• 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)

One of my favourite episodes from "The X Files"' first season is called "Roland." It's about a mentally handicapped man named Roland who works as a janitor at a rocket research laboratory. Roland ends up dispatching of the scientists by turning on the rocket systems. Later, he leaves behind complex equations. How could this be? After all, Roland is no rocket scientist! It turns out that his colleagues murdered his twin brother, who was a rocket scientist, so that they wouldn't have to share credit with him. All that is preserved of the twin brother is his disembodied head, which is cryogenically frozen and communicates with Roland through telepathy. If this sounds ridiculous so far, wait 'til you get to the thawing of the frozen head, or Roland being given a love interest. It's tardsploitation at its finest. "Roland" is a guilty pleasure in that you genuinely feel guilty in taking pleasure from it. Both the mentally handicapped and the physically handicapped (the brother is a frozen head, heh heh) are exploited with such seriousness and earnestness that you realize the filmmakers were unaware of just how utterly tasteless it all is. Furthermore, the episode is so goofy, but in that same serious and earnest tone, that you realize the filmmakers had no idea that they had lost any semblance of credibility.

There are a couple moments like that in Friday the 13^th Part VII - The New Blood. One involves Jason killing a girl in a sleeping bag. He picks her up and swings her against a tree. It's one of the sickest and funniest things I've ever seen, in a Friday the 13^th movie or otherwise. You laugh, and you know that you really shouldn't be laughing. Jason, in general, kills like he can't kill fast enough. He treats it like an annoying chore. The dominant thought that seems to be going through his mind is "Fucking die already."

The victims in The New Blood may be the most irritating yet in a Friday the 13^th movie. They are just plain mean. If you're familiar with this entry in the series, you know that it's about a girl with telekinesis who fends off Jason. Well, she was admitted to a mental institution and the other characters openly ridicule her for it. Believe it or not, the previous victims in the Friday the 13^th films were never bullies. There was the bike gang in Friday the 13^th Part III, but that was a bike gang. The antagonism here is much more intimate. These are her peers tormenting her. One of the bitchy girls sets her sights on the telekinetic girl's boyfriend. In order to spark jealousy in the boyfriend, she makes out with another guy. When this doesn't work, she kicks the decoy out of bed, casually admitting to him that she led him on and he has failed to turn her on. "Hey, at least I gave you a chance," she purrs.

I have to say that it was deeply satisfying to see Jason casually dispose of this bitch. We tend to become desensitized to the violence in Friday the 13^th films. We aren't interested in the why of a killing nearly as much as we are in the how. We have something invested in the characters of The New Blood, however. A good deal of the time, we really want to see them die. The intense desire to see a character die is not a feeling rarely mined by the cinema. Bloodlust is a strong emotion, and like all strong emotions it ought to be thoroughly exploited. You see this even in children's films. I remember thinking when watching The Rescuers Down Under that the evil poacher was so evil that death was not punishment enough for him. I remember leaving that movie unsatisfied because all they did was have the bad guy fall off a cliff. What is somewhat unique to these movies is having the unlikeable character taken out by the villain instead of the hero. In Gremlins, the title creatures executed a Mr. Potter-like character. We hated her and cheered for the Gremlins, making the subsequent triumph of the Zach Galligan character sort of perfunctory. Ronny Yu's Bride of Chucky killed off unlikeable characters so often that we did not feel that the good guys were ever truly threatened.

Especially sticky is the fact that this character gets this critic--and, I honestly believe, the filmmaker, and the theoretical audience--angry simply by virtue of being a cocktease. Sexual frustrations are sadly not a part of the violence in The New Blood, though, and this aspect can't really be commented upon. None of the killings in the film are rapes by steel; Jason basically just cracks them in the coconut. At one point he even goes after someone with a weedwhacker! (Later to be spoofed by the 1993 Super NES video game "Zombies Ate My Neighbors". I went so far as to add that little factoid to the Internet Movie Database.) In the Friday the 13^th films, those who do get them usually see sex as a pastime. A sexually-uninitiated outsider creates the sexual frustration shown through the rape by steel of the sexually experienced.

