What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th (2009)

These movies had effectively quit being a series when New Line took over from Paramount around the time of Jason Goes to Hell. It even lost the Friday the 13th name starting with that movie, which makes Jason X a strange wink of a title, because it was the tenth movie in a series whose banner it no longer carried. But as I've said, I wanted all ten of those movies to work together even if I had to make up my own connecting stories. With the 2009 remake, that was no longer a temptation.

I came into this new Friday the 13th expecting an updated version of the 1980 movie. I guess I realized on some level that it would bring in Jason instead of the no-longer-a-twist ending of the killer being his mom, but most of my anticipation about it had to do with better effects, looser restrictions around gore, and possible influence by torture movies like Saw and Hostel. In other words, I figured it would be a more graphic, disturbing version of the same basic plot from the first movie, but with Jason instead of his mom. Happily, it's way cooler than that.

I love how the reboot opens with the final scene from the 1980 film and actually has it set in 1980. For a brief second, I even wondered if I could make this fit somehow into the continuity of the other eleven films. But there's no doing that and as the movie unfolded, I didn't even want to. I enjoyed it as its own thing. 

It quickly jumps ahead to the present day with adult Jason in a sack mask like in Part 2, murdering a bunch of campers who wander too close to his territory. Redheaded Amanda Righetti (whom I loved as Grace on The Mentalist) had all the marks of the Final Girl and I wondered if this was actually a remake of Part 2 with Righetti playing essentially Ginny. 

But then she's attacked by Jason and there's another time jump - six weeks this time - to Jared Padalecki on a motorcycle searching for his missing sister. Of course his sister turns out to be Righetti's character and I was reminded of Rob from The Final Chapter. During the events of the movie, Jason's sack mask is torn off and he replaces it with an old hockey mask that he finds in a barn full of similar antiques. It's a much better explanation for the mask than the silly one from Part 3 where he stole it from a victim who had no business wearing it in the first place.

The reboot turns out to be a condensed version of the events of the first four Friday the 13th movies with professional actors and a great script. Since the filmmakers are no longer making the story up as they go along over the course of a few different films, everything ties together tightly and even the geography around the lake makes more sense. 

The one thing I don't love is the ending. It feels like it has to go for that final, gotcha moment of Jason coming back up from the lake to get someone we all thought was safe. It's cheap and undercuts the relative realism of the rest of the movie and its villain. Rather than the lumbering, mindless killing machine that Jason was even before he became a zombie, this version moves and thinks like a real person. I love that he's fast. He doesn't just crash through the woods like the Terminator, he chases his victims. And while he's clearly deranged and we never fully understand him, there are hints about how he lives and sustains himself. That's all great, so it's too bad that at literally the last second the movie decides to suggest that he's supernatural.

As much as I enjoyed this though, I'm glad we never got any more of these. If I kind of reimagine that last shock as a dream or something, it's a perfect little horror film. I don't know where you take it from here without going down the same path that the series did with a copycat killer or an unkillable Zombie Jason. Those were fun and fine the first time around, but I really like this grounded, mortal Jason and sort of just want this to be all that there is.

What's All This Then? | Jason X (2001)

And so we're done. 

Not really, completely. I'm going to watch the 2009 remake movie, too. But Jason X wraps up the original series by sending Jason not only into the way distant future, but also into space itself where he's probably floating still unless some unlucky ship happens by to pick him up. But we'll probably never see that movie, nor do I want to.

Jason X continues the tradition of the New Line movies of not really trying to have even a shaky continuity, opening with Jason already captured and in the hands of a facility that's just going to freeze him forever since all efforts to destroy him have failed. The movie doesn't care how Jason was captured, but as we saw in Jason Goes to Hell, it's not hard to catch him if you throw enough resources at the project. It's having him stay caught that always proves challenging.

