Jason X

Phew! There's finally a light at the end of the tunnel...this week, I finish off the Friday the 13th franchise with one of the more interesting ones, Jason X. I know there's still Freddy vs. Jason to watch, but it's really just a Freddy movie with Jason in a supporting role, so don't hold your breath waiting for me to get to it. Anyway, SPOILERS ahoy, so let's get started!

Our tale this time begins INSIDE Jason. During the credits, we take a journey through Jason's body and bloodstream. Every now and then, the camera pans back enough to show that Jason's being poked and prodded by a team of government-funded scientists. They take blood samples, skin scrapes, hair follicles...you name it, they study it. Oh, and did I mention that Jason in this one is back to being a Mongoloid, and has healthy flesh? When did he find time to come back to life... after his trip in the New York(Canadian, heh) sewers, maybe?

Well, at least it's a pretty great visual treat to sit through these credits. When they end, we discover that the year is 2010(wait, they captured Jason LAST YEAR?), and Jason has somehow been defeated again, and is being kept at a facility at Crystal Lake. The military apparently wants to exploit his rapid healing ability in their own soldiers. As the movie begins, a lone soldier is keeping vigil in front of Jason. The killer is bound by several chains and shackles, still dressed in his usual hockey mask and uniform. After making a few nervous attempts at engaging Jason in a chat, the soldier grabs a nearby tarp and throws it over the killer to cover him up.

There's an abrupt scene change, and we meet a team of doctors and soldiers, commanded by Dr. Wimmer(played by creepy film director David Cronenberg) as well as an attractive young woman named Rowan. Rowan wants to convince the military to destroy Jason, but they think that his inability to die or suffer permanent injuries is worth studying further. At the very least, Rowan wants to have Jason frozen, but Wimmer refuses. He and the soldiers plan to transport Jason to another government facility, for more in-depth experiments.

They approach Jason, who is still covered by the sheet. Wimmer asks the soldiers to remove the sheet, and doing so reveals that the soldier who had been guarding Jason was strung up in his place, chained and bleeding. Caught off-guard, the men fail to see Jason attacking from behind. He takes out the first 3 soldiers with brute force, then uses his chain to strangle the fourth one before the guy can shoot him. He beats the last soldier with a rod to the face, then notices Dr. Wimmer escaping. Jason throws a metal rod at the doctor, impaling him from across the chamber.

From the corridor, Rowan hears all of the screaming and shooting. She decides to take a quick peek, but one of the soldiers is thrown at the door, knocking it off its hinges as his body slides to a stop at Rowan's feet. She stares at the pile of corpses inside Jason's cell, then sees Jason looming in the hallway behind her. Great. This movie has an alive, teleporting Jason. Why not have him talk, too? Then it can hit the trifecta of stupidity.

Rowan grabs the military rifle off of the dead guy on the floor, and starts running. She gets to the basement level, where she lures Jason into a cryogenic storage chamber. When he gets to the middle of the small room, Rowan fires at him with her rifle. After several hits, one knocks Jason off of his feet, and he sails into a cryogenic chamber. Rowan swiftly locks him in, then starts the freezing process, but Jason stabs her in the abdomen with his machete before the process completes. As the cryogenic area self-locks, both Rowan and Jason freeze and die.

The story then picks up 455 years later. A class of science/archeology students, led by their teacher Professor Brandon Lowe is taking a field trip to what was once Earth. Due to overpopulation, pollution and several other factors, humans learned to colonize other habitable worlds and abandoned ours. So much for Earth Day.

So why was this intergalactic field trip done at the Crystal Lake research facility? Who knows. The students in Lowe's class include Tsunaron, a goofy-looking surfer dude-type; Azrael, an even GOOFIER dude who is accident-prone and lazy; Janessa, a cute brunette who seems to be channeling Allyson Hannigan's quirkiness; and KM-14, a female android built by Tsunaron as a "companion". There's also a black dude along for the class, but in this scene he has no dialogue, and no one calls him by name. Nice that even in the future, horror cliches still exist.

As the students look around, Azrael gets his hand frozen to a coffee mug while examining it. They quickly find the chamber Jason was trapped in, but can't figure out his appearance or the machete frozen in his upraised arm(and I can't figure out why the equipment would still work after more than 400 years...and wasn't the army supposed to be moving him? Wouldn't there have been an investigation when the soldiers never returned???).

Azrael pokes at him a bit after the cryogenic chamber is opened and Jason's thawed-out arm lowers, severing Azrael's arm. KM uses some kind of quick-sealing bond to cover the stump, then gives Azrael a dose of painkiller to calm him down. Lowe uses a communicator to call Lou, the ship's pilot, and tells him to prepare for lift-off as soon as they get back.

Once aboard the shuttle pod(which is shaped like a giant hockey mask on legs), we meet the rest of the crew in the larger ship that they're taking the trip with: Brodsky, the tough-as-nails Marine in charge of a small squad of soldiers; Crutch, a scruffy engineer; a cute doctor named Adrienne(and her students, Stoney and Kinsa)...and that's about it. So, let me see, we've got the students, the Marines, carry the one....about a dozen or so people for Jason to kill. Cool.

In the medical bay, Azrael lays down on a table and his arm is placed directly beneath his stump. Using nanobots called "ants", the stump and the arm are fused back together, then the ants retreat. Azrael staggers to the corridor, where a friend gives him a high-five, causing Az to stumble in pain again.

At the same time, Professor Lowe is analyzing Rowan's DNA to see how much damage the freezing did to her body, and Adrienne is analyzing Jason's body with her two horny helpers, Stoney and Kinsa. Adrienne eventually throws them out, and examines Jason alone, with a remote linkup to Professor Lowe's lab station. It's always a good idea to be in a room alone with Jason. Yup. Move along, nothing to see here...

Rowan has suffered damage from the prolonged freezing process all over her body, so the ants cover her completely to begin their repairs. In Adrienne's lab, she begins an autopsy of Jason, starting with a scan of his skull, which shows an abnormally small brain. Ha ha! She then gently removes his deformed eyeball, while he stares up at her with his good eye. She examines the mangled eyeball and drops it into a sink filled with liquid nitrogen. Yum, who wants eye-sicles?

In Lowe's lab, the repair job was a success. Rowan wakes up and immediately attacks Professor Lowe with a hard punch to the jaw. When she gets her bearings, the first thing Rowan asks about is whether or not Jason is dead. They only tell her that he was frozen along with her, then they inform her that it's been over 455 years since the day she was frozen. Talk about sleeping in...

Professor Lowe gets to his private quarters as soon as he can, and calls a frail man named Dieter Perez. Dieter's asleep, but he agrees to take the call when he sees the caller. Dieter is sort of a fencer of artifacts, but he remains skeptical of the value of Lowe's latest "treasures". Apparently, re-animated people are a dime a dozen, even if they've been frozen for as long as Rowan was.

Dieter perks up when he sees the name Voorhees. Apparently, even 455 years later, Jason's legend still gets around. He strikes a deal with Lowe to pay a ridiculous amount of money for Jason's remains, and the two agree on the terms. As soon as the online chat ends, Janessa shows up, ready for some kinkiness. Rowwwwwwwr.

Adrienne cuts Jason's mask off to examine his face, and we get our only really good look at him unmasked in this movie. His skin is soft and lumpy-looking, and his teeth are a bit crooked, but other than that he looks like a troll from your average Grimm Brothers tale. Except for the first couple of movies, I don't think I've ever seen this much skin on his face. Grimacing, Adrienne drops his mask back into place.

In Lowe's quarters, Janessa is using a pair of tongs to twist his nipples. Believe me, it's as weird to watch as it is to read. I feel sleazy just typing it. She rides him like Seabiscuit, until he agrees to let her pass his course. Yeesh. I wonder which end got the bottle....on second thought: No. I don't wonder.

Jason's blood begins to ooze out from under his mask, dripping onto the floor of the lab. Adrienne fails to notice it, because she's at her desk, studying the various samples of blood and tissue that she took from him. At the same time, KM is showing off some metal nipples to Tsunaron. He doesn't realize it, but KM has grown beyond her programming, and loves him. Awwwwww! Kiss her, ya lug!

Okay, so back to Stoney and Kinsa...briefly. They're making out, so apparently "horniness" hasn't found a cure in the future. We switch back to Adrienne so fast, it gives me whiplash. She hears something, but when she turns around, Jason has resumed playing dead-ish. She looks around a bit, then goes back to her analysis. Jason flexes an ice-covered hand, and Adrienne looks up again. He lays still. When she goes back to her study of his DNA, Jason stands up, then glances over at the cute scientist.

Adrienne remains oblivious, until she sees the examination table is now deserted. Jason grabs her ponytail, presses his arms around her, then throws Adrienne against a wall. The anonymous black dude from the field trip is on the other side of the wall, but he fails to notice her struggle through the frosted glass wall. Jason drags Adrienne over to the liquid nitrogen, dunking her head into it until her face is frozen solid, then he smashes her face against the table, shattering her head. Before he leaves the lab, Jason grabs a particularly nasty surgical saw to replace the machete that Professor Lowe took out of his frozen hand.

Lowe, meanwhile, has brought Rowan a tray of food. He tells her that they're heading for Earth Two, then relates the story of how "her" Earth was depleted of all resources, destroyed with pollution, and eventually abandoned. Rowan tells Lowe that she was one of the heads of the project researching Jason's invulnerability. She says that they tried to kill him in numerous ways--gas, electrocution, hanging, firing squad--but he never died.

Meanwhile, Janessa is trying to make a move on Tsunaron, but he shoots her down. They get introduced to Rowan, then Brodsky and KM come in as well. Rowan accidentally discovers that Jason is on the ship, and she insists on proof that he is dead. Can't say that I blame her.

They find Adrienne's body, and put the ship on a high-security lockdown, until Brodsky's squad can find and kill Jason. Hearing the security alert, Stoney and Kinsa decide to stop making out, and join the others. Jason has other ideas. He meets Stoney at the door, impaling him, then dragging him away, as Kinsa goes hysterical.

She gets to the lab with the others, and informs them of Stoney's death. Brodsky tells his squad to be on alert, and to shoot to kill. When Lowe tries to bribe the Sarge not to kill Jason, Brodsky agrees, but then tells his squad to kill Jason anyway. The Marine grunts all have names like Dallas, Sven, Geko and Kicker, but they might as well be named "Body 1", Body 2", and so on.

We then find Azrael in a virtual reality game with Stone Cold Steve Austin's Canadian-actor equivalent, Lukewarm. They're shooting imaginary aliens when Jason steps in and starts killing the aliens as well. Lukewarm stops the program after Jason kills his and Azrael's "avatars", and then watches Jason pick Azrael up by the neck. Lukewarm shoots at Jason, who drops the kid and goes after Lukewarm, but Az tries to help by jumping on Jason's back. Jason pries the kid off, snaps his spine, then shoves Lukewarm's face into a wall.

Next, Crutch is being stalked. He hears someone in the general vicinity, but can't tell who it is. Crutch then sees Jason's reflection in a monitor, but before Jason can slash him, Brodsky and his squad blast away at the killer, and destroy Crutch's little "garden" in the process. Jason disappears in the smoke and barrage of bullets, and Crutch escapes while the trio look for Jason.

The first one to die, Sven, is snatched up by Jason as he walks by the killer's hiding place. Jason snaps his neck. The next to die, Condor, is trying to spot Jason by climbing a landing and seeing the room from above. Sadly, Jason is already up there to meet him(More teleporting!), and hurls Condor onto a giant drill. The drill impales Condor as his body spins, sending gore everywhere.

Brodsky fails to reach them on his headset, and gets nervous. The 2 female Marines find Condor, and report that he's "screwed". Ha-ha. Jason goes after the first woman, Geko , when she backs into him in the darkness. Jason cuts her throat and lets her stagger into one of her squadmates, Kicker. He fires several rounds at Jason, and watches the big guy stumble backwards onto a giant hook. Kicker then hoists Jason into the air by the chain that the hook is attached to, and reports that he killed Jason.

Nope. Jason lifts himself off of the hook and kills Kicker buy cutting him in half. The top half tries to crawl away(should we call him Crawler now?) and radio for any survivors to escape, but the only one left seems to be Brodsky. Brodsky finds one of the dead girls on a hook, and tries to sneak up on Jason. Jason grabs him by punching through a steel container, and stabs him twice through the stomach. Before he dies, though, Brodsky gets some funny dying words, saying that one stab in the ribs won't kill him, then admitting that the second stab did the trick.

Back in the lab, Professor Lowe and his surviving students,along with KM and Rowan realize that Jason has massacred all of the Marines. A loud pounding on the door frightens them, but it's only Crutch. He finds out about the dead Marines, then Lowe talks to the pilot, Lou, who is just about ready to begin docking with Solaris, the space station they were trying to reach. He prepares for docking, then Jason kills him from behind. Pilotless, the Grendel crashes through Solaris, killing everyone on the station in one fell swoop, as well as damaging the ship. The black kid, who finally has a name(Waylander), puts the damaged space station on the viewscreen just before it explodes. Whoops!

After the explosion, Tsunaron does one of the few SMART things in the film, by sending a distress beacon out into space. After Professor Lowe assures the survivors that this particular region of space is heavily travelled, Jason begins pounding on the heavy metal door. When he stops for a few moments, Rowan hopes out loud that he went away, leading Janessa to deliver a classic wiseass comeback: "Why don't you stick your head out and have a peek?" God help me, I think I'm in love.

