Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning

So, last time out, we had Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover and the first appearance of Undead Jason. This time, our favorite Hockey Zombie returns....OR DOES HE??? *dun dun DUNNNNNNN* Yup, this week's funfest is Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning(but really, the only thing "new" here is the subtitle).

The film opens with a quick scene that bridges the previous sequel with this one, showing Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis once again, making his way through a forest during a storm. He's trudging along on his little chubby preteen feet, until he gets to a crude-looking grave marker: JASON VOORHEES. He hears 2 people coming towards his location, and he quickly finds a hiding spot behind some bushes.

Two unknown doofuses show up. Let's call them Archie and Jughead. They want to dig up Jason's grave to get a look at the legendary killer. They dig down to the coffin and use their shovels to pry open the lid. One guy calls the other one Neil, but I'm sticking with the names I gave 'em. They're not going to live long enough to care, so it's all good, right?

Anyway, Jughead bends down to get a closer look once the lid of the coffin is pried off. Archie just looks disgusted. There's a quick glimpse of Jason's wormy leg, as well as his machete, and he comes to life. He swiftly dispatches both Archie and Jughead(one gets it in the gut, the other gets stabbed through his throat), and climbs out of his grave to stare at Tommy's hiding spot. He pulls his machete out of one of the corpses and walks right up to Tommy, who makes no move to run at all. Dumbass. As Tommy begs for his life Jason raises the machete over his head, and--

He wakes up, looking like a guy in his early 20's. He's in a vehicle belonging to the Unger Institute of Mental Health, which I assume is run by a neat freak named Felix with roommate issues. The credits do their explode-y thing, and I pray for at least one recognizable name in the cast this time. I've seen this one before, but all I can recall is the mediocrity and the VERY '80's style of everything. Shavar Ross is in this, he sounds familiar. Maybe after I expunge this from my memory, I'll look him up on IMDB and see where I might know the name from. Jesus H. Monkeyballs, there's someone in this movie named "Caskey Swaim"! Seriously? That's a name? Sounds like a losing round of Scrabble, if ya ask me.

Nope, besides Feldman and Ross, no other names ring any sort of bells in my head. Damn. Well hopefully this one at least continues the tradition of having a cute chick as the Final Girl. All right, movie, amaze and delight me!!

As the credits end, we get to Pinehurst Youth Development Center. Sounds like a Nazi Daycare Center. Tommy looks like he might be turning into the OTHER Corey, Haim. I know, I know, bad taste and all, but he does look kind of like him. Or kind of like the "Daniel Jackson" character from the Stargate franchise, that sort of bookworm nerd character type.

The van pulls to a stop and one of the workers try to coax Tommy out, but he refuses to move, nor does he acknowledge the guy. A hot blonde named Pam comes out to see if she can help, and introduces herself as the asistant director of the facility. Ohpleaseohplease make her the Final Girl. She's VERY easy on the eyes!

Anyway, she does get him to exit the van, but he doesn't say a word. I think I read somewhere online that this guy has the least dialogue of any of the "Tommy" portrayers, and based on what I've seen so far, I believe it! He makes Marlee Matlin seem chatty. So, Pam takes Tommy to meet Matt, a doctor at Pinehurst. He tells Tommy a little bit about the facility, the staff, where his room is blahblahblah...and Tommy leaves to go find his room. He's had one word of dialogue since this thing began, and I think it was "Sure." Stellar. How bad does a movie have to suck to make me miss the acting finesse of Corey Feldman?!?

So Tommy finds his room, and begins to unpack his stuff. He takes out a picture of his mother and sister, and the film is so lazy that it doesn't even TRY to make it look like anything other than a publicity still. I'm surprised that they didn't stamp it with a PROPERTY OF PARAMOUNT label while they were at it. They were probably just too cheap to pay the 3 actors from the last movie to pose for a picture.

Oh, and Tommy also pulls out a knife. He plays around a bit with it, before hiding the knife under his mattress. Maybe the Knife Fairy will give him a dollar. He starts to put his clothes away, and is frightened by a toy spider on a string. The toy belongs to a kid who looks alot like Dudley, the boy who was molested on that one episode of "Diff'rent Strokes".(and, boy oh boy, were THOSE some pretty different strokes!! YIKES...hey, maybe HE'S Shavar Ross???) Y'know, by the guy who was the boss on WKRP. Yeah, I know, I watch WAY too much tv. Hey, it keeps me outta trouble!

Anyway, the kid introduces himself as Reggie, a local kid whose grandfather works at Pinehurst. He starts to make fun of Tommy's reaction to the spider, and Tommy returns the favor by wearing one of his trademark masks from the last movie. (see, in that one, Tommy was a horror-film nut who liked to make his own monster masks...). As Reggie watches, Tommy begins to reveal quite an impressive mask collection, probably courtesy of Rick Baker, who made all the masks in the last movie.

The sound of a police siren interrupts their conversation. Two local cops have arrived to deliver a horny ten couple who left the facility to trespass on a neighbor's property. The neighbor, Ethel Hubbard, and her son ride up on a motorcycle straight out of a beach party movie from the 1960's. After she threatens to kill all of the teens and blow up the place, she and her son Junior leave in a cloud of dust. From the look of them, I'm assuming none of the dust was caused by the motorcycle spinning away.

In the next scene, we meet some of our new victims: There's Joey, a simple-minded fat guy who gets more food ON him than IN him; Violet, a punky looking blonde who is absolutely hilarious later in the movie(it involves dancing, and is a great cheesy moment); Robin, a cute brunette who seems to be an uptight preppy chick; and Vic, a tough guy who enjoys chopping wood with a very sharp-looking axe.

So Joey offers to help the girls, who are hanging laundry, and proceeds to ruin a sheet because his hands are covered in chocolate(at least, we HOPE it's chocolate...). When the girls get angry, Joey approaches Vic, and ruins the firewood with bloodstains after Vic chops him in the back. The siren from the Naked Gun franchise shows up, but it turns out to be 2 paramedics, Roy and an unnamed guy we'll call "Bubba". Bubba sees Roy get upset when he views Joey's corpse, and mocks him. REMEMBER THIS SCENE!!!

Anyway, the scene cuts abruptly to 2 greasers having car trouble on their way to the same beach party movie the Hubbard motorcycle came from. One of them, Pete, is horsing around behind the steering wheel while the other guy does all the work. They get into an argument, and Pete goes off into the woods to take a dump. Charming.

As Pete wanders around, he starts hearing noises nearby. He swings his flashlight around and comes face to face with.....oh, it's just a bunny. Great, thanks for building up the suspense for nothing.

The other guy removes his leather jacket, turns around when someone behind him lights a flare, and gets it shoved in his mouth. Ouch! I wish I had taken note of his name. I feel bad now. Anyway, when Pete gets back to the car he gets behind the wheel. As he tries to get it started again, A hand shoots out from the backseat and grabs him by the hair, and another hand uses a machete to slice through his neck. What is this franchise's obsession with throat-slashings???

Back at Pinehurst, the new Tommy's not doing so well. He's having flashbacks to the day he stabbed Jason to death, brought on by the sight of Joey getting butchered. He gets out of bed to take some of his meds, and sees a vision of Jason in the mirror! The killer, of course, IS just an hallucination...but Tommy is still understandably shaken by the incident.

Downstairs, Reggie is helping to set the table, and he asks his grandfather if he can visit with his estranged big brother, who will be in town. The old man doesn't seem to like the idea, but knowing Reggie, I'll bet he still gets to have his visit. Oh, and we see a few more characters I don't remember being introduced earlier: a female who is kind of quiet and mousy, and a guy who resembles a sort of B-movie Jon Cryer who has a bad stutter.

The group gathers for breakfast, and there's an argument over how many places are set at the table. Apparently, Violet set 2 extra places, and it creates some sort of convoluted problem. Of course, since Tommy hasn't come down yet, and Eddie is still not at the table, I'm not sure that there IS a problem, but I also don't care enough to rewind this dull crap just to count the places at a friggin' dining room table.

Anyway, when Tommy walks in, he makes about as much of an impression on the group as The Invisible Man would at an orgy. Matt asks him to see what' holding up Eddie, but Tommy doesn't seem to like that idea much. As Tommy turns to leave again, Eddie pops up wearing one of those rubber masks, and scares the holy terror out of him. When Eddie sees that Tommy is reacting to the incident badly, he keeps playfully punching him in the shoulder, and that causes Tommy to blow off some steam by flipping Eddie over his head and onto the floor. HI-YAAAAA! He continually assaults Eddie with punches until Matt pulls him away.

Moving right along, we return to Ethel and Junior Hubbard, the dumb rednecks. She's slaughtering chickens for yummy grub, and he's eating "slop" like Babe the pig. When she hears the other chickens in their coop making a mothercluckin' ruckus, Ethel grabs her shotgun and nearly blows away a drifter who is looking for some work and a warm bed. She offers him a warm meal, but only if he cleans all of the chickenshit out of the coop first. After a largely pointless and unfuny conversation betwen her and Junior, the scene finally ends. Thank heavens.

Next, we get the crime scene where the 2 greasers died. Police have arrived, and are attempting to gather as much evidence as they can. Those same 2 paramedics arrive to take the corpses, and Roy exchanges words with the sheriff in an awkward attempt by the film-makers to remind us that these guys always seem to be the only ones who ever show up at every crime scene. *HINT HINT*

The next scene exists merely to pad the movie's victim roster and running time. We meet Lana, a cute-as heck waitress, and Billy, a hospital worker with an uncanny resemblance to Luigi, Mario's video-game sibling. After they flirt for a bit, she rushes back in to close up the diner and get ready to go out with him. She bares 2 spectacularly large breasts, and the scene ends there as I begin to weep.

While Lana's trying to keep me interested in watching the rest of the movie, Billuigi's getting high. By the time we see Lana again, she's already ressed up and finishing with her makeup. Damn. She hears something break in the diner, and goes out to investigate. We get a generic cat-scare, and then go back to Billy. He gets impatient, honks the car horn a few times, then gets an axe to the head as he begins to get out of the car to fetch her. Lana pets her pussy(sorry, I mean "cat") a few times and then walks out to the car, where she discovers her date's fate after she gets into the vehicle. She's murdered as she attempts to get away, with the axe being buried deep into her chest. Oh Lana, we hardly knew ye.

The following morning, Tommy watches from his upstairs window as 2 of his horny housemates chase each other around the yard, then suffers another vision of Jason. He rubs his eyes until Jason vanishes, and we get a scene straight out of Jaws. The mayor gets on the sheriff's case about finding the killer quickly and quietly, and the sheriff replies that he believes that the killer is actually Jason.

This scene is not just derivative of a far better film, but it creates a major plothole: the mayor rants at the sheriff that not only is Jason dead, but he's been cremated as well. Now, since we know that Jason is up and killing for about 7 more films, why did they throw in the line about cremation? I mean, I'm all for the attempt to have a new killer in the franchise and all, but why was this never mentioned or used again in any of the sequels that followed(except, arguably, Jason Goes To Hell)? Hanging or stabbing a zombie is one thing, but I don't see a pile of ashes going on too many murder sprees. Heck, they could just defeat him with an oscillating fan!

