I was rather stunned this week as I was making my way to bed to happen upon Gort. He had been generally absent that day, making the Mothership rather peaceful, until I rounded the corner and found Gort holding a large machete above his head and wearing a hockey mask.
Having screamed like a little girl and nearly soiled myself, I stood back up from where I had fallen and asked him what the hell he was playing at. He told me that he was experimenting with a new method of powering the Mothership's engines using the emotion humans called fear and he had been researching a series of films as a method to produce this emotion.
That was all very well, I said, but why was he hanging around outside my quarters dressed up like Jason Voorhees? "Fun," he replied.
If there is one horror franchise that refuses to die, just like its protagonist, it's Friday the 13th. Is this classic slice of slasher exploitation worth re-animating?
Friday the 13th
It is a little-known fact, well known to everyone by now, that the killer in this first offering is not the iconic Jason Voorhees, but his vengeful mother. She still makes for a chilling villain as she takes murderous revenge on the new recruits who replace the negligent councillors she blames for allowing her deformed son to drown at Camp Crystal Lake on Friday the 13th. She picks them off one by one with a series of gruesome and inventive slasher murders as they separate off for carnal relations. Featuring an embarrassing early role for Kevin Bacon, this set the template, not only for a franchise, but for an entire genre. It may not be the first slasher flick, but it is easily the most effective and iconic.
Body count: 10
Verdict: Classic
Friday the 13th: Part 2
Picking up where the last movie left off, we follow a now fully-grown Jason Voorhees, who we discovered at the end of the last movie was still alive, and, in fact, unable to die, due to a bizarre, supernatural mutation. This movie cements Jason as the star of the show, though his well-known hockey mask is yet to appear. Jason, instead, dons a sack with a single eye hole to cover his disfigured features and sets out to avenge his mother. Part 2 improves on the original with inventive deaths, an exciting, clever ending and surprisingly-good characters; no vacuous machete fodder here. There's even quite a sweet romance between a flirtatious young girl and a tragically-paralysed former football player. Of course, it doesn't stop them getting macheted to the face... This may well be the best of the whole series.
Body count: 9
Verdict: Classic
Friday the 13th: Part III
Once again picking up where the last movie left off (after the longest flashback in history...), this threequel takes the story off in another direction. Here we get an on-the-lamb Jason stumbling upon a farmhouse full of drunken teenagers on a bender. Despite a drop in quality, there are a lot of imaginative deaths here, particularly since this was originally Friday the 13th 3D at the cinema, explaining an amusing repeated motif of things flying at the camera. It's all good fun and we finally get to see Jason don his iconic hockey mask as he pilfers it from a goofy teenage horror fan who had been using it to scare people - busted. The film even ends with a great little reverse homage to the end of the first instalment.
Body count: 12
Verdict: Better than you remember
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
As the promiscuous teens did in the movies, the producers kept trying to kill off Jason and failing. This was their first attempt. Jason meets his (temporary) end at the hands of - of all people - Corey Feldman, playing a teenage, amateur horror make-up effects expert. The teen dresses up as Jason to distract him, then machetes him to death. This was to put an end to the ongoing series picking up where the previous instalment ended and to Jason, for now. Until this point, the film is a little pondersome. The movies all focus on the various sexual liaisons of a group of teenagers who have no connection to Jason until he starts hacking them to pieces, but here, the pre-amble takes up most of the run time. Still, far worse was to come...
Body count: 14
Verdict: Just what you expect
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
Lots of Jason cosplay jiggery-pokery going on here as a grown-up version of Corey Feldman's character, who is attending a reform school, is stalked by someone who appears to be Jason Voorhees. Is this Jason, someone posing as Jason or the disturbed Feldman stand in himself? Do we care? The answer is, not really. Starting out depressingly dull, the films picks up slightly as we continue, but this is far below the franchise's usual standard and doesn't even really feel like a Friday the 13th movie.
Body count: 21
Verdict: Best forgotten
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
Heeeee's baaaa-aaack! Our good friend adult Corey Feldman stand in, played by yet another actor, returns to put an end to Jason once and for all by exhuming his body and cremating it. In an all-time record dumbass move, he begins frantically stabbing the corpse with a metal fence post, which catches a lightening bolt and resuscitates our murderous friend, henceforth to appear in zombie form. The director made a point of trying to re-invent the franchise with more meta-humour, including a ridiculous James Bond-style pre-credits sequence, and less nudity; unfortunately, he only succeeded in sanitising a franchise that thrived on exploitation and turning a horror into a farce. Despite this, the film is an infinite improvement on the previous instalment, if still far from the best outing.
Body count: 18
Verdict: Not as good as you remember
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Forever to be known as Telekinetic Tina, the series' new protagonist was a girl struggling with the guilt of using her unexplained psychic powers to put an end to her abusive father. Trying to use her powers to bring her dad back to life, she inadvertently frees Jason from where he was chained up at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Still casting off shades of the last movie, this film is unable to decide if it's taking itself seriously or not. Take the scene where Jason wraps a woman up in a sleeping bag and smacks her against a tree, something later to be used as a gag in Jason X. At least this instalment can boast to be the first to feature horror-legend Kane Hodder as our stab-happy hero and Jason looks amazing, at least until the mask comes off. Hodder would keep the role right up to the end of the official series with part 10.