While everyone's staring at the metal door, Jason crashes through a glass wall. They all sprint back into the corridor, stop when they realize they're alone again, then have another realization strike them like a sack of hammers: they left Professor Lowe with Jason. D'oh! Say goodbye to your GPA, kids!

Lowe tries to bargain with Jason for his life. Sure, that always works with unstoppable zombies! He offers Jason money, power, influential connections...but Jason only looms closer. Finally, Jason moves in for the kill, and...ignores Lowe, in favor of the ancient machete he had been holding when frozen. Lowe proudly yells out to his students in the next room, "Guys it's okay...He just wanted his machete back!" Ay yi yi, what a lunkhead Lowe is.

In the next room, Rowan tries to come up with an escape plan. She asks Waylander if they can "beam off" of Grendel, and he looks at her like she's Anna Nicole Smith's dumber cousin. They decide it might be possible to relaunch the shuttle, and Crutch agrees to get to his console and start the launch sequence. Waylander tells Crutch that he'll assist him, while the others try to get to the shuttle. Rowan picks up the rifle-cannon off of one of the dead Marines, and assures everyone that she can use it.

KM and Tsunaron move off in a different direction to arm KM with more weapons. When he asks KM to assess their chances of escaping the ship, she calculates that they're almost definitely going to die. He kisses her, and she responds that their odds just got much better. Gotta love how horny these guys in the future are, huh?

Rowan, Janessa and Kinsa make their way to the cargo bay, where most of the Marines were picked off. Curiously, they find the spike Brodsky was impaled on, but no sign of the Sarge anywhere. Kinsa starts to lose it at the sight of all the blood, and Rowan threatens to kill her before Jason can, if she doesn't shut up. Then they spot a surviving Marine across the room. Rowan decides to help the survivor, and orders the other two women to get to the shuttle bay.

Back at the flight deck console, Crutch and Waylander find Lou, sans skin. They move his body(what's left of it...) out of the way, and start to prepare for the shuttle launch.

Rowan discovers that the survivor is none other than Brodsky. She examines his wounds and tries to get him on his feet,but he can't do it. She promises to bring back some others to help move him, then resumes looking around.

Crutch uses Waylander's vest to wipe Lou's blood of of the equipment, much to the young man's chagrin. Then Crutch delivers another really funny line about a war he survived, the "Microsoft conflict", where "We were beating each other with our own severed limbs." I gotta say, as cheesy as some of this movie is, I love the dialogue.

Anyway, at her console, Kinsa meets up with Rowan, who asks for assistance in moving the injured Sarge. Crutch tells Waylander to go, but when Waylander meets Rowan at the spot where she found Brodsky, he is no longer there. Left alone at his console, Crutch is shown Lowe's severed head, right before Jason smashes Crutch face-first into an electronic panel, killing him.

Frightened, Kinsa seals herself inside the escape pod. Rowan tries to talk her down, but Kinsa tries to launch the pod before it's properly unclamped from the Grendel. The clamps tear the pod apart when it starts to take off, and the explosion knocks everyone to the ground.

Janessa, Rowan and Waylander stand up just as Jason finds them. The weapon in Waylander's hands jams, and Jason moves in to finish the trio off...until Tsunaron enters the room. Trailing behind him is the new, improved KM. She's dressed like a dominatrix and armed with what the Marines earlier referred to as a "BFG", which should be familiar to anyone who's a fan of classic shoot'em ups. Everyone else: look it up. You'll probably laugh yer asses off afterwards.

Also funny, in a stupid way, is Tsunaron proudly proclaiming that he gave KM "an upload", when I'm pretty sure he meant to say "upgrade". KM grins and promises to hurt Jason, and he throws his machete into her stomach before she even gets to fire a single shot. Awesome. She jitters around a bit, then goes limp. When Jason goes to retrieve his weapon, she looks up at him, grins, then fires her BFG right into his face at point-blank range. Jason flies off of his feet across the room, and KM somersaults after him. Yay! Finally, a proper showdown.

KM pulls out 2 handguns and continues to assault Jason. Then she uses martial arts to knock him around, finishing him off with dozens of more gunshots and even more karate. KM proudly stands over the killer, but he knocks her off of her feet and gains the upper hand. Before he finishes the android off, Sarge comes out of nowhere to stab Jason from behind.

Back on her feet again, KM backs Jason against a wall, then shoots around him, creating a hole-y outline. When he raises his machete, she responds by shooting his arm off, then kicking him through the wall. She further damages Jason by shooting his left leg off, then blowing two-thirds of his head apart. Uh, I think you got him, honey. Still not finished, KM flings Jason's machete across the room, planting it in his crotch. Owwwwwwwwwwwww!

KM kisses Tsunaron, and everyone celebrates. The survivors get to Lab Two, where they patch up Brodsky. The Grendel shakes some more, and Waylander announces that, according to the computer, the hull is damaged and Grendel is losing oxygen. Luckily, another ship, the Tiamat, has responded to their distress beacon. Unluckily, Tiamat is 45 minutes away, which means that everyone on board the Grendel will run out of air long before the Tiamat reaches them.

Rowan has an idea, though. She points out a flimsy walkway connecting the part of the ship they're on to another, less-damaged section. She proposes that they make their way to the intact section, disconnect the damaged area from the end of the walkway with explosives, then wait there for the rescue ship to arrive. Everyone agrees that it might work, and they tell the Tiamat to continue on their rescue course. Quickly, the group leaves the sick bay to begin the trek to the undamaged section of the ship.

Jason, by the way, landed on the repair table when KM shot him up. A malfunction restarts the medical console, and the nano ants analyze Jason's injuries and begin the task of repairing him. There's not enough healthy tissue on him to complete the job, so the computer replaces the missing areas with synthetic tissue, essentially giving his DNA an even better upgrade than it already had...or "upload", to use Tsunaron's dumbspeak. The ants even improve Jason's clothing and mask, making them into literal armor, and give him both of his eyes back, which is pretty nifty, considering that one was completely removed earlier in the film. Nice ants.

While Jason's being repaired, the survivors are setting up the explosive charges, planning to detonate the damaged part of Grendel, to separate it from the section they're going to. When they finish setting the charges, Jason(or, as he's referred to in the credits, "Uber-Jason") makes his big debut. The only thing I don't like about the new look is the mask: it's bulky and lumpy, and looks like something from the "Mighty Ducks" cartoon from several years ago. But everything else is pretty sweet, including his new, demon-red eyes.(And again, I ask...how did the ants replace the eye that wasn't there to fix up? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

KM tries to kill Uber-Jason again, but this time, the bullets all just bounce off of him. KM decides to try martial arts again, but warns everyone to run away first. Unfortunately for her,Uber- Jason uses her distraction to knock her robotic head off of her robotic body. Rowan tries to step in to help, but Uber-Jason starts to choke her.

Waylander distracts Uber-Jason long enough for him to drop Rowan and join the others in their frantic escape, but Uber-Jason just throws him around like a rag doll. Brodsky shows up to find out what all the commotion is, and Rowan tells him that Waylander has the detonator for the explosives. Before he dies, Waylander shows Uber-Jason the detonator, then presses the button.

Everyone gets knocked around by the explosions, and the intact portion of Grendel eventually stabilizes, just as the rescue ship arrives. Everyone sighs with relief...then Uber-Jason punches a hole in the outer hull of the chamber they're in. As they struggle to avoid the vacum of space, Janessa starts to lose her grip on the metal floor. She delivers the immortal line, "This sucks on SO many levels," just before being sucked into space and crushed into a blob of goo. Damn. I liked her.

The only survivors now are Tsunaron, Sarge, Rowan, and KM's head. They seal off the destroyed room, just as Uber-Jason breaks through the outer wall. They run through door after door, sealing off each one as they go. Tiamat docks with Grendel, and a flimsy-looking tunnel opens up and connects the two ships. Too bad the escape hatch won't open. The power to the door is cut off.

Brodsky volunteers to do a space-walk to open the hatch manually from outside. As he climbs out, Uber-Jason breaks through most of the doors they sealed on their journey to the hatch, and Tsunaron and Rowan try to think of a way to impede his progress. Rowan tells Tsunaron that they need to create a diversion, which Tsunaron begins programming while Rowan (guided by Sarge's audio input) tries to repair the panel needed to get the escape hatch opened.

The diversion is funny as heck: Using the virtual reality tech we saw earlier in the film, Tsunaron and KM transform the room next door into Camp Crystal Lake. It doesn't fool Uber-Jason for very long, so they add in a pair of nubile female campers in tights shirts and short-shorts. The virtual campers tell Jason that they plan to drink, smoke and have oodles of sex, then they go topless and climb into sleeping bags.

His reaction is awesomely funny. Uber-Jason picks up one of the girls, seals her into her sleeping bag, then uses her as a club to bash the other virtual girl. The whole time, both girls are saying things like, "Ow, that hurts!" When Uber-Jason finishes the fake girls off, he resumes trying to reach the remaining people on the Grendel.

Just as that happens, Rowan gets the escape hatch working. Sarge uses a rocket pack to get to them from outside, as the remaining section of the ship that Uber-Jason demolished starts to explode in a chain reaction. Rowan and Tsunaron run through the space-tunnel, until Tsunaron realizes that KM's head was left behind. Against all logic, Rowan goes back to the Grendel to snatch up the robot head.

Rowan sees Uber-Jason striding in her direction as the virtual campground explodes and burns around him. Before he reaches Rowan, Uber-Jason is stopped in his tracks by Brodsky, and the two start brawling as the Grendel gets destroyed around them. As Rowan watches through a small porthole, the blast propels Uber-Jason toward the escape pod. Before he gets to them, Uber-Jason gets sideswiped by Sarge, and the two hurtle in the direction of Earth 2.

Tsunaron, KM and Rowan marvel at the fact that they survived, and we see Sarge and Uber-Jason start to burn up as they enter Earth 2's atmosphere. As the movie comes to a close, a young couple on the planet mistake the burning astronauts for a falling star. They make a wish, kiss, then realize that the "star" landed in a nearby lake, and decide to go check it out. Uber-Jason's banged-up mask lands at the bottom of the lake. Here we go again...THE END

Y'know, that was a fun one to watch. The jokes were funnier than expected, the effects were well-done, and the look of the film was sleek. Also, the cast was pretty likable and the women in particular were gorgeous. On the downside, the story was weak, and riddled with plotholes: How did Jason get into the hallway at the start, without Rowan seeing him? How was the lab still operational over 400 years after the facility closed? How did the ants repair Jason's malformed eye, after we saw Adrienne remove it? Well, in spite of the inconsistencies, I still found myself loving the movie as much as I did when I first saw it in theaters, so it gets 4 and a half killer trees out of 5.

And what did I learn from Jason X?
-In the future, all women are attractive.
-Computers 455 years from now will have extensive information about summer camps from the 20th century.
-Canada has their own Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he's easy to kill.

Next week, no movie. I'm going in for surgery Tuesday, so I'm taking at least a week off for the operation and recovery. When I'm feeling up to it(hopefully the following week, maybe the next), I'll pick up right where I left off. The next slasher film on my queue is Blood Harvest, starring Tiny Tim, so it sounds hilarious right off the bat! See you soon(I hope...)!

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday

Well, here we are again, in Jason-Land, with Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday...and by "final", they mean "we still made 3 more sequels after this, so, not so much". This one continues the trend started in the 7th film, of having Jason in a film that tries to change up his formula with a silly gimmick...in this case, body-hopping. It's like Freaky Friday the 13th!! Get ready for SPOILERS, as always!

Our story begins with an attractive women driving out to a rustic cabin at Crystal Lake. In record time, she manages to blow out a light fixture, and decides to prowl around in the dark to fix it. She follows this up by heading to the can, where she keeps turning away from the bathroom mirror, teasing us with the potential for a cheap scare that doesn't materialize. Clearly, the writers know the cliches and want to have some fun with us. Goody for us.

Luckily, we get to have some fun as well. She decides to take a bath, and we get to see what kind of body money bought in 1993. Stripperella barely has time to get wet, though: the power goes out. If I took a drink every time a slasher-flick cliche came up, I'd be in a coma by now!

Our damsel goes exploring, and Jason pops up out of the shadows and flings her over a banister. She gets up and runs outside to the woods, with Jason close behind. When she thinks that she outran him and stops to look around, Jason again appears behind her with his machete raised high for the killing blow.

Oops! Jason was outsmarted...numerous searchlights surround him, and dozens of Feds fire on him. Heck, they even fire explosives at the guy, blowing him to bits! THE END

Oh. Nope, the movie didn't end yet, sorry. As the law enforcement guys all celebrate dismembering the killer, a mysterious figure watches from a distance in disbelief. This is Creighton Duke; more about him later. The Feds gather up the body parts(which include a still-beating heart), and transport Jason to a morgue in Ohio. Why Ohio? Don't know. Don't care.

The medical examiner does a pretty funny exam while the opening credits roll. He places all of the different charred remains on his table, and makes several wisecracks about Jason's condition. My personal favorite is, "In my professional opinion, this guy's deader than shit!" Pretty funny stuff, for a Friday the 13th film.

When he gets to Jason's heart, he finds it full of a black liquid. It starts beating again, and he gets mesmerized, to the point of picking up the heart and taking a big bite out of it! Yum. The medical examiner then begins to vomit blood, and a series of red orbs circle him and pass through his body.

