so vast. In any given film. Even in the Nintendo video game. Making the fact that the grounds are stalked by a kind of woodsy maniac man all the more epic on a small scale. And you could easily lose track of people you know. The last survivors can become separated by huge gaps of space.
That's a distressing concept to me and I'd hope to anyone else. I'd also think this is something that might have affected characters' subconsciouses. Maybe made them paranoid, helping their transition into departing from total reality. If this series of movies has one realistic bone in its' body, it's probably that they accepted the idea (as most 70's horror films did too) that going through an event like this would really screw with a person's mind. Laurie Strode and Sally Hardesty might not have hallucinated anything they experienced, but at least the movies didn't suggest being stalked and nearly sliced to ribbons turned characters into expert booby-trap riggers. That being something that would take both concentration I wouldn't think nerve-frayed people would have and considerable time for them to work out. This is one of the few beefs I might have against Wes Craven's early films.
What I like best about the dreamlike quality to the "everything's okay now" endings (ripped off from Carrie, we all know now) is that they're not attempts to go psychological. They don't have any serious medical relevance. They're mostly just to help the mood along. Or to flavor the film more by adding some extra mood. Psychology is usually for Brian De Palma's stuff. Or Hitchcock. After Part III, the melting away of reality didn't really happen again in the series like it did in the early movies. We came close in A New Beginning when adult Tommy Jarvis (or 18-19 year old... he could have been that old as a character, though the actor was clearly in his 20's) is outside and seems somewhat disturbed by a hanging neon sign (and, am I mistaken or, is that thing hung high or what? How do they fix it when a bulb goes out?). So, the mood always evolved slowly over the course of the franchise.
Most fans like the classic mood. It's not exactly atmosphere as I've come to define it. I've always seen atmosphere as something unnatural. And of course, what is Friday the 13th without nature? Camping itself is a return-to-nature (I think that expression or phrase got to be like a fad in the very late 80's / early 90's, not completely sure). Where some people rough-it when just sleeping bags under the stars, maybe a tent - big or small, and some people have to bring in their big vans and cool, expensive motorized vehicles with lots of gadgets inside. As a kid, I always thought our family's camper was huge. Now when we look back culturally, the 80's seems primitive; doesn't it? But it seemed to be the first time in culture where all nations were rushing to come up with something new and different. I guess it took CD's a while to catch on with the mainstream.
Jason Voorhees as a character never really became a blue-collar figure, did he? In the loosest sense of the term, obviously. But, if his rampage through the dozens of bodies he slaughtered could have been seen as him also getting revenge against rude people invading his peaceful, quiet land... it could have been like a metaphor for urban development. Or, like Smokey the Bear trying to keep the forests clean from trash and destruction. But, ha; that might have made him too The Toxic Avenger. We all know about the backlash to the violence. And some people write that Friday the 13th became synonymous with freak-out attitudes over the promiscuity of youths. Usually attributed to the Right, politically. I guess that generally would make Jason red-collar (if there is such a thing, it's the opposite of blue in this case).
For awhile in the series, it was clear what movies the early Friday the 13th films were ripping off. That it was initially starved for original ideas. Over the course of 2 sequels, it was feeding off itself. When The Final Chapter came along, it was the last hoorah of director Joe Zito's involvement in grindhouse cinema. And probably the last time the Friday the 13th franchise could claim any kind of grindhouse cred. Following that, a somewhat made-for-TV aesthetic would dominate A New Beginning. Perhaps that's what sucked out the heady 70's atmosphere of the first 3 films). Jason Lives, excusing the dopey grade-school humor which is trademark to that one film alone, changed the direction of the franchise entirely. And that's where Friday the 13th finally started to feel somewhat original. This is important to note - whether it's due to Jason becoming a kind of zombie or maybe to the incredible mainstream attention the franchise was getting. Almost by mistake.
Due to how awe-inspiring just the novelty of having a new film come out every year must have been. And the advertising. And the iconic images of Jason in various medias with the hockey mask toting around miscellaneous weapons. He penetrated several forms of American media. A lot of series' fans, including myself, still find it quite epic that after just 5 films (and there being no sign at Paramount that things were slowing down anytime soon), a rockstar icon like Alice Cooper would come in for a Part 6 of a horror movie series as schlocky to the mainstream (or, what- 80's kitsch? Close, right...) as Friday the 13th, and do like 3 original songs for it. Or 2, I don't remember. I think there were 3 new songs. "Hard Rock Summer" was released earlier in Cooper's career. The lyrics to the real theme song for the movie, "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)," are more evocative of the mood of a creepy stalker than a telling of what's really in the plot.