But it's fine. Even though the later movies don't connect to each other, there are enough of them by that point that it's easy to imagine your own connecting story. And I like the audacity of sending Jason into a scifi setting where he can replace xenomorphs in an Alien ripoff. As scifi horror, Jason X is very much B-movie quality, but it's also self-aware, funny, and enjoyably cheesy. I'm glad I watched it, just like I'm glad I watched this whole, crazy series. 

What's All This Then? | Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Wait a minute, Mike! Haven't you skipped Jason X?

Yep! But I'm coming back to it.

My plan was always to tackle these movies in the order they were released, but I watched about five minutes of Jason X before realizing that a) most of it was going to take place in the far off future, and b) that it was totally ignoring the events of Jason Goes to Hell. 

I've finally accepted that these movies are no longer an actual series chronicling a sloppy epic. As far as the filmmakers are concerned, this might as well be an anthology series with each part being standalone. But dammit I started this project looking for an epic and Jason is going to have to cut my hands off with a machete to make me let go of that idea. 

Since Jason Goes to Hell ended with Freddy Kreuger's reaching up from Hell to grab Jason's mask, I hoped that Freddy vs Jason would follow up on that at least better than Jason X did. And it does. 

It's a great premise for a crossover. I'm not up on the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies, so I don't know how closely Freddy vs Jason ties into those, but what's going on is that Freddy is trapped in Hell because the people of Springwood have figured out that if they can keep people from talking or even thinking about him, he'll have no power over anyone. In order to change that, Freddy somehow orchestrates events in Hell to send Jason back to the physical world where he can start killing folks in Springwood. Freddy knows that this will start whispers about Freddy again, allowing him to regain more and more power the more Jason kills and the louder the whispers get. 

Too bad for Freddy though, Jason has his own notoriety and people start to figure out that it's him doing the killing and not Freddy. But by then Freddy has accumulated enough power to manifest himself and he jealously tries to take out Jason before re-embarking on his own murder spree. It makes total sense from a story perspective and the battles between the two horror icons are excellent (outside of a silly, but brief moment suggesting that Jason is afraid of water because he almost drowned as a kid).

The kids in the movie are all pretty great, too. Monica Keena (Bill Pullman's sister in While You Were Sleeping) is the main character and Jason Ritter plays her boyfriend. Kelly Rowland is fun best friend character and I really liked the character of Freeburg, a stoner with my favorite line in the entire Friday the 13th series: "Dude, that goalie was pissed about something."

The movie ends with Jason more or less victorious and free to run around and get captured offscreen in time for Jason X. So I really like this one and it makes me not want to wait until next Halloween to finally catch up on the Nightmare series. 

What's All This Then? | Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

I'm not doing a lot of behind-the-scenes research on these movies, because my curiosity is more about how well they hold together as opposed to the challenges that make that hard. But Jason Goes to Hell so blatantly disregards then end of Jason Takes Manhattan that I got to wondering what was up. Without going into a lot of detail (mostly because I imagine everyone already knows the details way better than I do), Paramount gave up on the series and let New Line take over, but without the Friday the 13th name. Part of getting New Line involved was also about a potential crossover between Jason and New Line's Nightmare on Elm Street series, which of course eventually happened, but I don't wanna get too far ahead of myself.

Jason Goes to Hell makes no mention of Jason's toxic death at the end of Manhattan and instead opens with him back in the woods around Crystal Lake. His entrapment and destruction by a military unit is a great scene that made me wonder why no one had thought of it before. I don't hold that against the previous films; it's just the mark of an excellent idea.

The movie quickly reveals that Jason has been possessed by some kind of demonic spirit (presumably in Jason Lives) which has the ability to jump from body to body, remaking them in Jason's image. And though the film never claims it, it's possible to imagine that this happened in New York and that the Jason who's destroyed at the beginning of this film isn't the same physical body that was disintegrated in Manhattan. That raises some extra questions, but it's the closest I can get to explaining the contradiction. 

The reason it raises questions is because Jason Goes to Hell says that these new host bodies aren't able to hold the spirit for long. The spirit wears them out and needs someone related to the original host (ie, Jason), which means that it requires another Voorhees to inhabit. Fortunately, Jason Goes to Hell provides a few. 