Right outside the lab, a lab assistant is chatting with the guys guarding the room. He brings a pizza into the lab, oblivious to the change in his boss's demeanor. The assistant starts to make fun of Jason's remains, and Jason, now in "Phil"(the medical examiner) kills him with a sharp metal probe. As Phil walks toward the exit, we can see in the reflective surface of a steel cabinet that it's definitely Jason in Phil's body, guiding him like a puppet.

In the corridor, Jason/Phil starts to walk by the two armed guards...until one of them makes a crack about how easy it was to kill Jason. In a television news magazine, we see the two guards dead on the floor. Hilariously, the host of the show claims that the 2 guards shown are from photos, even though we can clearly see that it's a video being shown. Geniuses wrote and filmed this script, I can tell.

The host of the show, Robert Campbell, sees the Jason legend as his ticket to fame. His show, "American Case File", is like a cross between "Inside Edition" and "America's Most Wanted". According to Campbell's report, Jason was born in 1946 to Pam and Elias Voorhees(nice bit of continuity there, referencing the dad's name from the sixth chapter of the series), and he was 11 when he supposedly drowned.

Campbell interviews Creighton Duke, and the conversation is delightfully batshit. Duke's theory about Jason is that the real Jason is long dead, and his soul is just jumping from body to body on an endless killing spree. Campbell reveals that 5 more murders were committed by Jason after he escaped the lab, and he publicly offers Creighton Duke half a million dollars to hunt Jason and provide proof of his existence, for all the world to see.

The television gets switched off by the still-lovely '80's hottie, Erin Gray. She plays Diana, a waitress at Crystal Lake's local greasy spoon. Diana has an unsettling conversation with Creighton Duke, because he believes that she and her daughter can help him find the killer. As his theories start to frighten her, the sheriff steps in to arrest Duke. Sharp-eyed viewers might have also spotted that the patch on the sheriff's uniform proclaims him to be the sheriff of "Cunningham County", a nice nod to franchise creator Sean Cunningham. Gotta love Easter Eggs!

Anyway, after Deputy Randy takes Duke away, Diana reveals to her daughter's ex, Steven, that there is a deep, dark secret that she needs to tell him. He agrees to meet her that evening, and hear her secret. Ooooooh, I wonder what it could be? Oh, and Steven is played by John D. Lemay, who co-starred in the tv series spin-off of this franchise. Cool! Is Robey in this as well? And is she still hot??

On his way to the house, Steven meets a trio of young campers that need a ride to Camp Crystal Lake. He unsettles them with a quick crack about all the activities that'll get them killed, but they all laugh it off. Before Steven leaves them at the camp, one of the girls(a cute redhead) tries to get him to join them, but he drives away, even after she gives him a quick peck on the cheek. Oh boy, I would have made a VERY different movie with her...after spending quality time with the Fed from the opening scene, of course.

Anyway, after Stevie-boy drives away, the young trio start hiking to the area where the camp used to be, and set up their tent. Faster than you can say "brutal slaughter", they shed their clothes and go skinny-dipping. The redhead warms up at the campfire afterwards, and the couple decide to have a romp in the tent.

The redhead gets up during the night to pee. Jason/Phil attacks her with a scalpel, and slashes her several times until she falls. Inside the tent, the couple debate using a condom, and the girl passes by her friend's corpse without ever seeing it when she leaves the tent to grab a condom.

Back in the tent, "Debby" and her boyfriend resume the sexcapades, and Jason decides to make his move. He impales Deb, then splits her apart when he drives his weapon up through her body. It's pretty brutal in the unrated version. The boyfriend presumably dies as well, but we just see the possessed M.E. marching away into the night.

Back at the cafe in Crystal Lake, Diana closes up for the night, and gives some leftover scraps to a stray cat in the alley behind the diner. One of the deputies scares the bejesus out of her while offering to escort her safely home. She declines. His girlfriend drives up, but before they can leave, Phil attacks!

He drags the deputy to a house, strips him naked, ties him down to a table, then shaves the frightened naked man. Why? Beats me. When the deputy starts swearing at him, Phil leans over his face, and the scene fades to black. Pretty bizarre. Did someone at Netflix replace my slasher flick with gay porn?

Diana gets a call from her daughter just as she arrives home. The daughter tells her that she has a new boyfriend, and it just so happens to be Robert Campbell, the television crime show host we saw earlier interviewing Duke. Diana tells her daughter about Steve coming back to town, and we discover that her daughter and Steve had a baby together. The possessed cop, Josh, attacks Diana from behind and makes her drop the phone. She panics and grabs a pistol from a nearby drawer, shooting the possessed officer in the head.

While Josh is on the floor, Diana creeps past his body to escape. He isn't dead, of course, and he manages to grab her and make her fall to the floor. He forces her mouth open, and tries to make her ingest a large sluglike creature that exits his own mouth. At that exact moment, Steven arrives. He and Josh scuffle, and when Steven manages to knock the possessed man down, he tries to help Diana escape. Sadly, she gets between Josh and Steve, and takes the impact of a knife that is flung across the room.

As Diana dies, Deputy Josh grabs Steve in an attempt to finish him off. He catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and stops cold when he sees Jason reflected back at him. That momentary hesitation allows Steven to stab him from behind, then push him out of a window. Steven rushes to check on Diana, who begs him to keep her daughter Jessica safe right before she dies.

The sheriff rushes in, and immediately assumes that Steven murdered Diana. When Steven insists that it was Josh who committed the murder, he discovers that the body of the deputy is no longer on the front lawn. Stevie Blunder is cuffed and arrested on the spot.

At the police station, Steven's old friend Randy, who is also a deputy, promises to help Steven clear his name. He takes Steven to a holding cell, right next to Creighton Duke's cell. Duke tells Steven that he knows everything about Jason, and will pass that information along... for a price.

The "price" turns out to be 2 broken fingers. Creighton Duke tells Steven that Diana was Jason's sister, which makes her daughter, Jessica, Jason's niece. Duke also tells him that only a blood relative can kill Jason permanently, by destroying his heart. He then encourages Steven to look for evidence of Jason's family tree at the Voorhees house, to convince Jessica that she and the baby, Stephanie, are unsafe.

Oh, and Jessica herself arrives home just in time to see her mother's blood being scrubbed off the floor. It's a nice way to say, "Welcome home!" Jessica reunites with her old friend Vicky, who offers to babysit while she takes care of her mother's funeral arrangements. Boy, there sure are a lot of potential victims to keep track of! Does this movie come with a scorecard?

Steven calls out for help, and Randy rushes to the rescue. He sees the broken fingers Creighton Duke left Steven with, and tries to help, but Steven steals his keys and gun. The staff at the restaurant hear about his escape, just after Vicky shows up with Stephanie. Joey B., who runs the cafe, lets Vicky keep the baby in the storeroom, but makes a big deal out of it. *YAWWWWN* Oh, and Steven just happens to be hiding in that very storeroom. Joey's son, Ward, finds him, but gives him the keys to his car.

Steven makes a beeline for the old Voorhees house, which is in ruins. While searching for a way to stop Jason, Steven finds the Necronomicon from the Evil Deadfranchise. Weird. He hears someone outside and hides in a closet, but the floor collapses, trapping him.

The intruder is Robert Campbell. He reveals that he stole Diana's body from the morgue as a ratings stunt. While he laughs about it on his phone, Josh leaps out of nowhere and attacks the sleazy reporter. The demon-slug gets transferred into Campbell, then Deputy Josh melts into a pile of bloody goo. Jason, now in the body of the reporter, gets up to resume his killing spree.

In the next scene, Jessica takes a shower. Yay! The power goes out, and she decides to walk around in the dark house half-naked. Double Yay! She makes her way to the garage, grabs a hammer as a weapon, then gets in the car. Robert/Jason sneaks up to the car and grabs her when she gets out again. Before he can pass the demon-slug into her, Steven shows up and rescues Jessica. As they drive away, Steven hits Robert/Jason with Ward's car.

A short distance down the road, Steven pulls the car over to try to explain what's happening to Jessica. She pretends to listen, then forces him out of the car. Jessica speeds away, leaving Steven stranded. Boy, I hope that this version of Jason isn't the teleporting kind. Steven, sprawled out on the road, passes out.

Jessica gets to the sheriff, and tells him that Steven killed Robert. When the cops need a better description of where she left him, Jessica tells them that Steven is near "the Myers place". Holy Shnikes!! MICHAEL MYERS is involved now??? This monstrosity might stop sucking for a scene or two! Deputy Randy swings by to pick up Steven. The 2 men brawl, then pull guns on each other. When Steven hears that Jessica is safe at the police station, he decides to let Randy arrest him after all.

Meanwhile, Jason/Robert shows up at the police station. He kills his way past the front desk, but never once utters the phrase, "I'll be back." Damn. Why do I always have to be the one to come up with brilliant ideas? Anyway, while the sheriff is on the phone in his office, we see Jason/Robert killing all of his cops in the background(it sounds impressive, until you realize that "all of his cops" consist of 1 female extra). By the time Sheriff Oblivious DOES notice what's happening, Robert is in the process of making Jessica swallow Jason. Maybe it's just me, but that last sentence sounds dirty.

The sheriff tries to pull Robert/Jason off of Jessica, but he gets a facepalm for his effort. The killer then pursues Jessica down a corridor, which turns out to be the same hallway Randy and Steven are walking down. Small world. Steven jumps over the handcuffs, aims a pistol, then shoots Robert/Jason right in the forehead.

A trio of cops check on Robert/Jason, and 2 of them get killed. The 3rd guy is knocked out cold by Creighton Duke, who then grabs the cop's keys and frees himself. Creighton straightens out his cowboy hat and grins, while Jason/Robert leaves the station.

At the diner, Joey pulls a pistol on Steven and Jessica. As she tries to make a citizen's arrest, Joey asks Ward to check out what's happening at the police station. The minute he leaves, there's a struggle in the diner, and a stray bullet knocks out the lights. Jessica knocks out Joey, and Jason/Robert kills Ward outside at the same time.

The zombie enters the cafe, kills a patron, and is shot several times. He dunks Joey B.'s husband face-first into some boiling-hot cooking oil, and hits Joey so hard that she swallows her dentures. He then tries to strangle Jessica, but Vicky springs up, armed with a shotgun. After she fires at him several times, the killer impales Vicky.

Jessica finds a note, but no baby. She takes off in Ward's car, and Steven reads the note she dropped: Creighton Duke took baby Stephanie to the old Voorhees house, and told her to arrive alone. At the house, Jessica and Creighton have a tense standoff. She gets her baby back, and Creighton tells her about the idea that only a relative can kill Jason permanently. To prove his point, he makes her pick up the dagger, and it glows in her hand.

Duke falls through the floor, just as the sheriff staggers in. Creighton tries to convince her that it's really Jason, but she hesitates. Then Randy walks in, and things get REALLY confusing for poor Jess! The sheriff is killed, but the possessed man turns out to be Randy after all. Steven waits for his former friend to put the baby down, then kills him.

The slug-demon crawls out of Randy, and chaos ensues. The knife has rolled away, the slug attacks Steven, and he throws it off of him. As Jessica and Steven try to pull Creighton Duke up out of the basement, the demon-slug sees Diana's corpse as a potential new body. Oh, and in a hilariously random bit, her corpse is next to The Crate from Creepshow. this movie has more cameos from horror movie creatures than "The Love Boat" had appearances by Charo! The demon enters her body through her, ahem, Velvet Underground.

The dagger is in a pile of gore, and no one wants to retrieve it. At that point, Steven's the one who realizes that Jason has found his new permanent body, and that's when Jason flies up from the basement in all of his masked, decomposing glory. FINALLY!! After an hour and 20 minutes, we finally get Jason in the film. Sheesh.

As Jason goes after Jessica and the baby, Creighton orders Steven to grab the dagger. Jason kills Creighton Duke with a bear hug, after Creighton delivers some mumbo-jumbo about having fought him before. Jason then throws Steven around a bit, and proceeds to smack him around with a rake that Steven had tried to stab him with before.

Jason grabs Steven by the head and throws him into a jungle gym, just as Jessica arrives. She leaps onto the killer, stabs him with the dagger, and watches him flail around while sparkly lights exit his body. Death by Tinkerbell.

The dagger isn't quite in far enough, so Jessica delivers a quick kick to the chest. The ground opens up, as Jason is dragged into Hell by giant, rubbery hands. He tries to take Steven with him, but to no avail. Hell swallows up Jason, and the 2 lovebirds walk off into the sunset. As the iconic hockey mask resurfaces in the dirt, a certain knife-fingered glove rises out of the dirt and snatches it, followed by a chuckle. THE END

Ay yi yi...Where do I begin? First off, I'm glad that I watched the unrated version, as the gory effects were a definite plus. But still...Jason has a supporting role in his own movie? Demonic worms take over human hosts in a blatant Invasion of the Body Snatchers ripoff? Jason TALKS??? (Well, okay, a human possessed by the worm talked, but still....) 1 lousy killer tree out of 5, for the nudity and gore.

And what have I learned after watching Jason Goes To Hell?
-Hell is filled with slugs. Slugs that look suspiciously like puppets.
-FBI agents look like pornstars.
-Jason has a homoerotic shaving fetish. Wow.

Next up is Valentine, the slasher flick starring Denise Richards and David Boreanaz. Watch it with someone you love....or, you know, just watch it when I do. Either way. TTFN!