Alice Cooper - "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)"
You're with your baby
And you're parked alone
On a summer night
You're deep in love
But you're deeper in the woods
You think you're doin' alright
Did you hear that voice
Did you see that face
Or was it just a dream
This can't be real
That only happens, babe
On the movie screen
Oh, but he's back
He's the man behind the mask
And he's out of control
He's back
The man behind the mask
And he crawled out of his hole
You're swimmin' with your girl
Out on lovers' lake
And the wind blows cold
It chills your bones
But you're still on the make
That's a bad mistake
But the moon was full
And you had a chance
To be all alone
But you're not alone
This is your last dance
And your last romance
Yeah, cause he's back
He's the man behind the mask
And he's out of control
He's back
The man behind the mask
And he crawled out of his hole
Oh, if you see him comin'
Get away if you can
Just keep on runnin'
Run as fast as you can
He's a dangerous, dangerous man
And he's out tonight
And he's watchin' you
And he knows your house
No, don't turn out the lights
Yeah, cause he's back
He's the man behind the mask
And he's out of control
He's back
The man behind the mask
And he's after your soul
Those lyrics bring Jason Voorhees back from being a mindless slasher killer driven by a profit machine to being more of a kind of urban legend ghost again. Realistically, almost no one will ever look at this series of movies that way. But as you might have guessed- I'm still not that big a fan of being realistic. It has its' merits, of course. And we don't really have a choice when we're living. But when it comes to escaping and watching movies, we do. And I choose to see the movies this way. And within the context of the 1980's, it's not all that far-fetched a theory. A lot of serious horrors were scaled down for mass audiences. And back then, that approach was charming. Audiences loved it and they never looked at most horror films and saw doom and dread and inescapable terrors that mirrored real life very much. Maybe most of that was because of how many supernatural themed films were coming out. And not just in the horror genre.
Maybe it instead had something to do with the revolutions in special effects that were taking place. All the different, new and innovative techniques being created to replace the ones too known by the public. Maybe the tones of the films were heavily diluted by comedy. Whatever it was, violent and gory horror films were the new popcorn flicks. Fast and easy entertainment. Yet, despite that less than cheery outlook (some people feel when the boundaries of gore have been pushed too far, there's nothing left to fall back on), the changes made to the slasher format - even when the other franchises, especially Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street were copying them to keep up - never held filmmakers back from being able to take things easy and slow. Even the detective film-ish Child's Play is considered slow by today's standards.
Which means, when we look back at the decade, the cheapest tricks or compromises made to the genre never destroyed it. It was lively and promising throughout all 10 years. And among the peaks and valleys, Friday the 13th was there. Sometimes raising the bar, sometimes lowering it. For example, is there any insane person out there who would claim in 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street didn't easily best Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter? And, though Friday the 13th owned the 1980's, that it was so popular and influential and perhaps underrated today yet it couldn't breakthrough into the 1990's... Brings us to the inevitable sob story of how New Line Cinema killed Friday the 13th. It's not actually that sad a story though, since Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was a very nice way to end the franchise.
It's not the injury that hurts- it's the insult of it all! You really couldn't injure this franchise. It was put to sleep humanely at the end of the decade that gave birth to its' phenomenal success. It was and then, it was over. Nothing wrong with saying the best chance this thing has of being treated right is with the fans. Resurrected through home video. To watch over and over again on whatever occasion suits the individual viewer, enjoyed as they see fit. If there was a wound, the salt in it would be that the new director Adam Marcus thought that not only was Friday the 13th about Jason as a zombie (a loose theory in its' most archaic stage) but that it's also a sci-fi friendly series about body-switching antics, ala- the obvious Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets the slap-happy shenanigans of Evil Dead 2 meets the runny diarrhea of Hellraiser's one-of-a-kind (and it should have stayed that way) body un-dissolving scene.
Imagine if Eli Roth had tried to do a sequel to something like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer thinking; "let's do this like it were Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom!" That's just an example, to try to show the difference between two ideas (I'm not insisting Eli Roth feels a loyalty to one or the other, or would even do a sequel or remake to someone else's film). Some things just don't go together. Getting an Evil Dead fanboy to make a Friday the 13th film (even if it's not called "Friday the 13th") is just as inappropriate as getting a Halloween fanboy to make a documentary on the Friday the 13th franchise (paging: Daniel Ferrands- and I'm willing to bet now he just might have done that for the almighty dolla). And after the beautiful and almost deep Jason Takes Manhattan, this was especially worrisome since the whole movie felt like direct-to-video.