Well whatever. That same day, Eddie and ? run off for a bit to have some rough forest sex. As we're watching, so is the drifter Ethel hired. He gets a knife in the gut for his voyeurism. Eddie and ? finish up, and Eddie leaves her to go skip stones by the lake as she sunbathes in all of her nude, beautiful glory. As I start drooling on my laptop, she gets her eyes cut out with a pair of gardening shears. Oh well, at least he didn't mess up her rack!

Eddie returns, after wasting precious film time throwing rocks and whipping tree branches at nature. He finds ? and when he sees her eyes, he backs away in shock and horror. Too bad for him, he backs against a tree, because the killer winds a leather strap around his head, pulls the 2 ends together with a stick, and winds the strap so tight it crushes Eddie's eyes right through their sockets. What is it with throats and eyes? Weird fetish, if you ask me.

At Pinehurst, Matt is getting pissed off by all the troubled teens vanishing into thin air. A rocket scientist Matt is not. Reggie and Pam are leaving the house for awhile so that Reggie can see his brother, a gang member named Demon. With some coaxing, Tommy agrees to go as well. Matt and Gramps wave them off, looking as happy as clams that they've sealed their fates by staying behind. Oh, and we get 3-4 shots of the pickup truck Pam's driving going down the same road. MST3K would have had a feild day with this turd.

They pull into a trailer park, and Tommy stays by the pickup while Reggie and Pam go to meet up with Demon. Demon has more Jeri Curl in his hair than Vanity. He's wearing more leather than Leather Tuscadero. He gives Reggie a burrito, then introduces him to his hooker-girlfriend, Anita. Anita also looks like she stepped out of a cheesy '80's music video. Reggie then introduces Pam as HIS girlfriend. Oh, you wacky movie, you!

Back at the truck, Tommy is fascinated by the buzzing neon sign advertising the trailer park. He shambles toward it, and when he's right beneath it, he starts freaking out again. Man, someone should start a drinking game around the scenes where Tommy starts going apeshit! He sees a white light moving in his direction and gets scared, until it turns out to be Junior, out for a joyride.

At first, Junior just mocks Tommy for not getting out of the way, but then he sees and recognizes the pickup. He turns hostile, and threatens to kill Tommy. He gets as far as hitting Tommy once or twice, and that sets Tommy off. Tommy turns into Chuck Norris and proceeds to beat the snot out of the big lummox, until Pam shows up and calms him down again. Tommy runs away, and Pam quickly ushers Reggie back into the truck to find him.

Alone at last, Demon and Anita settle in for a night of unbridled crap-producing. Hey, maybe they can write scripts for Friday the 13th! Nah. It turns out that all of the greasy food Demon's been eating is giving him the runs. Great. At least this isn't the movie that was shot in 3-D! He runs into a tin shack(another outhouse...these movie writers find the stuff they like and run with it, don't they???) and proceeds to take a massive dump.

While Demon's getting his ass exorcised, the outhouse's corrugated walls start shaking. He yells out in alarm, and it turns out to be Anita, who apparently wants him to go all Rick James on her. They start singing to each other(ON A TOILET? REALLY???), until Demon hears her gasp and suddenly go silent. The walls start shaking(the earth was quaking, and my mind was aching...it was you, shook me ALL NIGHT LONG!!!), and Demon gets off the toilet to go bitch-slap his ho.

The door only opens partway, and he sees Anita blocking it with her dead body. How thoughtless! As he slams the door to hide in the toilet, the killer uses a spear-like metal pole to begin stabbing through the walls at random places. The first stab misses, but the second one jabs Demon in the leg. The idiot leans up against the wall for safety, and the spear enters his spine and pokes through his gut. Buh-bye, Demon. See you in about 20 years, in Juwanna Mann!

When Pam, Tommy and Reggie return to Pinehurst, Jake the stutterer informs Pam that pretty much everyone but he and the 2 girls he was with are all missing. Pam tries to reassure him that everything is just fine, but the only real piece of new information she gets is that the reason Matt left was so that he could look for Tina and Eddie. Heck, even Gramps went missing!

Pam puts Jake in charge of the group staying at the house, which means it'll probably take him an hour or so to call 911 for help. (Every time he speaks, I get a flashback to A Fish Called Wanda: "Oh, c-c-c-c-c-rap, K-k-k-k-k-en's c-c-c-oming to k-k-k-k-ill me!") She leaves the soon-to-be crime scene as fast as she can. Can't say I blame her.

Junior speeds home on his cycle, and starts doing doughnuts in the front yard. He screams and hollers for his mommy, but over the noise of the motorcycle Ethel can't hear what he's saying. She thinks he just wants his dinner, and she yells back that it's cooking. As they're shouting back and forth, Junior speeds up to a tree that the killer was hiding behind, and a machete cleanly decapitates Junior Hubbard. Thank GOD. Movie, I owe you one.

In the Hubbard kitchen, Ethel thinks that the lack of ruckus means that Junior must have finally decided to stop riding around the yard like a fat ninny. She hears the front door open, and tells him to wash up and get ready to eat. As she's mixing more stuff into the boiling pot in the stove, the killer smashes the window in front of her, plunges a meat cleaver into her face, and watches as she falls face-first into the stew pot. Dinner is served!

Pam is still out, looking for Tommy on that one stretch of road we've seen about 9,000 times in this flick. I swear, I almost think at this point that they're spoofing old "Scooby-Doo" episodes. Remember in those, when Scooby and Shaggy would get chased by the "monster" each week, and end up passing the same background walls over and over again. Same thing here.Only, I doubt the people behind this franchise could be that clever or witty. Compared to this the average episode of "Scooby-Doo" looks like it was based on Shakespeare.

Jake is busy guarding Pinehurst by watching an old thriller on tv with a girl named R-r-r-r-obin(heh, couldn't resist. My apologies to any real-life stutterers out there.) who has 1980's big hair and a crooked nose. Jake tries to flirt with her, but she ignores him to watch the movie. When he mistakes her apathy for coyness, he confesses to Robin that he'd like to lose his virginity to her. She responds by laughing in his face. Just to recap: A guy who stutters and looks like Jon Cryer just got rejected by the second-least attractive female in the movie(I was going to say LEAST attractive, but then I remembered Ethel...and I'm not saying Robin isn't cute. She is, but not as cute as any of the other female characters we've seen so far...). What could possibly make him feel any worse?

Well, for starters, he gets cock-blocked a SECOND time, this time by Violet. When he leaves her room, he gets a meat cleaver to the neck. Hey, aren't the virgins usually the ones who SURVIVE this shit? I guess not.

Robin's next. She finishes watching her movie, and tries to get Reggie off the couch, so that he can sleep in his bedroom instead. When he just rolls over, Robin covers him with a blanket. Then she goes upstairs, strips her clothes off, and admits out loud that she should have treated Jake better. Robin then proceeds to climb into the top bunk of the room's bunkbed, and comes face-to-face with Jake's bloody body before getting a blade plunged up through her back and out of her chest.

Then we get the greatest scene in the movie: a quintesesntial '80' breakdance sequence featuring punky Violet. She robots her cute little ass off, even as we watch someone stealthily enter her room. In a great bit of irony, when the camera shows the door opening, we also get a closeup of a poster that reads "STOP THE SLAUGHTER".

Anyway, as Violet's poppin' and lockin' to her hearts' content, she hears something and turns around. Nope, nothing's there. She resumes dancing, only to be grabbed by the neck, thrown up against a wall, and stabbed in the gut. This guy ain't the most creative killer, is he?

Reggie wakes up. MJaybe all the giggling from the camera crew filming Violet's dance routine woke him up. He drags himself off the couch and trudges upstairs to see if Tommy's back yet. He's not, but all of the folks killed during the past 10 minutes or so are piled up in his room. Reggie loses his cool and backs into Pam as he attempts to make a hasty exit. She sees how frightened he is, checks out the room, then grabs Reggie and makes a mad dash for the backdoor...wow, a smart decision!

Before they get to the door, Reggie trips, sending them both tumbling to the floor. The door explodes open, and Jason enters the house. Wasn't he already inside? I mean, if he just finished killing everyone upstairs, why would he leave the house, shut the door behind himself, then break it down a short time later?

Well, no one else pauses to give this any thought. Pam and Reggie run to the front door, fumble with the knob, and eventually get outside, where it's raining. The hapless pair make it through the woods and emerge onto a road where they find an ambulance parked. Reggie screams for help, but they discover Roy's co-worker inside, with his throat cut. Jason pops up on the other side of the emergency vehicle, so they start running again. Reggie has a head start, so he and Pam get separated. Reggie tries to go back and find her, and gets turned around and lost. Pam, meanwhile, stumbles into Matt's body, pinned to a tree.

She runs back to the house and locks the door, apparently deciding that the little kid can fend for himself. As Pam hides next to a window, the body of Reggie's grandfather is thrown through the window, and it lands at her feet. Pam screams when she realizes that his eyes have been removed.

She runs back outside, and Jason pursues her in all his bald, masked, armed glory. As he corners Pam and raises the machete to kill her, Reggie bursts out of a barn on a bulldozer or steam shovel vehicle, ready to ram it into the killer. He sends Jason flying, then rushes over to Pam. After she assures the boy that she's fine, they both approach the unconscious killer on the ground. Jason suddenly grabs onto Reggie's leg, and the duo manage to run away after a brief struggle. Jason checks himself for injuries(???), then follows them into the barn.

He looks around, hears a noise behind a door, and comes face-to-face with Pam, who is holding a chainsaw. They duel for a bit, until Pam gouges his arm, near the shoulder. At that exact minute, the chainsaw goes dead. As Jason prepares to get his revenge, Pam throws the heavy chainsaw at him, knocking him off-balance. As the future looks grim, another player enters the game.

Tommy! Jason turns to face his nemesis, and Pam uses the distraction to climb into the hayloft, where Reggie has been hiding. They both urge Tommy to run away, but he hesitates long enough for Jason to slash him in the chest. Before Jason can deliver the fatal strike, Tommy uses his little pocketknife to stab the psycho in the leg. As Jason is clutching his leg, Tommy uses the diversion to climb up to Pam and Reggie.

Jason eventually recovers enough to stand up again, and he follows them up to the hayloft. He sees Tommy face-down in the hay and turns over his body. He walks past the body to search for the other two victims, and spots something moving behind a bale of hay, so he walks toward it.

It turns out to be Reggie. Jason makes a few threatening gestures, but before he can do more than stab a wodden plank, Pam emerges from her hiding place and clus him with what looks like an oar or an axe handle. As Jason gets closer to her, she sees that the ground outside has a wooden crate-thingy with tons of spikes sticking up. She leaps out of the way as Jason lunges at her, and Reggie pushes the killer through the hayloft's door.

He doesn't fall, of course. They never do. No, he just waits for the 2 dumbasses to get near the window, and grabs onto Reggie's ankle. As Pam and Jason each grab onto the kid, Tommy wakes up and snatches up the machete. He swings hard enough to make Jason fall, and they all watch the killer get several spikes through his body. This leads to the dumbest twist in the movie, just to warn you ahead of time.