The outsider from The Final Chapter on was Tommy Jarvis. He became like everyone else in Jason Lives, and so is replaced by this telekinetic chick. She accidentally murdered her abusive father with her powers when she was a child and the experience left her with tremendous emotional scars. She hasn't been able to come to terms with it, and it has since left her maturity--towards sex in particular, I suppose--stunted. The girl repeatedly cries out for her daddy; the idea appears to be that if she has sex, she will be betraying her deceased father. While this aspect is not very well-developed within the film, the association between Jason and the deceased father is very strong. She tries to use her powers to resurrect her drowned father, but instead brings Jason to the surface. Her psychologist repeatedly tells her that her delusions of seeing Jason and his crimes are directly related to her guilt over murdering her father. Jason is then a manifestation of her fear of her father. Not her real father, of course, but the idealized protective father.

She is telekinetic, but this is an extension of her femininity and sexuality, not a force--like Jason--intended to suppress it. Telekinesis is, after all, a condition that manifests itself during the teenage years, when the adolescent body goes through a wide variety of changes. Her defeat of Jason through telekinesis serves as an acknowledgment of her sexuality and femininity, and of course a triumph over the (self?)-repression from her father manifested in Jason. This then excuses the film from attacks by critics (admittedly influencing my preconceptions) who claim that the use of telekinesis is a gimmick employed to resurrect a dying series. You know: it's Carrie vs. Jason. The description itself points to the strength of the film, as it allows us to differentiate Carrie from Jason; while I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say that Friday the 13^th Part VII - The New Blood is better than Carrie, I would certainly argue that it is more optimistic and more humane. Carrie is a good guy here.

Reading Jason as a manifestation of her protective father is also interesting. It justifies the new murdering method. Jason is not trying to have sex or create some other sort of personal intimacy through his murder, he is just trying to dispose of them. Jason is a hypermasculine entity, and as his controller is a decidedly feminine female, it makes sense that he will not try to rape people with some sort of phallic symbol (i.e. ice pick, machete, spear). The character is not really much of a character this time around, but I think that, too, is typical for the entries this late in the game. We can pretty much forget that Jason is getting revenge for his death and the death of his mother. Jason is portrayed a bit more like a mythological character. His demise and resurrection--being chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake and being summoned by a teenage girl--even sounds like the stuff of myths.

Director John Carl Buechler has produced the fastest-paced Friday the 13^th film to date. But just as he doesn't let us catch our breath, neither does he allow for introspection and resonance. The earlier, grainier Friday the 13^th movies knew they weren't going anywhere, and so they had some laziness to them; they were comfortable. We had nice little moments like that scene in the first film where the girl impersonates Katharine Hepburn in front of a bathroom mirror while wearing a T-shirt and a pair of panties. The Friday the 13^th films never really had plots that mattered, and we were okay with that. We understood that the story was a pretext for Jason to kill everyone. With The New Blood, the plot takes precedence, and that is a misstep. The telekinetic girl is enough character and plot. The doctor who wants to upset her so that she uses her powers more often and he can better document her to get rich and famous is too much narrative.

Buechler doesn't understand that part of the charm is in the waiting, in the fact that nothing happens. Because of its fast pace and the overvalue allocated to the characters and plot, The New Blood actually feels like the least satisfying Friday the 13^th film to date. Not the worst, mind you, but the least satisfying. Pretty much all the films in the series have this sort of problem--that is their blessing and their curse. But this film probably does leave you emptier than most. The New Blood is lacking in the minimalist hopelessness of the earlier films. I'd go as far as to say that the old films had poetry. Perhaps it's a sign of the times, like the spirit of the '70s has finally left the earth. The newer Friday the 13^th films have more of a studio gloss and less of an independently-financed, exploitation flavour. (We are speaking relatively, of course.) But The New Blood has more unintentional comedy and is goofier than the old classics. Granted, it's an improvement on the previous Jason Lives in that we are laughing at the film more than we are laughing with it. Or if we are laughing with it, which I think could be the case, Buechler is better at subtlety.

