Friday the 13th: The Franchise (1980-2009)

i grew up on slasher flicks, and this is the series on which i cut my cinematic teeth. memoirs of a misspent youth aside, suffice to say that not a calendar friday the 13th passed without me and a handful of reluctant friends commemorating the event with a jason marathon. nostalgia being what it is, my heart has always belonged to jason voorhees. i count myself among the camp crystal lake alumni, and as such, everything i know about horror films begins and ends at the bottom of that lake. too bad that’s where most of it belongs. i've always suspected i wasted my childhood; upon rewatching this franchise - film by film, start to finish, in preparation for this year's installment - now i'm certain.

while friday the 13th established most of the rules for the modern slasher film, the series provides almost none of the content. it lacks the genuine terror of the halloween movies, the grittiness of the texas chainsaw massacres, the ingenuity of the various holiday slashers (black christmas, my bloody valentine, april fool's day, etc), and the gender-bending bizarreness of the sleepaway camp films. even the nightmare on elm street series, which i scorned as a child for being too unrealistic to be properly frightening, is at least uncanny at its core. though one of the quintessential slasher franchises, friday the 13th lacks something fundamental to the genre: horror. the plot is repetitively predictable; the characters are neither compelling enough to save nor obnoxious enough to need killing; the kills themselves are tragically short on blood; the nudity is lacklustre; manfredini's grandiose score serves as a didactic laugh-track (especially when compared with carpenter's minimalist yet terrifying halloween theme); and both the writing and acting are abysmal, even by '80s horror film standards. i'm sorry, but this shit is borderline unwatchable.

which isn't to say there aren't moments of gratification. there's something awesome about watching someone get tossed out a window and land in a shower of glass in every film (by part IV we were cheering out loud), and it's amusing to observe the static equilibrium of the chuck taylors worn by nearly every character from the '50s through '90s. and there’s a reason that this series became the gold standard for the rules of the slasher universe: watching teenagers get hacked apart with a machete for using illicit drugs and engaging in premarital sex is satisfying on a very basic north american puritanical level. it's admittedly kinda fun that even fri-13 virgins are able to discern who will live and who will die within moments of being introduced to a character. and though no actor’s reappearance is as anticipated as jamie lee curtis's in the halloween movies, it’s nice to see a familiar face distorted in agonizing pain. there are even a couple of kills for which yr thankful - the classic decapitation scene from the original film being the most memorable - and some (though not enough) sexy violence of the blood on tits variety. but mostly, these movies are really really bad. and they just get progressively worse.

Part I (1980) - Sean S Cunningham
the film's opening kills start the franchise appropriately with its 1950s origin story: two horny teens are so busy trying to get out of their white chucks and into one another's camp-issued shorts that they don't notice a psycho-killer come at them with a knife ... not unlike when they failed to notice a retarded kid drowning in the lake. flash forward to 1979, where the shorts are shorter but the teens just as horny. audiences are initially pretty stoked when annoying annie gets a knife to the throat, but things are pretty tame until brenda gets axed and her corpse tossed through a window, and bill turns up riddled with arrows after an ill-advised check on the archery range. our first fri-13 heroine, alice two-shoes, goes head to head with that vindictive bitch mrs. voorhees and eventually cuts off her head with a machete, which becomes jason's weapon of choice for the rest of the series. it's up for debate whether the best thing about the original camp slasher is mrs. v's slow-motion decapitation, or that it features kevin bacon in his first ever film role. kevin fucking bacon.
body count: 9

Part II (1981) - Steve Miner
... in which jason is a bagheaded retard. alice two-shoes is ice-picked at the opening credits and replaced with ginny, who's cute as a button and sharp as a tack. and despite the burlap sack over his head, jason proves a formidable foe who kills without regard for race, creed, gender, or physical ability. even the dude in the wheelchair gets it ... in the face! the deaths in part II get points for effort - killing two kids with one stab is both efficient and entertaining - but the film nevertheless lacks sufficient amounts of blood. ginny uses her child psychology skillz (this smarty-pants goes to college) to momentarily outwit jason at the alter of his dead mother's severed head and stab him with the machete, which buys her enough time to run for the fucking hills. but her brains are clearly damanged and she hangs around long enough to get attacked once more when jason jumps at her through a window. ginny wakes up in an ambulance wondering where her boyfriend's at, which is funny because so were the film's producers. john furey bailed before the film wrapped.
bodycount: 11 (12 if you count furey's disappearance)