It's not Jason at all, it's Roy the paramedic. He somehow got a head-covering bald guy mask, wore a hockey mask on top of it, and put on the same kind of jumpsuit Jason always wears. The sheriff meets up with Pam at the hospital to explain: Apparently, Roy's son was Joey, the fat kid who was chopped up by Vic. When he saw the body, he supposedly snapped and went on a killing spree. He even kept newspaper clippings about Jason, so that he could get away with the killings and get the costume to look accurate.

None of that last paragraph makes a lick of sense...First of all, why wouldn't such a small comunity know about Roy having a son, especially one who was living so close by? And how would Roy have changed his height and physical build? How does he keep teleporting in and out and in all of the locations he gets to? Oh, and why bother with going off on the Pinehurst kids? Wouldn't Vic have been a more sensible choice for a victim? Most of the folks Roy killed(Lana, Billuigi, the two greasers, the majority of the kids) had no reason to be on his radar. And why name the female lead after Jason's mother if they never planned to do anything with that reference? The more I think about the twists, the less any of it makes sense on any level.

Ah, screw it. Let's just see how they end this turkey. Pam enters Tommy's hospital room to see how he's doing. She wakes him up, and he pulls a large out from under his pillow to stab her in the gut. Wow, bold way to end the movie.

Nope, it's a dream sequence. Tommy wakes up in the hospital, and he looks kind of feverish. He lays back against his pillow, and sees a vision of Jason standing at the foot of the bed. I guess we're to assume that Tommy is possessed, because the more intense and evil Tommy's expression looks, the more the vision fades.

Anyway, Tommy detaches his IV, opens the nightstand next to his bed, and pulls out a hockey mask. Weird, most places just put a bible in there. Pam enters the room, sees the window wide open, and assumes that Tommy has escaped. He hasn't. He's right behind the door, wearing the mask. He raises a knife. THE END Wait, what?

Man, I've had straws that sucked less than this movie. The killer made no sense, most of the kills were ridiculously staged, and the ending is never followed up in any way, shape, or form in the 7 sequels that followed. The gore was all right, the nudity was pretty steamy, but this movie seems to embrace being mediocre. I'm glad part 6 is the next one in the franchise, because I remember that one being a guilty pleasure. 2 killer trees this time around. See ya next week! Oh, and if you haven't seen "The Walking Dead" on AMC yet, go watch it. That show ROCKS!

Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter

New movie, same Jason(sorta). That's the quickest way to sum up Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter. Oh, and since this is the "final chapter", that must mean that the next 7 movies or so are the world's longest epilogue. Also, this movie is the first one to introduce Jason as a zombie...in the first 3, he was alive. Get comfy, turn out the lights, and grab your popcorn and soda: it's SPOILER tiiiiiiiime!

The very first scene is a recap of The Story So Far, as told around a campfire to a bunch of teenagers. We get a basic highlight reel: Jason's drowning is shown; Crazy Ralph and others are seen giving dire warnings; we get to see the dream sequence at the end of the first film again; Jason's mother being beheaded; and then a montage of most of the "best" death-scenes, followed by a zoom-in of the hockey mask and the title sequence going up in flames.

Right off the bat, we have some interesting names in the credits. Corey Feldman plays the "first" Tommy Jarvis, a sort-of anti-Jason. Also we get Marty McFly's dad, Crispin Glover, before he just took batshit-crazy roles in movies(although I loved him in Willard and the 2 Charlie's Angel's films, so maybe there's a method to his madness.). But the best part of the credits? NO DISCO! Yup, the iconic theme song is back. Sweeeeet. Oh, and the make-up is done by the master himself, Tom Savini. This may end up being pretty good!

After the credits, we get a police-baricaded crime scene. As bodies are being hauled away, a few cops are bagging evidence in the barn where Jason spent most of the last movie dispatching his victims. Two of them remove the axe from Jason's head and bag it up, before covering him up with a sheet. Right on cue, an ambulance arrives to cart Jason's corpse away. When the paramedics get next to Jason, his hand brushes against one of them for a cheap scare. As all of the vehicles leave, we get a lingering overhead view of the campsite, and I expected some kind of jump-scare. Nope. Nothing happens.

At the hospital, the paramedics pass off the corpse to a slob in the morgue named Axel. Being a dedicated, serious professional, Axel leaves Jason's body alone in the morgue so he can go flirt with a cute nurse. At first, she rebuffs his advances, but eventually the cute nurse agrees to meet him later in the morgue. How romantic! Once there, she realizes Axel is missing, but he left her some softcore aerobics to get her in the mood. A body behind her rises up to grab her, and of course it's just Axel. The moron.

The nurse insists on watching the news, and Axel tells her that the body behind them is none other than the killer they mentioned on the newscast. This somehow gets her horny. Once again, Jason's hand shoots out from under the sheet, scaring the nurse enough to make her leave. She goes into a medical supply room to do some inventory, and proceeds to drop several bottles in the process. Axel meanwhile, pushes Jason into a drawer, but the door doesn't entirely close. Hmmmmm....I wonder what will happen?

Axel goes back to watching Sexercise, and Jason sneaks up behind him to cut his throat with a hacksaw. Then he twists Axel's head around completely, before turning his attention to the nurse. As expected, she's STILL picking up her mess of broken bottles, so she doesn't see or hear Jason enter the supply room. He waits for her to turn around before lifting her in the air by her neck, and stabbing her to death. That Jason's a thoughtful guy.

Abruptly, the story shifts to a family, the Jarvis clan. There's Tommy, a video game and horror movie geek, played by what I'm assuming is a pre-Goonies Corey Feldman; Mama Jarvis, a mom who likes to jog, and is divorced; and Tommy's sister Trish, whose ears perk up when she hears that a group of young people moved in next door. Oh, and the family dog, Gordon, also shows up

Right on cue, we meet the new batch of victims: an overweight hippy-chick, who dies less than a minute after we meet her, when Jason shoves a knife through the back of her neck and through her throat; the new neighbors Paul, Samantha, Sara(a "good girl"), Doug, Ted(a headbanger) and Jimmy(Crispin Glover's character, a wannabe sex-stud); and some cute twins, Tina and Terri, who they meet the following day. Happy hunting, Jason!

Anyway, after everyone settles in, we get a scene between Sara(who is a virgin) and Sam, who is Paul's girlfriend. They talk about sex mostly, and the sleeping arrangements. It turns out that Sara is getting a male roomie, but there are bunk-beds. Fascinating, Spock.

Next up, the Jarvis girls are hanging out on the sofa, both reading. Trish decides to go to bed, and Mom reminds her to be ready to go jogging at 6 a.m. As Trish leaves the room, we get a brief glimpse at a newspaper headline about Jason's many victims.

Tommy is having an early night of his own, by spying on one of the girls next door undressing near an open window. While peeping, he has some kind of psychotic fit, making animal sounds and jumping on his bed. Good to know Feldman was ALWAYS a freak, I guess. I'd wager he did this act the first time he had sex, too. Mrs. Jarvis comes in to tuck the perv in, and sees what's going on across the way. While Tommy pretends to be asleep, she draws the shade closed.

The following day, the teens decide to explore the forest and try to find the lake. When the hike takes longer than expected, Sara offers to walk back to get the vehicle and pick them up. She starts to hear someone following her, and...the next scene shows the rest of the group swimming at the lake. Faster than you can say, "We're half an hour into this thing....DIE ALREADY!!", they start skinny-dipping. This just went from being a tedious chore, to being the BEST MOVIE THIS WEEK.

Sadly, it doesn't last very long. Trish and Tommy arrive, and Trish whisks her younger brother away before he(and we) can see anything good. As luck would have it, the car breaks down. Sheesh. Tommy offers to fix it, because you really want a kid around the age of 10 screwing around with your car engine...

Back at the lake, Sara refuses to go skinny-dipping. Dagnabbit! Her friend Sam tries to coax her to go skinny-dipping, but she still refuses. So Sam does what any rational human being would do: she disappears under the water until Sara gives in. When Sara panics and assumes that Sam is drowning, Sam yanks her into the water. That's what friends are for!

Back at the car, Tommy and Trish meet Rob, a guy hunting bear in the area. He fixes the car in 2 seconds, so they give him a lift to their house. As expected, Mama Jarvis is less than thrilled to meet the armed stranger her kids picked up. Before she can object though, Tommy drags Rob upstairs to show him all the monster masks Tom Savini...Uh, I mean, "he" made.

The other house of young people is settling in for the night. Jimmy asks one of the girls to dance, then proceeds to spaz out in the weirdest dance scene ever filmed. Mercifully, the music is switched to a slower song, and the scene ends. After a brief bit where Trish says goodbye to Rob, we get more lame dancing from next door. Sam leaves to go blow off some steam, which involves getting naked and swimming out to the middle of the lake to retrieve a raft. Jason, as it turns out, blows off steam by driving sharp blades up through rafts, and into womens' torsos.

Paul leaves the house next, and Tina hooks up with Jimmy. Paul goes swimming too, finds the body of Sam in the raft, and tries to swim away, but Jason harpoons him in the crotch and lifts him into the air. See, this is why you should always wear a cup. Oh, and is it just me, or are there waaaay too many swimming deaths in this thing? It's like how most of the kills in the 3rd one were in that stupid barn.

In fact, here's an idea: have the next movie stage all the deaths around summer camp activities. Have Jason kill 2 teens by rubbing them together to start a fire. Have him tie bodies up into different kinds of knots. Have him assemble a raft out of bodies. Heck, Jason can even make a human s'more, by killing an albino between 2 other teens. I don't know, just be CREATIVE!!!

Wait, was I watching a movie? Oh yeah. So now we get to spend some time with Rob, our hiking camper who carries a large knife and hates bears with a vengeance. He grabs his trusty machete and decides to aimlessly wander around the woods in the dark. Smart guy, this Rob is. He hears a sound back at his makeshift campsite, and finds that someone has been in his tent and destroyed his belongings.

Jimmy and Tina end up in Ted's bedroom, and she unbuttons her shirt for a brief, tantalizing nanosecond. Sadly, the bed breaks the second they get on it. While these 2 dumbasses try to repair the bed, Ted finds a filmstrip from the Silent Movie Era. Exciting. He sets it up, and the main group of teens yuk it up, while Jimmy Gets His Groove Back upstairs with Tina. Terri wants to leave, but when Tina refuses, Terri decides to go out by herself.

Terri then decides to take seven hours to put on a raincoat and call Tina a slut. As she grabs a bicycle and starts to leave, Jason pins her to the house with his trusty blade. Of course, no one inside can hear the murder, seeing as they're watching a SILENT FILM. Sara, the virgin, announces that she'd like to be de-flowered, and the guy who was in that sci-fi show from the late '70's accepts the offer.(the show was something about a teen who was an alien named Matt Starr. Anyone else remember this?)

