Buy the New Blood poster at Moviegoods (click image)

This sixth sequel explores the premise of Jason facing a telekinetic foe. Sent to Crystal Lake as a form of therapy, it seems that Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln, kind of cute in an eighties jean-jacket way) accidentally sent daddy to a watery grave many years prior. Her shrink (Terry Kiser) believes that only by vacationing on those fateful shores will she be able to put her troubled past to rest. Thanks to the misguided nature of Tina's awesome psychic powers, Jason resurfaces from the deep; lucky for him there's a wolf-pack of horny teenagers renting the cottage next door to Tina, one of whom has a crush on our increasingly unstable heroine. Doesn't one always?

Even with the addition of psychic phenomena, a perfectly reasonable upgrade (if horror isn't the genre with the most interchangeable premises (given that a large percentage of them boil down to a nubile madonna against the forces of evil), I don't know what is) despite its unsuccessful execution (though it's fun watching a puzzled Jason react to objects that come soaring at him from nowhere in the climax--bear in mind that he's an inbred at heart), the film tastes bland. This is the first time that fan fave Kane Hodder played Voorhees, and his clever, if almost imperceptible, personalization of the character is to precede body movements with a jerk of the head. His Jason thinks, in other words, which is more than you can say for the scripts to parts seven on. Too bad secondary antagonist Kiser had yet to star in Weekend at Bernie's--The New Blood would be fertile ground for an in-joke.

Buy the Jason Takes Manhattan poster at Moviegoods (click image)

Jason Takes Manhattan was, by contrast, the Friday the 13^th entry I actively despised as a teenager--and now I find it at least as entertaining as its immediate predecessor. I can't clear the picture of all charges: it's still no moot point that Jason takes everything but Manhattan (depicted as a pre-Giuliani looking glass of hookers and dope fiends and toxic waste-filled sewers) over the course of the narrative; it's a slow-moving piece that builds to an incoherent climax; and do we need another female lead with an Electra complex? (Like The New Blood's Tina, Rennie (Jensen Daggett) has father issues stemming from a drowning incident.)

But, despite MPAA-ordered cuts, the film achieves a sadism that makes it an acceptable cast-off from Paramount, who severed ties with the franchise following Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan's box-office failure. Jason haunts a ship of fools--er, central-casting high school students (including The Scorpion King's Kelly Hu)--that eventually docks at the New York harbour (Vancouver stands in for NYC). Not in one piece, mind you. A hissable supporting villain gives Jason a crowd-pleasing note to play when he confronts Rennie's manipulative uncle--the principal--Charles (Peter Mark Richman, Chrissy's father on "Three's Company"), and it's worth enduring the length of this refuse for a memorable rooftop kill. The New Blood sports a red-letter murder as well, wherein Jason beats a squirming figure in a sleeping bag against a tree, but it arrives too early in the proceedings to compensate for the monotony of the rest of the film.

Buy the Jason Goes to Hell poster at Moviegoods (click image)

After eight movies in nine years, Jason took a four-year sabbatical and re-emerged, sort of, in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. ("Final" my ass.) Now entombed at New Line, home of Freddy Krueger, the character underwent a radical re-interpretation that gave him a modus operandi similar to that of the creature from Jack Sholder's The Hidden (a New Line production, in the interest of disclosure). This necessitated the insertion of a bounty-hunting devotee of Voorhees mythology (Steven Williams) all but named Basil Exposition; so informed is this veritable Ahab that he recites a little verse to bring us up to speed on the new concept in the film's simultaneously best and worst sequence: "In a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn, and only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die." Catchy. Jason Goes to Hell opens and closes with the Jason we know and love, but comprising the middle is a body-snatchers intrigue--Jason's soul travels on the back of a toothsome tapeworm. Dull, dull, dull, the picture's saving grace is the truly intense gore of the unrated version, courtesy of Tom Savini's heirs apparent KNB. As I was among the unlucky few to see Jason Goes to Hell theatrically and thus in its R-rated form, I was reluctant to suffer the film again on DVD, unrated or not. But I'm perversely glad I did: the zero-dimensional victims here deserve, on the movie's terms, every ounce of punishment they receive and then some.

