• Friday the 13th/Friday the 13th Part 2 (page 1)
• Friday the 13th Part 3/Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (page 2)
• Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning/Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (page 3)
• Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood/Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (page 4)
• Killer Extras (page 5)

As you will remember from Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, young Tommy Jarvis vanquished our favourite hockey-masked homicidal maniac Jason Voorhees, bringing an end to Jason's four-year regime of terror. He had shaven his head in order to resemble Jason, a technique that allowed him to establish trust with the monster. They are of the same origins: children who don't fit in, capable of understanding but incapable of enjoying the hedonistic pleasures of adolescence. The implication on the one hand is that their motivations stem from sexual frustration--Jason and Jarvis are both fascinated and repulsed by sex. This is a secondary factor, though. At the core, and consistent with all the Friday the 13^th films from the very beginning, is the frustration of being haunted by demons (such as the subtextual sexual jealousy and frustration of The Final Chapter's Jimmy, or of the Larry Zerner character in Part III, from whom Jason obtained his hockey mask) while everyone around you is entirely carefree. These Friday the 13^th films are essentially parallel to David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Some have mentioned that Blue Velvet's Dorothy and Frank are the two most sympathetic people in the film. They are sick people, whereas the Jeffrey character has the privilege of his naïveté. Friday the 13^th is about film noir anti-heroes and their jealousy of the plastic Ghost World in which they live.

In Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, Jarvis appears to turn into Jason. Jarvis' brutal slow-motion beating of Jason certainly reminds one of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs; is the killing of Jason then proof that Jarvis has become as Jason is? I recently watched David Fincher's Fight Club, wherein Edward Norton destroys his alter ego Brad Pitt by shooting himself. This ending and its subsequent final shot make up for a moralistic third act. Pitt has told Norton that eventually they really will be the same, and following Norton's final and complete act of self-mutilation, his enormous suffering develops into a fully-realized consciousness, thus fulfilling Brad Pitt's prophecy. Similarly, the connection of Jason with Jarvis suggests that Jason is a creature of Jarvis' id, acting out the repressed fantasies of his subconscious. The shaved head and total mutilation of Jason's corpse imply that Jarvis has destroyed him because he finally is him. He is now all-powerful, a creature of physical supremacy and emotional and moral sublimation. My friends, Jarvis doesn't kill Jason to regain a sense of justice for the murder of his family, just as Jason doesn't kill everyone to regain a sense of justice for the murder of his family. Revenge has absolutely nothing to do with regaining justice--it has to do with regaining power. One is weakened by an attack, and through attacking back they can feel strong again. Justice is a buzzword that ignores what's really going on. This is the reason I argue that films like Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter or I Spit on Your Grave are occasionally brilliant, while films like Death Wish or Enough are seriously confused.

I cannot say that Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning adequately recognizes or builds upon the promise of the last film. It has Tommy Jarvis, grown up as a teenager, haunted by memories of destroying Jason. He keeps seeing Jason in his dreams. He is unable to stop the masked one from doing his thing. Jarvis is put in the funny farm but eventually transferred into a halfway house so he can prepare to re-enter society. Quiet and moody, he does not get along well with the rest of the people at the halfway house. One guy spooks him with a mask and Jarvis wails on him. There is another round of Jason-style killings in the film. Is Jarvis now Jason, finishing what he started? In a word, no. The film gets major points for staying in the shadows. We don't cheer for Jarvis or the real killer, but we sympathize. Again, they are very much film noir antiheroes in a plastic Ghost World. They have baggage, baggage, baggage and nowhere to leave it. But the film loses major points for plain spreading thin Jarvis' transformation into Jason. It's quite obvious that I am one of the largest Friday the 13^th apologists, I actually take these movies pretty seriously. But by the end of Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning, you realize that the film is quite the tease. What was very significant is now the stuff of cheap gimmicks.

