Burl reviews Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday! (1993)

 

Hello all you toast pops, it’s Burl with a review of what may not have been the final Friday - ha ha, another duplicitous subtitle! - but will be the final Friday the 13^th movie review by me, since I think I’ve reviewed every other one of them already, even that terrible remake-boot from a decade ago! This picture is called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and of course it was not the final one, since there was still Jason X to come and of course Freddy Vs. Jason, which I don’t count as an entry in either series, or as a movie at all really!

This picture was the first F13 made after Paramount Pictures finished out their run with the disastrous Jason Takes Manhattan, then handed the series over to New Line Cinema, a.k.a. The House That Freddy Built! Anything New Line decided to do with it had to be an improvement, and what they decided was to ape one of their own earlier productions, The Hidden, and make it so the evil and literal heart of Jason could hop orally from body to body, just as The Hidden’s bug-alien did!

The beginning is pretty clever: a situation that seems specially designed to attract a Jason attack turns out to be just that, and the would-be victim is an FBI agent with a battalion of snipers backing her up! Jason is fired upon and finally blown to flinders, and his bits and pieces end up in the federal morgue! There a luckless coroner is hypnotized by the beating heart, and once he disgustingly scarfs it down, he becomes possessed by the murderous spirit of the Crystal Lake fiend and sets about finding some campers to kill!

Meanwhile, there are characters! I know what you’re saying: why do there always have to be characters! Ha ha! Here we stray into territory already staked out by the lesser Halloween pictures: it’s all about family, it seems, and several of the personages we meet here are Voorheeses! A helpful bounty hunter played by Steven Williams from House supplies plenty of goofy exposition, though how he has come by all this information we never find out! Our hero is a glasses nerd who is blamed for several of Jason’s crimes, and so cops, including a sheriff played by Billy Green Bush from Critters, who’s usually terrific but is here a nonentity, are chasing him down! The glasses nerd’s ex-girlfriend is a Voorhees, and so, ipso facto, is their baby!

Yes, a baby figures in, just as in Halloween 6! It’s a real cute one too, but thankfully is not placed in too much jeopardy! By the time hands come reaching out of the ground to drag Jason to hell (at least the main title is not a lie, ha ha), the baby has been rendered safe, and instead of the intimation that it will one day take up the mantle of its demented great-uncle, the finale is lumbered with a punchline that sets up the battle between Jason and a certain stripe-sweatered cash cow that would take place nearly a decade later!

I saw this picture in the theatre, as I recall, and I believe at the same cinema and with the same girl as I saw Children of the Corn II! Ha ha, it’s amazing what I subjected people to back then! Still, it’s hardly the worst of the Friday the 13^th pictures: it contains a few recognizably human moments along with the gnarly gore, and there’s mild imagination on display here and there! It’s not just pokings, you see: an unpleasant diner owner played by Rusty Schwimmer of Sleepwalkers, for example, catches an elbow to the mouth, which results in an amusing and largely bloodless Special Makeup Effect making it look like she just ate the world’s sourest lemon! Ha ha! And there’s a pretty horrific meltdown too!

But a lot of it simply refuses to make sense, or to cohere in any way! One of the great virtues of the series is its simplicity: a killer stalks the night and kills campers! When they try to complicate matters it only messes things up and shows off the profound stupidity of the whole enterprise! That happens with Jason X and it certainly happens here! I’m going to give Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday one and a half Jasonburgers!

Burl reviews Jason X! (2001)

 

Hi, it’s Burl reporting… from space! Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th, and therefore time to review another Friday the 13^th picture; and this is one I went to see at the theatre on a date with my then-new girlfriend who later married me anyway! Ha ha! It’s not a good picture, but it was a fun date anyway, because after all, who doesn’t want to see Jason in space! Of course only one picture fits that description, and it’s called Jason X!

Was it a good idea to send Jason into space? I can see the reasoning: ever since the original Friday the 13^th, he’s been skulking around the same summer camp, more or less: at the camp in part 2 and part 6; around nearby homes in part 3, part 4 and part 7; at a local halfway house in part 5 (and that wasn’t Jason anyway); and of course by part 8 they became hysterically desperate to find something different for the goochy-faced madman to do, so they put him on a boat bound for Vancouver! Ha ha! So where else was there for him to go but space?

