Mr. Jingles

Well, new week, same genre. This week, my agony runs deep with Mr. Jingles, the "sequel" to SICK. Ugh. All right, let's just take a deep breath and try to get through this as painlessly as possible. SPOILERS, as always, but save yourself from misery and just never rent this.

Right off the bat, I just started watching this thing, but I don't see how it's a sequel. None of the characters seem to be connected to the first film at all, and besides the fact that there's a clown killing folks, the two movies have nothing in common. Well, unless "bad production values count. Another bad sign? Many of the opening credits only give first names, and they weren't using a spell-checker. I guess no one wanted this crap coming back to haunt them on their resumes...

The movie opens up with a "young girl" named Angie watching a clown named Mr. Jingles kill her family. Angie looks about 30(okay, maybe mid-20's), but has pink pajamas and pigtails, so I guess we're supposed to buy the premise that she's a kid. As Angie hides, the clown murders her mother: first by stabbing her,then by bashing her head repeatedly into the floor. The sound her head makes smacking against the floor is cheesy and poorly timed with each impact shown.

Anyway, once Mr. Jingles finishes killing off her mom, he goes looking for Angie. Oh, and he's able to locate her by the smell of her urine. Yup. Maybe he should be called Mr. Tinkles. He also looks a little like Carol Channing.....

Outside, 2 detectives are sitting in their car, apparently just randomly going door-to-door with the hope that a murderer shows up for them to apprehend. Gee, that's logical. They hear the noise of Angie fighting off the killer, and rush to the rescue. The cops shoot Mr. Jingles to death, but he promises to return for Angie right before his injuries kill him.

The story then picks up the action about 7 years later. About the only change in Angie is that her pigtails are gone. Hooray. Through her conversation with her shrink, we find out that she's been hospitalized ever since her parents were killed, and that she's about to be released into the custody of her aunt Helen, where she'll be raised with her two cousins Heidi and Dylan, both of whom are also "teenagers".

Heidi can't wait to see Angie again, but Dylan could care less. He's Goth, so his role consists mostly olf him being surly and showing the emotional range of a fern. A dead fern. In the trash. He and his friends decide that the best way to welcome Angie home is to play cruel pranks on her during her welcome home party, and crack jokes about her family being murdered in front of her. Boy, and I thought MY family reunions were tough to sit through!

Angie is picked up by Aunt Helen(who, along with cousin Heidi, looks like she does porn...), and falls asleep during the trip home. She dreams about Mr. Jingles, who grins at her. Angie wakes up very abruptly, causing Aunt Helen to worry about her.

Then the story switches to the office of the mayor. He seems pretty upset about Angie's release from the hospital. He gets a mysterious phone call, swears at his secretary, and generally chews the scenery. Who cares? Not me!

Back at Aunt Helen's house, Dylan is smoking weed with his friends Chris, Curtis and Melanie. He tells his friends the story of Mr. Jingles, who apparently targeted several families from their neighborhood. Heidi disrupts their powwow session to let her brother know that Angie and their mom are on their way, and the pot party quickly disbands.

The movie delivers another random scene. A mystery man surrounded by candles is reading a book. He declares that someone is returning that very day, then he slams the book shut. HUH?

When Aunt Helen and Angie get home, Dylan and Heidi come outside to welcome Angie to her new home. Inside, Heidi waits for Dylan to leave, then shows Angie where her brother stashes his pot. In his room, they find a scrapbook he's been keeping, filled with clippings about Mr. Jingles and his murders.

Dylan heads to Melanie's house, where he tries to back out of the prank they had planned. Mel's dad overhears them and seems interested in the news about Angie's return. Um, shouldn't these people be dying soon? PLEASE?

Nope. Another scene change. Some drunk guy staggers over to the local graveyard to tell all of his woes to the dead. During his drunken tirade, he hears bells, and Mr. Jingles chops his arm off. Then the clown hacks him into pieces.

Angie and Heidi take a walk, and Heidi reveals that she enlisted her friends to throw Angie a party. At the same time, Aunt Helen gets a phone call, and is forced to fill in at work that night. Gee, a house full of unsupervised 20 year olds pretending to be teens....I wonder what will happen?

The mayor has a rendezvous with Melanie's dad. They discuss all of the mysterious phone calls, and it seems that the caller is the unknown guy with the candles. There's some conspiracy involving how Mr. Jingles died, and they're all in on it. Once again: who cares? So far, this is the least slashiest slasher ever slashed! If it doesn't start picking up steam, I may go on a killing spree myself! The only real mystery is why this is considered a sequel to SICK.

Dylan and his friends are discussing the night Angie's family was murdered, and Melanie shows up. Their pranks involve grave-robbing and a bag of props, so maybe Carrot Top will have a cameo. Again, everyone survives the scene.

Mel's dad and the mayor meet to discuss Mr. Jingles. During the conversation, the mayor gets a phone call, and finds out about the murder at the cemetary. He suggests that they should stick together, but Mel's dad would rather find his daughter and leave town.

Heidi introduces Angie to her friends, none of whom can act their way out of a paper bag. After they all debate the merits of having sex with band guys, one girl, named Trisha I think, is called a "slamhole". Wow.

The goth kids see the meeting at the grave. The 3 adults discuss the night of the original murders, and it's revealed that Mr. Jingles was the victim of vigilantes. The real stalker was a guy Mr. Jingles tried to stop. He went on his killing spree after escaping from prison, to get revenge on the townsfolk who ruined his life.

Aunt Helen tells the girls that she has to go on a business trip, and quickly leaves. At the graveyard, Mel tells Chris and Curtis to dig up Mr. Jingles' headstone, while she and Dylan start setting up props and decorations designed to scare Angie.

Heidi calls her friends, and tells them that Angie's birthday/welcome home party is on. At the gravesite of Mr. Jingles, Chris and Curtis hear ghostly circus music. Mr. Jingles castrates Curtis, then throws the teen's severed penis at Chris, who promptly get stabbed by the demonic clown. I'll bet that John Wayne Bobbitt hates this film even more than I do...