The violence in Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is only really sexualized twice. A girl gets undressed for bed, wearing nothing but a pair of panties. I'm prepared to believe that some women sleep in this manner, but how many pull the covers to just under their nipples? I never knew breasts had to breathe so much. Anyway, she is sleeping on the top of a bunk bed. Jason (or rather the killer--more on that later) stabs her from underneath with his machete. This is a stabbing and not a slashing, very important--it's a piercing wound simulating sexual penetration. She flops around in suffering/mock orgasm. In the other sexualized killing, a braless, dye-haired cutie in a tank top is pushed against the wall and stabbed to death. Again we hear her moan in shocked suffering/mock orgasm. Jason then sets the two up along with a boy he had previously killed in a makeshift ménage a trois. I believe he even puts this display in Tommy Jarvis' bedroom.

There is also a noticeable degree of eye violence in the film. In Friday the 13^th: Part 3, an eyeball pops out of a skull, but in Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning, orbs are mutilated on three different occasions. Two of them are lovers slaughtered post-coitus. (This happens in every Friday the 13^th film, but most of the time people are killed without having had sex.) The girl stretches out naked on the ground, content and satisfied with her sexual experience while her boyfriend bathes. It's one of the more erotic images in a Friday the 13^th film, simply because she is so relaxed and so free with her body and her sexuality. (Understand that this is precisely what gets you killed in a Friday the 13^th movie.) Jason materializes with some gardening shears and slices open her eyes. Her boyfriend comes back and Jason wraps a leather strap around his eyes from behind a tree and tightens it until it slices through the top of his head.

Now, why the eyes? The eye is often symbolic, I think, of God's omniscience. It's His all-seeing eye. It knows all. By taking it from them, Jason is robbing them of their omniscience. The taking of the eyes is the ultimate humiliation, as the power that they once had over him is usurped. Remember the serial killer in Se7en blacking out the eyes of little boys in their underwear? Speaking of the serial killer in Se7en, there may very well be an air of superiority stemming from this usurpation of power. I notice that the original 1985 poster art features red light shining through the eye sockets of Jason's goalie mask like lasers. Because Jason has extensive eyes, eyes that go in all directions, his omniscience is all-encompassing. The deterministic nature of the Jason character is then deeply realized. Without their eyes, the meaninglessness of his victims is reduced even further. (This is of course a major theme of the series.) The third victim is a cook, who simply has his eyes gouged out. This certainly throws a wrench in the machinery, as I don't know why his power would need to be usurped. The significance of his life is reduced by default. That's one of the maddening things about the movie: the philosophy behind its violence is never consistent enough, but a good deal of the time it's ear-splittingly loud.

Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is not liked very much by fans of the series. Still, the film is certainly not for people who are not fans of the series. I'm going to have to argue against the reputation the fans have given it. The problem that everyone has with the film is that the actual Jason is not in it. The person in the film doing all the killings is just wearing a Jason mask and has the same MO as the Great One. As horror film scholar Mike Bracken points out, they are still basically getting Jason. The reason most people see these movies is to see a stalking hulk of a man in a mask slaughter people in a variety of different ways. That's why the critics hate them, and that is why, I guess, we love them. Fundamentally, Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning brings home the goods. However, I can sympathize with the complaint. This is the first film of the series that does not show any clips from previous Friday the 13^th films. There is some dialogue from Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter on the soundtrack, but the picture never brings up how Adrienne King killed Mrs. Voorhees, or how Jason drowned as a boy, et cetera. Jason is regarded as a sort of urban legend, which is right, but the characters are much more detached from it all than in the previous films. The mythology of Jason himself is overly downplayed.

The killer turns out to be a father slaughtering in revenge for the murder of his son; he used the dead Jason as a disguise. On the one hand, this turns him into Mrs. Voorhees. She killed for the very same reason. The film therefore illuminates a thin distinction between Tommy Jarvis, the killer, and Jason Voorhees--this is a highly meaningful contribution to the Jason mythology, even if it is indirect. On the other hand, I am able to see this denouement as very Scooby-Doo. The killer isn't becoming Jason as much as pretending to be Jason. I think I would have preferred it if the film had not provided any motivation at all for him to wear the Jason mask. Mulling it over, I think the film respects the Jason mythology more than it disrespects it. Charges against it on the grounds that Jason isn't there are largely unjustified.