The picture begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, where Jason is being held in chains and being prepared for cryogenic freezing! In charge is an evil doctor played by none other than the director of Scanners, Fast Company, and so many more, David Cronenberg! Ha ha! I guess he was doing it as a favour for his buddy, trick effectsman Jim Isaac, who directed the picture (and who had earlier made The Horror Show)! Anyway, Cronenberg performs his silly lines with the requisite seriousness, then, when Jason escapes, tries to run away but suffers a flying impalement!

Jason ends up getting cryogenically frozen anyway, just like Walt Disney, and so does the science lady who’s been studying the masked killer since he was captured! Four hundred years later a spaceship visiting the now uninhabitable Earth retrieves the pair and revives them! As the ship is populated by a gang of students and their venal professor (played by Jonathan Potts from Body Count, ha ha!), the picture then becomes a spacebound retelling of part 8, with a revived Jason applying some futuristic killing methods (a face-freezing-and-smashing scene is perhaps the most memorable) as well as garden-variety pokings to the students and the crew!

There are some very 2001-era trick visual effects, by which I mean they’re not up to the standards set by the movie 2001 back in 1968, ha ha! The ship itself is very much the type that feels more like a studio in Toronto than an actual working craft, and there’s a distinctly Canadian feel to the whole production - yet another echo of the dire Jason Takes Manhattan! This maple leaf feeling is amplified by the presence of Potts and Cronenberg, as well as a cameo from Robert Silverman, whom we know from so many Cronenberg movies and also from his appearance as Mr. Sykes in Prom Night!

There are clever moments, like the use of the holodeck to recreate Jason’s usual campsite environment and thereby distract him! There’s a lady robot and some nanotechnology, and for whatever reason Jason is turned into a super robot version of himself! The whole is a dog’s breakfast of fan-fiction level ideas afflicted with the usual lack of affrights, though it’s all as slickly produced as any Friday the 13^th picture ever was! It was mildly fun to see it on the big screen, and though it’s bad, some pleasures remain, and so Jason X gets a rating of one and a half nanobots from me! Ha ha, and have a happy Friday the 13^th, everybody!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan! (1989)

 

Chay, pah, blaah, it’s Burl, here to review the final Friday! Ha ha, and by that I mean I’ve finally watched the one Friday the 13^th movie I’ve been neglecting all these years! Last summer I caught up with Friday the 13^th part 7: The New Blood, which I hadn’t seen before; this year, after stumbling across a DVD that was too cheap to resist, I finally had no more excuses and spent 100 minutes of my life (the longest running time of any Friday the 13^th movie, by the way) watching Friday the 13^th part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan, the Jason picture that boasts the most outrageously false subtitle since part 4! 

Oh, these dumb movies! I love them and I hate them and I somehow find I can’t quit them, but installments like this have me coming pretty close! It opens on a small cabin cruiser floating in Crystal Lake, on board which are two dimbulbs who drag their anchor in such a way as to hook on an electrical cable and thereby resuscitate Jason, who’s been reposed on the lakebed ever since the psychic girl’s dad dragged him down! It’s a pretty silly way to bring the unsightly maniac back, but then, ha ha, what wouldn’t have been?

We then move to what will be our major setting, subtitle be damned: a big greasy cruise ship captained by Warren Munson from Executive Decision, carrying the graduating class of Crystal Lake High to New York for a glamorous weekend! Jason climbs on board, and, after lying low for a while, begins taking out the boat passengers in his patented one-by-one style! But before that, and woven in throughout, is a bunch of junior league soap opera stuff straight out of the 90210, ha ha!

Peter Mark Richman, a mean-faced TV actor who was also in Naked Gun 2½, plays the perpetually angry chaperone Mr. McCullogh, who bares his teeth like the chainsaw brand for which he is named and never misses an opportunity to act like a total jerk! He’s also the guardian of Rennie, the final girl; her boyfriend, Sean, is the son of the captain, and is a disappointment to the old man thanks to his lack of interest in or aptitude for ship captaining himself; and there's a mean girl who hopes to seduce McCullogh in exchange for good grades, and her friend, and a few other bonfivés!