Dylan, now alone with Melanie, tries again to change her mind about the pranks on his cousin. Mel changes his mind instead, by going down on him. Back at the wacky demon-hunter's apartment, Bill(Mel's dad) finds a book on demonology, and the wacko monster hunter reveals that he was one of the cops who shot Mr. Jingles. A flashback is shown, only this time we see that the clown uttered a demonic incantation of some sort before he actually died. He apparently spent his prison time studying the occult, and sold his soul for the chance to get his revenge. Whatever.

Heidi takes a shower, and goes topless for us. Remember when I said earlier that the aunt looked like a porn actress? Well, I was wrong. This chick is definitely the porn-movie type. While she's bouncing around and singing, Angie falls asleep and dreams about Mr. Jingles again. When she wakes up, she tells Heidi that Mr. Jingles told her he'd be back.

Dylan and Orca--oops, I mean "Mel" finish having sex, and decide to get ready for the night of pranks. The domon-hunter and Bill get their "enchanted" weapons ready to fight Mr. Jingles, when there's a knock at the door. It's the clown, who punches his supernatural fist through the demon-hunter's gut, and gives Bill a blood-soaked middle finger on the other side, cackling the entire time. Mr. Jingles produces 2 axes out of thin air and proceeds to hack Bill to death.

Back at the house, the girls engage in more pointless jibber-jabber about boys. Heidi enters the room, bringing Dylan's secret stash of pot with her. As they start lighting up, the boys arrive. There's a blond guy named Parker, some other dude named Rusty, and the rest are all just fodder waiting to die.

Dylan and Mel show up, and Dylan spies his box of marijuana sitting out in the open. He goes inside to break up the party, while Mel changes into a clown costume. Dylan forgives Angie when she produces some pills that she stole from the hospital. He hugs her, and all is forgiven. Awwwwww...

Outside, Mel has finished putting on her clown costume. She practices using a scary voice, then finds the corpses of Chris and Curtis. Mr. Jingles jumps out at her, and kills her with another swift fist-impalement.

Everyone inside the house pairs off. Angie goes into the basement with Rusty, and holds onto her virginity for about a minute. The "slam-hole" girl starts doing it with a guy who looks like a homeless drifter, and the rest stay in the kitchen. Dylan sees what he thinks is Mel outside, and decides to freak out the others by pointing out the clown at the window that everyone else somehow misses seeing.

They go out in the yard, and Heidi trips and falls into a puddle of blood. Her boyfriend, Jason, gets killed from behind, then Mr. Jingles taunts Heidi, right before planting a hatchet in her head. Mr. Jingles cracks a few puns, poses their corpses, then leaves.

Slam-Hole lets Hobo Guy go down on her. As she starts to climax, she opens her eyes, sees Mr. Jingles above her, and is killed. Not realizing that Slam-Hole is dead, Hobo keeps kissing her torso until a thick stream of blood catches his eye. He sees Slam-Hole with an axe in her forehead, and Mr. Jingles kills him as well. Mostly off-screen, sadly.

A hot girl named Jen sends her boyfriend outside with Dylan to patrol. At the same time, Angie has a vision of Mr. Jingles, and stops Rusty from going all the way. He leaves her in the basement, and the clown kills him and a buddy named Parker when they decide to leave.

Parker's girlfriend, who is actually pretty hot, tries to comfort Angie, who is still crying in the basement. This gives Mr. Jingles an opportunity to kill Dylan, repeatedly slamming his weapons into the teen's back until he starts coughing up blood. Hearing Dylan getting killed, Angie and the hot chick escape through a narrow basement window.

Mr. Jingles grabs the hottie, and slashes her throat in front of Angie. She runs back into the house to call for help, but the killer clown follows her. When she discovers all of the corpses inside, sitting at the dining room table(a la Happy Birthday To Me, a much better film than this one...), the police burst in and assume that she killed everyone herself.

During her arrest, the mayor shows up, and tells a cop asbout her parents being murdered in a similar fashion. Outside, Mel's dad arrives and knocks out the cop who was escorting Angie back to the hospital. In the schlocky film's ballsiest moment, he rips off Terminator by saying, "Come with me if you want to live!" The movie ends with the mayor and the young cop being killed simultaneously by Mr. Jingles. THE END
Well, it was better than SICK, but that's pretty faint praise. The gore was certainly impressive(compared to the first film, at least), and this one had a solid clown concept, but it still reeked of "a few friends decide to make a movie for the heck of it" in many ways. 2 out of 5 killer trees, with the hope that they decide to resolve the cliffhanger someday withn an even more polished final product.

So, what did Mr. Jingles teach me?
-Undead, demonic clowns love puns and delivering wounds in the back.
-Any slam-hole can make a film, even if they don't have a clear ending in mind.
-Ex-cons who also dabble in black magic are a dime a dozen. Same with ex-cops.

Next week, I've got both Season of the Hunted and Jason Goes To Hell on my queue, so we'll hsave to see which one arrives first from Netflix. It'll hopefully be a fun week. Happy slashing!