We find out that Jason has a sister (played, I was happy to see, by Erin Gray) who also has a daughter and grand-daughter. The plot of this film is just the spirit jumping from body to body (and murdering lots of people along the way) in its quest to possess one these relatives. 

With these being the rules, my explanation about the spirit's changing bodies between Manhattan and Hell kind of breaks down. The only way I can make it still make sense is if there was another Voorhees that the spirit was able to inhabit after Manhattan and that's who we saw destroyed at the beginning of Hell. It's a crazy stretch, but no less crazy than anything else about these movies.

In spite of these story gymnastics (or maybe because of them), I quite enjoyed Jason Goes to Hell. In addition to the new Voorhees characters (and getting to see the Voorhees' home), there are some other fun, new characters. The father of Erin Gray's grand-daughter is a guy named Steven who looks like a nerd, but ends up being totally badass. I like him much more than Creighton Duke, the bounty hunter he temporarily teams up with. 

Duke looks and acts cool, but in a super one-dimensional way. He's a caricature of a movie tough guy and conveniently knows everything anyone needs to know about defeating Jason, with no explanation of how he learned any of it. But he's not in the movie a whole lot. Steven and his girlfriend Jessica get the most attention and that's good. 

The film ends with Jason's being magically dragged to Hell. I assume that some demonic force is reclaiming the spirit that's been possessing Jason and these other folks. None of that is explained in the movie, but maybe we'll get some answers in one of the next installments. This one wraps up with a surprising cameo by Freddy Kreuger's hand, which I wasn't prepared for since we have one more movie between this one and Freddy vs. Jason. I have no idea what to expect from Jason X except that it somehow involves his going into space. I'm curious if this Hell mythology will be explored there or delayed until the Freddy meet-up or just ignored and left for viewers to make up on their own. By this point, I mostly suspect it's that last option.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

As much as I enjoy the movies that get back to the summer camp setting around Crystal Lake, I also like how Jason Takes Manhattan shakes things up with a couple of new locations. After a quick prelude in the traditional forest, the movie moves to a ship carrying high school seniors to New York City for a graduation trip. Having victims confined on a finite ship with Jason is a fun idea, but so is his ultimately stalking them through the urban streets and alleys of Manhattan. (And I really dig that the ship isn't an actual cruise ship, but a freighter that's been converted into a charter vessel for parties. Seems like the kind of business that might legitimately spring up in a small, rural community near the ocean.)

Something I noticed in the prelude though is that the town around the lake still doesn't know what to do with the camp property. It was a functioning camp at the end of Jason Lives, but had been turned into private vacation cabins by the time of New Blood. Now, in Jason Takes Manhattan, there's a Camp Crystal Lake sign back up when a couple of the high school seniors are out for a private cruise on a small yacht. The community also went through a whole name change in Jason Lives that didn't stick. None of this is a problem though. It makes total sense that a community with this much tragedy in its history would have a hard time knowing what to do with itself.

Another thing revealed in the first part of the movie is that Crystal Lake somehow connects with the Atlantic Ocean (assuming that the lake is in New Jersey as suggested in the first film). When I first saw the yacht, I thought that it must stayed moored on the lake somewhere. But after Jason kills the two kids, he steers the yacht to the dock where the cruise ship is leaving from. So there must be a river that connects the lake with the ocean.

What I don't really understand about all of this is how Jason knows to go to the cruise ship. Maybe there's something on board the yacht that tells him, but why would Jason leave his familiar woods just to kill a bunch of kids on a boat? I don't know, maybe that's a dumb question and the answer is just "to kill a bunch of kids." Maybe Jason's just finally gotten tired of the forest. He's the walking dead at this point, so his thoughts are not our thoughts. It's not really a problem.