Other characters include second chaperone Mrs. Van Deusen, played by Barbara Bingham from Splitz; a doom-crying deckhand played by Alex Diakun from Malone; and student-slash-porkbellies played by such Canadians as Gordon Currie, later the vampire from Blood & Donuts, and Saffron Henderson, who impersonated Geena Davis in The Fly II! And later, when the so-called New York location is finally gained, we espy big tall Ken Kirzinger, who gets tossed around by Jason, but would later himself play the leather-skinned killer in Freddy vs. Jason!

Well, most of these people catch the chop or some variation on it from our man Jason, and one word of mild praise I’ll give this movie is that the killings are nearly as plentiful and as varying in method as they are in Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning! But the killings are also the problem, for far and away my biggest complaint about this terrible film is how poorly directed it is! Ha ha, there’s no suspense or spookiness and not a single affright to be had at any point throughout its overlong running time! Other people will point to the script or the performances, or the terrible non-Manfredini score, or the fact that it takes forever to get to Manhattan and when they do, aside from one brief scene in Times Square and a stock shot of the Statue of Liberty, it’s Vancouver; but I say the utter lack of filmmaking acumen is the picture’s cardinal sin!

It’s slick looking, with nice lighting from cinematographer Bryan England, and Paramount clearly spent more coin on the picture than was their habit with these things, but none of this can overcome the bone-deep terribleness on display, with all the tension of an oversized novelty bra! Wet firecracker scare scenes follow one after another and graffiti on the subway informs us that “Quayton Lives!,” until finally there’s an apotheotic finale for Jason that tries for 2001: A Space Odyssey but ends up more Invasion From Inner Earth! Ha ha! I give Friday the 13^th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan one half of an “Irish cop” with a heavily Canadian accent!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part 7: The New Blood! (1988)

Chay Chay Chay Paa Paa Paa! Yes, you’ve got it right: it’s time for another Friday the 13^th movie review! You know, just an aside before beginning: why, in any of his adventures, has Jason not visited a spa or some kind of health retreat? The closest he’s come to that is the halfway house or whatever in Part 5, and that’s not very close at all! Ha ha, imagine the damage Jason could do with a roomful of weightlifting equipment, or how he could blend in with the field hockey masks hanging on the wall!

Anyway, enough of my geeky film proposals! This installment is Friday the 13^th part 7: The New Blood, and it came to us from the director of Cellar Dweller, the late John Carl Buechler! Of course he was better known as a trick effects makeup man, and indeed, even if much of the trick effects work in this picture was cut out by overenthusiastic censors, there are still a number of gory treats briefly on view, a few of them pretty tasty!

As is well known, the concept here is Jason meets Carrie! There’s a cousinage already in evidence, since the first Friday borrowed its sting from the Brian De Palma picture! But yes, our heroine is a telekinetic teen girl, one who’s troubled by the guilt of having used her powers to accidentally kill her father by knocking him into Crystal Lake and then dropping a pier on him! She evidently has a broader remit, psychically speaking, than Carrie White though, because when she concentrates hard, she can resurrect long-dead corpses! When one evening she tries to will her dad back to life (ha ha, why? He was a jerk!), she accidentally revives Jason instead, who, to be fair, would have figured out how to return one way or another anyway, by the powers vested in him by the Paramount Pictures Corporation and Mr. Frank Mancuso Jr.!

Part 7's closest model seems to be Part 4, which also features two houses on Crystal Lake close to each other, but remote from everything else; and in both films one house has a mother and a daughter, and the other a group of party-hearty youths! By this point though, Jason has lost any pretense to humanity and is a fully supernatural zomboid creature! And the other novelty in this picture, aside from the psychic girl, is the presence of her evil psychiatrist: a genuine antagonist who is not the killer! Before this the only human antagonists in these films (Part 5 aside) were the bikers in Part 3, and then just a wide array of jerks here and there, like the morgue attendant in Part 4 or that sheriff in Part 6!

But while this one has its moments, I can’t pretend to prefer it to any of the other episodes I’ve mentioned! (Ha ha, it’s still a lot more fun than that 2009 remake, though!) It’s a fairly miserable series of films when you examine them critically, but people, even intelligent people, find themselves returning to these movies over and over! I guess there’s something about the simplicity of the concept and the inherent scariness of dark, lonely woods! Friday the 13^th part 7: The New Blood psychokinetically messes with that simplicity a bit, and the results frankly don’t seem worth it! I give the picture one chay and only half a paa!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part 3! (1982)

Hi-hi-hi, ha-ha-ha! It’s Burl, here to review yet another entry in the ever-present saga of Jason and the pokings, the choppings, and the novelty killings! This is the third one, the 3-D one of course, and not much loved, I think! As with the Star Trek movies, this series suffers a bit from Odd Sequel Out syndrome, where the even numbered entries are more beloved than the odds! So, admitting the possibility of predjudice with that syndrome in mind, this installment has always seemed to me a bit of a valley between Part 2 and Part 4! But, ha ha, it’s certainly better than Part 5!