A bigger shock for me initially was how divorced the film is from the usual Friday the 13^th aesthetic. Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is by far the goofiest Friday the 13^th yet. I have heard people say that there is no humour in it--have they been seeing the same movie? From the very beginning of the film, where a young Corey Feldman is looking on as Jason Voorhees' grave is desecrated, the film develops its own brand of delirious hilarity. The Harry Manfredini score seems to be aping John Williams in a way you sometimes hear a bad movie aping John Williams. An impending Jason massacre is made to sound like a magical adventure. Later in the film the kid in the movie, named "Reckless" Reggie (Shavar Ross of "Diff'rent Strokes" fame), attacks Jason by driving a tractor at him. When one of the camp counsellors--I mean halfway-house therapists--has a chainsaw/machete duel with Jason, Reggie is enthusiastically cheering for her. Reggie prides himself on being reckless; it's not so much that he is disaffected, but that he is more than ready to take on the challenges of the adult world.

Reggie is black. Early on in the film especially, his dialogue is sprinkled with Ebonics. Reggie's blackness is used because it more strongly establishes him as streetwise. It's easier to write a child as precocious if you make him black. I am not sure that this is racism as much as it's racial shorthand through stereotype. I am sure that for many it looks like I'm using overly complex euphemisms, but Reggie is not portrayed as inferior. At one point, we see him with his brother Demon, played by black character actor Miguel A. Núñez Jr.. Demon is a stoner who lives in a trailer park and dresses like Michael Jackson. He gets diarrhea from bad burritos and has to run to the outhouse. While in there he sings back and forth to his girlfriend a song that consists almost entirely of the phrase "oh baby oh baby." I have little doubt that you would have a much easier time describing Demon as a racist caricature. Then again, I could easily imagine a white actor in this role with few, if any, alterations.

The reason that the violence in the Home Alone films hit such a cord is because it shows boys establishing their autonomy. The humour and joy of that film was in watching little Macaulay Culkin establish his manhood and his ability to be on his own. For the most part, this is healthy or at least normal stuff. Moments like Reckless Reggie's attack on Jason and his cheering during the chainsaw fight provide children watching the Friday the 13^th films someone they can relate to. I think that's exactly the joke director Danny Steinmann is making here: this is self-consciously a slasher movie for kids. It's a cheap Xerox of the Spielberg magic that reminds of the quite atrocious Lady in White and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Assuming this material is aimed directly at kids, because this is a Friday the 13^th film the presence of these elements strikes a harshly sarcastic note.

Reggie does not share any kinship with Jason as Tommy Jarvis did in Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter. The material is still the same, adolescence is feared and hated, but the film's childish tone does not add any thematic significance. It exists more in reference to the film's new aesthetic qualities. There is a departure from the traditional Jason mythology. It's much slicker, and doesn't take itself as seriously as its predecessors do. The first three films (Part III being the goofiest) had the texture of pulp. Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter was pulp done 90% professionally. It paid homage and respect to its predecessors. Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is a lark, though. It doesn't distance itself through minimalism--it hardly considers minimalism at all. Its distance is primarily through self-conscious irony. (Friday the 13^th Part III was a mixture of the two.) Steinmann does not make the film into a Mel Brooks movie, but he's clever in the way he subtly reconciles the more professional look, a personal style and a sense of humour with all the conventions of the series. The film is a crude fit, but it fits and establishes itself as a uniquely oddball contribution to the series.

In addition to the "cheap Spielberg" tone, Steinmann shoots a few of the killings in a Raimi-esque fashion. For a few quick shots we get a point-of-view shot of the weapon zooming into its screaming victim. Steinmann even ups the ante on the bad dancing shown by Crispin Glover in Friday the 13^th: The Final Friday: before the tank-topped braless girl gets killed, she's dancing the Robot to some New Wave music. This is all very delirious and funny. The film is clever in having the story take place at a mental hospital halfway house, allowing for loony-on-loony violence. One resident offing another resident is the picture's first kill, the victim of which is so obnoxious that, combined with the idiocy of the murder itself, you can laugh without feeling callous. You may feel embarrassed that you haven't any semblance of taste, but you can laugh. The halfway house is generally interchangeable with a summer camp or summer house in the woods--the film's victims are to stay there until they're ready to re-enter society. The point of the Friday the 13^th films is that they never are.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.76:1 (16x9); English mono, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 92 minutes