The Summer of the Massacre

Hoo boy, if I had known how many truly awful slasher films there were, I might've reconsidered doing this. This week's movie, The Summer of the Massacre, is pretty damn bad. Before it even begins, we get this message up on the screen(the comments in parentheses are my thoughts as I was reading it):

"Many films have been based on true-life crimes over as many decades as the crimes have been committed, such as Ted Bundy, Ed Gein(...AND??? You could only think of 2 examples?); two of many famous killers. (2 of many? Is this an episode about the Borg?)
All films are truly harrowing piece's(no apostrophe needed, Einstein...) of film-making, able to terrify, unnerve and provoke emotions and thoughts that stay in the mind long after the tape has rewind(Did you mean "rewound"? What, was the budget so tight that you couldn't buy a dictionary?), due to the true facts(...as opposed to facts that are untrue...) portrayed in the features. But none as yet has been so near to the true horror's(maybe there was a punctuation sale at Wal-Mart) as The Summer of The Massacre's real life killer Hammer Head.
Based on a real factual occurrences(Phew! I was worried that this was about FAKE factual occurrences!) involving a malevolent monster called Hammer Head(didn't you just tell us this "true fact"?), whose form of life was cannibalism? (...okay, 2 things: first, this is a fragment, not an entire sentence, so try completing your thought; second, "form of life"? Seriously? And why is there a question mark? There's no question! God, 28 seconds in, and I already have a headache....can bad movies cause tumors?)
This film is a true account(3rd time you've told us...insecure much?) of the savage and unabated blood lust, which befell four very young teenagers(yeah, because those pesky elderly teenagers are a worldwide epidemic...). Four, who could nor would have expected such mad & nightmarish events that day(Is anyone else picturing Snoopy on top of his doghouse, typing, "IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT..."?), which would scare(Did you mean "scar", Hemingway?) the survivor for the rest of their living days...(2 things here, too: First, you just spoiled the ending, knucklehead; Second, wouldn't ANYONE'S remaining days be living???)

Okay, so just to recap: We're less than a minute in, and I hate myself for watching this already. There's another whole section of text, but I'm not going to bother. Okay, so now that we've made it past the 2 walls of badly-spelled text, the actual movie begins. It looks like it was filmed by bored high school students, using whatever odds and ends they could scrounge up.

Anyway, the opening scene shows a young British couple hiking in the woods. The young man, David, is arguing with the woman, whose name I haven't figured out yet, while some dude wearing a $5 rubber mask lurks in the background. David wants to have a nice, quiet weekend camping, while Jane Doe wants to check into a nice, warm motel instead. While debating whether to go back to civilization or not, neither of them sees the masked killer coming close enough to attack David.

There's a short, silly chase around the forest(in which the killer trips and the girl screams like a howler monkey), and the girl actually starts attacking the killer instead. Hilarious. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats. After the second or third time they trip over the same fallen tree, the killer finally catches Bridget Jones' body double and tries choking her to death. When that fails and she gets her hands on a branch to use as a weapon, the killer chases her into some tall bushes. He starts sniffing the ground(maybe it's SUPPOSED to be stupidly funny?), and she leaps at him. They scuffle some more, she screams again, and the killer finally catches her. He bashes her with his hammer several times, and the scene ends.

The very next scene shows another group of Brits packing for a journey and mumbling dialogue at each other. From what little bit I could understand, they lost the map before even starting on their trip. Great. After a long, garbled chat, a long-haired guy brings the map. They start up the van, which sounds like it's having an asthma attack, and begin going to wherever the Hell they're heading.

They stop twice. The first time, it's so the long-haired guy can get out and get sick. The second time is to plan a route or something. I swear, the dialogue is mostly gibberish, and the camera is a handheld shakycam. It's like watching an Andy Warhol movie, minus the artistry. Oh, and I think one of the guys is named Nick, but I'm still not entirely sure. ENUNCIATE!!!

Now, where were we? Oh, right....the movie's still on. Crap. Why couldn't the DVD implode like The Sororitydid? Anyway, the Austin Powers Squad find their way to a place called Blackwood, the home of Hammer Head. The van's in rough shape, so they decide that, rather than staying on the main road, they'll cut through the tiny village to find a gas station quicker.

They eventually find a gas station, but it's abandoned. When Nick gets angry and starts to deface the building, a wino staggers up to him and starts mumbling about sharks. Sharks, a killer named Hammer Head, get it? A real laugh-riot.

Anyway, Josh(the one with the short hair) elects to stay behind with The Yeti, so named by me because of a white, furry vest she wears. Josh plays a prank on her, so they decide to spend some quality time apart. I hate it when Mom and Dad fight.

So Josh leaves to pee, and Hammer Head follows him into the woods. The killer bashes him in the head several times with the hammer, then wraps his face in Saran Wrap, before wrapping the rest of the wrap around a tree to prop the corpse up. Nice.

The Abominable Wo-Man gets tired of waiting for Josh to return, so she decides to look for him. When she finds his body at the tree, for some reason, a nursery rhyme starts playing. Uh.....okaaaay. Hammer Head grabs Yeti and nails one of her hands to a tree, then leaves to haul Josh back to his lair. Yeti pries her hand loose and starts running.

Hammer Head follows the girl, and taunts her with his grunts and growls. He ties up her hands, then drags her to his house in the woods, where he strings her up in an upstairs room. Instead of killing the girl, he decides to finish off Josh first He trusses up the corpse like a turkey, then carries him back to the van.

At the vehicle, Hammer Head encounters Nick and the other girl, who take off into the woods. Together, the couple hide in the trees and try to come up with a plan. The phenomally stupid plan consists of Nick hiding behind a tree, Hammer Head attacking him, and Julie screaming. When Nick knocks the killer out temporarily, he and Julie split up and she promptly gets lost among the trees.

She does what all damsels do: she shouts to let the killer locate her, then grabs a branch to use as a weapon. Hammer Head somehow sneaks up behind her, and the chase resumes. She gets her foot caught, but escapes the killer after hitting him a few times with her makeshift weapon.

Nick, in the meantime, also finds a stick to use as a weapon. His is pointy. He waits for the killer to look for him, then sneaks up and attacks the psycho. They chase each other around, keep knocking each other out, then find themselves in a cornfield. The killer gets a corn cob in his eye, but keeps on coming. Nick stabs him in the gut with the pointy stick, then hits him in the head a few times as well.

Logically, the minute Nick turns away, the killer gets up and attacks him. Nick is bashed to death with the hammer, and the sequence finally ends. It's followed by several scenes of Hammer Head sewing up all of the wounds Nick gave him, grunting and shouting the whole time.

Yeti wakes up in the house and unties her hands. Walking through the killer's house, she finds body after body, most of them torn apart. She grabs a wooden plank to defend herself with and slooooowly tries to escape.