After replaying the climax of its predecessor, as though viewers required a detailed reminder of exactly what occurred in the previous film so they could progress through the new narrative without fear of bafflement, we meet the most miserable storekeeper couple in the world: a shrewish scold of a wife, and the fishfood-eating droopy-dog husband who, by his childish behavior, makes it impossible for her to operate any other way! There’s a bit of not-bad cat-and-mouse with the laundry hanging on the lines, and then these doughty citizens are sliced and poked! Then, finally, it’s on to the main body of the picture!

Dana Kimmell from Sweet Sixteen plays the weedy main girl, who has suffered through an earlier Jason attack but survived it somehow! Jason’s need to complete any task once begun means he’ll soon be after her and her terrible friends as they spend the weekend in a remote country house! Her boyfriend, who knows of her traumas, jumps out and scares her anyway, and then acts like a complete prig the rest of the time, at least until his head is squished and his eyeball shoots out into the audience, ha ha!

(Yes, you’re not allowed to forget the movies was shot in 3-D for long! Not just body parts and sharp tools are thrust into the lens, but baseball bats, yo-yos, juggling balls, joints, and dudes sitting on toilets, of which last this picture has no deficiency!)

Only slightly more tolerable than the boyfriend is Shelley, the tubby jokester of the gang! His inappropriate and ill-timed japes fill much of the picture’s running time or so it seems! There’s a stoner couple, with the man an eerie simulacrum of Tommy Chong! There’s a likeable Latina, and a blandly sexy couple unremarkable except that they always want to have sex with each other, and, in the rare moments when not talking about, preparing to, or actually making love, the fellow juggles and handwalks! Ha ha, your handwalking days are over, you showoff! And then there are special guests: a small motorcycle gang which takes a disliking to Shelley, and later makes the scene to get mild revenge on him for one of his earlier merry jests! All fall before Jason like wheat before the thresh, ha ha!

The sets in this movie fascinate me for some reason! They seem not to have been quite finished; there’s a stagebound unreality that makes it seem like a Lars von Trier warehouse experiment, with the sets just lines painted on the floor! The store at the beginning and the main house in which most of the murderin’ takes place look to be made of sheets of varnished plywood that have been leaned up against each other like an amateur’s house of cards! Ha ha, and the movie itself fascinates me a little! For me it's the one with the most mystique attached to it, which stems from the time a friend’s younger brother went to see it as part of a birthday party outing! This ten year-old’s retelling of the story and breathless descriptions of the murder scenes were more successful in selling the movie than the advertising was! (Though Jason’s knife poking through that curtain is a creepy image, at least to me!)

But the movie really isn’t very good! The direction is off and on, and the camera and lighting needs of 3-D make it sort of strange-looking, and the script tries to gin up drama with pranks and self-abnegation! It’s the only one of the Friday the 13th movies shot at a 2.35:1 ratio, and I like that; and there are some fun Special Makeup Effects; and there are some scenes where Jason is scary; and it’s of interest to historians of this sort of thing in that it’s the picture in which Jason acquires his famous hockey mask, stolen from Shelley no less! But that’s not much to hang a hat on, and so in the end I can give Friday the 13^th part 3 only one backup fuel tank!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part V: A New Beginning! (1985)

Heh-heh-heh, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl; and how can there be two Friday the 13ths in one month? I don’t know, but here’s Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning for you! It’s one of the lesser-loved installments, and I can certainly see why! It’s fairly terrible, although, and I must stress this, ol’ Burl has seen worse!

I don’t recall the words “Crystal Lake” being uttered once in this chapter, nor a lake being shown on screen, but I suppose we can assume the action takes place somewhere not far from that storied summer camp! We join Tommy Jarvis, no longer the chippy-cheeked kid he was in Friday the 13th part 4 (after all, they could only afford Corey “Gremlins” Feldman for a single day’s shooting), but now played by John Shepherd from The Hunt for Red October, as he arrives at his new way station, the Pinefield Youth Development Center! This is a halfway house with an impossibly broad mandate, caring for an aggregation of youths with afflictions ranging from the mild, like stuttering or being a goth, all the way up to serious cases of full on, bug-eyed, murderous psychosis!