Before we get to see an actual virgin sacrifice, the scene shifts back to the Jarvis house. Mama Jarvis notices that the power is out, and her kids are nowhere to be found. When she can't find the dog either, that's when she decides to worry. She goes outside to look for the dog, and--

Tommy and Trish are driving around. What happened to Mrs. Jarvis? I dunno. Tommy criticizes his sister's driving prowess, and the scene ends. Short and sweet. And entirely pointless. Sara, by the way, is now in her underwear. And THAT also goes nowhere. *sigh*

While we wait for the director to get his shit together, let's re-visit Tommy and Trish. They finally get back home. While looking for their mother, Trish tells Tommy to see if he can fix the lights. What is she busy doing? Well, Trish finds Rob's tent and sits in there for a bit. Just to recap: While her young, preteen brother is doing the job of an electrician, Trish is SITTING OUTSIDE IN A STRANGER'S FUCKING TENT.

After accepting the award for Sister of the Year, Trish is attacked by a machete-weilding psychopa....wait, no, it's just Rob. He's waving a weapon around and slashing his own tent, but nope, nothing suspicious about that!

Jimmy and Tina finish "doing it". Jimmy asks her if he was okay, and she tells him that Biff was better. Nah, just kidding. Jimmy goes downstairs to tell Ted that he "did the deed", and he enters the kitchen to have a celebratory drink. Jason pins his hand to a countertop then plants a machete in his head. Hello, McFly! When Tina gets back from the bathroom, Jason pulls her through a window and flings her to the ground.

In the tent, we find out that Rob's sister was one of Jason's victims. He's not hunting bear, he's hunting Jason. He tells Trish that Jason's body disappeared, and he believes that Jason is alive and on another killing spree. This causes Trish to panic, as she finally remembers that she left her kid brother alone in the house, wandering around with only a flashlight.

Before we get to see Jason murder a child, he first turns his attention to the few teens left next door. He starts with Ted, by sneaking behind the projection screen, waiting for Ted to walk up to the screen, then stabbing him through it. Then Jason moves upstairs. He waits for Sara to get out of the shower, and kills Matthew Starr by pushing his head into the bathroom tiles, then impaling him on the broken shower door. Jason then murders Sara by plunging an axe through her chest.

After Tommy gets the power back on at the Jarvis house, Trish and Rob find him. Jason destroys the phone line, and Trish tells Tommy to wait there while she and Rob use the phone next door. They even take the dog. We then have to endure another dreary "find all the dead bodies" sequence. Oh, and the most awesome moment in the history of this franchise occurs: while Rob and Trish explore the house, Gordon the dog decides to say "Aw, the Hell with you dumb humans!", and escapes by smashing through a window. Good for you, Gordon!

Trish looks for signs of life, while Tommy goes through Rob's backpack. He reads several articles about Jason, and sees a picture of what witnesses reported seeing. While he's reading, Trish is looking at the carnage in the upstairs bathroom. She freaks out and finds Rob. Together, they descend to the basement, where Jason attacks Rob. For audience members too dense to understand what's happening, Rob even narrates his own murder.

Trish runs upstairs, feels guilty, then returns to the basement. Rob is dead, of course, so her decision to help is pretty stupid, plus it allows Jason to grab her as she tries to leave again. She keeps finding corpses at all of the exits, so Trish takes a lesson from Gordon and attempts to break a window. After taking about 47 swings, the window finally gets smashed. Trish throws her weapon out ahead of her, then sprints next door.

She and Tommy try to lock the house down tight, but Jason throws Rob through a window to get in. While Trish is freaking out over Rob's corpse, Tommy is grabbed by Jason. Trish hits Jason with a hammer several times, and Tommy finally manages to free himself from the killer's grasp. They rush upstairs to hide in Tommy's bedroom, using a heavy cabinet to block the door.

Well, the cabinet only blocks HALF of the door, so Jason tears the other half down like tissue paper. Trish lifts up a television and shoves it over Jason's head, knocking him out. As another killer once said, "Welcome to prime time, bitch!"

Trish tells her brother that she will distract Jason, to allow him time to get away. Jason wakes up before they get past him(of course), so Trish makes him chase her while Tommy tries to come up with a plan. She throws herself out of a nearby window(repitition, thy name is Friday the 13th...), and Jason waits until she starts moving around to resume the chase. She slowly makes her way back into the Jarvis home, but Jason is right behind her.

Oh, and what has Tommy been doing all this time? If you said, "giving himself a haircut", you win your very own INTERNET!!!!!!! Congrats. Yeah, Tommy's cutting off his hair one strand at a time. By the time he finishes, Jason will probably take Manhattan. Trish buys him some more time by shoving a blade into Jason's hand. He's a zombie now, so I'm not sure what that accomplished, but eh. Whatever.

Jason pins Trish down, but before he finishes her off, Tommy shows up. It turns out that he has been making a mask of Young Jason, using Rob's newspaper articles as a guide. While Jason is transfixed by Tommy's makeup job. Trish grabs the machete and hits Ol' Hockeyface. knocking his mask off briefly. The makeup in this one is...uh...."green", I guess. I don't know, they seemed to forget his uneven eyes, and focussed more on his teeth this time. His smile could remove hubcaps.

Anyway, while we're all distracted by Jason's movie-star looks, Tommy runs up behind him swinging the machete, and imbeds it in his temple. Jason staggers, then falls to the floor, causing the machete to pass through his head as he slides down to the floor. Tommy grabs the machete off the floor before running over to hug his sister. Neither one notices that Jason's hand is twitching.

Well, almost...after they hug, Tommy does see Jason's fingers moving, and he proceeds to hack away at the killer while Trish look more and more horrified. The scene fades to white, and we next see Trish in the hospital. A doctor tells her that she'll need shoulder surgery, and that her brother's attack on Jason was nothing more than survival instinct. Trish asks to see him, and he walks in and hugs her. At the last second, you see his eyes open, and he looks at the camera with an evil expression. THE END.

Ugh. Despite all the t&a and the gore, this one was kind of lame. The look of Jason was altered, there were far too many would-be killers(Rob with his machete, Tommy, Jason himself...who wrote this one, Jessica Fletcher?), and there were waaaay too many unanswered WTF moments for me(WTF was up with Crispin's dancing scene? WTF was with Tommy appearing to be possessed at the end?...just to name 2). 2 and a half killer trees out of 5. Sadly, I already know the next one is worse, so that'll be torture to sit through.

Oh, yeah....what did I learn from this week's flick?
-Corey Feldman's going to look awful when he goes bald. Oh, and he's a spaz when a woman undresses in front of him.
-Zombies can afford plastic surgery.
-Someone should invent windows that are body-proof.

Sorry this one's late....been fighting a massive cold. To make up for it, hopefully I can get another in before the weekend. Ugh, my head feels like a medicine ball. G'night.

Friday the 13th III

Y'know the quickest way to kill a horror franchise? Well, okay, you set it in space, yeah. But the second-quickest way to kill a franchise is to make it 3-D. Think about the number of GOOD horror film sequels you've seen in 3-D. See what I mean? And that brings us to Friday the 13th 3.

This movie should be a train wreck. It should be the worst in the franchise. And yet, it has a lot going for it, including likable characters and some pretty good suspense. And, continuing the tradition of the second film, it recaps the action of the previous movie. As always, it's SPOILER time!

The movie begins, as I said, with a recap of the ending of Part Two. Ginny is running through the woods, and finds her way to Jason's cabin. She finds the bodies of her friends(and the body of the first movie's heroine), as well as a shrine featuring the severed head of Jason's mother and her ratty old sweater. Desperate, Ginny puts on the sweater, just before Jason bursts into the shack.

Ginny speaks to Jason in calm, soothing tones. He sees the sweater and his confused mind sees Ginny as his mother. She's holding a machete behind her back, and as he lets her get closer, she plans to kill him. Unfortunately, Jason glances at the severed head behind Ginny, and the illusion is dispelled. He stabs her in the leg at the same time that she brings the machete up. Lucky for her, the male lead rescues her and together, they seem to kill Jason. Ginny's final act is to unmask him, then they leave his body in there and wait for the police.

We see Jason's hand grab his machete and he starts to crawl away. Then, as the camera slowly gives us a closeup of Mrs. Voorhees' severed head, the credits swoooop out in EYE-BULGING 3-D(or, in this case, EYE-INDIFFERENT 2-D.), to the cheesiest disco music in the history of everything. Why did they abandon the iconic theme music for DISCO??? Anyway, since this was originally 3-D, expect a shitload of scenes where objects are pushed toward the camera for no reason.

So the credits finally end(as does the crappy disco THANK GOD!!!!), and we meet the redneck proprietors of Crystal Lake's own general store, Harold and Edna. They seem remarkably similar to the redneck mother and son in the second film, as Edna's favorite pastime is screaming out orders at Harold while she watches game television. Harold himself prefers his various pets to his nagging wife, and is seen walking through their store eating various goods while petting a large rabbit.

Edna is busy getting freaked out. She's been hearing news reports about Jason's latest killing spree in the area(we see Ginny being lifted into an ambulance, so this one takes place IMMEDIATELY after the events in Part Two) and she's spotted Jason out in her backyard stealing Harold's laundry, and she just naturally assumed he was Harold. Yeah, because Harold looks JUST LIKE a hulking, bald man-child with severe facial deformities. Anyway, when she goes outside to check the laundry, she starts yelling about how he only took in his clothes and not hers. Jason lurks nearby, and stays just out of view whenever she notices his presence.

We know, of course, that it wasn't Harold. When Edna goes to the store to bitch him out, the poor guy looks completely baffled. Of course it's pretty difficult to defend yourself with a mouthful of chocolate doughnuts, so I guess silence was probably a good idea on his part. Harold brings his bunny out to the barn, and finds another pet mutilated. When he tries to get a closer look, a snake nearly gets its fangs into him!

Frightened, Harold jogs back to the house, and nearly gives his wife a heart attack as he lurches into the bathroom. Apparently he crapped himself when he saw the snake. Lovely. We get treated to the sight of Harold on the toilet, which is probably going to be the scariest scene in the movie. While drinking a bottle of liquor he had stashed nearby, Harold hears a sound. Across from the toilet are a series of oily, ragged curtains. One by one, Harold begins to yank them open...and finds nothing. Then, as he decides it was his imagination, he leaves the bathroom and gets an axe to the chest.

Edna sort of hears him fall to the ground, and decides to go looking for him. She does the same slow, ponderous exploration Harold just did, and comes face to face with a white mouse. Grossed out, Edna backs against the wall, and right into Jason's grasp. He covers her mouth with one hand, and uses the other to shove one of her knitting needles through the back of her neck. This kind death gets repeated later in the film, so I hope you enjoy deja vu.

As the scene fades to white, we say goodbye to poor Edna and Harold, we meet our next batch of victims: There's Andy, a jock with a sense of humor; Shelly, who is Andy's roommate, a big doofus with a fixation on gory practical jokes; Vera, who's been set-up as Shel's date; Chrissy, who's driving the van and was a camp counselor a few years earlier; Chuck and his main squeeze Chili, the pothead hippies of the film; and Debbie, who is Chrissy's best friend.