She doesn't get far. Hammer Head meets her at the front door, and she hits him with her board. He chases her back into the house, where he traps her in a room filled with bodies and body parts. Hilariously, she puts some distance betweemn them because he stops to redecorate the room by putting some of the dismembered parts in specific places. Very feng shui.

Yeti finds the road, then hides in the woods when she hears the killer pursuing her. She goes in the opposite direction, but decides to give away her location by tripping and screaming. Very thoughtful of her. Hammer Head tries to find her, which should be easy, given her furry outfit. She even stands out in the open.

Hammer Head gets her on the ground, but she fights back yet again. This goes on until hde tries hugging her to death. I shit you not, this actually happens. He drops the hammer to strangle her, and she attacks him with his own weapon.

She staggers away, and a note onscreen tells us that she was found 2 days later. Her injuries included some fractured ribs, internal bleeding, and a miscarriage. Yup, I guess she was pregnant as well as a bonehead. The wall of text goes on to say that the cops found the house the killer was living in, along with 19 corpses, but no sign of him. THE E--no, wait. There's another scene in the credits. A guy is calling the authorities to report that the couple from the first scene vanished with the equipment he rented to them. Hammer Head kills him right after the call. He even tears the guy's eye out. THE END, finally.

Boy, what a stinker. Everything about this one was botched...the acting, the effects, the music...you name it, it was guaranteed to be terrible. I'm giving this one a big fat ZERO trees out of 5. Heck, I'm not even going to do my usual summation of the highlights. Next week, I review the sequel to S.I.C.K., Mr. Jingles. See you then, fellow movie masochists.

SICK

This week's slasher is SICK...literally! It's Sick Insane Clown Killer, or "SICK". Get it? Well anyway, let's watch this crapfest!! Prepare for massive, clowny SPOILERS!!!

The very first scene nearly made me shut the DVD off. Oh, don't worry, it wasn't horrible like The Sorority or anything...it was a blank screen. I restarted the movie, and now there's a woman in pink. She's having a fight with someone named Bill, who pulls out a knife and stabs her to death.

Oh, wait, she's not dead. She asks "Billy" what he's doing, and the camera pans down to answer her question. Billy has apparently cut a vertical slash into her torso, and is eating her alive. Nice guy, that Billy.

The title comes up, and we hear a guy discussing a party that weekend. He whips out a guest list, which saves me the trouble of having to tell one generic victim after another. The names are Roger, Beth, Mark, Susan and Tracy. The guy crosses out two names, puts check marks next to two, and circles the last one, Tracy. Oh, and the guy's name is Brandon, as a co-worker helpfully enters his office to tell me.

The co-worker tells Brandon that he needs him to do some extra work that very weekend, which doesn't make Brandon too happy. When the co-worker tries to tell him that he has important work too, we see a flash of the guy dressing like a woman. Uhhhh...huh?

Brandon refuses to do the work, and tells the other guy off. Then he jogs to the elevator. When it doesn't arrive fast enough, he races for the stairs. Boy, this guy REALLY likes weekends!

Oops. It turns out that his "date" for the party doesn't know she's his date yet. Because this is a movie, Tracy eventually says yes to his invitation. A brief flashback reveals that Tracy's boyfriend recently left her for another guy. Apparently the film is going to keep doing these weird, quick flashbacks whenever the script feels like it.

A montage shows Brandon and his friends packing for the weekend. When they finish, and Tracy still hasn't arrived, Brandon reluctantly agrees that they should get going. Tracy watches them from her car, parked a short distance away. Just before they drive off, Tracy pulls up and decides to go along anyway. Yippee.

There's a pointless driving montage, followed by a dog barking at a bird, followed by even more driving. They finally stop, at a pool hall called Madden's Lounge. While Mark and Brandon watch their dates enter the restroom, a hooker propositions the two guys. Tracy and Susan return, and the hooker scurries away. After ordering drinks from a Weeble, the 2 couples watch another couple have a spat. Mark and Brandon bet on whether or not the girls will ask the distraught woman to tag along.

She does.

The journey resumes, and the new girl, Denise, tells them that she met the guy while hitching for a ride. He acted creepy, and she refused to travel with him any further. She wonders aloud if he might follow them, like a stalker. Hmmmmm....

At the house, the girls bond over relationship woes. I suppose if these women were better actors, this scene might be somewhat amusing. To tell the truth, I've seen porn with better acting. AND dialogue!

That night, they all sit around a fire and tell scary stories. Denise tells a scary story about a town where children keep vanishing. The main suspect is a hospital worker who dresses like a clown to entertain sick kids. When a giant shoe print is found outside one child's house, the clown is questioned, but later released.

According to her story, the townsfolk form a posse to find the clown. They tie him to a tree, and torture the guy, eventually beating him until he dies.. When they return to town, they discover that the kid lied about the entire incident. The clown disappears, but not before killing the child and forcing her parents to eat her remains, before killing them as well. The story ends with Brandon jumping into the clearing, hoping too scare them all by wearing a clown mask.

Everyone leaves, except for Mark and Susan. Susan starts asking questions about Brandon, because she finds him to be creepy. Mark says that Brandon was a friend from school, but that they had only recently become friends again. He seems to not know much about Brandon. Hmmmmm.....oh, and did I mention that Denise is mysteriously missing?

Tracy forgives Brandon for his prank and even lets him give her a massage. This is quickly veering into science fiction. During this scene, Mark and Susan have a spat over Denise being attractive, as well as crazy-acting. Inside, Brandon's massage turns on Tracy, and they decide to take it to the next level. Denise watches them, as she just so happens to be right outside their window.

In the middle of the night, Tracy goes downstairs to get a bottle of water from the fridge, and Denise sneaks up and scares her. She grabs the bottle from Tracy's hand, but thanks her for picking her up on the road earlier. Talk about mixed messages!