Friday the 13th 8: Jason Takes Manhattan

Well, the last time we saw Jason, he was battling a low-budget version of Carrie. This time around, he's taking a vacation in Cana--uh, I mean, "Manhattan". Yeah, Manhattan. Definitely NOT Canada! Start spreading the newwwws, I'm watching Jason Takes Manhattan! SPOILERS follow!

The opening scenes are like an anti-tourism montage. There are junkies sharing drugs; we see street punks mugging someone; a grungy diner is depicted; and, of course, the rats and trash. If I had to take a drink for every cliche that I spotted, I'd be dead of alcohol poisoning now. The irony is, this shit makes CANADA seem pretty gross, since none of it looks like New York...

Anyway, as the cameraman drowns himself, the scene shifts to Crystal Lake/Forest Green/Whatever You Want To Call It. We meet Jimmy and Suzi, a couple of high school seniors preparing to graduate. They're on a yacht, preparing to have sex, when Jimmy decides to tell his girlfriend the legend of Jason. As he relates the tale, we can see that the anchor has snagged onto a power line underwater. As cartoony lightning bolts zigzag through the line and into Jason, the water around the boat lights up in several places.

Suzi hears something, so Jimmy has no choice but to go topside and have a look. Jason starts climbing aboard at the same time. Boy, I'll bet THIS will be surprising and original! Nope. Jimmy gets stabbed in the gut with the harpoon gun, giving Suzi time to run to the upper deck of the boat. She hides in a smallish crawlspace, where Jason swiftly finds and kills her. Big whoop.

Now the that Un-Dynamic Duo are out of the way, we meet our main group of victims. There's Rennie, a pretty girl who suffers from hydrophobia--for a very good reason; her uncle Charles, and her teacher Colleen, both of whom are chaperoning the graduates; Sean, whose dad is the captain, and who doesn't want to follow in his dads' footsteps; Rennie's bitchy nemesis,Tamara, and her lackey Eva, ; JJ,a wanna-be Joan Jett; Wayne, a geek who carries a video camera everywhere he goes; Julius, an athlete(specifically, a boxer) with a surplus of confidence; a weird old man who takes on the "Crazy Ralph"-type role that makes it into most of these films; and many, many more.

Right off the bat, there are a few conflicts, mostly involving Charles. He makes a big deal over Rennie going on the cruise, and tries to talk her into staying home. Lucky for us, she refuses to leave. Also, Charles finds Tamara and Eva smoking a joint, and tells them that they will be confined to their cabin once the boat arrives in Manhattan.

JJ and Wayne are busy filming the goofiest music video EVER. Wayne gets bored and takes off to find Tamara(he has a major crush!), and JJ decides to explore the ship for an isolated area with good acoustics. She ends up in the engine room, and sets up her electric guitar for a jam session, while Jason arrives, eager to request "Freebird" or something. JJ is so lame, she doesn't even actually plug in her guitar: she pops a cassette into a boombox, then mimes playing the guitar. Jason, kill her swiftly, she deserves it.

When she sees Jason walking her way, JJ screams. Crazy Ralph II hears her screams, and decides to stop working so he can listen. Jason chases the girl, then teleports himself in front of her(a gimmick that occurs a few times in this film, and stupid every time it happens.) Jason corners JJ, smashing her face with the guitar. YAY!!!!

Back in Rennie's cabin, she's having a deep, soulful, meaningful conversation with her dog. Upon further contemplation, she's probably the least-cute of the franchise's "Final Girls". Her hair is a mile high, her clothes make her look like Ducky from Pretty in Pink, and her body is "meh". Anyway, while Rennie is contemplating bestiality, Jason is watching her with great interest.

While dressing, Rennie hears a sound coming from outside. It sounds like a child, calling for help. Her little porthole-window turns into a view of Crystal Lake, and she sees Jason drowning as a child. Her dog has more common sense than her, and leaves to explore the ship.

Well, that scene went nowhere, so let's abruptly switch to an impromptu sparring match between Julius and a doofus with a sweat problem. While Julius pounds on the poor guy, Tamara and Eva watch from an overhead window. The 2 girls discuss whether or not Julius has a "hot bod", until Tamara gets distracted by an attractive deckhand. When he leaves, Tamara tells Eva it's time to get high.

Wayne nearly collides with Uncle Charles, who is looking for Rennie. Charles behaves like a prick, then moves on. Wayne barely seems to notice.

Tamara and Eva drag out the cocaine. Eva hesitates to snort it, but Tamara bullies her into it. Before they get a chance to get high, Rennie walks in on them. She's looking for her dog, and they offer her a hit. She refuses, and they worry that she'll tell others what she saw them doing. When she leaves, Rennie just barely avoids seeing Jason lurking around the corner.

The girls get high, unaware that someone has found them. The unseen person watches them, then steps forward. Jason? Nope, it's stodgy old Charles, who threatens them with expulsion. He reminds Tamara that he will stop by her room later, to see a late biology assignment she needed to complete. When Charles leaves, the girls worry that Rennie will tell him what she saw, so they decide to play a mean prank on her.

We then meet the poor guy whose face was just used as a punching bag by Julius. He's resting up in a steam room, lying down with a towel covering his face. Jason waits for him to add some water to the hot coals in the center of the room, and enters after the poor guy lies down again. Jason picks up a heavy-looking, steaming-hot rock, and shoves it into his stomach, holding it there will the boy writhes in agony. When the kid stops wiggling around, Jason leaves.

Rennie is now with Colleen, talking about the trip so far. While trying to get Rennie to open up a bit, Colleen fails to notice Eva and Tamara coming up beside them. Tamara body-checks Rennie, sending her sailing over the railing, into the ocean. Colleen throws Rennie a life preserver, and Tamara uses the distraction to slip away with Eva.

Rennie's hands miss the preserver, and she slips under the water. She feels something dragging her under, and sees Young Jason grabbing her ankle. She eventually fulls away, just as Sean dives into the water to save her. Together, they make it to the boat, and climb a ladder back up to safety.

Tamara and Eva get away, and Tamara laughs at the thought of Rennie's suffering. Eva sees what a bitch her best friend is and refuses to go anywhere else with her. The 2 split up, although Tamara can't quite figure out why. Even though I'm rooting for Tamara to die a horrible death, I'm sort of rooting for Eva to survive. She's rather cute, and has inexplicably become one of the good guys.

Back on the top deck, Rennie is collapsing in exhaustion, while Colleen orders all of the bystanders to get more towels and medical supplies. Uncle Charles shows up, sees his niece and Sean both looking like drowned rats, then yells at Sean and Colleen about leaving Rennie alone. He wraps her in a towel and stomps off with his arms around Rennie. Before they go back to their room, though, Crazy Ralph 2.0 delivers a dire prediction of death and doom.

Rennie runs away from all of the chaos and goes back to her cabin. She wearily washes her hands, not noticing that the water has become blood. When she screams, Young Jason reaches through the mirror, covered in ice, and wraps his widdle-bitty fingers around Rennie's neck. Rennie stumbles back, sits on the floor, and the mirror becomes normal once more.

We then switch over to the "action" in Tamara's room. Charles enters and finds her wearing a kimono-style bathrobe and drinking champagne. When she offers him a glass and he refuses, Tamara disrobes, revealing that her "biology project" consists of her half-naked body marked with labels for all of the, uh, "parts". While Charles sputters and stammers like Dr. Smith on "Lost in Space", Tamara jumps his bones.

It doesn't last long. Charles kisses and caresses the teen, then pushes her off of him...but not before Wayne sneaks in and films them in bed. Charles threatens to expel them, but Tamara threatens him with the videotape, and he ends up leaving in a hurry. Alone at last, Wayne confesses to Tamara that he has a crush on her, and she pretty much grinds his balls to dust with her rejection. He slinks away while she decides to take a shower. Jason watches Wayne as he strolls out of Tamara's room.

In the shower, Tamara uses the most frustrating shower curtain in cinematic history. She towels off and puts her robe back on, just as Jason arrives at her door. Tamara hears him, and catches a glimpse of the killer as he steps into the main room. She then stands at the bathroom door like a doofus, giving Jason the time he needs to sneak over, and slam his fist through the door. He grabs her by the throat and throws her across the bathroom, and she slams into the porcelain shower wall
.
Tamara grabs a towel to cover up with and starts to cry, while Jason smashes the mirror over the sink. Selecting a particularly huge shard of glass, Jason murders her. The sound of her screams is covered by the boat's whistle.

The captain and his first mate discuss a massive storm rolling in, and how to proceed. The captain expresses his regret that he alienated Sean by pushing him too hard to be perfect, and tells his friend not to do the same with his newborn son. Then the captain leaves the other man steering awhile, probably to find and apologize to Sean.

The second he leaves, Jason arrives. He sneaks up to the poor guy steering the ship, and stabs him in the back. He stabs the guy several more times, then admires his handiwork. Jason hears someone coming and hides.

It's the captain again. He sees his friend on the floor and rushes over to help him, then sees all of the blood. As the captain leans over the dead shipmate, Jason walks behind him. He pulls the captain's head back, makes a long cut across his throat, then watches as the captain's head tilts back further, opening the gash wide. Blood streams through the wound, which looks pretty impressive and real.

Anyway, Rennie and Sean show up mere moments later, looking for Sean's dad. They want him to either turn the ship around or call the Coast Guard, so that Rennie can go back home. When they find the captain's corpse, Sean has an emotional meltdown.

Below deck, most of the students we've met before hear Sean announce that he's making a distress call. By this point, my mind is getting boggled. Why are there only about 10 kids seen? What happened to all of the teens shown when the boat left Crystal Lake? Or how about all of the dancing kids seen during the "social activities" montage right after that? There's no way in Hell that Jason killed 95% of a high school's graduating seniors without people falling over corpses every five feet!

I can't believe I'm complaining about logic in a "Jason" movie. Okay, let's move on...as the storm gets worse and Sean tries to radio for help, Jason breaks the antenna. At that point, Charles and Colleen arrive, followed by Ralph 2.0. Crazy Ralph 2.0 starts spouting off about how the kids are the last students to graduate from their school, how doomed they all are, etc. Even when Charles tries to accuse the nut of murder himself, he won't shut up. To further complicate matters, Julius gets his jock friends to go off with him to find weapons and attack Jason themselves. Wayne and Sean's stoner friend also take off. The scene ends with Charles realizing that Rennie is missing, until Sean assures him that she's just dropping the anchors.

Rennie IS dropping the anchors, completely unaware that Jason is right above her. She finds the lever that controls the anchors, but it barely moves. As she struggles to push the lever in the right position, Rennie senses someone right behind her. She spins, only to come face-to-face with good ol' Uncle Charles. He easily pulls the lever back into the original position, before yelling at his niece and dragging her back to be with the others.

Eva goes to Tamara's room to see if she's safe. She sees the damaged bathroom door and opens it to see if Tamara's been hurt. Man, this sucks. She redeems herself by trying to do the right thing, then she goes the extra mile to help her friend, and all it's going to get her is a brutal death at the hands of Jason. We should start a petition, right now: no hot Asian chicks can die in horror flicks. EVER. Who's with me? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Eh, you're all heartless bastards!

Where was I? Oh, right. Eva. She finds her BFF dead on the bathroom floor and runs away. Jason meets her out in the hall, blocking the exit. Eva runs the other way, find a staircase, and decides to see where it leads. Oh, she found that disco lounge from the beginning of the cruise. Eva runs to the center of the dance floor, panics, and spins around to scan the exits. Get ready, because it gets weird in a moment.

As Eva tries a couple of doors and finds them locked, she runs to the center of the room again. She begins to spin around again, and Jason is at every exit. There are, like, 6 Jasons. As she scans every door again, the Jason's disappear, and she starts to back up...right into Jason, who lifts her by the neck with both hands and lifts her off the floor. She eventually dies, and Jason throws her body across the dance floor.

Back with Julius and his "posse", they sit on the floor in a circle and place their "weapons" in the middle. Each person grabs a weapon: crowbars, clubs, harpoon spears, you name it. As they realize that Julius hasn't grabbed a weapon, Wayne asks him what he'll choose. Julius hesitates, before grabbing a gun. Then they all go Jason-hunting.

Wayne winds up in a room filled with metal pipes and steam. As he walks deeper into the room, a sudden blast of steam hits him in the face, and he drops his weapon. And his glasses. OOPS! As Wayne stumbles around in the dark, a figure jumps in front of him, and he quickly fires at the blurry person.

It wasn't Jason. It was one of the generic no-name kids in the posse. Wayne uses the close-up feature on the camera to see the kid, and a pair of feet walk up and stand next to the body. Wayne pans up to see that it's Jason, who promptly swats the camera out of his hands. Wayne looks pissed, but he runs.

In his hurry to get away, Wayne trips over JJ and her stupid pink guitar. Jason grabs him from behind and throws him into a control panel, electrocuting Wayne. Hey, at least it wasn't another strangulation or neck slash. As Jason watches, a fire ignites.

Charles returns to Colleen and Sean, and insults them both. Then he mocks Sean for not knowing how to operate the ship. You know, if Jason doesn't murder Charles, I just might.

Sean gets the ship back on course, but Jason sets off an alarm, making Colleen worry. Charles takes a flare gun, planning to confront Jason with it. Meanwhile, Jason kills another generic dope, and Julius hears the scuffle. He finds his friend dead, and then Jason hurls Julius into the water. Bye, Julius.

