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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 10/28/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

The Thirteenth of the month, falling on a Friday

A year ago I watched all of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, the first slasher series I've sat down and watched all of. I'd seen individual entries here and there of some other franchises, as well as a few one offs like Black Christmas. Well, beckoningchasm kind of dared me into doing the Friday the 13th franchise, and I took him up on it! I had a small history with the franchise, having seen the eleventh entry (Freddy vs. Jason) and tried to watch the first couple a while back when they were on STARZ and I had the subscription (I gave up because...these movies are trash, to be honest).

Well, I watched them, and I hated the experience less than I thought. I mean, the movies are generally, well, trash, and they never work as actual horror, but there comes a point where the filmmakers realized that there was so little to actually work with that they started trying to be interesting in different ways. I didn't hate it when filmmakers tried to bring a certain level of artistry and cleverness to the killing of random teenagers, nor when the filmmakers tried to make the teenagers slightly more interesting. It was far from the worst combination for these things.

Those interesting qualities came and went (mostly went) with Paramount (and later New Line Cinema) mostly seeing the films as profitable embarrassments that helped grease the wheels of studio filmmaking, the studios relearning the value of B-movies, something studios had known very well decades previously but had gotten forgotten with the fall of the Studio System.

Formula

There are a few things that the Friday the 13th franchise is known for, but one of them is definitely the fact that they are incredibly formulaic. There are a couple of exceptions here and there (mostly the sixth and ninth entries), but it's essentially a handful of sex-crazed people end up in the vicinity of Jason Voorhees (and his mother once), get killed one by one while no one figures it out until there is one left who then fights off Jason and survives. Jason definitely gets killed to never return before he...comes back in the next movie (with, again, a couple of exceptions like the first and fifth films).

There is at lot of repetition in this franchise, and when the filmmakers are just going through the motions it can get really boring. I have a soft spot for some parts of the first film, but the way that no one even realizes anything bad is going on unless they're actively being killed destroys any sense of tension. The second is a repeat of everything wrong with the first, and the third does it all again except in 3-D! (To make it even worse, it's a specialized 3-D process that's hard to replicate or present theatrically.) It really takes until the fourth when the filmmakers seemed to realize that they didn't have to make the characters boring and the kills dull (to be fair, the first one has a few decent ones but are limited by a tiny budget, credit to Tom Savini, the special effects artist, who came back for the fourth).

A lot of that has to do with the curious decision to cast Crispin Glover in one of the teenager roles. He's manic in such an interesting way that any time he's on screen he's just fascinating to watch. Corey Feldman is also fun to watch as a child that outsmarts Jason. That, and with a bigger budget and some better talent behind the camera, the kills get more fun, like pulls through the window in slow motion or the twisting of heads. The fifth leans heavily into trashiness and comedy, but it is the sixth, Jason Lives where I came fully on board with the franchise.

Breaking the Formula, and Snapping Back


My opinion of the franchise seems to be largely out of step with the dedicated fanbase that likes the first movie a whole lot more than I do while being more mixed on the sixth, but the sixth is easily my favorite. It's not even close.

The sixth is the one that fully embraces comedy and irony in the face of the film's danger. I suppose the reason I like that comedic side is because I never thought its more serious side (the threat of Jason, the characters, any of the few attempts at tension, the actual sense of horror) worked on any level. It was always something of a joke of a horror franchise because it was largely so inept at, you know, horror. So, having someone like Tom McLoughlin in who had a deep appreciation of horror history back to the Universal monster movies and a strong sense of humor while having the tall task of bringing Jason back from the dead and no real desire to simply repeat formula, brings, what I found to be, one of the most purely entertaining horror/comedy films I've ever seen.

People hold up films like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil or Evil Dead 2 or Shaun of the Dead as the peak of the horror/comedy genre, but none of them have two kids under a bed looking at each other and asking, "Well, what were you going to be when you grew up?"

It also has the first real sense of iconography, helped by the fact that they turned Jason into a supernatural being for the first time, allowing him a sense of the mystical about him that helps enhance some of the film's best images.

But, Jason Lives was the worst performing movie of the series so far, and Paramount snapped back with The New Blood which tries to introduce more mystical elements with a character based on the Stephen King creation Carrie. It might have worked, but the series was back in the hands of people who didn't understand horror, or character, or tension, and it's more of a wet fart than a horror film. The same can be said for the eighth entry, Jason Takes Manhattan which does all of the same things the franchise was known for except on a boat with a third act in New York that delves into weird new lore for Jason where he turns into a child after being hit with toxic sludge. Okay.