Susan wakes up after hearing someone calling her name. She slips on a robe to explore the house, and a shadowy hand sloooowly reaches for the woman. The scene ends with Susan making a gasping sound, but we don't see what happens to her.

Brandon gets up too, and finds Denise sitting in the dark kitchen, smoking a cigarette. He bums one off of her, and Denise seduces him into having kitchen-sex. Is this horror, or a softcore porn flick?

The next morning, Tracy finds the fridge filled with creepy dolls and a threatening note. They all accuse each other of placing the dolls there, but no one 'fesses up. Denise even suggests that it might be the handiwork of her jealous, insane lover. Tracy starts packing, and when she and Brandon start to argue, Mark announces that Susan has disappeared.

After Brandon tries to persuade Tracy not to leave, Denise claims that she saw Susan walking near the river. They decide to delay leaving, so that they can search for Susan first. Before they start out, they hear a weird, distorted howl-scream. Tracy nearly decides to stay at the house, but when she hears another scream, she changes her mind. The 2 guys ask her to get Denise, but now she's gone as well. They all agree that she seems pretty suspicious at this point.

In the house, they find another threatening-looking doll. They all talk about how weird Denise is, but Brandon's the only one who doesn't agree. They find her smoking behind a tree, and she tells them that when she saw Susan leave, she made statements about her marriage being on the rocks. No one believes her. Oh, and Denise also claims that when she heard the weird shrieks coming from the woods that she also heard someone talking nearby.

Brandon grabs his gun from the car, they leave a note in case Susan returns, and they all start hiking through tghe woods. Denise leaves to pee, and brings a piece of Susan's clothing back with her, to show to the others. She "found" it.

As they start to really worry, we see Susan tied to a tree. The person who took her is brandishing an axe and wearing a clown mask over his face. Damn, I guess that eliminates Denise as a suspect. The killer taunts her with a tongue twister, then lets out a weird roar.

When they hear the roar, the quartet start arguing. It leads up to Brandon slapping Denise, and Tracy sees that maybe he's not the nice, shy person he presents himself as. They all find a "doll corpse" nailed to a tree, covered in what might be blood. Denise thinks it's "George", they guy she fought with back at the bar, and they all hurry to get back to the cabin. Along the way, they miss seeing another "doll corpse" in the grass. Susan is seen crying, as the killer starts caressing her with the edge of his axe.

Back home, they find the note gone, and Susan's clothes laid out on a bed, as if she were still in them. At the collar of the shirt is a doll's head. Brandon then announces that the phones are dead. Even the cell phones don't work. When the car doesn't start, they find the wires in the engine broken, and another doll left for them to discover.

Brandon decides to go out to the shed, to see if any engine parts can be found to fix the car. When they unlock the shed, they find blood and dismembered body parts everywhere. Many of the parts are stripped of any flesh, implying that they've been there for awhile, possibly years.

Mark announces that he intends to look for his wife once more, before night falls. Brandon suggests that he and Tracy should stay at the house, so Mark takes Denise along with him. Hey, wasn't he convinced that she was a psycho, not even ten minutes ago?

As Mark and Denise wander through the woods, they hear an axe striking wood. Denise tells him that she made up the stories about the psycho boyfriend to piss off Brandon and Tracy. Brandon and Tracy, meanwhile, realize that most of the stuff with the dolls and the notes happened during times when Denise had mysteriously wandered off.

Denise gets Mark to admit that his marriage was in trouble, then she seduces him. While they have sex in the woods, the chopping continues. Then we see Susan again, either unconscious or dead, still tied to the tree. The clown taunts her once more, then beheads her with the axe.

As night comes, Brandon decides to see if he can find a CB radio to reach the authorities with. Denise and Mark split up after having sex, to "cover more ground", AKA, to get Mark killed faster. Brandon finds the radio, and uses it to call for help, and finally gets a response. He gives the person on the other end his address, but it looks like it's the killer he's talking to, given that the mystery man's home is "serial killer-y".

Mark finds more doll parts while looking for Susan, and the killer is watching him from a nearby hiding place. Mark finds the killer's lair, filled with corpses, candles and guts everywhere. His quick search also reveals the clown costume. He finds Susan propped up against a tree, then escapes before the killer can grab him. In the distance, Denise sees Mark finding the corpse, and runs away.

She gets back to the house, and tells Brandon and Tracy that she thinks that Mark killed Susan. Neither one buys her story, and Brandon pulls the gun, ordering her to sit. They tie her up, then Brandon leaves to find Mark.

The clown follows Mark, waiting for him to get tired. Denise tries to convince Tracy that Brandon isn't telling her the truth, and even tells her that she seduced Mark. When Brandon returns, he convinces Tracy that Denise is messing with her head, then the CB starts up. A man claiming to be the sheriff tells them that he got their call, but that it might be awhile before he can rescue them.

Mark stumbles in, then keels over. The axe is stuck deep between his shoulder blades. Before anyone can really react to this, there is a knock at the door. The person claims to be the local sheriff, but they insist on seeing him at the window first. To no one's surprise, the face at the window is a clown.

Tracy goes hysterical, and Brandon tries to calm her down. They get started on boarding up the doors and windows, and the killer cuts the lights, leaving them screaming in the dark. Brandon gets a flashlight, lights several candles, then hears a door open. They stay in the barricaded room until Brandon tells them to create a diversion, so he can escape and get help.

Brandon runs through the woods in the dark, then stops a few feet away to light a cigarette. The girls then see 2 doors rattle at the same time, and at one of the doors, a hand waves Susan's severed head around.

The next morning, Tracy wakes up to find Denise sitting next to her, holding a gun. Denise leaves to go to the bathroom, and Tracy hears her scream the moment she leaves. Then Brandon shows up and embraces Tracy, telling her that it's over. From behind, a white glove taps her on the shoulder, and Tracy sees that Brandon was in cahoots with the clown the entire time.