But the goofiness still reduces the victims of their personality. They are perhaps reduced further than ever before. When Jason destroys the dicktease, it plays like a particular Shania Twain song. The creature she has made herself up to be don't impress Jason much. There is something in The New Blood that gives it the strongest '80s flavour of all the Friday the 13^th films. I really cannot say for sure what that is, it might be the clothing. The actors wear brighter colours. They somehow look tackier than usual. The squatty girl with the glasses who wants to prove she can get a man somehow reminded me of Natalie from "The Facts of Life". The idea of Jason terrorizing the cast of "The Facts of Life" is, of course, a very pleasant thought. One of Jason's victims is dressed as a preppie. As I have learned from the VH1 documentary "I Love the 80s", the preppie style was meant to be a reaction to punk. That, too, is a very pleasant thought, as it helps the film develop a sort of superficial culture of crap. (Trivia: Susan Blu, the heroine's mother, voiced Granny Smurf on the super-banal "Smurfs" cartoon series.)

The origin of the heroine's telekinesis is interesting. Her father is directly mentioned in the dialogue as being a drunk, but he doesn't look like one. He is said to have beaten the mother, but she doesn't show outward signs of abuse. There is cleanliness to the dysfunction. You realize that there really isn't any place for the outsider to fit into. Her problems cannot be articulated properly in this universe, as most of the people who inhabit it do not have very many problems. Writing that, I realize it sounds awfully naïve, but the attitude is neverthless not without its validity. When you're young, there are several times you have to ask questions like, Why isn't everyone else this fucked up? How can they be so comfortable when the walls are closing in? And I suppose that that is a large part of the reason so many teenagers and college students get involved in causes, cults--even gangs. There comes a point where you are almost forced to get involved in something bigger than you are, just so you don't end up like the characters in these movies. We tend to think that audiences relate to the characters in the Friday the 13^th films. I think it's really the opposite. These are the people we don't want to be and don't want to be seen as. They are shallow, empty, and very stupid. That's why audiences cheer when they die. Much of Friday the 13^th Part VII - The New Blood can be described and, moreover, celebrated as a B-movie joke that is sometimes in delicious bad taste. The film is never boring. The twist at the end is among the stupidest on record, but its stupidity has its own sort of audacity. All the same, it is respectful to the conventions and mythology of the series. I can't remember the last time I had so much joyous disrespect and respect for the same film.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.77:1 (16x9); English Dolby Digital 5.1, English Ultra-Stereo, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 88 minutes

I have to say, I'm quite surprised to be in the minority on Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Jason fans really, really loathe this movie--many consider it the worst of the series. To add insult to injury, Leonard Maltin gives it two stars and says that it's one of the best! Somehow, I found this entry to be the most satisfying since part 5, Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning. It's toned down a bit from the glossy campiness of the previous Friday the 13^th film, but it stays in your stomach longer, and it is often really tremendously powerful.

Maybe I was just feeling a little overly sensitive last night, maybe it's because I had just finished reading Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, but there is a scene in the film that is somehow one of the most revolting things I've witnessed in a long time. Two thugs take the heroine into a back alley. They hold her down and inject her arm with heroin so she'll be high for her rape. The actual rapist tells his friend that they'll need a lot of this stuff as they plan to go all night. Why do they want her to be high, exactly? That's not an attack against the film's mastery of logic, but a question of, "What exactly is the nature of their perversion?" They say something about how it will feel better if she's high, but how will it make her feel better? It seems that by injecting junk into her, they hope to frighten her that much more. The goal of rape is basically to humiliate your victim. You want them to feel ashamed of what they are. You want them to remember you, how terrified they were when you used them. In other words, rapists know full well about the ramifications of their acts, and that is the whole point. It's not so much that she asked for it; it's that she deserves it. When the thugs inject that needle into that girl's arm, she doesn't know where it has been or what exactly is in it. Her terror is a turn-on for them. Also part of the connection of forced drug injection is this idea that they want to somehow fill her with filth. In effect they are raping her with both their dicks and with a needle, reminding this clean-cut teenage white girl that she is in now in Manhattan and they are giving her a disease she'll keep for a long time.

Man, rape is one of most profoundly hateful acts that humankind could have cooked up. The thugs, for what it's worth, are Hispanic. The scene makes a statement about ethnicity in New York, namely that non-whites are animalistic and hateful. It's awfully gratuitous and offensive, but I'm nonetheless fascinated in that which is politically incorrect and destructive to the social fabric. The racist slant is thorny; you know that it's wrong but it nonetheless hits a cord. It's not embarrassing like a good deal of racist imagery, but confrontational and angry. When I evoke the Rape of Nanking in a review of Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, I want to stress that I'm not trying to trivialize that any more than I would trivialize some image or event within the Holocaust, although that has been exposed enough to perhaps have grown a bit more of a skin. I'm trying to say that this sequence in this Friday the 13^th movie is in that league of atrocity.