As everyone's getting to know each other, 2 cops show up behind the van, both with sirens and lights going. Everyone races to ingest all of Chili and Chuck's drugs, until the cops both go speeding past them. Turns out they were called in to investigate the murders from the previous night at the local general store. The van slows down to watch the body bags being loaded into an ambulance, then resume their trip.

Another body is soon found by the group, this time on the road. They get out of the van to get a closer look at the guy, who seems to be dressed like a homeless cowboy. They remove the cowboy hat from his face, and the old geezer wakes up. He thanks them for helping him, and returns the favor by trying to give them an eyeball he found. Hope he kept the receipt.

They all quickly pile back into the van, leaving Crazy Ralph II waving the eyeball at the camera in SEXY, MIGRAINE-INDUCING 2-D!! Back on the road, the group finally get to the site of the new camp, Higgins Haven. The van crosses a rickety bridge, and drives right into the middle of the new campsite, observed by an unknown figure in one of the cabins. The only thing we know about this observer is that they are wearing a plaid shirt. Maybe it's Kurt Cobain?

Nope. It's Rick, Chrissy's summer romantic partner from 2 years ago. As they start unpacking the van, Chris realizes that one of the doors on the van was previously open, and now it's closed. She cautiously opens it again, only to be scared by Shelly, who's hiding in the van. He tells her that the others went skinny-dipping, and he felt too self-conscious to join them.

Next, Chrissy shows Debbie where her bedroom is, because it was Chrissy's 2 years earlier. Instead of a bed, she has a hammock. And instead of a horror film, I have a sleeping aid. Oh, and as Chris looks out the window, we get to see an ominous-looking barn. Gee, I wonder if anyone's hiding out in there???

Speaking of the barn, the following scene features Rick and Chris, having an in-depth discussion about hay. As Rick is lifting the bales up to the loft, he notices they seem to be getting heavier. That's because Chrissy is riding the last one as he's pulling it up. It'll be her fault when he has to file for worker's comp...

Suddenly, there's a horrendous scream! Chrissy and the Rickmeister run back to the cabin, and he checks the ground level as she investigates upstairs. she hears a muffled thumping noise and approaches a wardrobe, giving me terrifying flashbacks of Morty from the 2 Fear movies I had just watched. Nope, it's actually Shelly, with an axe embedded in his forehead. Andy and the others run in, and Andy rushes over to check for a pulse.

Well, it's another prank. Shelly starts giggling, and gets up. When he sees that he upset Chris, he tries to apologize, but no one wants to hear it. Vera asks Rick for the car keys, so she can make a quick run to the store for some kitchen supplies and other things they need. Shel begs her to let him tag along, and she gives in.

Deb catches up with Chris in a field, where Chris reveals that she was the survivor of something traumatic. The memories still haunt her, and she's having serious difficulty deciding whether she should stay or go. Awwwww...

At the store, Vera doesn't have the money to cover the groceries, so Shel tosses her(and us) his wallet, in GLORIOUS, MAGNIFICENT 2-D!! A biker chick gets the wallet first, and she and her friends enjoy terrorizing the 2 teens...or the 2 20-somethings PLAYING teens. Anyway, Vera doesn't back down, so she gets the wallet back, pays for the food, and she and Shelly run to the car. Vera gives Shelly the keys, and he backs into the gang's motorcycles.

That doesn't go over too well with the bikers, and one smashes the car's windows and one side of the vehicle with a heavy chain. Well that just makes Shelly mad, and he drives over the pile of motorcycles on his way back to the road. Elated that he stood up to the biker, Shel is happier than a pig in mud.

The next bit of MESMERIZING, BONE-CHILLING 2-D!!! is a yo-yo being used by Andy. The group of counselors are sitting around doing jackshit when Shelly drives up in the wrecked VW. Even Jason emerges from the barn to check out the damage! Rick sees what happened to his car and blows his top. He plans to abandon the camp, until Chris convinces him to change his mind, but they still take off for a little while. They drive right past Jason and never notice him.

As the happy couple drive away, the bikers sneak onto the property for a little revenge. Ali, the one whose bike they ran over earlier, is siphoning the gas from the other camp vehicle with a sidekick named Snake. While they work on stranding the campers, Ali's girlfriend, Fox, decides to check out the barn.

Wanna guess what happens next? After Fox enters the barn, she acts like she arrived at Buckingham Palace. I've never seen anyone look so enraptured by dust 'n' rust. As expected, Jason reveals sneaks up behind her while she plays with saddles and cowbells and shit. At one point, she even senses his presence, but still sticks around to fondle saddles and canteens. She trips at one point, and nearly gets a pitchfork through her face, which would've been kind of funny: Imagine watching a Friday the 13th sequel where every death was accidental. At one point, Jason could even look at the camera, wave by-bye, shrug and go take a nap or something.

Anyway, after nearly frenching a pitchfork, Fox decides to climb up into the hayloft. As her feet hit the first rung of the ladder, a clump of loose hay comes at her in ELBOW-SCRATCHING EARTH-SHATTERING 2-D!!!! While Fox is making the slowest ladder-climb in history, Ali and Snake are finishing up the gas theft. Ali tells Snake To find Ali, and Snake runs off toward the barn, armed with a full canister of gas and a cigarette between his lips. Einstein.

It doesn't take Snake long to find Fox...she's swinging on a rope in the hayloft, hooting and hollering. Snake scolds her about keeping their presence unknown to the campers, but when he looks up at the hayloft again, she's gone. Snake enters the barn, demanding that she show herself and stop screwing around. When he gets no response, he decides to climb up into the hayloft to find her. Once there, he fails to see her corpse pinned to wall by the pitchfork, whose handle is pointing at the camera in UTTERLY KNEE-SKINNING 2-D!!! When he does turn around and finally spots her, Jason attacks Snake with a different pitchfork, sticking it through the bikers stomach in PANTS-WETTING, BRAIN-FREEZING 2-D!!!

Standing outside the barn holding 2 heavy-looking containers of gas, Ali kicks the barn door a few times before putting down the gas and simply opening the door the, you know, SMART way. Incidentally, wasn't the guy playing Ali also one of the nightclub bouncers in Fright Night? I KNOW I've seen him in some other movie before this one. Eh, whatever...Ali hears something up in the loft, and gets pissed. When he demands that they come down, Jason throws Snake's corpse at him. Ali grabs a nearby machete and runs after Jason, who has jumped down from the loft to fight the biker. It doesn't last long: Jason throws Ali across the room, then uses the machete Ali found to stab him several times before leaving.

The cameraman decides to wander off to see whatever happened to Chris and Rick. They wound up in some clearing next to a drainage pipe. Rick pointedly asks Chris why she decided to come back to the camp after surviving whatever the hell she survived, and she tells him that she felt she needed to prove something by returning. While they act out a scene out of "General Hospital", Shelly and Andy are having a juggling contest in STUPEFYING, ROCKET-LAUNCHING 2-D!!, and the 2 potheads are zoning out.

Andy loses the contest when his girlfriend tempts him away for sex, and that leaves Shelly with Vera. Vera gets up to poke at the logs in the fireplace, giving Shelly(and US) a great view of her ass. He tries to ask her out, but Vera doesn't even let him finish the sentence. She tells him that she needs some fresh air, and that they should talk after she gets back, then she quickly heads outside. Shelly watches her a bit from the window, then turns his attention back to the roaring fire--just as Jason strolls past the very same window.

Upstairs, we get an all-too-brief look at Deb's breasts, as she and Andy climb into the hammock for some swinging-rope sex. Kinky! I approve. Too bad the director didn't--we get pushed outside for more melodrama with Chris and Rick. She reveals to him that the last time they went out together, her mother threw her out of the house the same night. Chrissy eventually got lost walking in the woods, and fell asleep under a big tree. When she woke up, she heard what she thought was her father coming to look for her. It wasn't....instead, she came face-to-half-face with Jason. He had chased her around for a bit, before dragging her away.

She passed out, and when she came to, Jason was gone. She has no other memories of that night, so she decided to try to jog her memory by returning. At this point, Rick's car dies. They decide to walk back to camp, and Rick mumbles something about a shortcut.

At the cabin, Chuck wakes up from his drug binge. He goes outside to use the outhouse(what is it with outhouses in this franchise?), and gets spooked by something. The call of nature overcomes his survival instinct however, and Chuck decides to use the toilet anyway. So far, this outhouse is the scariest image in the film.

Chili wakes up alone, but apparently the movie could care less, because we return to Chuck on the toilet smoking a joint. The outhouse starts rocking, and the dimwit fails to notice at first. He pulls up his pants to go confront the guy, but instead bumps into Chili, who came outside to find him. They decide to check out the barn, because Chuck thought he saw Shelly go in, but WE know it was actually Jason.

Vera is seen next, sitting on the dock by Crystal Lake. A hand grabs her by the ankle, and it's attached to someone wearing a hockey mask and holding a spear gun. It turns out to be Shelly. He tries to apologize yet AGAIN for his dumb practical jokes, but Vera gets upset. Shelly calls himself a jerk and leaves Vera there feeling bad for him. He waddles onto the porch at the cabin and watches Vera from a distance before deciding to go out to the barn. Uh oh.

At the barn, Shel starts knocking on windows and calling out Chuck and Chili's names. When that doesn't get a response, he enters the barn and nearly wets himself when a dusty-looking cow-skull nearly hits him. At the same time, Vera finds and goes through Shelly's wallet. A noise startles her, and she drops the wallet into the lake. Vera removes her shoes and wades in to get the wallet, just as someone wearing the hockey mask and holding a spear gun approaches the lake. She explains to him that she dropped the wallet and managed to retrieve it, and she gets a spear shot into her right eye....in LOW-DEFINITION, LACTOSE INTOLERANT 2-D!!! Jason then sees the bedroom light on and goes after Andy and Deb.

The happy couple are just finishing up their snuggle in the hammock. While Deb takes a shower, Andy announces that he's going downstairs to grab a beer. Someone enters the bathroom while Deb is showering and creeps up on her. When Deb pulls back the curtain, it turns out to be Andy, walking on his hands. He asks her if she wants a beer too, then resumes his hand-walk out into the hallway. As he rounds a corner, Jason blocks his path and brings the machete down hard on the poor idiot's crotch. I think I speak for every guy in the world when I say, "OWWWWWWWW!!"

Deb climbs back into the hammock, oblivious to Andy's demise or the danger she's in. She picks up a copy of Fangoria magazine and starts thumbing through it. Blood drips onto the page she's reading, and Deb looks up to see Andy's corpse hanging like a pinata. Before she can do anything beyond a scream, Jason grabs Deb's forehead to pin her down, and plunges his blade into her back and up through her chest. (see what I meant earlier about the similarity???)

Chrissy and Rick get closer to the camp, but apparently the film crew couldn't care less because the movie switches back to Chuck, who has decided to make popcorn on a stove top in CHOLESTEROL-INDUCING, HEART-EXPLODING 2-D!!! Chuck, being the dumb ass that he is, lifts the lid over the popcorn, has it fly up at his(and ours) face, and actually tries to catch it in his mouth. Chili walks in just as the dingle berry puts the lid back. Good save, bro.