An actual problem (though still not a big one, I don't think) is all the time jumps in the series. Each movie takes place around the time that it was released, so from one point of view it's only been about nine years since Mrs Voorhees killed Kevin Bacon and friends in revenge for Jason's supposed drowning. But we've also seen Tommy grow up between Final Chapter and New Beginning, meaning that about 10-15 years passed between those movies. And Tina grew up during the events of New Blood, which have to take place after Jason Lives, because Jason is already in the water when she's a young girl. So that's another 10-15 years of movie time right there. Which means that if the first movie takes place in 1980, the main events of New Blood should take place around 2008 or so, not 1989.

The reason this isn't a big deal for me is because I grew up with Marvel Comics' retconning its historical references all the time. Whether it's Tony Stark's originally creating the Iron Man armor during the Vietnam War or classic Spider-Man's joking about Johnny Carson, I'm used to overlooking references that date particular stories in a long-running series. So Jason Takes Manhattan can take place in 1989 and we just push the first movie back to the late 50s, even though the characters and technology all clearly exist in the late '70s or early '80s. Works for me.

What doesn't work as well is Manhattan's attempt to fool around with Jason's origin story by emphasizing the Kid in the Lake legend. It's fine for Rennie's childhood trauma to be centered on the story of Jason's drowning, because that's what everyone believed for years. Maybe that's the only part of the legend she'd heard. But there's this weird suggestion at the end of the movie that maybe Jason reverts to his boyhood self as a result of being covered in toxic waste? That's just weird.

Toxic waste was a mysterious, magical substance in the '80s, so a nostalgic part of me likes the idea of it's having this weird effect on Jason, but it really doesn't make any sense if we take it literally. Fortunately, the Friday the 13th movies have a long history of figurative endings, starting with Alice's hallucination at the end of the first one. After I complained about how Jason Lives ignored the ending of New Beginning, a buddy pointed out to me that Tommy's attempt to murder Pam may have just been a nightmare he was having. So it's very possible - and I'm going with it as fact - that Rennie simply imagines seeing young Jason at the end, when in fact he's been dissolved by toxic sludge and (one assumes) sent to hell.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Tommy isn't around anymore and after the watered down version of him in Jason Lives, I'm not sorry. I hope he found a good life and lived it. Meanwhile, the series replaces him with basically its version of Stephen King's Carrie and I'm not sorry about that either.

It's especially cool to me that "new blood" Tina is played by Lar Park-Lincoln, whom I formed an enormous crush on the year before in House II: The Second Story. If I'd known she was in New Blood, I would have hurried to see it sooner. 

Not that she's an amazing actor in New Blood, but she's got a great look and is at least as good as anyone else in a Friday the 13th movie outside of Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover. Terry Kiser might give her a run for her money as Tina's psychiatrist, but I'm importing a lot of fondness for him from his performance as Bernie in Weekend at Bernies. 

The story goes that Tina's psychic powers manifested themselves during a summer trip to Crystal Lake when her father got drunk and hit her mom. From the accusations and apologies, that apparently wasn't the first time and Tina wished her father dead. Unfortunately for her, her wish came true when the covered dock he was standing on collapsed, seemingly in response to her emotional outburst. Now, years later, she and her mom have returned to the cabin with Tina's doctor to face her demons in the next step of her guilt-ridden recovery. At least, that's what Dr Crews claims. His motives become less clear and pure as the story unfolds.

And of course there's a neighboring cabin with a bunch of young people gathering for a birthday bash.

Jason is still chained to the lake bottom after the last movie and it's apparently not as voluntary as I speculated at the end of that story. I guess those chains are more strong and tight than they look. He's accidentally freed by Tina though after a particularly harrowing session with Dr Crews and Tina also begins having premonitions of various people's deaths.

I mostly enjoyed New Blood thanks to Park-Lincoln and Kiser and just the addition of a supernatural opponent for Jason. The party neighbors are all generic stereotypes though and Jason's activity is pretty uninspired. But there's some good stuff in his final showdown with the last few survivors, especially once Tina gets some control over her powers and starts using them. 