Back in her room, Rennie leans against a wall, RIGHT NEXT TO a porthole. As she sees another vision of Young Jason beckoning to her, the real Jason smashes the porthole and--what else?--grabs Rennie by the throat. She grabs her pen and shoves it into one of Jason's eyes.

Sean comes back, and the couple hug. Colleen lets some of the survivors stay in the club, and Charles explores the kitchen. As he walks through again, he fails to notice that a large knife has just gone missing. Charles is attacked, but not by Jason. The knife-grabber is none other than Ralph 2.0 He runs away before Charles can stop him.

the ship starts taking on water, and Rennie and Sean nearly drown trying to get to a higher deck. Charles finds them, and again accuses Sean of being the cause of all the bad luck. As Sean tells him off, Colleen arrives and announces that she has lowered a lifeboat. She hears about the lower decks flooding, and realizes that she just killed the teens she left below. Whoops.

As Charles, Colleen, Rennie and Sean make their way to the railing on the deck, Ralph 2.0 shows up, staggering and waving a knife. Charles tries to shoot him, but the flare gun jams. Doesn't matter, though--Ralph 2 falls over, revealing an axe in his back.

They all climb down the side of the boat on a rope ladder, and Jason gets there just as the last person gets off the ship. They push away from the sinking boat, and Sean and Charles start rowing. Before they get more a foot away, Jason pops up out of the water!

Oh, wait. It's just Julius. They pull him into the raft, along with Rennie's dog(!?), and resume rowing. Before long, a heavy fog sets in. Charles tries to belittle Sean again about his navigation skills, but Julius encourages him. That royally pisses off Charles.

Sometime during the night, the fog lifts. Almost everyone is asleep, but Julius sees the Statue of Liberty and gets excited. They all wake up and smile as if a mass-murdering zombie hasn't just murdered most of their friends.

As they dock the boat and get back onto dry land, Jason also starts to emerge from the water. He takes a few steps, the stops. Directly overhead, he sees a massive billboard featuring his mask. He does one of those doggy head-cocks, admires it, then walks away.

As the survivors start to look for a payphone or a police officer, the pair of muggers seen during the opening credits show up. One of them admires Rennie and decides to take her, too. After they leave, Julius tries to go after them, but Charles chickens out. He proposes that they all split up to find help.

The thugs take Rennie to a secluded-looking alley, and inject her with something that looks like Herbert West's re-animation fluid. One of the thugs leaves to get some more drugs, and the remaining guy starts to tell Rennie what he plans to do with her. Right about then is when Jason shows up. He picks up the discarded syringe and plunges it into the rapist's back, with such force that it emerges from his chest.

The second thug returns to get some money, and he and Jason have a showdown. The street guy whips out a handgun and fires several bullets into the masked killer. Jason shrugs off the wounds, and bashes the guy's face into a steaming-hot pipe. Rennie starts running, and Jason follows.

Oddly enough, he encounters Julius instead. Jason chases him up to the rooftop of a nearby building, and the young boxer decides to try sparring Jason to death. He lands a dozen or so punches while Jason just stands there and takes it. When Julius wears himself out, he tells Jason to give him his best shot. Jason does, and decapitates the teen with one punch. Idiot. His head rolls off the roof and lands in a dumpster, whose lid slams shut.

Rennie is wandering the streets when the injection kicks in. As things get all blurry and wavy, Sean comes to the rescue. They meet up with Charles and Colleen, who also have a cop with them. The cop gets them to his car, but when the interior light come on, they all see the severed head of Julius stuck to the car's dashboard. So what, his head has the ability to levitate and plant itself in weird spots now???

While everyone in the car screams, Jason grabs the cop and drags him away into the shadows. Rennie quickly gets behind the wheel and puts the pedal to the metal. She mows Jason down with no hesitation, and just keeps going. The ghost of Young Jason appears, and causes Rennie to crash into some kind of fusebox. Soon, the car is engulfed in flames, and only Colleen fails to escape.

Okay, I don't get Young Jasoin. Is he helping her, or trying to get her killed? I mean, if he wants her to help him get laid to rest, then why does he seem to screw with her safety? And if he just wants her dead, why not just let Zombie Jason do his thing unhindered? Seriously, does the whole "vision" thing make any sense?

Well anyway, the exploding car triggers a flashback for Rennie. As a young girl, Charles tried to get her to learn how to swim. How? By shoving the little girl into Crystal Lake! While drowning, Rennie sees Jason as a child, trying to pull her to the bottom of the lake. Which makes no sense, since he didn't drown as a child, he survived the first several movies before becoming a zombie.

Well, who cares? The flashback ends, and Rennie and the others abandon Charles. Good for them! Jason gets up after they leave, and chases Charles. After throwing him through a window first, Jason finishes Charles off by drowning him in a steel barrtel filled with sewage.

Jason then interrupts the first kiss between Rennie and Sean, who seek refuge on a grungy subway train. He chasees them from car to car, and in the movie's funniest joke, no one seems to even notice Jason. Getting frantic, Sean pulls an emergency brake.

When the teens depart from the subway car, Jason follows. They manage to get him electrocuted on the tracks, but we know better, don't we? Yup. As the teens emerge from the subway tunnel into Times Square, Rennie spots Jason following them. She and Sean run past a gang of tough-looking teens, and Jason kicks the gang's boombox while following his prey. The gang of kids threaten Jason, and, in a scene right out of Beetlejuice, he frightens them by lifting his mask briefly.

The teens run into a small diner next, and after a funny bit of dialogue with a sarcastic waitress, Jason interrupts by destroying the diner's entrance. He kills a cook, then continues his pursuit.

Rennie and Sean run out of ideas, and climb down into thev sewer system to hide. A city worker tells them that he is about to exit the sewer, because a large gush of toxic waste is scheduled to flow through the tunnel, so they follow him to safety.

Jason finds them first, and kills the sewer worker. When he knocks out Sean, Rennie distracts him long enough to get Jason to chase her. She gets toxic waste om him face, and when he removes his mask, he appears to be melting before her eyes. She takes off before he recovers.

Rennie wakes up Sean, just as Jason catches up. While the teens climb up a ladder to a manhole cover, Jason hears the wave of toxic sludge coming. The gunk overtakes him, melting him into a grey, monstrous lump. As the stream of waste flows away, a small boy's corpse replaces Jason on the floor of the sewer. His hockey mask floats away. The movie ends with Sean and Rennie embracing, right before being reunited with Rennie's dog. THE END Sheesh!

When I was youinger, I thought this one was pretty cool, but it has a ton of faults. The lack of teens seen during the cruise, the stupid stuff about Young Jason, the 2000 or so neck injuries...it just ran out of steam. FAST. But at least most of the people in this one could act, so that's a plus. 3 and a half killer trees out of 5 for this one.

And what did I learn from Jason's journey to Faux York?

-Toxic waste makes you young.
-Jason can not only teleport, he can also clone himself.
-Canada is a scary place!

No idea what's coming in next. It'll be a surprise for everyone, me included! TTFN...

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

(quick note: technology sucks! My laptop kept overheating, despite trying out 2 different cooling fans. So, after having to keep restarting the thing, and taking over a week to watch a 90-minute film, I surrendered and bought myself a new laptop, from Alienware. Should arrive this week! *crosses fingers* Anyway, here's the thing I wrote while I watched Friday the 13th 7 for over a week of 20-minute spurts...enjoy!)

Well here it is, the day I've been dreading: the era of the "Jason vs. Gimmicks" movies in the Friday the 13th franchise began with today's movie, Friday the 13th VII: The New Blood. Or, to put it more accurately, Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Carrie. That's it, that's your premise in a nutshell: a pouty, whiny blond girl with telekinesis goes up against Jason. Who loses? The audience, mostly. As always, ahead thar be SPOILERS!!!

The film begins on a promising note, with a narrator telling us the "legend of Jason", which amounts to a sort of "Cliff's Notes"-ish highlight reel featuring some of Jason's best kills. Most of the clips come from Parts 4-6, the Tommy Jarvis trilogy: Corey Feldman getting grabbed through the window; the wheelchair guy's corpse getting pushed down all of those stairs; Tommy's sister hitting Jason in the head as he goes after Tommy; the lightning bolt reviving him in the previous film; the deaths of most of the 1-scene characters from that same movie; Tommy describing Jason's motivation, followed by his plan to trap him at the bottom of Crystal lake...those are the highlights.

As the narrator winds up his spiel, the screen goes dark. Then a bright, white light shows through all of the holes in the iconic hockey mask, and it splits apart to reveal the title. The famous theme music is gone, replaced by Foreboding Metronome Muzak instead. According to the credits, the damsel this time is named Lar Park Lincoln. Jason is played by Kane Hodder, the actor most-credited with the role. Other familiar faces include Terry Kiser(BERNIE!!!) and...no one else I recognize. Da-amn, movie.

Anyway, the film begins at some point presumably not long after the events in 6: Jason's "sleeping" at the bottom of the lake, still chained to the rock Tommy attached him to, and he's completely dormant. I guess stabbing fish just doesn't have the same thrill as stabbing humans does. Although later scenes contradict this, his clothes are still intact and no weapons are seen in either hand. In fact, there are many more contradictions in this scene: Jason's wearing a different set of newer-looking clothes, that are NOT the same color; the sign at the lake now says Crystal Lake again, though it was changed to Forest Green previously; and Jason's facial deformity(as we see later) has changed yet again. Weird.

We meet our protagonist, Tina Shepard, as a little girl. It's weird, but the young Tina is almost a dead ringer for the little girl from the 3 Poltergeist movies(I checked IMDB...it's not her.). Anyway, she's standing outside her family's summer cabin listening as her parents have a fight over custody of her. A real Hallmark moment...

Tina decides to run away from home, after hearing Daddy hit Mommy. She gets to the edge of the lake just as the argument ends, and climbs into a rowboat before her father can catch up to her. He begs her to bring the boat back, but she refuses, even after her father apologizes for hurting her mother. As Tina is screaming at her father, the dock begins to shake and the water around the boat churns. Oh, and Tina makes a face that looks like she just farted. Classic.

As the dock starts to collapse, Tina feels some remorse, but is too late to stop the accident. Her father falls into the lake, and the debris comes crashing down on top of him. She screams for him a few times, then--

Oh. Dream sequence. Tina's now a budding teen with a pretty nice physique, and her mom has a head of hair any lion would envy. It's probably about 10 years since her father died, which brings up some pretty big questions: If her father did die in the lake, why didn't they recover the body(you'll see what I mean...)? And, if they had made ANY attempt to fish his corpse out, wouldn't anyone have noticed the hulking brute down there too, chained to a rock and wearing a hockey mask???

Eh, whatever. On with the show. So, Tina and her mom are heading back to Crystal Lake to meet up with Tina's shrink, Dr. Crews, on the pretense that he thinks bringing her back to the place where he died might be a therapeutic breakthrough for the troubled teen. In reality, though, he simply wants to put Tina under as much stress as possible, so that he can exploit her telekinesis and become famous. Oh, and the shrink is played by Terry Kiser, who was in the Weekend at Bernie's films, as previously mentioned. If he smirks and gets a hat stapled to his head, this movie will rock.

Meanwhile, we also have neighbors to deal with here, a house full of attractive young rich kids staging a surprise party for a friend. They're a pretty damn generic group...there's Nick, the resident hunk who serves as Tina's love interest; Michael, the birthday boy; Jane, his moody girlfriend; Eddie, a wanna-be writer and sci-fi geek; Russ, a guy who decided to let Eraserhead style his 'do; Melissa, a hot blond who somehow manages to be both snobby AND slutty; Maddy, the boy-crazy bookworm; Ben and Kate, the required black couple who never survive these things; Dave, a pothead; and a cute, yet generic, girl named Robin.

Anyway, Tina and the doctor get started on their "treatment" right away. He sets up a video camera, and puts a book of matches on the table in front of her. Right off the bat, I'm drawn right out of the movie by the stupidity on display...hasn't this guy ever seen a horror film? Everyone under the sun can pretty much predict that if you put a matchbook in front of someone with "powers", there will be a fire that starts spontaneously!

Surprise! The matchbook moves....then ignites. Wow. Shocking. The movie switches to a brief quickie in a van involving a couple who are not yet named, then we get more of Tina making a sad face. We get a lot of that in this movie. When she frowns, she resembles Kermit the Frog. Anyway, KermiTina runs out of the lake house after getting upset yet AGAIN, and stands at the edge of the lake, reliving the whole trauma of making her dad drown.

Suddenly, she gets an idea! She thinks she can sense her dad's soul nearby(nope, it's Jason), so she wonders if her "POWERS!!!" can bring him back. Uh, Tina, you DO know what ten years of decomposing underwater is going to do to a body, right? I mean, I loved my grandmother, but that doesn't mean I want to hang out with her zombie for any period of time, while she bakes cookies and eats brains.

Well, science doesn't matter to our heroine. She focuses all of her mental ability on reviving her dad...and wakes up Jason instead. D'oh! His clothes are still as bright blue as they were in the opening scene, but now they're ripped in places. I guess color doesn't fade in lake water. *rolls eyes*

So yeah, Jason wakes up. Yay. Tina loosens his chains(with her POWERS!!!!!), and he bursts up out of the lake right in front of her. When their eyes meet, Tina faints. As he walks toward dry land, Jason inexplicably does nothing to harm Tina.