Chuck and Chili exchange some banter about orgasms, and the lights all go out. Chili asks Chuck to go out to the shack to check the fuses, and he does so after some grumbling. While he's out there stumbling around in the dark, Chili hears a sound at the door. She finds Shelly there, with his throat badly slashed, but assumes it's another practical joke. He basically dies in front of her, and she never realizes it.

Chuck, meanwhile, has been unwittingly walking barefoot in blood. He uncovers more weird dusty shit in the shack, like dead bats and rusty waffle irons, before getting the lights working again. Bad news for him: Jason is behind him when the lights come back on. Jason throws him at the generator, and poor chuck becomes a chuck roast.

As the lights begin flickering, Chili finally comprehends that something weird is happening. She approaches Shel's corpse to get him up, and discovers that the blood on him is real. Next, Chili goes upstairs to tell Deb and Andy that Shelly died, and Jason uses the distraction to grab a hot fireplace poker to kill her with. She finds the corpses upstairs, rushes to the front door, but the wind blows it open and she freaks out. Chili hurries the other way, and Jason thrusts the poker through her stomach and out of her back. He then picks her body up, Bride of Frankenstein-style, and decides to decorate the cabin for Rick and Chris.

Right on cue, Chris and Rick come back, and they both smell smoke. They try to get the front door open, but something is blocking it. A corpse? Nope, just a chair. The burning smell turns out to be the popcorn. As Chrissy cleans up the kitchen, Rick goes to explore the rest of the house. When he finds the place empty, he and Chris decide to go check out the barn.

Rick goes out first, and Jason grabs him. As they lurk around the corner, Chris exits the cabin, and calls Rick's name several times. When Chris decides to go back inside, Jason squeezes Rick's head until one of his eyeballs pops out in COTTON-PICKIN', FINGER-LICKIN' 2-D!!

We then get treated to the "final character discovers the bodies" segment. Chris heads upstairs, finds the bathroom flooded, and Snake's body nearly hits her while falling out of a tree. Chris runs back to the cabin and we get a funny scene where every door and window keeps flying open because of the windstorm outside. While she's scurrying around trying to close everything, Rick's body gets thrown through one of the windows. While Chris tries to examine Rick's wounds, Jason climbs in through the broken window to come after her.

Chris runs upstairs and topples a bookcase, sending a ton of books raining down on Jason. While he recovers from the awesome power of literature, Chris tries to find a good place to hide. She gets into a closet and finds a dead body to keep her company. Her scream alerts Jason, and he begins trying to break the door down, first with his fists and then with an axe.

Chris stops hyperventilating long enough to grab the knife out of the corpse at her feet. Jason creates a hole in the door large enough to fit his hand through, and Chris stabs it before he can reach the doorknob. That seems to give her more confidence, and she proceeds to go on the offensive, swinging the knife in wide arcs in front of her while Jason is forced to back up. Eventually, one of her slices lands a hit in his leg near the knee, and she uses the moment to try to escape. She breaks a window, but Jason grabs her coat before she can get all the way out, and she hits him with her hands until the coat rips. Jason has no choice... he lets her drop to the ground below.

Outside, Chris watches Jason descend the stairs and make his way to one of the doors to follow her. She runs around the side of the cabin, grabs a massive log, and waits for him to open the door.When he comes out, she delivers a hit with the firewood that sends Jason flying into the porch railing.

While Jason struggles to get up again, Chris jogs to the van. She gets it started, and nearly runs over Jason as he stands in the road trying to stop her. Unfortunately for her, the van runs out of gas on the rickety bridge. Thanks, bikers! Jason is seen limping rapidly toward the van, and it doesn't take long for the killer to catch up and grab Chrissy by the throat through her open window. She struggles to get free, and finally decides to roll up the window, effectively pinning his arms in place. It isn't much, but it gives her the time she needs to exit through the passenger door.

As Chrissy takes off towards the woods again, Jason gets his arms free by head-butting the window. She returns to the barn and uses a spade to keep the double-doors shut. That doesn't give her much time: Jason merely reaches through a crack in the doors and lifts the spade up enough to get the entrance open again. Once inside, he uses the wooden plank that serves as the real barricade to close her in the barn with him. Then he starts hunting her down.

Jason goes through piles of old debris, throwing objects everywhere. He then moves to the stables. When that still doesn't get him anywhere, the camera pans up to show us that Chris is hiding in the rafters, clinging desperately to a narrow beam above Jason's head. As he starts getting royally pissed and tearing the barn apart, Chris swings herself upside down on the beam, and drops down on top of him. Chris runs to the door, but can't lift the beam Jason used to close it quick enough. He grabs his machete and sprints after her. As he swings it, Chris ducks and the machete gets imbedded in the door.

She climbs up to the hayloft and uses a large bale of hay to block the narrow entryway and buy herself some time to come up with a plan. Said plan consists of weilding a shovel and hiding behind more bales of hay. As expected, Jason pushes his way up into the hayloft, and Chris whacks him in the noggin with the shovel. While Jason is unconscious, she wraps a length of rope around his neck and manages to push him out of the hayloft while he starts to wake up.

Poor Jason...His body swings down, and his neck appears to snap. Chris starts to leave the barn, and uses a metal wheel to dislodge the plank of wood enough to get the doors open again. She then comes face-to-hockey mask with Jason, who hoists himself up enough on the rope to give him some slack. Then he lifts the hockey mask to confirm to Chris that it was him that chased her that night she got lost in the woods.(The make-up of his face is never consistent in these things...in most of them, one eye is deformed, but in this one it's his teeth that are the most grotesque feature, along with a pig-like nose. Whatever.)

He jumps down to the ground and snatches up his machete. Prepared to finish killing Chris, Jason raises the weapon over his head, only to be foiled by a still-alive Ali! Jason turns and hacks off Ali's hand at the wrist, then bends over him to continue slashing away. Chris spots an axe nearby and plants it in Jason's forehead when he turns back to her.

Jason reacts to this new development by thrusting his arms out in TWISTED, GOOSE-BUMPING 2-D!! He staggers forward a few steps, before finally falling at her feet. Chris then does the dumbest thing ever(until I watch the next one, anyway), and gets into the cursed canoe that provided the jump-scare in the first movie. Chris kneels by the water to wash some of the blood and dirt off her face, then pushes the canoe into the lake.

The next scene shows her waking up in the canoe. The police have arrived, and Chris relaxes...until she sees Jason in an upstairs window of the house, preparing to come down. She desperately starts to row away, but the undead corpse of Mrs. Voorhees this time appears(head intact, no less...nice lack of continuity!!) and drags her into the water.

We then see a cop who looks kind of like B-movie actor Tim Thomerson arrive on the scene. It's revealed that the previous segment was a dream(DUH!), and the cop escorts her away from the house. The closer they get to his car, the crazier she gets, until his partner has to restrain her in the backseat. The camera creeps over the campsite until it shows Jason's body in the barn with the hatchet still intact. There is a brief shot of the lake, where we see a ripple in the water, then it fades to black. THE END.

Well, that was a pretty involved storyline for a sequel! I liked that it kept me guessing(at one point, I figured maybe Shelly was the killer, given his demented and awkward pranks), and the 3-D was funny as hell in 2-D. But the film kept up the tradition of having a cute female lead, the story added some new twists to Jason's story, and there were some honest-to-goodness surprises along the way. I'd give it 3.5 killer trees out of 5, only because the gimmicky 3-D and slow start prevented it from being rated higher in my view.

So, what did Friday the 13th III teach me?

-A heck of a lot of cute actresses made their way into this franchise!
-The gimmick of 3-D adds NOTHING to a movie (unless piranhas are involved...). Hollywood, take notes!
-Some hockey masks have the magical ability to transform the face of their wearer every time they put them on!

Next week: We bid a fond farewell to Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th IV: The Final Chapter. I'm positive that this movie ends the Jason franchise...I mean, Hollywood wouldn't lie to us, would they?

The Fear: Halloween Night

The Fear was a surprisingly watchable film: The antagonist was creepy; the characters were mostly likable; and the women were all pretty hot, which is always a plus. So, hoping for a good sequel, I moved The Fear: Halloween Night to the top of my rental queue. Was Morty just as scary the second time around? Read on to find out! (As always, MAJOR SPOILERS, as I ruin the whole movie for ya!)

In terms of plot, there's a lot of deja vu here. Both films deal with facing fears, and both have a protagonist who has a traumatic event in their past that bites them in the ass during the present. Also, both movies feature a creepy wooden statue-puppet, named Morty. But there are also differences.

As I mentioned, the story begins with a flashback: The main character, as a young boy, was travelling with his mother to a costume party on Halloween Night--he as a skeleton, and she as a witch--when she spots what appears to be a car accident. She pulls over to offer assistance, and sees a man murdering a woman with an axe. He chases our unlucky witch and proceeds to kill her in front of her son. As he turns the corpse over, he realizes that he just killed his own wife.

Distraught, the killer grabs his son, Michael, out of the car and shoves him in the trunk of his own vehicle. He then uses his wife's corpse as a speed bump and flees the scene. As the car speeds away, Michael grabs a glow-stick and uses it to see his surroundings, bringing him face-to-face with our favorite Indian mannequin, Morty. Sort of.

Okay, so I'm going to pause the movie here to vent a little. We're about 5 and a half minutes into the movie, and there's already a problem. The dummy is NOT Morty...or, at least, not the SAME Morty. He's played by a different actor in this one, and the 2 look nothing alike. Now, I have no problem with another actor assuming a role played originally by another person, but why not hire someone who at least RESEMBLES the first guy? Is this supposed to be a different Morty? How many ancient Indian puppet-statues named Morty could there be in the world???

So since the characters are all different, as is the house they keep Morty in, I'm just going to assume that there ARE 2 entirely different possessed Indian puppet-thingies named Morty. As Jamie Kennedy and David Arquette said in Scream 2, let's move on....

Well, apparently my rant took awhile, because it's now "20 Years Later", according to the movie. Michael is bringing his friends up to the family's house for a fear-themed Halloween party: Everybody invited has to wear a costume that represents their greatest fear. Guests in attendance include Chris, a horny Dane Cook wanna-be; Peg, Michael's girlfriend and Chris's sister, who resembles Anne Hathaway; Lisa Ann, a girl who feels that her looks get in the way of people taking her seriously; Jennifer, the "Velma" of the group; Ned, who looks like Harry Potter; Mams, Michael's grandmother played by Pamela Voorhees herself, Betsy Palmer; Crow, an American Indian friend of the family; Gramps, who is Michael's grandfather(lucky guess, huh?); oh, and Mitch and Trish, who arrive late.

Before they arrive at the home of Michael's grandparents, there's some small talk about the origins of Halloween, and a brief discussion about a local legend in Michael's hometown, Hackett...seems that several years earlier, there was a gruesome serial killer on the loose in the town, The Highwayman. Gee, I wonder if Michael knew him?