(And speaking of direct-to-video...) It was just a sign of the times. That it was time for the baton to be passed to another franchise. Your call; which franchise did a better job of keeping on the 80's Friday the 13th legacy of ridiculously unnecessary sequels: Leprechaun or Children of the Corn? Leprechaun made the best use of its' novelty the most number of times and had the amazing Warwick Davis as its' horror villain icon. But Children of the Corn was the most consistent in terms of general mediocrity and giving the audiences exactly what they might have / probably expected. Other than some real Peter Jackson-y / Sam Raimi type stuff in Part III: Urban Harvest. The 90's also gave us at least one great slasher spoof- Dr. Giggles, which seemed to function like a typical slasher film, trying to make another new Jason or Freddy, but instead was way too amusing to take seriously.
One would almost get the impression that what the 90's wanted was Jason and Freddy but couldn't keep them alive. It seems people wanted the look / idea of a fresh villain but really, the sequels to Candyman, Critters, Child's Play, and Hellraiser were really just Jason and Freddy for the 90's. Until Scream came along. We may very well have Scream to thank for studios having the interest in even talking about a Jason "vs." Freddy movie. Which was actually a hot topic back around 1998. Then, people stopped caring until 2003 when, I think personally it was way too late. They still got the director of Bride of Chucky like everyone pretty much wanted all along for the project but by that year, the formula for the 90's slasher film had grown beyond pale, sad, rotting - beyond all that. How could these outdated icons exist in the decade of Jigsaw and... that ghoul from The Ring, and... that Road Warrior guy from Jeepers Creepers...
Of course, before we even had to worry about the monstrocity that is Freddy vs. Jason, 2001 gave us Jason X, even more hated by "fans" than (the underrated) Jason Takes Manhattan. This is not me saying Jason X is a good movie. It's not. But people forget mighty quickly about how bad Leprechaun 4: In Space and Hellraiser: Bloodline were. Aside from the fact that they, like Jason X, took place in outer space (I should have mentioned that, shouldn't I?). In fact, I would say without flincing Jason X raised the bar of acting for those 2 mistakes, and almost made it look like Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday didn't exist. It's a slightly better movie than it gets credit for. It's just a sorry excuse for a direct-to-video movie that actually not only got a theatrical release, but was one of only 2 Friday the 13th films to be reviewed in-print by Roger Ebert. I think he in fact preferred it to 1981's Friday the 13th Part II.
I generally pretend that everything New Line released is not connected to Friday the 13th. And all things considered, that's a very solid plan. I don't have to worry about the fact that Sean Cunningham had his name on 93's Jason Goes to Hell, because everything he directed or produced after 1980's Friday the 13th was completely ignored. I think his 1983 film Spring Break got a theatrical release but critics were still too in-shock over Porky's to have noticed (I can't believe Bob Clark gave up on his still promising horror career to make that piece of shit). Not to mention, Police Academy came out the next year and made him invisible. The man once a trend-setter (though he was copying Halloween to get to Friday) was now yet another follower. It's like he learned nothing from the failure of his family-oriented projects (there's no genre colder to actors, directors, etc. than Family, at least as far as non-animated projects are concerned).
Also unrecognizable in Hell is the once-stellar work of music-score composer Harry Manfredini. Who decided to toss out the brooding, freaky strings and replace them with bloated, sickly, cheesy horns. And not any kind of cheese you want to eat. The FX work sagged worse than an old woman's floppy boobs. The attempts at humor and levity in the dialogue were downright agonizing!
And at least that film had ambition and knew what it was doing. It was only trying to live up to its' influences. Not the last film to fail to do that (Cabin Fever). Unlike the even worse Freddy vs. Jason, which pretended the entire time that this is what fans of both franchises had been waiting for for 10 years since Freddy popped up in Jason Goes to Hell and stole Jason's mask. If I was a complete drooling idiot with an I.Q. in the MINUS, maybe that movie would have done it for me. I don't have the time to cover or dissect the many, many flaws of "Vs.," so again... imagine it's merely a bad dream. New Line should have just keep bringing Freddy back instead of trying to second-guess Jason. As for Jason, the real Jason, best portrayed by Richard Brooker in Part III, C.J. Graham in Jason Lives, and Kane Hodder in Part VII: The New Blood... He lives forever. On DVD. And if you've got a good player, VHS.