The clown is revealed to be Billy, the unseen killer from the first scene. He's Denise's uncle, and they, along with Brandon, enjoy luring unsuspecting people to the woods, so that they can murder and eat them. Uncle Billy drags Tracy away for that nights' "dinner", then we see a final scene back at Brandon's office, where he invites some clients to spend the weekend at his cabin. THE END

Eh. The cool-looking demonic clown on the DVD and the menu screen is not in the film, and the body count's a little low, but I've seen worse. I hope that some of the other clown-related slashers on my list have a little more scary stuff, though. This was pretty slow, and the revelations at the end seemed kind of tacked-on, as if the writer wasn't sure how he wanted the film to end. 2 killer trees out of 5.

This week, watching SICK, I learned:
-that not all clowns are scary
-that the cooler the killer looks on the DVD, the lamer he will look when you put said DVD into a player...
-all you need to make a slasher movie is a half-baked script, and your friends as actors. Yeesh.

Well, my next endeavor is called The Summer of the Massacre. Gosh, I wonder what it's about? With such a mysterious title and all, it's a real brain-stumper. See you next week!

Friday the 13th 8: Jason Takes Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santa Claws

'Twas several nights after Christmas and it had many flaws,
Because I ended up watching something called Santa Claws.
It had lots of sex, it seemed less slasher than porn,
But it sucked as a slasher, so it's getting my scorn!
SPOILERS will follow, as they always do,
So if you want to see it first, I bid you adieu!

The film starts off with a young boy named Wayne.
He saw Mom boinking a stranger, which drove him insane!
Wayne grabbed up a gun and shot them both dead,
Then the credits came on, when I wanted gore instead!
Our heroine is a model, named Raven Quinn,
She poses in the nude, wearing not so much as a grin.
Wayne's now her neighbor, as well as grown-up,
And has an unhealthy obsession with her double-D cups...

One day they chat, and she treats him real nice...
So he decides to put all of her co-workers on ice!
Oh, and he keeps on a table a mannequin's head,
Which looks like Raven (but much less brain-dead).

To make matters worse, Raven's single--and how!
Her husband's a photographer, and has models to plow...
His mother and sister tell lies to Raven's kids,
Blaming her for the marriage being on the skids.

At about this time, Wayne starts up his plan
Helping her get ready for Christmas, that crazy lovestruck man!
He screws up though, by moving too fast,
And when Raven gets pissed, his brief happiness has passed.

She then starts to flirt,
Boy, I wonder why her mood changed?
(Oh wait, it's a delusion...
I forgot he was deranged.)

His first victim, another actress, is killed after a shower,
He uses a claw, killing the delicate flower.
The claw is like one from Raven's last flick,
So Wayne adopts that movie-killer's dumb-as-Hell shtick.

After killing the starlet, Wayne attacks an old man,
He worked at the studio, 'til Wayne kicked his can...
The very next day, Wayne buries the bodies in snow,
Which isn't too bright, 'cause it melts, y'know?

In the next scene, the ex is photographing a sexy witch,
And when Raven calls him, it's her he tries to ditch!
Raven wants to talk, try to work the marriage out,
But her ex is busy getting tits shoved up his snout.

Wayne, by the way, slips Raven's kids sleeping pills,
While we watch another "starlet" strip for cheap thrills.
When the kids are out cold, Wayne buys a Santa suity,
And we see more of that random stripper's booty.

When she gets home, the girl pets her pussy....a cat!
Why, there's nothing at all sleazy about that!
Then she gets naked, and fills her tub up with bubbles,
But Wayne ruins my fun, and just causes her troubles.

He knocks at her door, and gets into her house,
And kills her, that rude, psychotic louse!
Then he resumes babysitting, before Raven gets home,
And she never suspects that they've been drugged and home alone.

The next night, Raven has to "model" again,
So she asks Wayne, once more, to watch her children.
He starts spray-painting his new Santa costume black,
Probably to prepare for his next lame attack.

Unexpectedly, Raven's hubby makes a surprise return home-a,
And finds his kids in a Wayne-induced coma.
He assumes that Raven drugged the poor kids,
And plans to confront over what he thinks she did!

The ex grabs the phone, first to call his mom,
She of course has no idea what's going on.
She tells him that Wayne has taken over babysitting the kids,
And the whole thing makes the ex incredibly livid!!!

He goes next door, but Wayne isn't home,
So he returns to the house, so the kids won't be alone.
He waits for his mom and sis to arrive,
Then goes off to find Raven, as fast as he can drive.

Back in the studio, Raven's removed her top,
This scene is so good, why must it stop?
But alas, it does end, just as Wayne sneaks in,
Later, I'll rewind it, though, again and again!

Wayne kills a secretary, then stashes her in the john,
By the time she's discovered, he hopes to be long-gone!
This all occurs just as the ex knocks at the door,
Some dude lets him in, because the security's piss-poor.

The flunky's the next guy that Wayne kills,
He should be a hitman, the guy's got mad skills!
While this is going on, the ex finds his wife,
And informs her about the looney now in her life.

Wayne interrupts them, in his Santa suit made black,
And Raven now sees that's he totally whacked.
She tries real hard to reason with the guy,
But he decides that the couple both have to die.

The ex and Wayne get into a fight,
When Wayne gets knocked down, the couple escape into the night.
He corners poor Raven, knocks the husband out cold,
Is this thing close to done? It's getting kinda old!

The ex wakes up, and Wayne attacks him once more,
While Raven just stands there, useless to her core.
When Wayne drops his claw to strangle the guy,
Raven finally does more than simply stand by!

She picks up the claw and stabs Wayne from behind,
And shows love for her hubby, who responds in kind.
The ending shows the family together at last,
Putting their troubles squarely into the past. THE END

Sheesh. You know a movie's bad when you get so bored watching it, you start reviewing it like Dr. Seuss. The worst part is, it fails as both a softcore porno AND a slasher flick! How did they manage to do THAT??? It gets 3 killer trees for all of the gratuitous cleavage-baring, and a -1 as a bland and uninteresting slasher flick...so, "2", I guess(although that still seems like way too high of a score.)