This latter comes into play when a harmless, chocolate bar-loving buffoon is chopped up by an axe-wielding buggy-wug, the aforementioned psychotic! As the other inmates (clients? patients? campers?) wail and cry, and the police cart the nutter to the pokey, two ambulance men arrive to haul away the buffoon’s corpse, which has been sectioned and neatly stacked like cordwood! Roy, one of the paramedics, reacts to this sight like Dracula being shown a crucifix, and there are several lingering close-ups of Roy’s face in a rictus of disordered passion! Ha ha, and why could this be?

Well, the pokings start in earnest then! Is the traumatized Tommy behind it all, having somehow inherited Jason’s murderous inclinations by killing him in the previous, so-called final, chapter? Or is it Jason himself, resurrected again? Or is the killer someone completely random, like, say, Roy the paramedic? Ha ha, no, that would be ridiculous!

And yet the outrages carry on unabated, a tidal wave of homicide that carries up any and all in the area! Two objectionable greasers find themselves eating a road flare and receiving a throat-slice, respectively! An itinerant handyman, who for the briefest of moments fills the role of red herring, catches a machete in the stomach! The impossibly unpleasant bumpkin family next door receive a decapitation and a face-chop! Eyes are poked out with shears, heads crushed with leather straps, and an unfortunate soul singer is transfixed by a pole while relaxing in the outhouse! There’s a lot of mayhem, but most of it is implied, or seen after the fact, or hardly seen at all; the ratings board people, then at the zenith of their restrictive powers, did their shearwork as ruthlessly as Jason (or is that Roy the paramedic) himself!

So of all the Friday the 13^th pictures, it has the most murders while being one of the driest of them gore-wise! That’s fine I suppose, but in addition to gore it lacks suspense, horror, terror, frights, emotional, psychological and logical sense, solid performances and competent mise-en-scene! What it doesn’t lack is salty language, which it wields like a child who’s just been introduced to the concept, and fecal references, which it positively wallows in! Ha ha!

All the killings at least keep it lively! And if the conclusion, in which, yes, Roy the paramedic proves to be the killer, because he was traumatized when the chocolate-bar oaf who was chopped up turned out to be his son (and even the characters who are explaining this, as if it’s the last ten minutes of Psycho and Roy is Norman Bates, just sort of shrug at that motivation), indeed disrupts the Friday the 13^th timeline which some people apparently hold dear, at least it’s something different! I give Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning one giant pot of watery, horked-in soup!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th! (2009)

Chuff-chuff-chuff, por-por-por, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl, here to review a Friday the 13^th picture! But not any old Friday the 13^th picture; no, this is the attempt they made about a decade ago to bring Jason and his antics into the new century, to make his slicings, his dicings and his pokings relevant to a new generation of thrill seekers!

It’s called simply Friday the 13^th, but it’s not exactly a remake of the 1980 Friday the 13^th, just another variation on the theme! It plays, I guess, like Friday the 13^th part 2 would have if they’d tried (pointlessly) to inject more logic into the saga instead of bringing in a long-dead character and putting a bag over his head! But of course they sacrifice different logic in doing so!

It opens with a restaging of the original picture’s climax, with Mrs. Voorhees catching a head-chop from a surviving girl! But her severed head instructs Jason to Kill For Mommy; and so if Mrs. Voorhees is issuing orders to her son, that means he didn’t drown, and she knows it; and if that’s the case, why was she taking out her revenge on these camp counselors? What’s everybody so mad about? Ha ha, who knows, and who cares!

This picture has a very long pre-title sequence involving the demise of a whole group of college-age kids, of the type you’d never want to hang out with in real life! They are quickly gotten rid of by a ragheaded Jason, whose methods have become more sadistic than they used to be! No longer for him the simple poking, but now a slow campfire roast in a sleeping bag, or a bear trap to the leg! But of course one of the girls resembles Mother, and so as the picture wears on we can be assured of the same gambit used in part 2, and also of course in Humongous!