The rape itself doesn't actually transpire. Jason breaks into the scene and kills the thugs. I suppose that if director Rob Hedden were truly sincere about the visceral horror of the moment, he would have gone through with it. But the scene is powerful enough to be worth mentioning all the same. A couple fans complained that none of the characters act like what they just went through really bothered them. The male hero's father is slain, and he doesn't seem to be at all affected by it. (Even more curious is the lack of an aftermath for that attempted rape.) I can't call this an unsound argument, as the terror is muted when we realize that the survivors are going to be able to go on with their lives. This was also a problem with the far-too-happy ending of Jason Lives: Friday the 13^th Part VI. The series had made fairly good use of the Tommy Jarvis character only to say goodbye to the torments he faced by giving him the girl and the promise of a bright future?!

The survivor of the first Friday the 13^th film, played by Adrienne King, is plagued with memories of the insane Mrs. Voorhees. In the second she is stuck with an ice pick, in effect making her Jason's very first kill. It was a great joke. The character hadn't died in the first entry, and so she bided her time before the sequel basically waiting and dreading judgment day. The power and absurdity comes in the lack of a conclusion. There is something very nicely insane about the first three films in the series. They actually try to pick up where the last film left off. Adrienne King survives the first and dies in the second, and the survivor of the second is seen on TV by a cranky modern couple in the third. These are of course movies where the plot consists of mostly filler, and so this idea of hooking them all up in one long story helps to underline the meaninglessness of it all. Like the last two films in the series (6 and 7), the filmmakers seem to want to create a feeling of closure for the audience. It's not a good idea. The lack of closure was a virtue of the series. We don't want these characters to grow or get on with their lives. We quite simply do not like them that much. It's interesting to me that the two surviving characters get on with their lives in Manhattan. Even in being filled with trash, graffiti, and rapists, it's home for them. I think that the feeling is sincere. The villains in New York are real, but defeatable. You can protect yourself from them. Whereas Jason will hunt you down and it is basically a forgone conclusion that he is going to get you.

The film is adamant about establishing Jason as a mythological figure, a boogeyman. The heroine's uncle forced her to learn how to swim by throwing her in Crystal Lake and telling her that if she doesn't swim, the little boy Jason, who had drowned years ago in that lake, would come and get her. She never swims again. Destroying Jason is, of course, destroying her fear of autonomy. With Jason gone again, she can now swim, grow up, and basically live peacefully. There is certainly something post-modern about the idea of Jason taking Manhattan, which is why it's a pretty good gimmick. He emerges from the sea onto Manhattan, an immortal mythological being journeying into a temporal, myth-less environment. When the heroes run into a restaurant and exclaim to a waitress that a maniac is trying to kill them, she wisecracks, "Welcome to New Yawk." The citizens of New York are unable to recognize that Jason is not just any maniac--he's Jason, for Christ's sake! That's part of the humour; New Yorkers--well, in this movie, at least--are an irreligious, arrogant bunch. They know that they have seen it all and can deal with it all, and so when they encounter Jason, they can't muster surprise or terror as much as frustration with their inability take him down the same way they can take down your typical maniac.

One of the most common complaints I have heard about Jason Takes Manhattan is that Jason doesn't arrive on-shore until the final third of the film. The rest of the time, he's on a ship bound for Manhattan. They apparently didn't have enough money to shoot much footage in Manhattan, or the faux-Manhattan up north. I wouldn't say that the title isn't misleading, but then again, I'm not sure that there was that much more that could have been said about Jason taking Manhattan. It would have been sort of a good gag to see him take over famous New York landmarks or something, but that is perhaps a different movie for a different time. In this case, it occurs to me that less is better. In order for the scenes in the city to have much significance, I think that it's necessary to establish a Camp Crystal Lake-like setting on the ship.