Lost at Sea


The ninth entry goes off the deep end. In a franchise that has little in the way of actual lore, going from the mother of a long-since dead child, to the child actually being alive the whole time, to the child being effectively unkillable, to the child coming back from the dead, the franchise decides, with Jason Goes to Hell, not to actually send Jason to Hell until the very end of the film. Instead, it creates this weird lore about Jason not actually being Jason but a slug monster that possesses people, but only of the Voorhees family? It's this weird subgenre of horror in the 90s that focused on weird mysticism where it didn't belong, especially when you consider the heavy emphasis on the bloodline stuff (Jason can only be killed by another Voorhees?) and...checks notes...a magic dagger.

That one was miserable, and I ended up having more fun with Jason X, the one set in space, which was effectively just another Jason movie but with a new setting. It was still just a kind of stupid slasher with dumb characters running around, but it wasn't boring and the kills were pretty good (there's one where a guy gets thrown on top of a large screw and then he slowly revolves from his midsection...it's neat).

And then we got the long-awaited team up with Freddy Kreuger (teased at the end of the seventh film) which horror fans get a kick of but so bungles both franchises' lore while being so safe regarding its treatment of its horror icons that the fight ends up far less interesting than expected. And finally the modern, gritty reboot that's just difficult to look at because everything is morose, gritty, grimy, and ugly.

The Appeal


The franchise isn't for me, but I get it to a degree. I see where it's fun (the kills and the comedy), but even with all of that given, the films have surprisingly little else going on. What is going on when there are no kills or comedy? Is it tension? Nope. Character just kind of hang out without having any idea that someone is out to kill them, and that robs any sense of tension from any scene. Is it horror? If jump scares are your thing there are a few here and there, but otherwise the franchise is largely just not scary. The characters are largely just meat for the machete. And, on top of that, most of the kills are just quick stabs. There are great kills here and there (the sleeping bag in five, the screw in nine, almost everything in six, the arrow in one, to name some randomly), but mostly they are just machete stabs that get cut away really quickly.

Part of that is censorship from the MPAA that wouldn't give the movies R ratings without cuts to the violence, in particular seven, but the films are far less gory than their reputations as a whole.

It's only really six, Jason Lives, where I see the combination of character based humor and inventive kills (along with strong, witty editing, the best performances in the franchise, and the best iconography and visuals) that makes it actually a fully entertaining film. Four (The Final Chapter, less final that its title implies) gets pretty close, but it still can't escape the formula it revels in.

As I said, though, I'm not part of that dedicated horror crowd. My opinions are out of step a bit with most of them. Still, I'm mostly just glad that I found some parts of it to enjoy myself so it wasn't a complete slog of a process.

A Quick Note

My Goodreads giveaway of my novel Crystal Embers ends tomorrow. Enter it to win one of 100 Kindle copies!

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Five Nights at Freddy's

Freelance

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Friday the 13th (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "But, it was cheap. Cunningham did his job effectively to make the money, and Paramount has been kind of embarrassed that they've relied on it so much ever since." [Library]

Friday the 13th Part III (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "I don't get into the moral outrage of Siskel and Ebert at these films. Yes, they're pure exploitation without merit, but they're just too...boring to get riled up about." [Library]

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "I think I still prefer the Nightmare on Elm Street series for all that franchise's flaws, it was more innately imaginative and started better, but I can certainly start seeing the appeal of this franchise with the fourth entry." [Library]

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I never expected to enjoy a Friday the 13th movie nearly this much, and yet here I am. This movie put a stupid smile on my face for something like ninety percent of its runtime." [Library]

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Still, it does have those great, late-stage makeup and creature effects that rival the zombie in The Return of the Living Dead. That's something. It's also about a minute of screentime." [Library]

Jason X (Rating 2/4) Full Review Eh, I don't hate it. It's far from the worst of this franchise. It has some consistent amusement here and there. It has no interest in trying to rise above the material in any way like Jason Lives did, but it delivers a mildly effective Jason movie." [Library]

Rocky (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The result is a tender character piece that, especially when combined with its rousing score by Bill Conti, ends up a fun, touching sports film that never loses sight of what it's about: its central character." [Personal Collection]

The Deer Hunter (Rating 2/4) Full Review "For all of Cimino's pretensions and self-indulgent meanderings, he and Zsigmond were a great team in making a good looking picture, and it's filled with very good performances. I just...it feels like a bad comic book movie." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 11/18, and it will talk about the directing career of Paul Leni.