Part III (1982) - Steve Miner
this installment was intended to end the series, as evidenced by its complete lack of anything worth watching until the last half hour of the movie. it takes place in a barn instead of at camp, which is bullshit. it also features a leather- and bandana-clad multi-racial biker gang that terrorizes the town and irreparably damages the annoying fat kid's self-esteem. and despite jason's evolving creativity when it comes to offing promiscuous teens - the shower kill is a dude, someone is knifed through the underside of a hammock, another dude gets a well-deserved machete to the balls for thinking walking on his hands down a hallway is a good method of personal transportation - the only moment of real consequence in this film is when jason finally finds the signature hockey mask. there's also a strategically placed self-referential copy of the savini issue of fangoria, which is nice for those of us nerdy enough to notice. oh, and it was released in 3D, making the scene in which jason squeezes a kid's head until one of his eyeballs pops out a lot more awesome than it has any right to be.
bodycount: 13

The Final Chapter (1984) - Joseph Zito
if only it were true! the final chapter is the best fri-13 by far. how could it not be? it stars corey feldman and crispin glover! (and you thought kevin bacon was as good as it could get). crispin glover's character jimmy is creepy in that way only crispin glover can't help but be. he spends the majority of his screen-time agonizing over the probability he's a "dead fuck," which, you know, becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. after jimmy manages to seduce one of the twins with his amazing dance prowess, he receives a corkscrew to the hand and a machete to the face. part IV reminds us that in order to stay alive in the slasher universe, thou shalt not: fornicate (you might get a spear-gun to the balls); consume illicit substances (especially whilst watching olde tyme pornography); venture forth into strange lands to investigate mysterious noises (even if yr armed); or be fat (as evidenced by the overweight hitch-hiker's devastatingly horrific "squeezed banana" death). however, all of this is largely beside the point, because the point of part IV is corey fucking feldman. though tommy's obviously not the strongest kid in the sandbox - he's too attached to various apron strings and the weird-ass horror masks he makes in his spare time to play sports or talk to girls - this kid is hardcore! he plays little brother for most of the film, then goes apeshit at the end and delivers his sister from jason by repeatedly stabbing him with a machete while screaming "DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!" like a 9-year-old freaking out on refined sugar and angel dust. the demonic look in his eye at the end of the movie suggests an imminent case of stockholm syndrome and the inevitability of yet another sequel.
bodycount: 13

A New Beginning (1985) - Danny Steinmann
part V was a bad idea, start to finish. it's so awful jason isn't even in it. a new beginning starts several years after its prequel with tommy, not yet recovered from the childhood trauma of having his family attacked by a psycho-killer in a hockey mask, living in a half-way house for troubled teens. the killing begins, and each of the kids at the half-way house is offed less creatively than the last. we're so bored that the highlight of the movie is when yet another annoying fat kid, this one addicted to chocolate bars, gets axed for being annoying, fat, and full of chocolate. oddly, while the kills are sleep-inducing at best, the cast of peripheral characters in part V are somewhat more entertaining than in the previous films. there's a spunky black kid who has an awesome older brother who lives in a van with his superfreak girlfriend and gets killed in an outhouse made of tin after he gives his brother a burrito, and a very angry hillbilly woman whose son gets decapitated riding around on his dirtbike while she's making some kind of shitty stew. but this break in style does nothing to revive the franchise, nor does it make the film's 92-minute runtime anything more than a waste of time. and much to everyone's total lack of surprise, the reason this movie's so boring is because the psycho-killer in the hockey mask isn't jason! (which we all knew already because jason's mask has red detailing and this one has blue). and it isn't tommy either, which is stupid because why else would you bother to bring back the character? instead, this snooze-fest of a massacre is brought to us by some townie paramedic who happens to be the father of the fat kid whose death is the only thing worth watching in this whole film.
bodycount: 19 (+3 in a dream/hallucination sequence)

Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) - Tom McLoughlin
jason is restored to action when his rotting corpse is exhumed by tommy (that's right, they bring him back for a third time, and he's played by yet another actor because continuity of character matters to tom mcloughlin about as much as continuity of plot), who stabs jason through the chest with a section of wrought-iron fence, which serves as a well-placed conductor for some well-timed lightening. now jason's a zombie. worst. ret-con. ever. tommy is put in jail for being a crazy person and is mercilessly tormented by the sherriff's cocktease daughter, who for some reason is all hot for tommy's stories about "camp blood." jason gets up to his regular antics (including slaughtering a group of business douches on some team-building paintball retreat), mayhem ensues, and the movie ends in a ring of fire with jason in chains at the bottom of the lake. next movie plz.
bodycount: 17

Part VII: The New Blood (1988) - John Carl Buechler
finally we have kane hodder playing jason. things are looking up, right? not so much. our heroine tina is a talented young woman with latent telekenetic powers that only manifest themselves when the men in her life are being assholes. the first time it happened, she accidentally on purpose killed her alcoholic abusive father, and now she's being provoked and exploited by her evil shrink, who secludes her in a cabin at crystal lake - the site of her father's death - in order to "study" her powers. in a moment of panic, tina's telekenesis breaks the chains that restrain jason, thereby loosing him on the entire camp. part VII might have been more aptly subtitled "jason vs carrie," and if the writers had developed that plotline more fully, perhaps this movie would have been watchable. but it wasn't, they didn't, and them's the breaks for diligent audiences like ourselves. so instead we sit through another hour of painfully awful acting and dialogue punctuated intermittently with laughable kills. no one but us is taking this seriously anymore. none of this movie matters until jason and tina-carrie go head to head, then it's retard strengh vs teen-angst-fuelled telekenesis. tina goes all dark phoenix and throws everything she's got at jason, including vines, tree-roots, the entire floor of a house ... she even manages to raise her dead father from the bottom of the lake (cpt rocket finds this satisfying because he hates these movies and at this point he can at least pretend he's watching x-men). her super-powers are of course no match for jason, but tina's zombie dad comes to the rescue and drags him back into the lake. seriously.
bodycount: 16 (+1 in a dream)

Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) - Rob Hedden
lightening strikes again! or power lines, in this case ... power lines that happen to be attached to jason's body at the bottom of crystal lake. zombified once more, jason wakes up and utters his first ever non-grunt sound: he laughs. evilly. underwater. and just when audiences were starting to think that retard strength and apparent immortality weren't enough, sorcerer jason casts the rarely used "land be gone" spell to alter geography so he can catch a boat from crystal lake to new york. despite its amazing travel capabilities, however, this boat just doesn't cut it for jason. he has standards, after all. so he takes a good hard look at another motherfucking boat and jumps ship to ruin the graduation party of a bunch of coked-out teens from jersey. this is cpt rocket's favourite film in the series cuz he's hard for this girl in a leather jacket who plays a shitty guitar solo in the engine room of the boat like she's in the crow or whatever. dead bodies abound so the kids abandon ship and escape to new york city in a lifeboat, while jason swims alongside like he's a fucking dolphin. once they hit shore, the kids are immediately mugged, and some girl gets drugged by thugs. jason is apparently intimidated by the big apple, cuz he ignores everyone from nyc and only chases the kids from jersey. one douche tries to channel cassius clay and attempts to punch jason to death by hitting the only armoured part of his body approximately 70 times (cpt rocket counted). jason gets as bored as we are and punches him back, which decapitates the dude and sends his head flying into an open dumpster. in a moment of unprecedented premeditation, jason then locates and climbs into the dumpster so he can retrieve the head and carry it around for a while until he has the opportunity to put it in the front seat of a police car to scare the shit out of the kids who get into it. jason hits times square and kicks a ghetto blaster, which understandably pisses off the gang to whom it belongs and they're all switchblades and tough words until jason pulls off his mask as if to say "dudes, i'm from jersey. and mentally challenged." so the gang backs off because they don't kill retards, or ugly people. then toxic waste turns jason into a child and he's left for dead in the sewer. i'm not even kidding.
bodycount: 25