Series creator Sean Cunningham's DeepStar Six (released the same year as Jason Takes Manhattan) has the tagline "Not all aliens come from space," implying that some aliens come from deep underwater. A deep body of water is an obvious symbol for the subconscious, as the planet is covered with it but we only skim the surface of it. So basically there could be all sorts of things going on down there that we know nothing about. Underwater aliens are as alien as those from outer space; the irony is that they are here with us all along. The film takes great pains at establishing, then, that Jason is one of those "monsters of the id," as they said in Forbidden Planet. Jason is even introduced with the phrase "according to legend." The heroine keeps hallucinating Jason as a little boy, as that is how she has always pictured him since her uncle told her about his drowning. She has a certain kinship with Jason. They were both left to drown in Crystal Lake, and their failure to swim in the water is an all-purpose symbol of their inability to operate on the level of everyone else.

The gore in the film was toned down after the MPAA cracked the whip. The first kill nonetheless proves slightly shocking: Jason guts a guy with a spear gun. When he pulls out he is surprised by the splash of fluid. The most sadistic kill belongs to Kelly Hu, who's choked in mid-air, only to be thrown violently to the ground when Jason is finished. This stuff is harsher than its reputation suggests. I do have to say that I don't feel that it has the same sort of impact as previous entries. Yet again, the murders are not penetrations or "rapes by steel." (Well, actually the first two, happening soon after (or maybe it was just the preliminaries of) coitus, were murders by a penetrative weapon.) The killings lose that creepy feeling of sensuality. The connection between the heroine and Jason is stronger, the former a creation of the latter's subconscious, but Jason doesn't act out of sexual jealousy or frustration as was the case in earlier entries.

Thinking somewhat heavily on that issue, I've come to realize that Jason's existence is similar to the one he enjoyed in Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood. Jason's goal (as well as that of his controller) is again simply autonomy and emotional peace, not sexual intimacy. Thus when Jason is defeated, the heroine is saying that she can conquer her demons, and we can develop closure. Closure is a lot harder to establish in the reading of Jason as a sexual being. If there is a motif to Jason's killings, for a while it seems that it may be a sort of "turning the sin against the sinner." The fornicating couple is killed through a piercing weapon. A rock-and-roller is beaten to death with her guitar. A film geek is electrocuted. One of the druggie thugs is stabbed with a needle. And so on. In everybody's favourite kill, Jason knocks a cocky boxer's head clean off. I don't think that Jason kills, in this case, as a product of conservative dogma. If anything he kills the people the audience wants him to kill. I suppose you could argue that the target audience for these movies is sexually inexperienced, or mostly inexperienced in anything. After all, they're getting high from watching a Friday the 13^th movie.

A better explanation may be that these characters are just plain annoying. In previous entries, I think it was the case that the audience wanted to distance the characters into the roles of victims in a Friday the 13^th film. If they related to them, that would be a confession that their lives really are that shallow and meaningless. In this film, I don't think there's any threat of the audience relating to the characters. They exist as stereotypes, and at times the stereotype itself may be the victim. It can be read almost like a Spike Lee routine, or Eric Harris' tirade on niggers, spics, and racist white people. Jason executes tough-guy blacks, gangbanging Latinos, and Asians with scholarships. Maybe it's strictly racism, or maybe it's an attack on the way we confine minorities into those roles. In other words Jason isn't attacking Latinos--he's attacking the idea of the gangbanging Latino. Somewhat more comfortable, I suppose, is the way that some of Jason's other targets include a tight-assed principal, who complains about how one of his students was paddling the boat through the night while he himself took a nap; and the traditionally skanky blonde, who snorts cocaine before getting slaughtered by Jason in the shower with a shard of a broken mirror.

The abundance of broad stereotypes lends the film a healthy campy feel. They are far from actual human beings, so we can laugh at their deaths in good conscience. The knocked-off head is still my favourite gag. When it lands in a dumpster, the lid slams shut. The film doesn't have the superior attitude that Jason Lives did. It's funny, but funny with a relatively straight face. Yes, even when Jason scares off some punks by lifting up his mask and showing how ugly he is, or the part where he sees a billboard for hockey masks, the film does not sink to the depths of Jason Lives' jokery.

Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the final film in the series to be released by Paramount. They apparently found them very embarrassing yet wanted to continue producing them as they were extremely profitable. This film turned a profit (the total gross was around $15M against a $5M budget), but it was nevertheless the least successful entry in the Friday the 13^th franchise. Grosses had dropped significantly after Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, maybe because it was the best of the series, maybe because people realized that the horribly cynical subtitle, The Final Chapter, was a bald-faced lie.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.77:1 (16x9); English Ultra-Stereo, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 100 minutes