Humour in a Friday the 13^th movie is a very delicate thing. It may be present, but it may not be overt. You must search for it; it should not hit you over the head. In Tom McLoughlin's contribution to the franchise, Jason Lives: Friday the 13^th Part VI (hereafter Jason Lives), McLoughlin begins the title sequence with Jason turning around inside an iris shot of his mask and slashing at us, flooding the screen with red. It's an obvious parody of the James Bond intros, but for whatever reason I decided to let it slide. When Jason attacks some paintball players who've been forced to wear bandannas that label them "dead," I could not let it slide. That sort of obviousness is really inexcusable. Then there is the case of a redneck gravedigger looking at the dug-up grave of Jason and saying, "Some people have a funny idea of entertainment." This attempt to implicate the viewer is symptomatic of McLoughlin's superiority towards Friday the 13^th films and their audience.

A female character says, "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." McLoughlin is attacking his audience in that the girl thinks she's in a Jason movie, as her repeated viewings of them have distanced her from the reality of violence. The line of course does not suggest that the movies have informed her about weirdoes wearing masks inasmuch as they have taught her to write off weirdoes wearing masks as the weirdoes wearing masks she sees in the movies. It also, I think, puts a blow against the often-accused derivative nature of these films that has been assigned by snoozing critics. Essentially all of these horror movies have an unfriendly weirdo in a mask. Roger Ebert has even given a derisive name to their genre; McLoughlin is not arguing with these critics, he is conceding to them.

Jason Lives has however been very well received for its sense of humour by the very people you think would be insulted by it: Friday the 13^th fans! Many feel this is one of the series' best--if not the best. Because I imagine that a lot of the people reading this like Friday the 13^th films and Jason Lives in particular, and so I don't offend these people, instead of doubting their sanity, we'll have to politely agree to disagree. But man, this movie upset me. Tom McLoughlin's smarminess is an insult. Friday the 13^th Part III and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning each had a goofy sense of humour, too, but they made you work for it a little, and they never really thought they were above the material. "Wakka wakka" disco music is great; what McLoughlin does in this movie is not.

The film does attempt to get back to the roots of the original Friday the 13^th film. An early draft included scenes with Jason's father, for instance, and this is the first entry to include camp counsellors since Friday the 13^th Part 2. McLoughlin even has a sort of recap of the theory of Jason as a misunderstood child forwarded in Friday the 13^th Part 2. Unfortunately, the actress in the film telling the story looks like she can barely contain her laughter. In Part 2, it was strictly melodramatic--the right tone. These connections are largely superficial. Although this is the return of Jason from The Final Chapter, as he was not present in A New Beginning, I feel that A New Beginning did a far better job connecting to the roots of the Friday the 13^th films. McLoughlin creates these connections, I fear, to mock them.

There may be thematic elements of the Friday the 13^th series that McLoughlin has touched on, but there are major portions he is unable to grasp. He has a little girl falling asleep while reading Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. In a sense, it's essentially just a visual joke, unnecessarily pointing out the inescapable fate of her mortality. There is "no exit," she is doomed. I know that it's funnier to have a child reading it, but since she doesn't die, the joke doesn't have much power. Simply as a sight gag, I may have liked it a little more if the film weren't constantly trying to call attention to its own sense of self-awareness. If we begin to consider No Exit and how it applies to Friday the 13^th, we realize that this girl may be one of Jason's creators. The characters in the Friday the 13^th films are essentially living the sort of Hell in No Exit. They, of course, die for the simple reason that they do not lead lives worth preserving, that is inarguably how and why they have been constructed. Life in a Friday the 13^th film is basically waiting. Jason and his friends, the freaks, geeks, and Tommy Jarvises, are in tune with this concept and have learned to loathe Friday the 13^th characters. The thought that "Hell is other people" is a remarkably on-target assessment of the philosophy of slasher cinema. While I really do wish that he would have done it with a little more subtlety, like when Crispin Glover's identity was summed up as being a "dead fuck" in The Final Chapter, McLoughlin is accurate in labelling his victims with bandannas that say "dead." They are dead; they haven't any other purpose but to die.

