Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Yeah, do the double take. I loved this movie. Thank you, beckoningchasm. Without you, I probably would have never discovered the absolute joys of the sixth entry in the Friday the 13th franchise.

Allow me to let you in on a dirty secret: the Friday the 13th franchise is dumb trash. It’s most entertaining when it finds ways to be funny. I imagine there’s a way to do a serious work of introspection around the character of Jason that would be highly compelling, but it wouldn’t mesh well with the slasher genre. I guess horror-comedy didn’t mesh all that well either since this was the beginning of the end of the franchise from a box office point of view (it would take four more movies, of course, because even diminished, it was still making money for Paramount). Because this is outright a comedy in horror dress, and it is hilarious from almost the beginning to almost the end.

Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews) decides that he needs to expunge the world of Jason Vorhees (C.J. Graham) by digging up his decaying corpse (remember, he’s not actually the bad guy of A New Beginning) and burning it, but that, of course, sets off a course of events that leads to Jason coming back to life to extend his murder spree by another couple of dozen. I think that opening stupidity is supposed to be tongue in cheek, but it plays too straight for my tastes.

Anyway, the series of events that that awful decision sets off is…kind of great. The key is that the writer/director, Tom McLoughlin, seems to be well aware of the franchise’s weaknesses, namely it’s self-seriousness, especially in its first three entries, and the fact that the core conceit is actually really stupid. So, he either sidesteps a lot of it (there are camp counsellors, but they’re a small percentage of what’s going on) or simply finds fun to be had in the events around Jason. Now, this isn’t entirely new for the franchise. The fourth entry, The Final Chapter, did that in some small measure while doing nothing particularly interesting with Jason other than giving him a few decent kills. This, however, goes completely overboard in using the bevy of side-characters to find humor. In addition, McLaughlin is the first to take real advantage of the Jason kills.

The problem I’ve had with the Jason kills in the franchise up to this point is that they’ve been rather…mundane. A stab with a machete here ends up dominating a vast majority of the kills while something like a belt to the eyes is the remaining ten percent. In Jason Lives, that’s not entirely changed, but the filmmaking around that is vastly different. The kills may not be witty, but the filmmaking around the kills is. Like, for instance, there’s a moment where Jason pulls a throwing knife from his belt and hits a deputy in the face with it (because he’s equipped for death now because it lends itself to the joke), and then the film cuts to a dart going into a dartboard. That contrast of the killing blow with something as mundane as a dartboard is funny. It’s exactly the kind of filmmaking this series has needed since, pretty much, the beginning.

So, the basic story is that Tommy is trying to convince the residents of Crystal Lake (renamed to Forest Green because of the Jason killings) that Jason has come back from the dead to kill again, and it’s all his fault, but he has the key to killing Jason at the same time. His main antagonist in his rhetorical fight is Sheriff Mike Garris (David Kagen) whose daughter, Megan (Jennifer Cooke), falls for Tommy while he’s in lockup. Together, Tommy and Megan team up to try and find a way to stop Jason before he kills too much, but that, of course, take him through a series of teenagers trying to have sex or protect kids or just doing nothing because Jason, for the single lines of dialogue about his motivation, is really just a random killing machine designed by screenwriters to be menacing.

The funny thing about all of this film’s need to not take it seriously, is that McLaughlin gives some of the most firmly professional iconography of the series, like Jason standing on top of the RV that he’s turned over by killing the two sex-crazed teens within. It looks great. In fact, the whole film looks great. Where the first film had the good graces to film at night and not much else, McLaughlin and his cinematographer, Jon Kranhouse, give the proceedings a multi-dimensional edge that is really nice to simply look at a lot of the time.

The film is also decidedly self-aware regarding itself (it was a huge influence on Kevin Williamson when he was writing Scream, apparently) with one character breaking the fourth wall and other characters saying things that make them obviously aware of the rules of horror films (the first kill is soaked in this). In fact, there was a moment late in the film when I was convinced that I was going to give the film full marks when one kid turns to another and says, “Well, what were you going to be when you grew up?” It’s perfect. And then it ruins it by taking its ending horror antics too seriously.

It’s also interesting to note that while the previous entry made a very serious forward step towards outright pornography with its prevalence of female nudity, Jason Lives has absolutely none. It’s just a fascinating little contrast.

Anyway, I loved this film. My only real complaint is that the final ten minutes or so take the horror conventions, that the film has largely been poking fun at, too seriously, and the opening is still kind of just stupid. Other than those two relatively minor complaints, I had an absolute blast with this film. I think the comedy, prevalent through the entire thing,  might have been inspired by either Buster Keaton or even Jacques Tati, with an Americanized, 80s-infused, exploitative skin on top.

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.

Rating: 3.5/4