Finally we meet a whole new gang of teens, a completely unlikely group of pals, and most of them boneheaded jerks! They’re spending the weekend at the remote country house of the biggest jerk of them all, a shrill, possessive colungus who’s constantly remonstrating with his guests about scuffed tables and spilled beer! There’s also a character imported whole from Friday the 13th part 4, the handsome backpacker searching for his missing sister! But where the heck is Crazy Ralph?

While there are a couple of nicely set-up moments, like one involving a shower curtain, the movie is on the whole remarkably free of tension or frights! It’s clearly trying for an intensity never reached by the older episodes, but doesn’t manage any better! There’s a flatness to the whole enterprise; while the poking scenes come with a bran-fuelled regularity, the rollercoaster momentum the movie wishes to have never gets going! If the movie hits a sweet spot, it’s in the meatiness of its killings, which are gory but not excessively or cartoonishly so!

Jason’s lair, which is somewhere beneath Camp Crystal Lake, or maybe underneath his old house, features trophies from his past adventures in killing! This would be a nice touch if it weren’t so obviously, well, obvious! Better the energy should be spent on creating real characters to murder, or actual suspense, dread or terror in the execution of said murders! It’s altogether a pretty tired enterprise, filled with terrible songs, and I can’t muster the energy to give this Friday the 13^th more than one field of leafy greens!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part 2! (1981)

Chuff-chuff-chuff, pah-pah-pah, it’s Burl here again with yet another Friday the 13^th movie review, part 2 this time! Ha ha, it just seems like the season for these things, though I have to admit, whenever I watch one, I do tend to think to myself “Ha ha, why on earth am I wasting precious time watching this silly movie?” I watch much worse pictures and don’t have thoughts like that, but there’s just something so calculated and disposable about these movies, which, when you add the fact that they’re pretty terrible, engenders these soul-crushing bafflements!

But I’m still drawn to the things for some reason, as are many others – you perhaps included – so we must accept our lot and make what we can of it! As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, for parts 4 and 6 for instance, as with the Star Trek pictures, I tend to prefer the even numbered installments of this particular series! The first Friday the 13^th has never done much for me, anyway! So what’s to prefer about part 2? Ha ha, it’s exactly the same story, except instead of Silly Steve Christie trying to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, it’s Upstanding Paul trying to open some sort of councilor training center at another abandoned camp right next door, and also on Crystal Lake!

It makes no sense, but it’s a clever way of skirting the issue that dogs these summer camp maniac movies, which is to say, how do you deal with all the kids running around? Anyway, of course the main difference between the two pictures, and the only difference required, many would say, is that it’s no longer Jason’s mother doing the poking, but Jason himself! He ties up a little unfinished personal business by jabbing the lady from the last one with an ice pick, and then it’s off to the councilor training center!

His first victim once he arrives is none other than Crazy Ralph, which I think is unfortunate! And I’m not the only one! I saw this movie on a midnight double feature with the first one sometime in the 1990s, and a fellow stood up after Ralph’s demise and said, and I quote precisely, “I love Crazy Ralph and will miss him like a brother!” Ha ha, there was respectful, empathetic applause from the whole rest of the audience, including myself!

I like the hero lady in this one – maybe that’s why I like the picture more than I should! There’s nothing special about her really, but she’s pretty, and I think I probably had, and have, a bit of a crush on her! I also like that you get to see the inside of Jason’s house! He’s thrown together some corrugated metal and plywood, installed a few windows and a door, and furnished the inside with filthy rugs, several chairs and a little table, as though he expects one day to receive guests for tea! Ha ha! I l appreciate that little detail – it does more to humanize this mad killer than the psychological rationalizations for his murderous behaviour which are delivered by the drunken hero girl later on in a bar!

Of course most of the gore effects have to exist simply in your mind, since they were cut out by de facto censors before its original run! Consequently the picture is a little dry, but not entirely! There’s a pretty good machete-in-the-face gag, and some throat slittings and so forth! But the picture looks a lot better than the first one, which is a bit of a cheapie – this one has nice photography from a fellow named Peter Stein, who also of course shot C.H.U.D.!