Where I feel McLoughlin has failed more severely, though, is in his use of the Tommy Jarvis character. Jarvis was our connection to Jason. The Final Chapter and A New Beginning implied that he would "turn into" Jason. He was complex, at least relative to the characters in a Friday the 13^th movie. The case is that he is sort of like the Dennis Quaid character in Far From Heaven: surrounded by all this plasticity where everyone seems to be at peace, unable to join them. He's a little jealous and angry with this. In McLoughlin's film, he becomes a hero. While he resurrects Jason in his attempt to actually cremate him, he is also responsible for helping to take Jason down. The local sheriff has a beef with Jarvis. He thinks he is crazy, and when the Jason murders happen, suspects that he has committed them. The only person who believes Jarvis' side is the sheriff's daughter! This is rather inexcusable. In giving Jarvis a love interest, he becomes associated with the victim and not the killer. When we begin to fear for Tommy Jarvis, his connection with the killer is destroyed. This is an essential aspect of the Friday the 13^th experience.

Jason Lives does not have any nudity in it, and its only sex scene is clearly played for laughs. There is no eroticism in the film. Accordingly, McLoughlin has de-sexualized the violence, sanitizing the Friday the 13^th experience as well as further destroying the thematic link with his sexually jealous protagonist. It is important to note that the teenagers in these movies are not killed after sex because sex is immoral. Nor is it exactly because sex is a sign of emotional maturity that is being rejected by the childlike Jason or the virgin who has summoned him out of his/her subconscious. I'm taking the position of your father now, but using sex as evidence of maturity is the very definition of an immature view towards sex. Indeed, teenagers and certain divorced, sexually promiscuous older women I know have forwarded this ideology with great gusto. Though I generally squirm at the notion of defining masculinity (and adulthood) through sexual experience, this idea still gets a good portion of what is going on in the slasher film.

The real reason that Jason kills people who have sex, the reason he commits those "rapes by steel," is because as a manifestation from the subconscious of the virgin, he represents a frustration with the comparative lack of guilt of his victims. They haven't really any hang-ups about sex, and their freedom from sexual guilt is what is so frustrating. That is what enrages the Jason character to kill. It is useless and meaningless to impress morality onto an immoral person. Morality is essentially a very private and personal thing, and we really shouldn't care about the choices that others make. It's not logical to incarcerate a murderer because what he did was immoral as much as because with him in prison it is safer for us to live our lives. And so the real problem is in seeing these people doing what they will. You see this and ask yourself, "Why am I cursed with inhibition, shame and fear?" The only thing you have is a fear for the consequences.

I suppose that it is not necessarily about sex. Just a handful of the characters in the Friday the 13^th films are worried about being killed by Jason himself, whereas everybody else isn't until it's far too late. Fear and shame are more or less interchangeable in this sense. What is ideal for Jason and his creator is to become disaffected from everything that makes them so miserable. The universe in the Friday the 13^th films is essentially atheist. There is no promise of spiritual rapture. There is a sort of hollow loneliness; it's stylistically minimalist. The ephemeral pleasures of all that life or existence have to offer. The denial of this fact through Jason's jealousy is what lends the series such great poignancy.

McLoughlin understands that these characters are, as we would say in the perspective of an emotionally haunted character, shallow. I have read that they are more complexly written than those in previous entries, but no. They are thankfully as non-written as they ever were. McLoughlin lets his characters have sex, party, and laugh. They don't smoke pot as I think they should, since the weed is symbolic for a relaxed pleasure-seeking existence and casual immaturity. But that is excusable. In portraying the victims, McLoughlin is pretty respectful of Friday the 13th tradition. The problem is that nobody in the film feels guilt or frustration. Tommy Jarvis' demons have evaporated away. He warns people about Jason, but unlike previous protagonists in the Friday the 13^th films, he easily relates to his love interest. Jason does not have any real motivation for killing people now. He seems to exist independent of anyone's subconscious.