When she wakes up, Tina sees her mother and Dr. Crews standing over her. Jason, of course, is nowhere to be seen. They help her to her feet, get her in the house, and Crews starts dismissing her story as nothing more than some kind of hallucination. As they argue, Tina's stress level causes her to crack a picture frame with her POWERS!!! Nick shows up and invites Tina to the surprise party, and her mother lets her go...which irritates the hell out of Crews.

In the next scene, we meet Jane and Michael, who are stranded when their car overheats. Jane is forced to tell Michael that the whole reason they drove out to Crystal Lake in the first place, was to throw him a party. Uh, if the house was a family summer house in the first place, wouldn't he have figured this stuff out? Was the script written by a roomful of chimps with A.D.D.?

Michael leaves Jane alone, so he can take a leak. Jason grabs her from behind, covers her mouth, and kills her quickly, pinning her to a tree by her throat. When Michael returns and sees her, Jason starts pursuing him through the woods. As Michael starts putting some distance between himself and the killer, Jason throws his knife(where did he get a new knife???), and plants it right in Michael's back. Michael tries to crawl away, but Jason picks him up and flings his body off of the knife like a pesky fly.

Back at the lake, Nick and Tina enter the house, where everything for the party is being set up. Tina meets almost everyone, then has a VISION due to her POWERS!!! Yeesh. Anyway, she spills a drink and runs out of the house like the Road Runner being chased by Wiley Coyote. Meep-meep!

On the way in, Tina finds a long shard of metal stuck in the door frame. She gets frightened, and decides to tell Crews and her mother about everything she's been seeing. When she gets to the part about the spike, Crews offers to go check it out, but he claims not to see it. Sure enough, when Tina and her mom go out to look, it's gone. Hmmm.....

Meanwhile, in the forest we meet another couple, Dan and Ann Nonymous. Oddly enough, Dan is the spitting image of "MacGruber"('MACGRUBER!!! We Made A Fucking Movie! MACGRUBER!!!'...lol, go see it, you'll get the reference...), which just cracks me the hell up endlessly. Anyway, when Dan goes out of their tent for firewood, Jason plunges his fist through the guy's back, and out through his chest.

The Chick With No Name doesn't fare much better. She gets picked up in her sleeping bag, then flung against the side of a tree. Damn, I always thought that scene in Jason X was original. Oh well. (according to Wikipedia, the female's name is Judy, but I have no idea where this is ever mentioned by anyone in the film. Anyone?)

Anyway, Nick and Tina meet up again outside, and play 20 Questions. Nick reveals that he came from a broken home, but made something of himself, while Tina reveals only that her dad died at the lake when she was a child, but leaves out the telekinesis. Nearby, Melissa decides to eavesdrop. Melissa sneaks back inside without being discovered, and Nick and Tina also go in.

Everyone's busy making food. Maddy tries flirting with Eddie, but Robin steals the limelight by cozying up to Dave, leaving her nerdy friend in her wake. While Tina loses track of Nick, Melissa recruits Eddie into making a tasteless joke about Tina's mental health issues, which is a VERY bad idea. Tina uses her POWERS!!! to make Melissa's pearl necklace strangle her until the string snaps, sending pearls flying everywhere. Tina runs back home, just as Nick returns.

That evening, Tina begs her mother and Crews to let her leave. When Crews refuses, Tina throws a hissy fit, and uses her POWERS!!! to fling a television toward the conniving doctor. You can practically see the strings lifting the TV, the effect is terrible. As she storms out of the house again, Tina runs into Nick and tells him about her visions and premonitions. Her mother interrupts the conversation to tell her that they'll leave in the morning.

Sandra(who the heck is SHE???) and Russ hook up, and decide to go skinny-dipping. YAY, NUDITY!!! Jason kills Russ before he gets as far as taking his socks off, by decapitating him with a machete that he found. Sandra comes up for air, sees Russ missing his head, and screams as Jason emerges from the water right behind her. HUH? How the heck did he pull that one off without her noticing him in the water with her? Jason grabs her ankle, pulls her quite-lovely form underwater, and she drowns.

Back at the surprise party that never happened, Nick tries calling Michael to find out why he never showed up, but gets no response. Melissa tries to seduce Nick, and settles for Eddie when Nick rejects her. Maddy decides to use Melissa's beauty supplies to give herself a makeover, and Ben and Kate hook up. Jason walks right up to a window and watches them all, and no one takes notice of a hulk wearing tattered clothes, in a hockey mask, and brandishing a weapon right outside.

Back in the Shepard cabin, Crews reveals that the spike Tina saw outside the house was put there by him. He's been using the local legends about Jason to terrify Tina, hoping to get enough filmed evidence of her POWERS!!! to make himself famous. Crews takes a walk in the woods, finds one of Jason's victims next to a spike similar to the one he used to scare Tina, and he assumes that she's had a psychotic episode. Tina's mother discovers his scheme when she sees his notes and the spike in the desk drawer, they argue, and Crews is threatened with the exposure of his scheme. But before their argument gets to that point, Tina overhears a small portion of the fight. When she hears Crews mention keeping her locked up as a mental patient indefinitely, she takes one of the car's keys and makes a hasty escape. Her mother hears the car, and she and Crews use the other car to try to find her.

Tina gets herself into a highly emotional state and has a vision of Jason murdering her mother. She rams the car into a tree, then panics when it won't restart. She picks a random direction and jogs into the woods. Maybe the Blair Witch can draw her a map.

Maddy transforms herself into Tammy Fay Bakker. Pleased with her trans-whore-mation, she goes out to bag the first man she sees. She finds a corpse in a tree instead, and Jason chases her. Maddy ducks into a tool shed the size of a condo, and hides behind a wall where she can see Jason enter. He hears her moving around, and waits for her to back up against a wall, so he can punch through the wall on either side of her and stab Maddy with a sickle. For once, the virgin dies! Wow.

Nick finds Tina in the woods, at the same time that her mom and the doctor find the wrecked car. Crews watches as Mrs. Shepard runs off to find her daughter, and both make enough noise to alert Jason, Freddy and Leatherface combined. Smart thinking.

Back at the un-surprise, un-birthday house, 3 couples are having sex. First we get Ben and Kate having sex out in the van. They hear Jason moving around, and assume it's Michael, the birthday boy, finally arriving. Jason kills Ben first, by crushing his skull. Then he murders Kate by jamming a party horn into her face. I wish I could be more specific, but the kill happens so fast, it's hard to tell WHAT he does with the noisemaker. Supposedly there's a DVD with all of the gore extended, but this ain't it!

The next couple having serious snuggle-time are Eddie and Melissa. Melissa tells Eddie that she was only using him to make Nick jealous, and he leaves. Robin and Dave finish having sex, just before Jason cuts the power. Left in the dark, they still keep going at it. Those two are real troopers, I tell ya.

On their way back to the summer houses, Tina and Nick discover Michael's body in a tree. Nick has no time to mourn his cousin's death, though: the others have to saved! Yeah, good luck with that plan. Half of them are dead, why not just call it a day? No? Okay, I tried to help....

Robin and Dave got stoned and ended up screwing like bunnies too. He gets the munchies, and leaves her naked in bed while he goes to make himself a snack. Dumbass. She might be a generic character, but she is also fairly damn cute. For being stupid, Dave gets a butcher knife in the gut.

Tina and Nick return, and Tina finds the spike Crews used to scare her. She also finds her dad's old pistol, and gives it to Nick. After all, why would a girl with POWERS!!! need a gun? Oh, and she also finds a series of old newspaper clippings about Jason, providing a hugely unnecessary info-dump for the audience. Tina FINALLY realizes that it wasn't her father that she brought back from the dead, and her POWERS!!! go bonkers.

Melissa sneaks outside while Eddie decides to start opening Michael's gifts. In one of the few funny bits in the movie, he unwraps a package labelled as a "Penis Enlarger", and finds a magnifying glass in the box. Mean, but funny. I'll bet it was from Melissa. Seems bitchy enough for her. Jason slices through his neck less than a minute later.

Tina gets a psychic vibe telling her that her mother is in the woods, and Nick decides to try to find his (remaining) friends while she attempts to try to rescue her mom. Robin gets dressed(damn...) and starts knocking on doors, but finds no one. When she enters one of the bedrooms, she gets a generic cat scare(who the hell had a cat in this movie???), followed by Jason throwing her through a window. Hilariously, Tina and Nick never hear a thing.

Nick urges Tina to escape with him, but her concern for her mother makes her stay. Nick still leaves, but promises to bring back help. He gets to his cousin's cabin, and heads up the stairs. Nothing happens...yet.

Crews finds Mrs. Shepard and tries to coax her back to the lake, but she refuses. The shrink sees Jason coming up behind her, so he uses her body as a human shield, which Jason promptly stabs. What an asshole this guy Crews is.

Nick discovers Eddie's body, and bags the plan to warn his friends. When he re-enters Tina's house, he finds Melissa there instead. He tells her about discovering Eddie, but she doubts him. I almost feel bad for her...almost.

Crews and Tina bump into each other in the woods, and Crews tries to convince her that her mom is waiting back at the house. When she notices the blood on his shirt, Tina assumes that the doctor killed her mother. She runs in one direction, while Crews runs the opposite way. When Crews leans against a tree to catch his breath, Jason mutilates the doc's face with a circular saw. Good!

Tina wanders around some more, until she finds her mother's body. She gets upset, sees Jason nearby, and begins following him. Instead of having a face-to-mask confrontation with Jason, Tina discovers Kate in a tree, the party favor still jammed into her eye socket. She backs away from the corpse, only to stumble into several more. Seems that Jason's been building a little shrine dedicated to his hobby.

This all leads up to Tina's first big battle with Jason. She finds him waiting for her at the edge of the woods, and starts using her POWERS!!! She levitates some fallen tree branches and wraps them tightly around his legs, yanking him into a large puddle. Then she ripa a power line loose from a nearby pole, and sends it directly into the water. Little cartoony blue bolts of electricity course through Jason, and he drops face-first into the puddle like an anchor.

Being a completely inept nimrod, Tina approaches him. To my complete non-shock and un-surprise, Jason gets up. Tina runs away, and Jason just watches her, looking somewhat baffled. Then he starts to follow her. She enters the house where most of her new BFF'S were just slaughtered, and Jason leaps through a window like Spider-Man. Tina screams, and Jason just calmly keeps walking toward her, as they have a staring contest.

Tina slams a door shut between them, then psychically shoves a table in front of the door as a makeshift barricade. Jason just pushes everything aside, so she throws a small sofa or loveseat at him, which he also swats away. She floats a potted plant with a severed head in it at Jason, then runs back outside, before stopping to turn around and wait for him to catch up. When Jason finally emerges, Tina brings the porch down around him, collapsing the floorboards so that he'll be buried under all of the debris. Can you imagine explaining the property damage on your insurance claims???

Tina goes back to her family's house, where Nick and Melissa hear the commotion. Tina tells Nick that she defeated Jason, just before we see him punch through the porch roof he was just buried under. Melissa refuses to buy the Jason story, but when she attempts to make her dramatic exit out of the house, Jason meets her at the threshold. He plants an axe in her head, then tosses her body across the room.

Nick attempts to shield Tina with his body, and they make it up the stairs. Inexplicably, Tina then decides to wander back to see how fast Jason's following. (Hint: he's fast.) As he gets to the top, she sends a light fixture crashing into Jason's face, which knocks him back. He falls through the stairs, creating a huge hole. Being imbeciles, they decide to go back down, slowly creeping past the edge of the gap in the staircase.

Just before they can get out of the front door again, Jason crashes through a wall under the staircase. He grabs Nick, throws him across the room, then decides to stomp him through the spine, but Tina uses her kooky, spooky POWERS!!! again, squezzing Jason's mask so hard it makes pus run out past the edges of the mask. He turns to stop her, and Tina makes the hockey mask explode in half.

Here's where we run into continuity issues again. Gone is the deformed eye, replaced by a piglike, flat nose, and a mouth that is crooked. Why do his deformities change so many times after the first couple of sequels? Didn't any of the FX crew WATCH any of the previous movies, to at least get an idea of what Jason looked like? The face looks kinda cool and all, but it doesn't look anything at all like the previous faces of Jason.

Anyway, while he snarls at her, Tina wraps an electrical cord around his neck, which lifts him into the air. While he flails around, Tina creates a crater in the floor, then sends Jason plummeting through it.

She approaches Nick's body, quickly checking the hole to verify that Jason hasn't moved. The nanosecond she looks back at Nick, Jason opens an eye. While she tries to revive Nick, Jason pulls Tina into the basement with him.

Their second battle starts. Jason gnashes his teeth and glares at Tina, and she sends a jar of nails flying at him, hitting him in the shoulders mostly, with a single nail planting itself in his forehead. Grinning and shrugging it off, Jason plucks out the nail.

Next, Tina tries using fire to defeat him. She makes a can of gasoline spray him, as well as splashing newspapers and several other flammable, dry materials lying around. When he's soaked with gas, she causes the furnace door to fly open, then lights him like a birthday candle. The room gets engulfed in flames.

Fortunately, this is exactly when Nick decides to wake up. He joins Tina in watching Jason collapse in a flaming heap, then they rush outside. They get to the dock just before the house explodes, knocking them both down. As Tina and Nick embrace, Jason somehow manages to get behind them, and throws Tina like a frisbee. Nicks fires the pistol he found earlier at Jason, with little or no effect. Jason shrugs his shoulders a bit, gnashes his teeth, then throws Nick into a boat before turning back to Tina.