Altogether it’s not terribly good, but it has a comfy-cozy attractiveness and a few funny details, and of course a very pretty lady! The ending is somewhat abstract, but I don’t mind that! When all is said and done, I give Friday the 13^th part 2 two untubby jokesters!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th! (1980)

Ch-ch-ch, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one of the granddaddiest movies of modern horror, the original Friday the 13^th! Ha ha, I’ll tell you right off the bat that this has never been my favourite horror series, and even within that series this particular picture sits maybe third or fourth for me! I certainly prefer both part 4 and part 6 to this inaugural entry!

However, with that said, this certainly has a few virtues scattered here and there in its running time, and I try to be a positive person, so I’ll mention as many of them as occur to me! It’s tempting, too, to want to give the picture extra credit for being the first in the series, but even the people who made it won’t make any great claims to originality! All they did was go see Halloween a bunch of times and try to copy it as closely as possible, with the addition of some Special Makeup Effects!

Ah yes, Special Makeup Effects! This movie has that glorious credit prominently displayed in its opening titles, which is right where it should be! You know what perplexes me? Well, the fact is that if you do Special Makeup Effects for a movie, you really have to fight to get your name in those opening titles! But the credit being there serves as a statement of purpose to the savvy horror fan: they know firstly that the movie contains said Effects, and secondly that their presence is recognized by the filmmakers as a virtue! It’s win-win all around, and silly are the producers who try to save a buck, or retain a bargaining chip, by denying the Special Makeup Effects man or woman their rightful head credit!

And so to the picture itself: It starts in the most unconvincing 1958 since the Sha-Na-Na revival concert, and a pair of lustful Crystal Lake camp councilors are taught a harsh lesson at the point of a knife! Then, years later, that earnest gadabout Steve Christie has decided to spend twenty-five large to get the old camp up and running again! The camp’s history of violence seems to mean nothing to him, ha ha! He’s hired some attractive young folks (including Kevin Bacon) to help him fix it up, but then he and his moustache drive off in the unreliable camp jeep, leaving the kids he’s just barely even met in charge of the renovations!

Well, you know what happens next! Pot smoking, drinking, strip Monopoly, an annoying jokester character (why must there always be one of these!) and even making love! Oh, and there’s a mad killer on the loose, stabbing, hacking, chopping, firing arrows this way and that, taking final care of Steve Christie’s work force one by one, and eventually of Steve Christie too!

Well some of these killings are cheat jobs, but others employ the Special Makeup Effects wizardry of Tom Savini, and he did a fine job of it! Everything else about the movie is pretty mediocre, and I don’t recall ever actually being scared by it, even when I first saw it and didn’t know the killer was an old lady in a fishing sweater! It was wise of them to replace her with a hulking, deformed maniac in future episodes (which they pretty much had to do anyway, because, you know, DECAPITATION), but this first installment will always be the odd man, or should I say odd woman-of-advancing-years, out! Ha ha!

But that leaves me with one important question: Steve Christie! What was his story, really! What was that guy all about? And maybe he wasn’t even killed, because we don’t see it happen! He just doubles over with a surprised look on his face! You know, they should have brought him and his ponky moustache back in one of the later sequels and given him some prominent role to play in the larger narrative! Ha ha, maybe they still can! Anyway, I give Friday the 13^th two unusual looking Final Girls!   

Burl reviews Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter! (1984)

Hi, Burl here to look at another one of the famous killer Jason’s crazy machete-waving adventures! I’ve always thought of the Friday the 13^th movies much the way many others think of the Star Trek pictures: namely that it’s the even-numbered ones that are better and more entertaining than the odd! I’m not what you’d call a great big fan of any of them really, but I’ll take II, IV and VI over I, III and V! (I haven’t really sat down and watched the ones after that, except for the one where he goes to hell and the one where he goes to space, both of which I saw in the theatre! But the one with the psychic girl, his grand trip to Manhattan/Vancouver and his match-up with the redoubtable Fred Krueger, along with whatever others there may be, have all passed me by!)

I watched the fourth one again the other day, because I recalled it somewhat fondly, and because Crispin Glover is in it, and, ha ha, he’s great in the picture! He brings a really welcome note of eccentricity to it, probably in spite of any direction he was given, and certainly in spite of anything in the script!

The story is pretty standard! There’s a family who live near Camp Crystal Lake: a single mother, her teenage daughter and her son, the monster-mad Corey Feldman! Also they have an amiable retriever dog, Gordon! Next door to them is a rental property that’s inhabited by a group of kids out for a wild time, and there is also a pair of comely twins who apparently live somewhere nearby! This, with a little skinny-dipping as a garnish, is precisely the formula needed to encourage the murderous rage of Jason! Although he doesn’t seem to need much encouragement, ha ha!