I never thought I'd say this, but next week, I'll be glad to watch the next Friday the 13th sequel. See? See how badly this thing traumatized me? I'd like to deck somebody's halls, I'll tell ya that right now!

Frozen

Ever have "one of those weeks"? I had 2(TWO!!) winter-themed movies queued up on Netflix, and both managed to arrive late. I was ready to throw in the towel and just re-watch Session 9, but both arrived (FINALLY) in the mail 2 days ago. Yay. It's a Christmas miracle. Anyway, without further ado, I shall pop in the first film, Frozen, so let's get our eggs nogged and snuggle up to our favorite ho-ho-ho's. I added SPOILERS to the figgy pudding, so be warned! Oh, and I promise to watch the next one IMMEDIATELY after I sign off, to make up for all of these stupid delays.

The first thing I noticed about Frozen is that it's directed by Adam Green, who also directed Hatchet and Hatchet II. That's a good sign, as Hatchet was a fun, crazy slasher flick. and the second one is on my queue. So, let's keep our fingers crossed!

The premise is deceptively simple: 3 friends on a ski vacation are left stranded on a ski lift as the place closes for the night. Will they survive? Was it done on purpose? Is there a kid somewhere in the film demanding 2 dollars from John Cusack?(wasn't part of that set at a ski resort? I may be thinking of the wrong film...)
There's Parker, the cute perky blond; Dan, a smooth-talking guy with charisma to spare; and Joe, aka "Lynch", a guy who looks a little scruffy, but also seems decent enough. The trio of friends have come to this particular slope because Lynch persuades them into thinking the girl who runs the lift has a thing for him. The plan is to let him charm her, in the hope that all 3 can ride the lift for free.
The plan is flawless, save for the fact that the lift operator is a mean-looking guy, instead of some cute bubblehead.

After a quick discussion, Lynch and Dan convince Parker to flirt with the guy until he accepts a bribe. She starts up a conversation with the guy, but he seems pretty immune to her charms.

While Parker's using her feminine wiles to get her way, Lynch and Dan are having a heated debate over why Parker's even there to begin with. It seems that, since she started dating Dan, Lynch and Dan's other buddies haven't seen him around as much. Anyway, Parker gets them all in, but is criticized when the guys discover that she bribed the lift guy with $100, the full amount they gave her. Oops. She was apparently supposed to "ask for change". For a bribe?

Well, whatever. It worked, because they all get to ride up the slope. During the ascent, Parker and Lynch start in on each other. Parker's romance-talk and smoking habit bother Lynch, and his sarcastic attitude and alpha male behavior bug her. As Dan tries to keep the peace, the lift suddenly creaks to a halt. Ooooh, here we go!

Wait, nope, after several other patrons complain, it starts up again. Anyway, they all ski and ride snowboards and blah blah blah, 'til they're nearly worn to a frazzle. Lynch tries to hook up with a cute girl whose skis keep tripping her up, but he nearly gets torn apart by her boyfriend. He defuses the situation by playing dumb, and charms the girl into breaking up with the boyfriend later.

After they find out about the break-up, the friends decide to take one more trip up the slope, but the lift operator refuses. He tells them that some rough weather is moving in, and that he can't risk it. When they remind him that he was given $100, he decides to allow them up one last time. Gee, I wonder what will happen?

Well, as it turns out, a couple of things happen...First, the lift operator is told by a fellow employee that the boss wants to see him. He remembers to tell the other guy that there are still 3 skiers up there, though. Phew!

Oops. It turns out that, as Lynch, Parker and Dan are going up in the lift, they see 3 skiers rushing downhill. When the new lift operator sees them coming, he throws the switch. Talk about bad luck!

Stranded, the trio don't realize at first that they were forgotten. They assume that the lift was stopped due to technical problems, or maybe a skiing accident. They even exchange gruesome ski stories, just to freak Parker out. Once they realize that they were left in mid-air, they try yelling for help, but it's too late by then.

As the day turns to night, they try to come up with some escape plans. Parker suggests that it might be possible to jump from their height with the snowboard, ride down, and call someone. The guys, on the other hand, think it's risky, and still hold out hope for employees to show up and get them down, possibly with ladders.

When it gets darker, they suddenly remember something else: it's Sunday. That means that, theoretically, they could be up in the air until the following Friday. As that dawns on them, Parker starts to laugh. It turns out that she has to pee. As she and Lynch argue over how THAT is going to work, he reminds her that they will all have to figure out a way to go to the bathroom, because they won't be able to hold it all in for 5 days straight. To prove his point, Lynch pees right then and there.

Well, at least it can't get worse...until the storm starts. Damn, the lift operator was right, and the storm is a doozy! Lynch zips back up, lowers the safety bar again, and they all sit tight while ice, snow and rain batter them. Makes me want to take a trip to Aspen!

As they continue to wait for the storm to die down, a pair of headlights appear. They get excited as the vehicle starts driving toward them, and shout and wave with frantic desperation. From inside his plow, the guy can't hear them. Geez dummies, try throwing something down to get his attention!

Wow, they heard me! Dan throws his goggles straight down in front of the plow. Sadly, he does this while the driver is looking at the rear of the vehicle, trying to back up. Angry now(and afraid), all 3 start throwing stuff: skis, goggles, poles, you name it. One item bounces off the windshield, but when the driver looks ahead again, he sees nothing and chalks it up to hail or something. Dumbass!

As the night goes on and the temperature drops, Lynch tries to keep them distracted from the cold by coming up with inane lists: Top 3 Breakfast Cereals, Worst 3 Blind Dates, stuff like that. When Parker loses one of her gloves, Dan turns to reassure her and sees what could be the start of frostbite on her face. He announces that he's going to jump, then get help, but the other 2 urge him to stay.