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) - Adam Marcus
(produced by Sean S Cunningham)
the final friday? would that it were. everyone in this movie is stupid. someone actually checks a pulse for breathing, presumably because that's way more accurate than checking the respiratory system for a heartbeat. (why are we still watching these?) jason, once more an adult, gets blown up, and the coroner attending him consumes his still-beating heart, thus contracting the psycho-killer cannibal-possession virus. the tent-scene - in which a generously endowed young woman is delivered from her ineffectual attempts to orgasm by repeatedly impaling herself on her less-than-enthusiastic lover when jason slices her stem to stern with a machete - is the best kill since mrs. voorhees lost her head. and if we are to believe the visual shoutout to the necronomicon from evil dead, this jason lives in the same neighbourhood as ash williams. and speaking of badass motherfuckers, enter creighton duke, whose main interests in life involve breaking fingers and hoarding information about jason voorhees. jason has become more calculating, or at least less retarded - he shaves some cop's face before turning the blades on him (cpt rocket thinks this is probably because jason hates moustaches because mrs. voorhees married some douche who had one who used to beat him a lot when he was a kid or something, but really he's trying to make this movie more interesting than it actually is). but it must have something to do with family, because apparently jason had a sister who wasn't retarded and she had a daughter who had a daughter who is somehow the last zion or whatever and must be protected by spells or enchanted machetes or some other nonsense completely unrelated to everything else in the jasonverse. jason gets fucked up and somehow turns into a worm-fetus, so he crawls into his dead sister's vag in order to become jason proper again, but with a gross melty body. then the movie turns into an '80s fantasy metal music video when an enchanted dagger transforms into a magic jewelled sword that happens to be the only thing able to kill jason, for reals this time. jason gets stabbed through the heart and sucked into the netherworld, leaving behind only his hockey mask. but then - *gasp* - freddy krueger's hand grabs hold of it and brings it back into hell so we can all hold our breath for 11 years hoping that movie never gets made.
bodycount: 22 on-screen, plus at least 6 implied

Jason X (2001) - James Issac
aka: jason in space. this movie is even billed as both horror and science fiction. anyway, it's 2010 and jason is no longer in hell because he's been captured by the government and cryogenically frozen because the aforementioned retard-strength and apparent immortality make execution impossible. flash forward to 2455, when a team of researchers discover the body and think that bringing jason back to their spacecraft and thawing him is a really good idea. nanotech solves the problem of regeneration and turns jason into a robozombie programmed to hate everything. he wakes up and immediately kills a sexy intern by sticking her head in cryogenic fluid and smashing it on a table. best kill ever. jason then runs around the ship killing everyone else he runs into until the researchers try to trap him in the holodeck by simulating a lakeside camp for horny teens circa 1980, but he knows fake tits when he sees them so he kills a bunch of real people instead ... by hurling the ship into a spacestation. kay-em 14, the requisite hot robot girl of any sci-fi worth its salt, goes all matrix on jason's ass and hurts him real good, but then he's revived by a broken computer. one survivor finds his balls and tries to destroy jason forever by riding his full-metal-body through space on a suicide mission into earth 2. however, jason's body fails to incinerate on his fall through the atmosphere, and he lands ... in a lake ... by two horny teenagers.
bodycount: 21 on-screen (including the suicide), over 200 credited, plus a spacestation

Freddy vs Jason (2003) - Ronny Yu
(produced by Sean S Cunningham)
who the fuck thought this was a good idea? no one, for a long time (development was, well, hell), but after 11 years we all knew we had it coming. mostly this is a nightmare film, and cpt rocket and i both hate freddy so hard we're sympathetic to jason and spend the whole movie waiting for him to lay the smack down. the film begins with freddy raising jason from the hell whence he put him so as to get back at the kids who are no longer afraid of bad dreams. these kids are so not afraid of anything anymore that they throw a rave in a local cornfield, where jason gets his frag on and kills the shit out of a bunch of them. now they're scared again, and wow, do we not care. a weird date-rape dream-sequence thing happens where freddy, jason, and some teenaged douche fight over who gets to fuck/kill an unconscious girl full of ghb. i hate everything right now and for the rest of the movie until the kids get smart and arrange for a showdown. they work some dream-mojo and head to crystal lake, where freddy and jason finally go at it and jason cuts off freddy's hand and impales him with it ftw.
freddy's bodycount: 1
jason's bodycount: 24 (if you count freddy)

Friday the 13th (2009) - Marcus Nispel
(produced by Michael Bay)
not a fucking jason movie. detailed assessment of the reboot's trespasses against the franchise forthcoming.