Buy the Jason Goes to Hell poster at Moviegoods (click image)

Disavowing knowledge of the events of the ninth film, Jason X shoots a cryogenically frozen Jason and his last, unfinished slaying (the aesthetically endearing Lexa Doig of TV's like-minded "Andromeda") into outer space and the barely-evolved future--2455. College kids on a field expedition (a fact unclear to me until I listened to the DVD's commentary track) discover the couple, thaw them out, and then Jason starts hacking away at his emancipators in gratitude. Besides missing several obvious set-ups for an anti-gravity slice-and-dice, the film looks too slick for its own good, substituting Sci-Fi Channel sheen for the grimy patina that is part and parcel of Friday the 13^th's charm. It's a plastic movie of plastic self-awareness, an instalment geared towards non-fans, allowing them to feel above the lowbrow notion of slasher cinema while pacifying them with CGI effects galore. I was largely disappointed. (Click here for Walter Chaw's theatrical review.)

Paramount's DVD releases of The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan are in neither the same league as New Line's issues of Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X nor each other. The New Blood's 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer has a soft, low-contrast appearance that pegs it as probably the ugliest Friday the 13^th disc since Part III's. Its 5.1 Dolby Digital remix is no great shakes, either, outshone by Jason Takes Manhattan's 2.0 Dolby Surround track. (Jason Takes Manhattan's 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced image is of utmost clarity to boot.) Jason Goes to Hell features 1.85:1 anamorphic video compromised by the severe darkness of the cinematography, but it's otherwise exemplary, as is the 5.1 audio presentation (in Dolby Digital and DTS!)--even if cricket noise dominates the surround channels. Jason X is, as one would hope for a film of recent vintage (ported direct-to-digital, no less), the best of the lot aurally and visually. One could mount a case for its stunning lack of imperfections as totally inappropriate for the material at hand.

Supplementing Jason Goes to Hell on DVD is a commentary track with director Adam Marcus and co-screenwriter Dean Lorey. A chummy pair, they concede to having crafted a film that insulted its core audience, second-guess their rationale for many an awful moment, debate the merits of the R-rated cut (which cohabits the DVD with the unrated one), and reveal that producer Sean S. Cunningham's questionable mandate in story meetings was, "Get rid of that damn hockey mask!" Wonder why Jason straps one host to a table nude and proceeds to shave his five o'clock shadow? So do they. And wait 'til you hear the meaning of Erin Gray's acronym MILF. This is a far less self-satisfied yakker than director Jim Isaac, screenwriter Todd Farmer, and co-producer Noel J. Cunningham's (Sean's son) comm on Jason X, though it's fascinating to learn there that, independent of Marcus and Lorey, Isaacs and Farmer brainstormed a Jason movie that deposited him in the middle of an LA turf war: Jason Goes to Hell's original pitch.

Jason X is a Platinum Edition title, although Platinum Edition Lite might be a more appropriate banner. "By Any Means Necessary: The Making of Jason X" (17 mins.) focuses on the work of F/X house ToyBox; the other featurette, "The Many Lives of Jason Voorhees" (30 mins.) conducts interviews with professional fanboys Joe Bob Briggs, Drew McWeeny (a.k.a. Moriarty of "Ain't It Cool News"), Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank (of American Movie), and others. The Paramount days are recognized in this Jeffrey Schwarz retrospective though no clips from the Paramount series of films are shown; "Many Lives" ends on an inadvertently sad note, with Hodder expressing gleeful anticipation for the upcoming, long-awaited Freddy vs. Jason: since that time, he has been replaced in the role.

New Line emerges as Jason's saviour in this documentary (as the house that Freddy built, they apparently know--moreover, know how--to treat a horror icon with TLC), yet the studio is responsible for a scant two Jason movies in ten years (a Friday the 13^th was annually on the Paramount slate). Jason X, meanwhile, was completed at the beginning of this century, sitting shelved until spring of 2002. Rounding out the Jason X DVD: trailers for Blade II, Final Destination, and A Nightmare on Elm Street; Farmer's screenplay, accessible via ROM exclusively; and a "Jump to a Death" chapter menu, also a special feature of the Jason Goes to Hell disc.-Bill Chambers

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.