Dan jumps. He lands flat on his back, and at first it appears that he might be dead. The good news? He sits up. The bad news? Both legs are broken, so badly that the splintered bones are protruding through his pants. Oh, and he's bleeding out---FAST.
Parker tries to throw him her scarf to him to help staunch the bleeding, but it flies away into a high tree branch. Lynch balls up his scarf to throw, and it lands closer, but in FRONT of poor Dan. After several attempts, much agonized screaming and many tears, Dan finally leans over his broken, splintered legs enough to snatch up the scarf. and ties it to one of his legs.

Of course, there's still the OTHER leg...Parker offers to toss her coat, which, while a sweet gesture, is incredibly stupid. Lynch comes up with a dangerous plan of his own: he wants to try to pull himself across the cables, until he can get to a safe jumping point. After considering it, they revise the idea: he's going to cross the cables to the nearest wire-pole, and climb down to the ground to help Dan.

Before they can watch Lynch kill himself on wires, they all hear howling. The wind, perhaps? Nope, it's much worse: wolves. And thanks to Captain Numbnuts, there's now a blood-scent to follow. Great thinking, Dan. Hope you enjoy being eaten alive, dude. Dan starts to freak out, and Parker tells him it could be worse. When asked how, she tells him that he could have been eaten by the Sarlaac in the Star Wars trilogy.(that's Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi...I refuse to acknowledge the other 3 until technology is invented to make them suck less!)

Lynch prepares to scale the wire, but it's blocked by a layer of ice. As he and Parker chip away the ice, fragments of it start falling toward Dan, who covers his face. When he lowers his hands, he comes face to face with a snarling, growling wolf. While he panics, Parker throws something, and scares the wolf away. It's right about then that Dan realizes that he no longer has feeling in his legs. Uh oh.

More bad news, but this time it's up in the ski-lift chair. Frostbite is settling in on both Parker and Lynch. Determined to be brave, Lynch stands on the seat, and starts his rope-climbing idea. A short distance in, he starts to feel the wire cutting into his hands. Then he glances down and rushes to pull himself back into the chair with Parker. When she asks him what was wrong, he tells her not to look down.

Parker looks down. Below the chair, wolves have begun to circle Dan. He begs Parker and Lynch to look away, then just covers his head with his arms. The wolves tear him apart. As he screams to death, his friends try not to watch the carnage. They still see too much, and both start screaming and crying.

Later, they fight over who was responsible for Dan's death. Parker blames Lynch, because he didn't jump first. Lynch tells her that the death was a direct result of her dating Dan in the first place. They both shout, then cry, then console each other. Then Parker gets upset thinking about her dog, She imagines that the dog, while waiting for her to return, will starve to death. They eventually both calm down enough to fall asleep.

The next morning, Parker wakes up and discovers that she gripped the railing sometime during the night. As a result, her hand is now frozen, welded to the safety bar. When she does finally pry her hand loose, a whole lot of flesh stays on the bar. Her cries wake Lynch up, and he sees her hand. He also sees that her frostbite is much worse, and warns her again about scratching it. Oh, and she finally peed, all over herself.

Realizing that they won't last until the weekend, Lynch decides to try to cross the cable again. He pulls himself up, and part of the mechanism holding the chair up breaks, making the chair swing sideways. Lynch pulls himself across the wire to the next chair and rests in it.

Now alone in her section of the lift, Parker tries to keep as still as possible. At about this point, the wolves return. When they see Lynch about to make his next move, they begin to circle underneath his position. He shouts over to Parker, asking her to reach one of the remaining ski poles, and try to throw it as close to the climbing post as she can. She does, but it's not very close.

Lynch climbs out of his new seat and makes his way to the post. As the wolves watch, he actually makes it! Quickly, he starts climbing down, exciting the wolves by losing his footing once. When he gets to the ground, he makes a mad dash for the snowboard and begins to strap it on.

That's all the distraction the wolves need. Two move into position, and one of them pounces on Lynch. He tries to roll away, and struggles to reach the pole Parker threw. As the wolf keeps clawing at him, Lynch gets the pole and surprises the wolf with a sharp jab. Both wolves retreat back into the trees.

Lynch gets to his feet, and starts coasting down the trail, while Parker gets excited. A few moments later, the wolves follow him, and Parker screams for him to get to safety. There is no response, and Parker prays that he made it safely away.

The rest of the day passes with no activity, and that night Parker assumes the worst. The next morning she decides to try to do what Dan and Parker did, but she has no real plan. She sees that the last wheel holding the chair up is close to breaking, and she climbs down the chair. The wheel starts to snap, and as Parker dangles under the chair, it plummets. Luckily, it hangs on by a wire, and the wire stretches enough to the point where she thinks it might be safe to attempt a jump.
Parker takes her leap of faith, just seconds before the last wire snaps. She lands safely on the snow, but the chair falls as well, and injures one of her feet. Ignoring the pain, Parker straps on some skis and takes off down the trail.

A short way downhill, she sees the wolves eating Lynch. They start to growl at her, but the meal of Lynch distracts them, and she gets away. Once she gets to the bottom, Parker staggers past the ski lodge, heading for the main road. She sees a car, but it sails right past her, and she collapses just as she reaches the road.

While she lays there, dead or unconscious, another car arrives. This motorist stops, and he pulls her to her feet. After making sure that she's alive, the driver gets her into the car and tells her that the hospital is 10 minutes away. Parker just stares at her reflection in the sideview mirror. THE END

Phew! While not a slasher film in the least, Frozen was definitely harrowing to watch. The performances were quite convincing, and the tension was thicker than the ice! As a horror film, I'd give it a solid 5 killer trees out of 5. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

And what did I learn from Frozen?
-Ski resorts are all deathtraps.
-Never try jumping off of a ski lift, your legs will break and animals will eat you!
-The need to pee and rescue your starving puppy can give you instant bravery!

Later this weekend, I'll do the other movie Netflix sent me, something called Santa Claws. Sounds awful enough to be pretty fun. I hope. Happy holidays!

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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