Sadly, Jason's ultimate defeat is lame, with Tina animating the corpse of her dead father to recapture Jason and chain him again to the bottom of the lake. That sounds awesome on paper and it might have been if Tina's dad was as decayed and zombie-like as he should have been. I'm imagining a longer battle between two zombies, one of whom is controlled by Tina. I would have loved that. But Dad looks like he's been in the water for about twenty seconds and the showdown is over almost as soon as it starts. 

I suspect that this is the last we'll see of Tina, but if that's true it's too bad. She goes on the list with Ginny, Trish, and Pam as Jason survivors I'd love to see in some kind of monster hunting secret society.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

I'm a bit ticked off at Jason Lives for how much it ignores the continuity of Final Chapter and New Beginning. It continues using the character of Tommy Jasper, but completely ignores the fact that New Beginning ended with Tommy's about to murder his halfway house mom, Pam. Pam is never even mentioned, nor is Tommy's sister Trish (though to be fair, New Beginning never brought her up either). And just as frustrating is the change in Tommy's personality. He was super traumatized in New Beginning and I felt horrible for him. In Jason Lives, he's basically Dr Loomis from Halloween: a little unhinged and very ranty about the dangerous killer on the loose, but otherwise functional, even to the point where he can grin and banter with the female lead.

Part of me wants to come up with my own explanation for what happened at the end of New Beginning. Tommy clearly did not kill Pam since the sheriff in Jason Lives knows who Tommy is and doesn't have a murder warrant for him. So maybe Tommy's putting on Jason's mask and picking up a knife in New Beginning was just one last bit of trauma working itself through him, but he realized what he was doing and stopped it before Pam even noticed. Who knows? I don't really care, because obviously the film series doesn't. But it's disappointing.

I like that Jason Lives gets back to the summer camp setting and especially that it ups the stakes by having actual children campers present. I think it kind of cheats in dealing with the kids, but at least it shakes up the scenario some. As much as I like that though (and the counselors Sissy and Paula are likable), I never really got into the rest of the movie. It's impossible to take seriously with its wacky paintball combatants or the cartoony relationship between the sheriff and his daughter. 

And then there's the weird, Frankenstein way that Jason is brought back to life. I buy that Tommy wants to dig him up and cremate him to stop the nightmares. But there has to be more to Jason's resurrection than just a lightning strike. We need some magic or demonic possession or something. I'm curious to see if future installments try to explain any of that or if we're just supposed to be so happy that Jason's back that we don't need a cause for it. If the series doesn't offer anything in the next movie or two, I'll come up with something on my own. Probably involving Pam and Trish, because where are they?!

Finally, there's the ending in which Tommy decides that the only way to permanently destroy Jason is to return him to the bottom of the lake where he was thought to have drowned as a kid. Because why? It's a rubbish theory born of desperation and makes Tommy look even more ridiculous than he already does. 

To the movie's credit, it doesn't even suggest that the theory works. Tommy gets Jason into the water, but Jason is explicitly shown to still be alert and active down there. His hands are free and there's only a loose chain around his neck holding him to the lake bottom. I don't know how much time passes between Jason Lives and the next movie, but if it's more than ten seconds it's only because Jason's voluntarily taking a little break.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

With Jason apparently really, finally dead at the end of Final Chapter, Paramount had to figure out a new way to continue the series. A New Beginning is a shaky start to the next phase of the Friday the 13th saga, but it works for me for a couple of reasons.

I like that it jumps forward in time to put Corey Feldman's character Tommy in his twenties, still traumatized by the events of Final Chapter. There's no mention of where his older sister has ended up, but Tommy has been in a psychiatric hospital and is now being transferred to a halfway house. He's haunted by dreams of Jason's coming back to life though and is generally withdrawn and skittish.