I think the filmmakers really did intend this to be the final chapter of the Friday the 13^th story! Apparently the movie was originally going to end with Jason getting his head frizzle-fried in a sort of microwave oven contraption which Corey Feldman had created for some reason, but they scrapped that because it was too outside of the established M.O. of these movies! Ha ha, if only they could see into the future of the series, with the enraged ambulance driver and the psychic lady and the space stuff and the body-hopping and all that, they’d have known there was room to move with this formula! Anyway, they settled on the famous machete-slide for Jason’s demise, which was still supposed to be pretty final; but of course the picture made quite a few ducats, and they figured out a way to continue the movies anyway!

I still kind of like this movie, because it has Crispin Glover and his insane turkey dance - he's as funny here as in Rubin & Ed - along with some pretty tasty, if abbreviated, Tom Savini trick effects! It also has a few nice directorial flourishes, like the opening shot, which might be the single most ambitious shot of the series with its complex craning and tracking and lighting and choreography, and even a helicopter! On the downside, it has even less well-developed characters than most of these pictures, a dumb script, and The Last American Virgin, who is in the film as Crispin Glover’s “friend” Ted the Computer, and is a really annoying jackass! And can anyone tell me why Gordon the dog jumped out the window like that? And what happened to the mother? Ha ha, so many questions!

I give this picture one and a half lightning-quick haircuts!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part VI: Jason Lives! (1986)

It’s mid-summer, and so naturally it’s time for ol’ Burl to tackle one of these Friday the 13^th movies! Jason Lives seems like a pretty good place to start, since it’s the one that makes me go “Ha ha!” the most! By that I mean it’s the funniest of all the movies, though not necessarily the best – I’d have to say that if I were going to pick a favorite, it might be that old standby The Final Chapter! Ha ha, the fact that its subtitle is an outrageous falsehood only makes it better!

This one caught a bit of heat for taking Mr. Jason out of the realm of the living and making him a completely supernatural zombie killer! You could easily argue, as many who actually care have done, that since he drowned in the first movie he was already a zombie, but that’s splitting hairs, ha ha!

Anyway, the movie starts with Tommy Jarvis, who was the kid who shaved himself bald in Part 4, and I forget what he did in Part 5, and his friend Horshack driving out to the cemetery to see what they can do about Jason! The thing to do would have been to totally leave him be, and even Horshack knows this, but Tommy is far too stupid to realize it! So he digs Jason up and manages to get him reanimated through the power of lightning! Ha ha, a dumber move could hardly be imagined, and it doesn’t really serve to get you in the character’s corner! Unfairly enough it’s Horshack who pays the ultimate price – he gets his heart ripped out and is dumped back in Jason’s coffin to be munched on by maggots!

Well, the rest of the movie goes back and forth between Tommy trying to undo his dumb move by convincing an incredibly angry and aggressive police chief that Jason lives again, and scenes of Jason poking people with sharp implements! He cuts off three heads at once, rips off arms, impales some people and gives other ones a pretty stiff neck-twist! Ha ha, one old jasper gets a broken bottle in the throat!

Eventually Jason makes his way to the old camp where he used to dwell – it’s been fixed up and reopened for some reason – and terrorizes some councilors and the smart-alec kids in their charge! I have to give this movie credit for including kids, because in most of these movies there are usually a bunch of teenagers and you’re not sure whether they’re campers or councilors or something in between! There’s a pretty good little scene between two of the kids: in the middle of Jason’s rampage, one of them turns to the other and asks “What were you going to be when you grew up?” Ha ha!

I remember that this movie was actually released in the middle of the summer of 1986 – there must have been a Friday the 13^th on the calendar! I snuck in and saw it in the theatre, but by then my tastes were refined enough that, while I enjoyed the movie, Aliens, The Fly, Stand By Me, Big Trouble in Little China and Manhunter were pictures I held in much higher esteem! Ha ha, I think I even preferred Maximum Overdrive! Nevertheless, this was a fairly enjoyable effort as Friday the 13^th movies go, and I award it two overturning RV campers, and an extra ha ha for the Alice Cooper fans out there!