I suppose you could argue that the film is about how Tommy battles Jason because he no longer has any use for him. It is about Tommy's battle of industry over inferiority, as we learned from Erik Erikson. The problem with that is two-fold. Firstly, McLoughlin makes Tommy into as shallow a character as the rest of the characters; Tommy doesn't have the chops for that kind of psychological complexity. Secondly, I think that healthy might be bad. Part of us really doesn't want us to see Tommy conquer his demons because his demons set him apart from the victims. This is the last film in the series to use Tommy Jarvis--I guess Jason moved on. It's a pity that he couldn't have followed that next logical step and executed Tommy.

When Jason is resurrected through lightning, McLoughlin shows us a close-up of his eye. This is a reference to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--the novel, not any of the films. The title character of Frankenstein narrates much of it, and describes seeing an eye open as being the horrifying evidence of the monster coming to life. If you think about this reference in terms of Tommy bringing Jason to life (he stabs him with an iron pole to make sure he is dead, the pole acts as a lightning rod bringing him life), it is certainly quite fascinating. McLoughlin unfortunately seems to use this image more for its satirical impact. In another movie it would have meaning; here it is yet another joke.

McLoughlin appears to regard Jason as a force of nature reclaiming the woods from these intruders. He has one of the teens talk some nonsense about Indians and how they built traps to aid their quest for obtaining new women. Some of Jason's early victims are corporate executives playing paintball in the woods. Through his destruction of these assholes, Jason is essentially strengthening the boundaries of the supernatural world. While I think that it is appropriate to view Jason as a monster and a supernatural entity, McLoughlin's apparent reading is awfully primary, and much of this idea is encompassed in the reading of Jason as the creation from the subconscious to deal with jealousy.

I have heard a few horror fans say that this isn't just a good Friday the 13th movie, it is a good movie period. If we view it outside of the context of the Friday the 13^th films, it's truly kind of thin. As a horror/comedy, it doesn't quite match up with the slasher version of Jack Frost (which features a rape-by-carrot nose, but earns its stripes in a scene shortly beforehand where two teenagers race to strip their layers of clothes off in a small, nice moment) and certainly not with Dr. Giggles, which for all its humour and goofiness was often actually scary and respected the conventions of the genre. (Incidentally, I saw and reviewed Dr. Giggles the day after I lost my virginity.) It's the sort of nuttiness that aims to distract rather than to help form its own sense of identity.

The film looks professional in the same way that Jack Frost and Dr. Giggles do. I don't consider this a good thing. Watching the film, I found myself sincerely missing Friday the 13th's grainy texture. It had the soul and voice of an exploitation film, a minimalism that was highly appropriate for the material. This sort of high-definition gloss was present in A New Beginning and confirms that the latter half of the Friday the 13th Decalogue loses the aesthetic that made the original so pleasurable. The film has a soundtrack of songs by Alice Cooper. The one played over the end credits is called "The Man Behind the Mask"--it's not a very good song. There's nothing memorable about the tune, and the lyrics sound rambling and forced. It reminded me of the Todd Solondz song at the end of Fear, Anxiety & Depression, "A Neat Kind of Guy." Solondz could probably claim to be making fun of New Wave music and self-indulgent masturbation, especially in view of the content of Fear, Anxiety & Depression. I'm not sure that McLoughlin and Cooper could angle for irony, no matter how hard they want to.

All the same, part of me desperately wants to download the song and burn it onto CD simply because it's a ROCK SONG ABOUT JASON! I suppose that my feelings for Jason Lives are honestly a little like that. It's difficult for me to really dislike a Friday the 13^th film. I'm a fan and my affection runs deep. But what is going on in this film really isn't cool, and it upsets me that people are always saying how this is what a Friday the 13^th film should be like.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.76:1 (16x9); English Ultra-Stereo, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 87 minutes