When people start being brutally murdered at the halfway house (it's in the woods, presumably in the Crystal Lake area, but I don't remember that that's ever specified), New Beginning leaves the identity of the Jason copycat killer a secret until the very end. The film throws a lot of suspicion at Tommy, making sure that he's absent when the murders take place, but I enjoyed stubbornly refusing to believe that it was him. I had no idea who else it might be though, with my totally illogical guess being that maybe it was the guy who ran the halfway house, because he disappears halfway through the film and only turns up again towards the end when someone discovers his murdered corpse. Unfortunately, the actual identity of the killer is out of nowhere and underwhelming. It makes sense, it's just not revealed in any interesting way. But I still like that there's so much focus on the mystery of the killer's identity like in the first film.

That was my overall experience with New Beginning. I like about as much as I don't like. And that includes the pool of potential victims. The halfway house's cook and his grandson Reggie are both super charming and cool. I also really like Violet, who's into New Wave music and dances a great Robot. I would have so had a crush on her in 1985. The couple who run the house are great, too, and I mostly like the resident Jake up until his awkward scene trying to get another resident to have sex with him. I also really, really like Tommy and don't want to believe he's hacking people up.

On the other hand, sex-crazed Tina and Eddie are obnoxiously one-dimensional as are the house's hillbilly stereotype neighbors. The final resident Robin is just bland. So New Beginning has some characters and elements that I like and a bunch of stuff that I don't. And also in the negative column is the cliffhanger revelation that thanks to the combination of Final Chapter and New Beginning, Tommy actually has finally been traumatized to the point that he's ready to pick up the mask and machete himself to be the series' new villain.

Knowing that the title of the next movie is Jason Lives and not Tommy Attacks, I'm hopeful that it retcons this development, but by now in the series I'm ready for anything.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

The series not only gets back on track with the misnamed fourth film; it ramps up in a big way with a pretty great story and a more expensive production that includes actual actors. I kept blinking during the opening credits as one recognizable name after another popped on the screen like Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, and Erich Anderson (whom I know as Felicity Porter's dad on the TV show Felicity).

All the actors - even the one's I didn't already know - are much better than the casts in the previous films. Glover is especially watchable as the spazzy Jimmy (his dancing scene alone is worth whatever you pay to watch the movie) and Gremlins-era Feldman is a charming, nerdy kid who also feels like a real person. 

It helps a lot that all of these characters are pretty well defined and don't just fall into archetype buckets the way the Part 3 cast especially did. The plot is mostly driven by the old trope of having a bunch of young people vacation in the forest, but this time it's got characters I actually like. For example, all the Friday the 13th movies have an obnoxious "wild and crazy" guy who's super overt about how horny he always is, but Final Chapter's Ted is also revealed to be extremely lonely, precisely because he turns people off. I feel sorry for him even though he brings his misery on himself.

The established couples in the group also have their own dramas instead of being cookie-cutter hook-ups. Samantha and Paul have been together long enough that they're possibly too comfortable with each other and Paul messes things up by becoming interested in one of a couple of twins the group meets up with. The other couple, Sara and Doug are at the beginning of their relationship and sweetly realizing how much they actually like each other. Seriously, I could watch a straight-up murderless drama about all of these characters working through a weekend together.

(Incidentally, I thought Doug looked familiar, but didn't recognize actor Peter Barton as the guy from The Powers of Matthew Star. It's been too long since I watched any Matthew Star and I'd also completely forgotten that it also starred Amy Steel, who was Ginny in Friday the 13th, Part 2. Funny world.)

Final Chapter also adds another layer by having the group's rental house be next door to a home owned by a single mom and her two kids, Trish and Tommy (Feldman). So there's all this going on even before Jason arrives. 

Not that the movie waits that long to show Jason. After all, he was supposedly dead at the end of Part 3, so Final Chapter picks up immediately after with all of the corpses from the previous movie being taken to the morgue. It turns out that Jason isn't quite dead yet though, so once he dispatches a couple of hospital workers, he's back into the forest in search of more victims. 