She sees him coming, and makes one last-ditch effort to use her POWERS!!! to raise her father from the dead. Here's where we get another plothole so huge you could pilot a jumbo jet through it: Her dad rises up through the wooden dock, and grabs Jason. But the thing is, apart from from moss on his cheeks, he hasn't decayed at all. In fact, he blinks and screams at Jason, indicating that he is very much alive now. Even his hair looks the same. Since he died when Tina was a little girl, shouldn't he have decomposed at least A LITTLE?

This never gets explained. Tina's dad wraps a chain around Jason's neck, then drags him back to the bottom of the lake. Tina calls out for her father, then faints. When she wakes up again, we see firemen extinguishing the exploded house, and one firefighter finds and picks up Jason's mask, which had split in half. Tina gets taken by stretcher into an ambulance, and is told that Nick is fine.

In the ambulance, they reunite. Tina tells a stunned-looking Nick that she took care of Jason. The ambulance takes off. THE END

WTF??? The end? What about Tina's dad mysteriously coming back to life? What happens to her now that her mother's dead? Who gets blamed for all of the killings this time around? "The End", my ass!

I've always hated this one, and seeing it this week reminded me exactly why I did. The kills are way too similar, Jason's face and costume is altered, the iconic music's gone, Tommy Jarvis is only mentioned in clips, the kills happen too fast...the movie's a mess. Sadly, it's still not the low-point of the series,as Jason still has to get to New York, Outer Space, and Elm Street. 2 killer trees, for at least the production values, make-up gore, and humorous touches.

No clue what the next slasher flick in my queue is. I actually may start on Part 8 of the franchise, as the later ones are all currently on the Netflix Instant menu. But hopefully, I can get a break with a holiday-themed slasher flick first. These later sequels are horrible, some much worse than I remembered them being. See you next week?

Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives!

This week's slasher flick is one of my favorites...it was only the second or third R-rated film I had seen in theatres(the first two were Fright Night and Revenge of the Nerds, both of which would probably get a PG-13 these days), and I had just read the novelization of the film, so I was psyched to see it onscreen. Sadly, my favorite segments of the book were nowhere to be seen(a prologue and an epilogue introducing a new Voorhees psychopath, Jason's father, Elias), but the film itself was a pretty fun adventure-y slasher. There was lots of humor, some familiar faces, and another cute Final Girl. Anyway, let's start watching, and remember, SPOILERS are all over the place...so watch where you step!

The movie opens with a now-adult Tommy Jarvis travelling with his buddy Hawes. Hawes is played by Ron Palillo(Horshack from "Welcome Back, Kotter") and Tommy this time around is played by Thom Mathews(an actor from a few '80's horror flicks, including the first 2 Return of the Living Dead movies....a fun, likable guy). They both basically grew up in a mental hospital together, where Tommy has been since leaving the halfway house in Part 5. This movie largely ignores the last sequel, so Jason hasn't been cremated, and Tommy hasn't been possessed. Still with me?

Okay, so they arrive at the cemetery and quickly locate Jason's grave. They dig him up, which Hawes hesitates to do, and discover that Jason's body is covered in maggots, cobwebs and mold. Tommy has a brief flashback to when he used to look and sound like Corey Feldman, and tosses a hockey mask down into the grave. Then, in a fit of rage, he pries a spike off of the fence surrounding the grave and stabs the corpse with it several times. Tommy drives the stake through the corpse one last time, and walks away to grab a can of gasoline, so that he can reduce the body to ashes.

In a scene out of Frankenstein, a few bolts of lightning hit the spear, and the electricity re-awakens Jason. Tommy doesn't realize what has happened, so he dons a pair of insulated gloves and removes the metal pole from Jason's midsection. Before he can douse the body with gasoline and get a match lit, Jason tries to pull Tommy into the grave with him.

Luckily, Tommy manages to kick until his leg is free from the killer's grasp, and he makes a dash for the gasoline, while Hawes is screaming off to the side. When Tommy tries to light Jason on fire, the match sputters out due to the storm that just brought Jason to life, so Hawes tries to help out. He swings the shovel at the back of Jason's head, and Jason slams his hand through the man's torso, and throws his disemboweled body into the empty coffin, which slams shut. Bye, Horshack.

Tommy runs to the truck and drives away as fast as he can, while Jason retrieves the mask and puts it on. Then, as we get an extreme closeup of his eye, the film-makers do a James Bond spoof, and have Jason step into the center of the screen, turn to face the camera, and throw a machete. Pretty funny. Then the blood that covers the screen shows the titles and the credits start up. Besides Thom Matthews and Horshack, the opening credits don't display any real "famous" co-stars, but there are a few recognizable faces as the movie goes on. Besides Ron Palillo, there's a minor character played by Tony Goldwyn, a guy best-remembered(in his acting, at least) as the villain in Ghost.

Anyway, Tommy doesn't stop until he gets to the Forest Green Sheriff's Department. Okay, see, the location is still Crystal Lake, but the townsfolk voted to change the town's name because of all of the negative attention Jason has brought to their community. So Tommy goes running in to report that Jason's alive again, and Sheriff Garris arrests him, assuming that Tommy is a kook.

At this point, the action shifts to a married couple, Darren and Lisbeth. The husband(played by Tony Goldwyn) is arguing with the wife about how lost they are. She's driving, and he's got a map spread out on his lap. Oh, and they mention that they're the new head counselors of the summer camp in Crystal La--uh, I mean, FOREST GREEN.

Lisbeth suddenly slams on the brakes, and points out to her husband that Jason is blocking their car, still holding his "spear". She starts driving in reverse, but gets the car stuck in some mud. This leads Darren to suggest speeding forward, in the hopes that Jason will dodge out of the way, and they can continue to the camp.

Nope. Jason stays rooted to his spot, so Darren honks the horn at him out of frustration. To silence the horn, Jason plunges his weapon through the car's front end. Instead of listening to his wife and getting away in reverse, Darren grabs a teeny-weeny pistol out of the glove compartment and gets out of the car. The gun looks like it MIGHT swat flies, but not much else. As Darren tries to line up a shot, Jason smashes one of the car's headlights, then sticks Darren with the spear, before flinging his corpse through the air.

Lisbeth screams, and Jason tries to finish her off by shoving the spear through her side of the windshield. Lucky for her, Lisbeth manages to duck, and crawls out of the car on the passenger side. She sees Jason towering over her, and tearfully(and hilariously) asks him to give her a minute, which he inexplicably does. She grabs some money out of her purse, but he's gone when she looks up again. Lisbeth looks around in amazement, and that's when Jason leaps behind her and plants the spear in her head. The scene ends with a closeup of an American Express card, which seems kind of like counter-intuitive marketing, if you think about it.

Back at the jail, Tommy wakes up just in time to meet the sheriff's daughter, Megan, and her friends. Megan finds him cute, and that just pisses of Sheriff Garris even more. After the kids leave, Garris tells Tommy that he and the deputy will escort him to the edge of town, on the condition that he not try to come back.

In the next scene, we meet the cemetery caretaker Martin, a grizzled old man who looks like he was born to star in Westerns and cackle about gold mines and use phrases like "Darn, tootin'!" way too much. He finds Jason's grave dug up, and mistakenly thinks that Hawes' leg is Jason's. As he's grumbling about being a high school graduate(???), Martin looks right at the camera and complains that some people have a strange idea about what's entertainment. Very meta, movie. Touche.

Jason power-walks his way through the forest, making his way to Camp Forest Green. At the same time, the counselors are unpacking supplies and acting not-very-worried that their bosses haven't properly trained them yet for the kids who are going to be there soon. Anyway, after they tease Megan a bit over her crush on Tommy, she retaliates by spooking them with the legend of Jason. As Megan wraps up the tale, the busloads of campers start arriving.

And, in yet another jarring scene transition, we meet a trio of idiots dressed in fatigues and armed with paintball guns. Hell, give them British accents, and you have the cast of Severance, which was another surprisingly good slasher flick. These guys are Roy, Larry and Stan. Apparently they all work in the same insurance office, and do war games to "relax". Oh, and did I mention that Jason was standing close enough to Stan and Larry to easily pick them off?

Before he gets the chance, a female executive shows up and "kills" them both. She also "killed" Roy, who is now trudging around whacking at tree branches with a machete. While he's whacking off(branches), Jason gets behind Roy and slams his face into a tree. Oddly enough, the tree has a happy face where he hit it, so I guess Roy must've died happy. Good for you, Roy! After killing Roy, Jason lifts up the dead man's machete, and stares dumbly at the arm still attached to it. Maybe Jason should be the new Carrot Top?

We get a brief scene of the sheriff and his deputy following Tommy's pick-up truck to the town line, then we go back to the doofusy insurance-survivalist guys. One is tripping around the trees destroying everything in his path, and doing enough damage to make an Indian shed a single tear in a commercial in the 1970's. Specific enough?

Anyway, Jason VERY quickly kills the three survivalists wandering the woods together, and then turns to the nerdy guy. Nerd Boy takes off through the forest like the Road Runner(Meep! Meep!), and Jason follows at the pace of half a snail. *yawn*

Tommy, meanwhile, takes a detour before leaving Forest Green, and heads for the graveyard. He dodges around from grave to grave, until Sheriff Garris tackles him to the ground. Tommy insists that he can prove Jason's alive by showing them the open grave, which the sheriff points out is, in fact, completely covered in. Rather than verify that Tommy dug up the grave, Martin takes a huge swig of alcohol and asks the audience if they believe him to be "a farthead"?

Resoundingly, a group of children at summer camp scream, "YESSSSSSSSS!" I feel as though the movie is somehow reading my mind. Spooky. Cort, a male counselor who looks a little bit like Patrick Dempsey, is teaching the boy campers some bullshit about using rocks as landmark points. The girls are merely screaming and shouting, so this may be the worst summer camp in history. Playing with large rocks and screaming. Next time you pay through the nose to send your kid to camp, remember this scene.

Jason is still power-walking through the woods. If he's not at the camp yet, he might want to consider Driver's Ed. Oh, and something else I just noticed about this scene: While his head is all rotting and decomposed, the hand holding the machete is completely and utterly healthy and normal-looking. So apparently, only certain parts of Jason ever decompose. Uh-huh.

Tommy is dropped off at the edge of town, and he scowls as the sheriff drives away. We then see Martin staggering home through the woods, singing and drinking. Before he gets to do anything of any importance, the movie switches AGAIN, this time to a couple nearby, Steven and Whatsherface.. He's just proposed, and she said yes. Hey, Jason, think you could kill an old gravedigger for the happy couple? Yeah? 'kay, thanks man!

After Jason shoves Martin's broken bottle of booze into his throat, he goes after Steven and Whatsherface. They quickly run and hop onto Steven's motorcycle, but Jason catches up before they get away. He impales them both like a shishkebob, bringing the sad love story of Steven and Whatsherface to an abrupt end. Damn, this hurts even more than when "Joanie Loves Chachi" was cancelled.

Meanwhile all the little rugrats at Camp Forest Green are fast asleep. Paula and Sissy, two cute-ish female counselors are playing card games when they hear screaming from a nearby cabin. The discover that one of the little girls, Nancy, has seen a monster, and that he is EVERYWHERE. Wait a minute, did they switch franchises on me? Is Freddy the villain now? Or am I supposed to believe that a killer in the dream of a girl named Nancy is just one huge coincidence?

They finally calm the kids down, and we see that Cort is having sex in a camper with Nikki, a chick who dresses like she's auditioning for Flashdance 2: Electric Boogaloo. She tells him not to orgasm until her favorite song ends...which isn't for another 10 minutes! The expression on Cort's face when she tells him that is priceless. Jason actually comes to the rescue, though: he pulls apart the power cord, making everything in the camper go dark.

Nikki forces Cort to get dressed and go outside to check the cord. She claims it's too cold out for her to go. So Cort circles round the camper, finds the torn cord, then is frightened when Nikki sneaks up behind him...so much for the cold, huh?

They decide to leave, so that Nikki can return the camper to her stepfather. Cort steps on the gas, and sends her flying, and it's revealed that, during their brief time outside, Jason climbed into the camper and hid in the bathroom. While Cort is putting the pedal to the metal and cranking the volume on the radio, Nikki gets yanked into the bathroom and Jason pushes her head into the wall with such force that it makes an imprint in the wall.

Cort is much easier to kill. Jason merely walks up to him, stands directly behind him, then plunges a knife into Cort's ear. Short 'n' sweet. His death causes the camper to careen wildly, eventually crashing onto its' side. Jason pops a dor open, and stands on top of the wreckage as it starts to burn.

Back at the sheriff's office, Garris and his daughter are having a pretty heated discussion about how her feelings for Tommy Jarvis are interfering with police work. A phone call comes in, and Megan and her father both discover that the local camp counselors were murdered. Sheriff Garris is more adamant than ever that it's the work of Tommy, while Megan is beginning to question whether or not Jason truly died.

Tommy leaves a local bookstore, armed to the teeth with tomes on zombies, the occult, and how to put down restless spirits. Hey Tommy, I know this cute chick in California named Willow Rosenberg, she might be able to help you with those subjects....We see Jason roaming aimlessly, and Megan just being her cute self in the sheriff's office. She amuses herself by seeing how far back she can recline her father's office chair without tipping over, and a sudden phone call sends her crashing to the floor.