Body count: 16
Verdict: Not as good as you remember
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Finally freed from the clutches of the previous three directors' odd new formats and Carrie-style shenanigans, Jason is back to his old ways. Here he hops on board a boat full of students on their way to Manhattan for a school trip, leading to a claustrophobic twist on the usual slasher action, before Jason arrives in New York city and it all really kicks off. The quality rockets back up here and there are some brilliant moments, such as a cocky amateur boxer challenging Jason to a fist fight, only to get his head punched clean off, or the climactic scene of Jason melted down to a cowering young boy by toxic waste. It even features an early appearance by DayHWStoodStill-favourite Kelly Hu. Among the best.
Body count: 19
Verdict: Better than you remember
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday
Starting with the novel and meta-textual idea of an FBI agent posing as a helpless teen in a sting operation to catch Jason, this film quickly descends into farce. Jason is blown to a million pieces, but his soul begins possessing victims and turning them into killers like him. It is discovered he can only be killed by a familial descendant, a cue clearly taken from Halloween. Points for trying something different, but the result is just downright odd. The movie does, however, have a couple of great scenes, including a sequence where a woman is impaled on a metal pole, mid-coitus, then split in half as the pole is pulled up through her shoulder. The scene was never intended to stay in the film, as producers only hoped it would make the rest of the deaths seem tame to the censors by comparison. To everyone's surprise, the film was passed largely uncut, and the scene remains a grisly favourite of gore hounds everywhere. Despite the highlights, which also include an appearance by Buck Rogers' Erin Gray, the rest of the movie is just dire. It ends with Jason being banished to hell, seemingly at the hands of Freddy Kreuger himself, as plans for a crossover were afoot...
Body count: 23
Verdict: Best forgotten
Jason X
For some reason, this future-set, scifi re-imagining of the Jason franchise features a good portion of the cast of post-humous Gene Roddenberry creation Andromeda. Here the normally-robotic Lexa Doig is the human counterpart to a this-time android Lisa Ryder. As Jason and the sizzling Doig get cryogenically frozen and awakened by a spaceship crew in the far future, we get a whole new opportunity to see horny teens underestimate Jason. True, they do manage to overcome him with future technology eventually, but only just long enough for him to get a cyborg upgrade and set out on a whole new, future-set franchise that was never to happen. The film has some fun ideas and a great dose of genuine humour, such as the classic 'holodeck' scene where a couple holographic bikini girls taunt Jason into a bit of Looney Tunes-style violence.
Body count: 23
Verdict: Classic
Freddy Vs Jason
The only surprise with this is just how long it took to put the two biggest hitters of cheesy slasher horror in the same movie - ten years of development and rights issues, if you want to know. Picking up where Part 9 left off, ignoring Jason X, Freddy Kreuger from the Nightmare On Elm Street series finds the finally-deceased Jason down in hell and turns him into his minion. This, unfortunately, leaves Jason a little sidelined, at least until the end, when he turns on his new master and we get the mother of all showdowns. It's cheesy as hell and you must forgive the presence of Kelly Rowland and that DayHWStood-favourite Lauren Lee Smith was passed over for a part, but this is still a hell of a lot of fun.
Body count: 20
Verdict: Better than you remember
Friday the 13th
When we heard that Friday the 13th was to be rebooted by Marcus Nispel, the German director behind the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and DayHWStoodStill-favourite Pathfinder, we were quietly optimistic. Indeed, the film is well made, gritty and disturbing, with some solid talent like Supernatural's Jared Padalecki, DS9's Nana Visitor and veteran trash-TV actor Richard Burgi. Despite including plenty of teen shenanigans and copious amounts of grotesquely-fake breasts (what sad times we live in), somehow Nispel forgot to make the film any fun. Friday the 13th was always meant to be sordid, cheap and tacky entertainment, while even the sex scenes in this seem more unpleasantly forced than naughty fun. Nispel dispenses with Pamela Voorhees and Jason's origin in a thirty-second flashback, then sets up and executes a whole cast of campers in the next twenty minutes, before racking up a whole new set for the rest of the movie, making it feel a little contrived and pointless. Jason himself seems more like Leatherface in a hockey mask than the villain we know and love. Not only does he kidnap girls for his amusement, he even wraps a camper up in a sleeping bag and suspends her over a camp fire, leaving her boyfriend to run to her rescue, landing foot first in a bear trap, so he must lay in agony and watch his girlfriend roast alive. This is grizzly and inventive, but far too thought out and downright malevolent for the normally-mischievous and dimwitted Jason. Indeed, the whole film just doesn't feel like Friday the 13th. Close, but no cigar.
Body count: 14
Verdict: Not as good as you remember
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