That axe in Jason's head looked pretty bad at the end of Part 3, but my suspension of disbelief is high enough to let me buy that he was only mostly dead. The dude doesn't have a lot of higher thinking anyway, he's pretty much just a murder machine at this point. So if you tell me that Chris' axe was able to put him into deep shock for a while without actually killing him, sure, I'll bite. I'm not a brain doctor.

Another cool element in Final Chapter is Erich Anderson as a mysterious woodsman named Rob. I feel like we're supposed to be worried that he might be another killer for a while, but that doesn't make any sense and I never believed it. And there's enough secrecy around him to make him a compelling character even if I'm not afraid he's going to use that machete on Trish and Tommy. As it turns out, Rob is the brother of a character who was murdered in Part 2, so he's actually out looking for Jason to take revenge. I love that addition of a monster-hunter character and that the movie's paying attention to continuity with the rest of the series.

Since Final Chapter isn't set at a camp, but just in the woods surrounding Crystal Lake, it makes me retroactively more comfortable with Part 3's also abandoning the camp setting. With these last two movies, the setting has opened up a bit and I'm okay with that. Part of what bothered me about Part 3 was that the water on the property looked more like a creek than a lake, but I guess it could have been a tributary of Crystal Lake or just a little arm of it or something. I don't know. I still don't like Part 3, but being able to move past it to Final Chapter makes me feel a little more generous towards it.

I learned that Part 3 was originally supposed to be the final film to create a trilogy ending in Jason's death, but I'm not shocked at all that Paramount decided to make another one. What's shocking is that they expected anyone to believe that the fourth one was actually the final chapter. I remember even in 1984 and as a total outsider to the series thinking, "Yeah, right." 

And boy do they ever want to suggest a sequel. Jason may be dead (or maybe not, I don't know how this goes), but it took Tommy's making himself look like Young Jason to confuse Adult Jason long enough for Tommy to get close and do some hacking. That physical transformation combined with the trauma of the evening apparently does a number on Tommy's psyche, so when he's hugging his sister at the end, he's got a super creepy expression. The question the movie is asking is clearly, "Is Tommy going to become a new Jason?"

I know just enough about the lore of the following films to suspect that that's not the case (I mean, it's Jason's name, not Tommy's, in the titles of future installments), but I've got no idea what really happens. I'm super into the series now and understand why it's so popular. Really enjoying this.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

Well that went downhill quickly.

Part 3 opens by reshowing a big chunk of the end of Part 2, but actually has almost nothing to do with the previous movie. A character watches TV and sees Ginny put into the ambulance, but the report is all about how there's a homicidal maniac on the loose (fair enough) and doesn't mention whether or not Paul survived. That's too bad, but I guess it leaves me free to create my own ending to Part 2 and say that Paul survived and chased Jason off. It seems unlikely, but it's also probably the best way to explain Ginny's surviving.

What Part 3 is interested in (outside of super dumb, comin-at-ya 3D effects complete with popping popcorn and a yo-yo) is just having Jason roam the countryside murdering people in overlong sequences before settling into clearing out a bunch of young people on vacation at a farmhouse. 

One of them has some history with Jason, though it's nothing from either of the previous films and she remembers very little of it. It's most interesting to me as an explanation that Jason has been active in the area before the events of Part 2. But it's weird, because all the woman remembers is being captured by Jason and dragged off. She blacked out after that. She obviously wasn't murdered, but there's also no mention of her being raped or any other horrible thing that Jason could have done to her. So that supports my theory that even though he's been around all these years, he maybe didn't get a taste for murder until he took his revenge on Alice at the beginning of Part 2.

The other important element in this movie - just from a legend-building standpoint - is that it's the origin of the iconic hockey mask. It's a lame prop used by one of the vacationers to draw attention to himself, so when Jason kills the kid, he takes the mask to replace the sack that got pulled off him in Part 2. 