It's Tommy. He's out getting supplies to try to take down Jason, and wants to make one last attempt at getting the sheriff to help him. Megan takes a leap of faith, and tells Tommy that she'll pick him up and help him with his plan. Hilariously, she agrees to pick him up at Karloff's General Store. For anyone keeping score, so far we've had a sheriff named after frequent Stephen King-adapter Mick Garris; a general store named or the most famous Frankenstein portrayer; and earlier, there was a mention of a place called Carpenter, which was probably an allusion to horror director John Carpenter.

Jason finally arrives at Camp Forest Green, at roughly the same time that Sheriff Garris gets to the crime scene. He orders his deputy to call for a roadblock, in the hopes of catching Tommy as quickly as possible. Another deputy calls him over to a clearing, and shows him body parts belonging to one of the insurance guys.

Jason hacks a phone line with his machete, and starts to approach the house where the counselors are staying. Sissy hears a noise, and goes over to a window to see if anyone's nearby. Paula wakes up and assures her that it's just Cort pulling a prank. Sissy grabs an open can of soda, crouches under an open window, then pours the soda onto what she assumes is Cort's head. It's not. Jason pulls her outside so fast that her slippers fly off when she leaves the ground. He then twists her head completely around.

Megan pulls up to Karloff's, and Tommy tries to persuade her to leave her car with him. She refuses, and tells him that she can get him the supplies he needs. After weighing his options, Tommy agrees. She waits behind the wheel while he leaves to go conceal his truck.

Jason passes by the girls' cabin, and Nancy sees him carrying Sissy's headless corpse. She starts having a freak-out, but he passes the window without any reaction. Phew!

Megan and Tommy, meanwhile, nearly drive into one of the police barricades. She shoves Tommy under the dashboard, where he comes face-to-vagina with her crotch. Say what you will about Tommy, but one thing's for sure: He's not only clever with his vocabulary, he's also an adequately cunning linguist. (I almost went with a reference to SNL's "Colonel Angus" skit instead, but this was easier to form a sentence around)

She starts speeding up--in reverse! The 2 police cars call in to the sheriff, and he recognizes the description of the car they're pursuing. He tells them to be cautious, still unsure as to whether or not Tommy is with her. Tommy, who is suddenly on his best date ever, tells her to be careful as well.

She tells him that she'll lose them on Cunningham Road, another thinly-veiled reference to the movie franchise's history. When Tommy starts to sit up, she shoves his face back down between her legs, and tells him to stay there. Wow, why can't I meet a lady like this? She heads toward the campground, tells Tommy that the turn will be "hairy" (this gets better-sounding by the second!), and nearly runs into her father. Sheriff Garris calmly lifts up a rifle, and tells her to step out.

Jason, bloody machete in hand, approaches the front door of the counselor's cabin. Inside, Paula is sleeping pretty soundly. As the dripping blade looms over her body, Paula wakes up. It's Nancy, not Jason! She got out of her bed after seeing Jason, and found the weapon on the ground outside her window. Paula convinces Nancy that the blood is fake, and that Cissy and Cort are just playing pranks on the campers. She gets Nancy to leave with her, on the pretense that they can out-prank the other counselors. Jason watches from a short distance as they tiptoe outside.

Back at the police barracks, Tommy is being interrogated by Garris and Rick, one of his deputies. Megan is still trying to convince her father of Tommy's innocence, when a call comes in: two more bodies were just discovered, Cort and Nikki. When Megan asks what the estimated time of death was, she points out that the estimate goes against Tommy being the murderer, because she was picking him up at that time. Garris doesn't quite believe her yet, and orders Rick to lock Tommy back up in a cell.

At the camp, Nancy and Paula enter a room full of sleeping children. Paula tells Nancy that if she gets cared again, all she needs to do is close her eyes, say a little prayer, and the scary moment will pass when her eyes open again. Yeah, I'm sure a prayer will EASILY defeat a machete. She kisses the girl, stands up, and fails to notice Jason at the window, directly in front of her. Geez. In one of the more suspenseful moments of the film, Paula slowly walks the length of the cabin, and Jason keeps pace with her from outside, peering in through each window as they pass them.

Outside, Paula starts to get the willies. An owl makes some noise, and Paula starts to call Cort's name. She runs back to her own bed, and sees several drops of blood on the floor, as well as the front door still hanging open. Paula approaches the door to shut it, smiles with relief, then dies as Jason pushes it open again and kills her. Damn. I liked her. Jason doesn't just kill her, either: he kills her, then throws her through a window, THEN drags her body back inside for more abuse! Geez, what the heck did she do to piss him off?

Back at the jail, Megan is pretending to sketch. She holds up the sketchpad for Tommy to read a message on it, but doesn't feel like letting the audience know what it said. I think one of the words might've been "COVER". Anyway, she goes back to pretending to sketch, and Tommy asks what she's drawing. She holds it up, and he tells her the picture stinks. When Megan throws the pad at him, Tommy snatches it, prompting her to pretend to be outraged, so she can demand that Deputy Rick get it back.

When Rick ignores the conversation, Megan gets up and marches toward the cell herself. Tommy grabs her and kisses her through the bars. Man, I never wanted to be Tommy Jarvis so bad before this! She kisses him back, and Deputy Rick finally notices the sheriff's daughter making out with a murder suspect. While he pries the lovebirds apart, Megan grabs his gun, which has a laser sight on it big enough to fit over a cannon. At gunpoint, she forces the deputy to let Tommy out of the cage. Then she locks Rick in the cell, before the couple make a mad dash for her car.

Outside, Tommy tries to convince Megan to let him fight Jason alone, but she refuses. As they drive toward the camp, Tommy explains his plan to her: Jason keeps returning to Crystal Lake because it was where he drowned(which is stupid, because up until Part 4, he was still alive). Anyway, Tommy believes that if he can lure Jason into the lake, he can either destroy him, or at least immobilize him in the lake so that he can't do any more harm.

Back at the camp, Jason enters the girls' cabin. He marches down the middle of the room, watching each girl sleep, until he gets to Nancy's cot. She stares at him with her blanket pulled up to her nose, and Jason takes a step toward the frightened girl. Remembering the advice she was given, Nancy closes her eyes and prays. Jason hears 2 police vehicles pull up, and quickly leaves, giving Nancy the impression that her prayer made Jason vanish. Boy, wait until she becomes a teenager and meets Freddy!

Garris orders his 2 deputies to secure the camp, while he goes to the main house to gather any surviving counselors. He gets an eyeful of the bloody mess beyond the front door, and changes his mind. Gee, I hope the deputies are still alive...

One deputy takes a stroll by the lake, and begins flashing his light into each rowboat, looking for possible hiding places. Jason watches from the trees. He waits until the deputy's flashlight finds him, then tosses his machete right into the poor guy's forehead. The deputy lands in one of the rowboats he was just looking at.

Sheriff Garris finds a cabin full of sleeping boys, and moves on to the next one. He spots Nancy's empty bed, and freaks out. The second deputy, Burt Reynolds, hears some noises in the woods, and draws his gun. He demands that Jason come out of hiding, but it turns out to be Nancy. He urges the little girl to return to her bed and sleep, and Nancy runs away after spotting Jason.

Burt fires several rounds at the killer, to no avail. Jason keeps on coming. When he gets within arms' reach, Jason puts his hands on either side of the deputy's head, and squeezes until he makes the poor guy bleed. After crushing the skull, Jason admres his own craftmanship.

Sheriff Garris runs back to his car to grab a shotgun and some shells. He runs into Nancy, and sees that all the commotion has woken up several other children as well. He gathers all of the kids into one cabin, then instructs them all to hide under the bunks until he gives the all-clear. Garris then pumps the shotgun a few times, and tries to draw Jason out into the open.

Sheriff Garris trips over the body of one of his deputies, then nearly collides with Jason. He lines up a shot, and the force of the shotgun blast knocks Jason off his feet. Garris approaches the body and shoots Jason again when he gets up. He then shoots him a third time, before running out of shotgun shells.

Sheriff Garris unholsters his pistol, and fires several rounds into Jason. A bullet to the face is the only one that stops him for a moment, and Garris takes off running into the woods. Tommy and Megan arrive by this time, and when Megan sees all of the bloodshed in the counselor's house, she screams for her father. He's still being chased through the woods, of course.

Megan gathers all of the children together, while Tommy heads to the lake, hoping to draw Jason to his location. While Megan encourages the kids to resume hiding, Tommy gathers some heavy rocks to try to weigh Jason down.(Why he thinks he can get close enough to the killer to weigh him down with several rocks baffles me.) While the children are all hiding under their beds, we get one of the greatest lines of dialogue in the entire franchise, when one kid asks another, "So...what were you going to be when you grew up?" Awesome.

Both Garris and Jason hear Megan calling for her father, and when Jason decides to chase the girl, Sheriff Garris goes ballistic. He lunges at the killer, knocking him off of his feet, before kicking him and beating him with a large hunk of wood. Jason lets him get several whacks in, before they resume running through the woods.

Tommy grabs a motorboat and drifts out to the middle of the lake, while Megan finds the police cars and tries to radio for help. Opening a car door, however, reveals Sissy's severed head, which rolls out and lands at Megan's feet. When she screams, Jason starts to head in her direction, prompting her dad to make a lunge at Jason. Jason responds by twisting Sheriff Garris up like a pretzel, then twisting his arms behind his body, and breaking the man's spine.

Tommy padlocks a heavy chain around the largest rock he could find, then takes his boat out to the center of Crystal Lake. Jason obviously didn't get the memo, because he explodes through the door of the cabin where the kids are hiding. The screaming children make Megan start jogging towards their cabin, and Jason crashes through a window to try to grab her. Hasn't this guy mastered nthe fine art of doorknob-turning? Even if he hasn't, why couldn't he just exit through the massive, gaping hole where the front door used to be?

Anyway, Jason grabs Megan by the head, planning to crush her skull, but Tommy manages to distract him at the last moment. Apparently, there is no greater insult in the zombie community than to call someone a "maggot head". Tommy does this twice, which really gets Jason's goat. As Jason wades out into the lake, the water gradually gets deeper and deeper. Eventually, Jason vanishes completely underwater. Uh oh, didn't really think your plan through very well, Tommy!

Rather than wait for Jason to reappear, Tommy goes to Phase 2 of his plan. He pulls out a large can of gasoline and starts pouring it out in the lake, around the boat. He lights the ring of fuel on fire, then simply waits for Jason to pop out of the water. When Jason does burst up beside the boat, Tommy tries to wrap the chain around Jason's neck. A struggle ensues.

As Megan and the kids tearfully watch the boat catch fire, Jason ducks back under the water. Tommy leans over the side of the boat to look for the killer, and Jason uses his stupidity to pop up again and pull Tommy back into the lake with him. The boulder sinks to the bottom of Crystal Lake, landing right on top of an old sign someone had defaced, changing the name to "Camp Blood". Luckily for Tommy, the chain around Jason's neck tightens, and he struggles with it, briefly forgetting about his latest victim.

When Tommy starts to swim for the surface, Jason forgets about the chain and snatches Tommy's leg instead. They struggle a bit, until Jason gets the upper hand and chokes the life out of Tommy. He lets the body float to the surface, and turns back to his other dilemma with the chain and rock.

Megan starts sobbing at the sight of Tommy's body rising to the surface, and she decides to attempt to save him. She plunges into the water(fully dressed, dammit! This sequel had the least nudity of any of them, it seemed...) and rolls Tommy over, then starts dragging his body back to shore. Jason makes a grab for her pretty ankle, and pulls her underwater. Desperate to escape his grasp, Megan clutches the side of the busted motorboat, and gets the engine started after a few failed attempts. She manipulates the rudder so that the propeller blades dig right into Jason's head and neck. There's even a great "Holy shit!" look in his eyes when he sees the propeller coming at him.

Jason's body convulses and jitters while the blades cut him up, and Megan uses the distraction to get back to Tommy. The lake starts filling up with meaty chunks of gore. As Jason finally stops moving, Megan pulls Tommy onto dy land and starts giving him CPR. As some of the kids get on the verge of crying again, Tommy coughs up about 3 gallons of lake water, and Megan hugs him while the kids all cheer. Tommy declares that Jason's reign of terror is finally over, and everyone watches the last bits of the boat burn up. The last scene of the movie shows the lake in the morning, looking calm, peaceful and kind of muddy...yuk! The camera shows Jason just hanging out in the water, followed by an extreme closeup of his eye, glaring at the camera. THE END?

Nope. We got at least, what, four or five movies after this one? Still, I think this one's a little more fun than the others. The humor was well-placed, the pace was more action-adventure, and the Tommy Jarvis saga finally paid off with a conclusion. Had this been the last movie, I don't think anyone would have felt cheated, really. A solid 5 killer trees out of 5 for this one.( Oh, that reminds me, I did some research to see if I could also re-watch The Guardian, the movie that inspired the rating system in the first place...and it's never been put on DVD! Can you believe that, with all of the crap that gets released, and even re-released to DVD and Blu-Ray? Man.)

So, what did I learn after watching Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives?
-Thom Mathews needed a bigger career in movies. He rocked!
-You could have an entire Friday the 13th film, and no scene at the end where his face gets unmasked! (I don't really count the face at the start of the movie...it was so dark, and the face was so covered in cobwebs and dirt, you couldn't really see much.)
-A little girl who survived Jason's rampage later met up with ANOTHER killer in her nightmares! What are the odds???

Up next: Hopefully, either the 7th film in this franchise or the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Happy Thanksgiving!