As introductions are being made, Mams decides to make Chris wet his pants by giving him the wrong directions to the john. I hope he poops in your kitchen sink, you bat! When Michael hangs up his jacket, he has a brief flashback of his mother getting struck in the face with the axe again. Oh, and as he reunites with grumpy Gramps, Michael spots a hilarious family photo of his father wielding his axe in mid-kill. Nice!

Up in the attic, Michael meets up with his childhood friend Crow, and the new Morty. At this point, we learn the reason for the party and its' theme: Crow is performing an ancient, sacred ritual designed to cast away everyone's fears and bring them cleansed souls. Morty will absorb their fears and then be set on fire, to symbolically eradicate evil, or something. Oh, and since Michael is "leading the ceremony", he has a Morty-mask he must wear. And Morty has a flask of raven's blood around his neck...as long as he wears it, the "evil's held". Whatever. Just get started already...Why is everyone still alive?!?

Chris and Peg come up to the attic to see what's keeping Michael so busy, and he introduces them both to Crow...and Morty. Chris behaves like an ass by mocking Crow's heritage and saying "Morty" about 300 times in a row. Oh, and as the rest become distracted by the arrival of the 2 late guests, Chris steals the flask-necklace from around Morty's neck. Good thing this isn't a horror film, or that might be a bad idea...oh yeah, this IS a horror flick! Guess they're boned, huh?

So at dinner Michael finally gets the ball rolling. He tells his friends about the ancient ritual...they, as a group must form a "fear circle", and dress as the fears to symbolically cast them off, or something. Blah blah blah. When they seem into it, Grumpaw storms out of the room to angrily clean the dishes. I swear, this guy was the ORIGINAL "Grumpy Old Man". After some horsing around and my impending coma from the lack of ANYTHING going on, Grumps drops some plates at the mention of The Highwayman. He cuts his hand, causing Lisa Ann to go into what a high school Drama Club student might do to show a fear of blood. She ain't no Meryl Streep.

As the others crack jokes, Michael admonishes the group for not taking the whole thing seriously, and takes a walk outside, clutching the Morty-mask the entire time. He comes to a clearing and staggers as more memories assault him. These traumatic memories eventually cause him to pass out. While he's out playing with his inner Morty, Trish decides to have a heart-to-heart with Peg about the tension she senses between her and Michael. See, Peg doesn't know that The Highwayman was also his dad, so she thinks Michael's fear about becoming his dad is a fear of commitment. Deep, huh?

Anyway, after Trish plays amateur shrink with Peg, Peg decides to go find Michael. She does eventually, crouched next to the grave of his father with his face in his hands. She begs him to talk about things with her, and he stands up, revealing that he's wearing the wooden mask. YIKES! Startled, Peg tells him it's not funny, and he responds that it wasn't meant to be.

In the most surprising twist so far(*YAWN*), Michael tells Peg almost everything about his troubled past: How he saw his dad kill his mom; watching his father become an alcoholic; and eventually how his dad committed suicide. He also reveals to her that he's been having night terrors, hallucinations, etc. Wake me up when something scary happens.

When Peg tries to show him compassion, he reacts badly. Michael tells her that no one can empathize with him if they haven't been through that kind of trauma themselves. He attacks his father's gravestone with a stick, and Peg leaves. As he follows her, blood starts pouring out of the gravestone. As we watch, Morty starts rocking in a chair on the porch, mostly due to the wind picking up. When more blood streams out of the grave, one of Morty's arms moves. Hmmmm....

Michael walks into the house just in time to referee a fight over pumpkin-carving. As pumpkin-guts go flying, he goes upstairs to speak to Peg about what happened between them by the grave. Instead of speaking, they begin a bout of passionate lovemaking. Ned passes by the door, hears them makin' whoopie, and runs downstairs to tell the others. Geez, it's like this script was written by 12-year-olds on Ritalin or something.

A loud crash makes the group rush upstairs again. They find Chris on the floor, mouth full of blood, with Morty on top of him. Even Michael and Peg rush out, still fully dressed. Dammit. As expected, Chris jumps up to scare the group. Crow examines Morty, and discovers that his arm is damaged, leading to an insincere apology from Chris. Crow and he exchange a few insults.

As Crow carries Morty away to repair the damage Chris caused, Michael and Peg start arguing about her brother and his lack of maturity. Chris decides to get involved in the discussion. A short scuffle ensues, followed by Peg accidentally being pushed down a staircase. Chris panics and rushes to her slumped body, only to have her sit up and mock him. Psyche! She even takes a bow, reveals that the whole argument was a ruse designed to prank Chris, and everyone claps. Well, almost everyone. Reminded of his mom's death yet again, Michael decides to go to the porch and sit in the same rocking chair Morty was in about 5 minutes earlier. When Peg joins him, he reveals that the whole scenario was a little too close to what happened to his mother. Still upset, he seeks out Crow.

Crow is repairing Morty. I love how, in these scenes, not one person, Crow included, has noticed that the sack of blood is no longer around Morty's neck. Anyway, Michael goes to the stables, and apologizes to Crow for fooling around, then tries to back out of the ceremony. Crow responds by showing Michael the mask he found in the cemetery. He also tells Michael that his father was both a good man, and a bad man, as all of us are. Deep, dude.

Crow assures him that he's as ready as he can be, before revealing his own greatest fear: horses. I sure hope he doesn't get killed in the stable while repairing Morty...Grumpy Grampy shows up to threaten Crow. I guess the ol' geezer just LIKES being a grouchy douche bag.

Mike's Mams tells him to fetch Grumplestiltskin for lunch. On the way to the barn, he hears the voice of his father calling out to him. The voice tells him that something's coming for him. As Mike has a fleeting vision of Crow being attacked, he faints again.

Crow FINALLY realizes something we knew ages ago...the blood-pouch is no longer around Morty's neck. He looks for it and finds some feathers on the floor. As he examines these feathers, a bale of hay swings toward him, knocking him through a stable door. Crow tries to get to his feet, but a horse traps him, while another horse uses a hoof to kill him..

Mikey wakes up in the hay. He finds blood on his hands and washes them off, right before Mams scares him half to death. She tells him to go back to his friends. Oh, and she's holding a broken plank of wood. hmmmm...

Trish finds Ned being a voyeur and flirts with him. She hints that she could go for a nice dip in the pool, and he reveals that water happens to be his phobia. They are briefly distracted by Peg, who is hauling a bag of trash around or something. She tells them that Mike is getting ready for the ritual. We then get treated to a scene involving Jennifer and I don't know, Chris(?) maybe, walking in the forest. They see a large white wolf, causing Jen to dart the other way, toot-sweet! Chris gets nervous about being lost in the woods and tries to take off after her.

Michael, meanwhile, is setting up a place for Morty to sit in the attic. After seating the mannequin, he puts on the Morty-mask again, and checks himself out in the mirror. To his shock and horror, he sees the mask transform him into Dear Ol' Dad. He pulls off the mask and smashes the mirror, then turns around and takes a swing at Morty too. He's like the George Foreman of fighting inanimate objects. Geez, the only skill less useful than that would be watching and spoiling cheesy horror flicks once or twice a week...

So now we switch over to Lisa Ann, the girl who feels that her looks get in the way of people taking her seriously. She's walking with some British guy whose name escapes me, and she reveals that her two biggest passions in life are religion and politics. Yeesh! The British guy goes along with it, and it's getting annoying not remembering his name yet.. Sure, I could look it up or something, but do I even care at this point? Nope. Unless someone says his name, I'll just call him Hugh Jazz. Anyway, Hugh tells Lisa that she has inner beauty as well as the only kind of beauty guys really care about, outer. Oh, and she asks him about his relationship with Trish, so I guess that makes him Mitch. THANK YOU, stupid movie.

Mitch and Lisa meet up with Jennifer and Chris at the edge of the woods, just in time to hear someone shrieking. They find Ned and Peg cornered by a huge, mutant snake. Ned cuts off Snakezilla's head, and it twitches for awhile, probably a happy-dance that it gets to exit this boring-as-hell movie. Somehow, during the scene, Trish showed up and managed to climb up a tree without anyone noticing. She begs Mitch to help her down, and his "help" consists of telling her to jump. He's afraid of heights, so he makes a dorky attempt to climb up one branch, then falls so he doesn't have to keep climbing. Trish gets down (rather easily, for someone who just 2seconds ago couldn't do it), and Peg announces that they should begin putting on their costumes for the ceremony.

After the "rescue", we see Mams in the kitchen, most likely making a stew out of all the camp counselors she killed in Friday the 13th. YUM! Peg rushes into the kitchen dressed as a clown, and practically gives her a heart attack. She tells Peg that she has a costume on as well, even though it looks like any normal black outfit. When Peg guesses it's a witch dress, Mams tells her that it represents "darkness", her greatest fear. As Peg sets the table for dinner, Jennifer comes downstairs wearing a box. She admits that her greatest fear is claustrophobia. The girls share a laugh over the costumes and find Ned in the kitchen with Mams, wearing a shark costume. He tells them that the movie Jaws traumatized him as a young child, and the fear stuck with him through the years. Chris walks in dressed in a sheet covered with words and question marks. His fear? Making decisions.

Ugh. This movie's giving me a headache. Can we just skip it this week? Whattaya mean, "NO"??? Okay, fine, but one of YOU readers are paying for the asylum I wind up in after I finish watching this thing.

Next, Lisa Ann and Trish enter. I have no friggin' clue what Trish is supposed to be representing(unless her blazer is made out of snakeskin, looks like a normal jacket to me), but Lisa Ann is dressed in a slinky red dress, representing her fear of blood. Mitch comes in screaming, to make everyone jump, but is not wearing a costume. He tells the group that he isn't afraid of anything, but they point out to him that he reacted badly to climbing the tree. I guess a costume representing acrophobia would've been pretty tough to convey. Jazzed for a party, they all get seated in the dining room and wait for Michael and Gramps-zilla to appear. Oh, and Morty is seated as well, at the head of the table.

The lights suddenly go out! Aww, it's just Mikey being a melodramatic a-hole as usual. Nice way to scare your grandmother, you douche. When he turns them on again, everyone can see that he is dressed in a tuxedo. Great, his greatest fear is waiters? Nope. He gets down on one knee and proposes to Peg. Before she can say yes or no, the lights go out after a fuse blows. Mams lights a few candles before recruiting Mikey to go to the basement with her to check the fuse box. Everyone else gets up from the table, except Jennifer who is trapped by her bulky box costume. Comedy gold. These guys must've written for Henny Youngman too.

Mike and Mams make their way to the fuse box, and find Crow's corpse on the floor. While Michael is reeling from the discovery of his friend's body, Mams reveals that she found him in the barn and "took care of it", implying that she did the same on the day Michael's dad died. Wait, what was that last part? Michael tries to run away, but flashbacks and another headache make him stumble, and he passes out.

When Mike wakes up, he is back in the dining room. Peg and the others find him, and help him to get up. They begin talking and realize that Jen is gone. Uh oh. Even worse, her box is in the corner, dripping with mysterious red stains....

They open the box, revealing Jennifer, wrapped up in her own intestines. Well, at least she doesn't seem to be claustrophobic anymore! Michael does the most rational thing he can think of: he tells the group that Morty has been possessed by the ghost of his dad, and is killing people. Sounds rational to me!

From here on in, the accusations begin flying! Crow is blamed, until Mike and Mams(wasn't that a talk show in the '90's?) admit that they found his body. Then everyone speculates that Grumpy-Gramps must be the killer(he has my vote, too; wasn't Crow killed IMMEDIATELY after Gramps argued with him???), which Mams scoffs at. Michael suggests that it is Morty, who has come to life to kill them all. That leads the others to the conclusion that it's Mike himself doing the killings, seeing how weird the place makes him and all.

Mike insists that the killer IS Morty. Peg stands by him, and, after a brief discussion, the others agree to help search the house. Lisa Ann and Mitch go to their bedroom. While Mitch is trying to calm her down, Lisa Ann opens a closet and comes face-to-face with Morty. She screams like a howler monkey on acid. Then she faints.

Off by themselves, Michael and Peg find the blood-pouch that Morty was wearing before the ritual. That seals the deal for Mike: he fully believes now that Morty is the one killing everybody. He tells Peg that finding Morty will prove it, and she placates him by agreeing to continue the search.

Lisa Ann wakes up. She stares right into Morty's eyes and screams again. Mitch pops up and reassures her that Morty is quite harmless. Lisa Ann gets turned on by the adrenaline rush that all of these frights are giving her, and she seduces Mitch. Morty continues to stare at the couple as they make out. He looks bored. Hey Morty, welcome to MY world.

We switch back to Mike and Peg. Feeling insecure, Peg tests Mike's love by asking him a "relationship" question...you know, like, if you were stranded on a desert island, who's the one person you'd want with you? Well, Mike fails the test. When he finally gets the point of the question, he answers it the "right" way. She hugs him. Geez, your boyfriend just failed to name you as the first person he'd want with him in a crisis, and you're HAPPY??? These 2 idiots deserve each other.

Anyway, she kisses the big dumb galoot, and as he resumes the search down the hall, we see a hand grab her. Mike realizes after a few steps that she vanished, and as he's calling her name, a montage of death scenes starts up: We see his mom getting killed by his dad; we see Lisa Ann drowning; Mitch falls to the floor somewhere, with blood coming out of his mouth...Mike gets overwhelmed by the onslaught of visions and falls over again.

It turns out that Peg was snatched by Chris and Ned. They try to convince her that Mike's a killer, but she won't buy it. They give up reasoning with her, and simply drag her away. Nice friends.

While Mike's eating floorboards, Lisa Ann and Mitch are bumpin' and grindin' like there's no tomorrow. As they frolic, Morty FINALLY decides to come to life. He slooooowly begins shambling toward the bed, and Lisa Ann freaks out when she sees him. Mitch turns and thinks it's Mike in a costume, and Morty gives him a good whack with his wooden arm. While Mitch is struggling to get up, Morty even pulls a "Freddy", and quips, "Going down!" as he throws Mitch out of a nearby window.

Lisa Ann screams and runs into the bathroom as Morty chases her. She locks the door, but he breaks it easily, and catches her. To quiet her down, Morty bashes her forehead into the side of the toilet, then he drowns her. Yuck.

Ned takes Mitch's pulse, but of course he's dead. They all move away from the body, but the action cuts abruptly to Mams and Trish walking into Lisa Ann and Mitch's room. They find Michael there on the floor, wearing the Morty-mask. Trish sees the others outside and tells them that Lisa Ann is dead, and Michael is with them. The trio head back inside just as Michael wakes up.

Michael sees the carnage and blames it all on Morty. He runs out of the room to find the wooden statue, and Trish follows, convinced that Michael is on a killing spree. Personally, by this point in the movie, my bet is on Mams. She DID kill all those counselors at Crystal Lake, after all!

Michael makes his way down the hallway, and a sudden noise convinces him to go up to the attic. As he heads in that direction, Peg pursues him. She calls out his name, and he passes out before he can respond.

When Mikey wakes up, his tuxedo has more blood on it, and there's a trail of blood leading to a dark corner of the attic, hidden by a curtain. He approaches the curtain, only to find Peg hanging by a noose. He gets her body down, but before he can do anything, a locked wardrobe begins shaking. Maybe he's got a lion and a witch in there!

Nope. It's the Talented Mr. Grump-Paw. Michael tries to confess to the murders, but Grumps won't let him. He claims that he saw Morty moving himself, and that the wooden statue also locked him up in the wardrobe. He tells Michael that he must go through with the ceremony. If he can overcome his fear, he can defeat Morty. They cover Peg up with a dirty sheet, then go off to begin the ritual.

In the front yard, Ned, Chris and Trish decide to try to stop Michael before he can kill anyone else. As they debate whether to try to rescue Peg first or stop Mike, Morty shows up in Peg's clown costume. Once again, Morty speaks, telling the others that they're not all right. He then proceeds to knock the trio around like rag dolls, before he tears off the clown suit.

Mike and Grumps find themselves trapped in the attic. Morty either nailed the trapdoor shut, or locked it. Either way, they're going nowhere fast. Gramps reveals to Michael that one of the reasons his dad was a killer was because he tried to face his own fear as well, but failed to conquer it. Grampy's words help Michael, and together, they decide to work at getting the trap door open.

Morty, in the meantime, is still doing Freddy-isms. Y'know, one of the great things about the first movie was the fact that Morty was a bit of a mystery: a silent, ambiguously menacing figure. The keyword in that sentence: SILENT. Here, he's like a cartoon character. Anyway, as Gramps and Michael start to bash open the trap door, Morty stops hitting Chris and vanishes. He magically teleports inside the house and bursts into the attic.

Gramps and Mike start to defend themselves, but Morty pulls a devious trick on Michael: he transforms himself into Mike's dad. As expected, Michael falls for the ruse. When Grumppaw tries to warn Mike that it's a trick, Morty tells him to stay out of it. Morty offers his hand, and Michael takes it. Grumps, afraid for Mike's soul, decides to break them apart. Using an AXE.

Too bad Morty wasn't born yesterday. He anticipates the attack and goes after the old man. During the scuffle, the 2 men bump into Michael, and he gets thrown downstairs. Gramps hurries over to the trap door to see if Mikey's okay, and Michael sees that Morty has dropped the illusion and looks like himself again. Mike tries to help his grandfather, but the trap door gets slammed in his face before he can climb up again.

Gramps and Morty struggle over the axe. Morty finally remembers that he's made of wood, and starts pounding the old man with his wooden fists and a wooden knee to the face. While Grumpy is laid out, Morty summons a pile of rats that climb onto and attack the old man. As Michael peers through a crack in the trap door, it appears that the old man has a heart attack and dies.

Frantic now, Mike rushes through the house. To his surprise, he sees what appears to be Peg with her back to him, staring out a window. She sees him and he suspects that she might really be Morty. Peg tells him that she woke up and searched through the house for him, but avoided the attic. Mikey ain't convinced. He picks up a chair and holds it out like a lion-tamer. Peg asks him to let her prove who she is, so Mike asks her the "relationship test" question she posed to him earlier. She gives him the same silly answer he gave earlier.

Mike removes the blood-pouch from around his neck, puts it around hers, and they embrace. They leave through the front door, and Morty decides to chase them. Somehow, Morty found a way to grow teeth, which are pearl-white and visible as he sneers at the couiple. Mike and Peg get into the car, where Chris is behind the wheel, and they urge him to run Morty over.

Bad plan. Morty morphs into a tree, and they crash into it. Morty becomes himself again and strolls over to the wrecked car, where everyone is knocked out. He plucks Ned out of his seat(still in his shark costume), and throws him into the swimming pool. Then he attacks Chris, and preys on his indecisiveness: Morty handcuffs him to the car's rear bumper, lights a trail of gasoline on fire, then gives him the axe. I think Morty's been moonlighting as Jigsaw! (and by the way, does this mean the Saw movies ripped off dreck like The Fear???)

Anyway, Michael wakes up while Morty is handcuffing and taunting Chris. He gets Peg out of the car and carries her away. Unfortunately, Morty sees them and decides not to watch Chris die. Mike tries to club Morty in the head, but Morty grabs his weapon and sends him flying. As Mike tries to recover, Peg attacks Morty as well, but a smack across the face with a heavy wooden hand knocks her out.

Morty morphs into Mike's dad yet again, and tries to kill Michael with a knife. But, as it turns out, he just wants Mike to become his worst fear: a killer, like dear ol' dad. He tries to force Michael to stab Peg, and his strength seems to make it inevitable. With a quick plunge of the blade--

--Michael stabs the ground next to Peg's head. But he PRETENDS he stabbed her, long enough to trick Morty. Peg wakes up, and they start running away again. In one of the funniest scenes in the movie, Michael finds Chris. He begs Mike to chop his hand off to free him, because he can't bring himself to do the deed. Mike quickly grabs the axe, Chris screams like Dakota Fanning....and Mike simply cuts the chain linking the handcuffs together. Nice, lol. They run away in slo-mo as the car explodes.

At this point, Mams and Peg show up in another car. The survivors all share a Hallmark moment, until Morty leaps between Peg and Mike. Morty tells Mike that he still has plenty of fear for Morty to exploit, which gives Mike an idea. He grabs a thick stick and lights it on fire. Turning around, he tells Morty that he knows the mannequin's greatest fear. As Peg douses Morty with kerosene from a torch, Michael throws the flaming stick, and makes good on his threat. Morty staggers around, giving new meaning to "Burning Man".

As the group watches Morty burn, they all do a symbolic forehead slap when they realize they left Ned in the pool. D'oh! They rush to the pool, only to find Ned calmly wading in the shallow end, still in his shark outfit. He is very calm...apparently, being thrown into a pool by an Indian statue is very cathartic.

As a group, they all agree to stick to a story: a maniac broke in and started attacking the party. As they all file out of the house, Michael stops and stares for some time at the picture of his father. He takes the blood-pouch necklace back, and places it on his dad's picture. As they walk out together, the photo gets a closeup, and we see the dorkiest special effect of the film, as Michael's face slowly replaces his dad's. THE END

Wow, what a wasted opportunity this was! You have a relatively low body count, a ton of red herrings(like: making Gramps look like the killer, or dressing Peg up min the clown suit again after Morty tore it up), a killer who manages to make Freddy Krueger seem "deep", and an ending with no real surprises or scares. But the biggest disappointment was Morty himself. I can understand having another actor in the suit, but why change the look of the character? Seriously, my guesses about the grandparents or Mike being the killer were better than what actually happened in this mess. 2 out of 5 trees, just for wasting my time.

What did I learn from The Fear: Halloween Night?
-If you can't swim, dress like a shark. It allows you to float and be rescued just in time.
-Ancient Indian monsters love wisecracks.
-Don't always assume that having Jason's Mom in a horror movie makes it a scary movie.

Next up: Friday the 13th Part III: The Saga of Shelley!!(okay, that's not a real subtitle, but I liked Shelley, he was a fun dude.) Have a scary weekend!