And that's almost all the interest I have in Part 3. The acting is horrible, the dialogue is worse, and I care about none of the characters. It has nothing to do with a summer camp. It's just a random incident with disposable victims. The only other thing worth mentioning is that Jason is apparently killed at the end, so Part 4 will have some explaining to do to undo that.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

After the first movie with Mrs Voorhees as the killer, I speculated that the sequel would introduce her son in some kind of supernatural way. The end of the first one leans hard in that direction (although out of nowhere, in contrast with the relatively mundane murder mystery of the rest of the film), so I imagined that Mrs Voorhees' deep, emotional connection with her dead son would cause him to be resurrected in some way. But I couldn't figure out how he'd go from being a small, teenage boy to the hulking monster needed to drive the rest of the series.

Part 2 answers that question by rejecting any supernatural premise at all. Jason's potential resurrection was all in Alice's imagination. The truth is more grounded, if no less unlikely. Since Jason's body was never recovered from the lake, legends persist that he never actually drowned at all, but now roams the woods around Crystal Lake as an adult. And that turns out to be the actual case.

It doesn't make a lot of sense at first thought. Mrs Voorhees goes on a murder spree because she thinks her son drowned. She wanders those woods a lot, so how come she never encountered her son alive before? Part 2 reveals that he clearly knows about her, but he's never approached her? 

There's a possible explanation though, which is that she does know that he's still alive, but is no less angry about the negligence of the camp counselors who almost caused his death. And then there's the fact of Jason's deformity as revealed at the end of the film (he spends most of the movie with a sack over his head; not yet the iconic hockey mask). Was Jason deformed before he drowned and that's part of why his counselors wanted nothing to do with him? Or was his deformity somehow the result of drowning and being abandoned in the woods for so long? What affect do both of those options have on Mrs Voorhees' insanity? Was she already pretty close to snapping before the "drowning" and it didn't take Jason's actual death to push her over the edge? So many questions. But I don't need clear answers to enjoy the movie. There are possible answers, even if they're muddy, so I can move on and let the story unfold.

After Jason tracks Alice home and takes revenge for her killing his mom, he returns to Crystal Lake and goes quiet again for a while. But that only lasts until camp season opens and another summer camp starts training counselors near the site of the previous one. 

The other camp seems to be already established, but maybe I missed something and it is in fact brand new. It doesn't really matter. Even if it's been around for a while, there's an explanation for why Jason hasn't bothered it before. Local legends aside, we don't have any evidence that Jason ever killed a human being before taking revenge on Alice. Maybe that awakens something in him that compels him when he sees activity at the new camp.

The new camp is run by a guy named Paul and his assistant Ginny, who's also his girlfriend. He's not building his camp from scratch the way Steve was in the first film, so rather than cleaning, hammering, and painting, Paul has gathered his counselors for a training session in first aid and wilderness survival. And there are a lot of counselors. I was shocked by how many potential victims the movie introduces right away and couldn't figure out how I was supposed to keep that many straight in my head.

But then the movie surprises me again by having most of the staff go off to town for a last hurrah before the serious training begins the following day. A handful of counselors stay behind and there's our real victim pool for the movie. And while Paul and Ginny initially go to town with the other celebrants, they come back early to discover what Jason has wrought and to face him themselves.

It's a cool, different take because rather than just having a Final Girl, Part 2 gives us a Final Couple. Even though Paul is dating an employee, he's not super creepy about it. I don't love the guy, but I like him just fine. He's clearly trying to find the balance in his relationship with Ginny, but their fondness for each other overshadows any issues around power or authority.

None of the actors in Part 2 are very good and that includes Amy Steel as Ginny, but I like her a lot anyway. She's super pretty, so maybe that's why, but I also like that she's a grad student in psychology. That ends up being just a way to throw in some theories about why Jason might be doing what he's doing, but it's still cool that Ginny is smart and holds her own next to Paul (including beating him in chess). If they defeat Jason, they do it as a team.

The movie is ambiguous about whether Jason is defeated at the end. In another surprising move, it fades to black as Ginny goes unconscious while Jason and Paul are still fighting. Ginny wakes up on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance and neither she nor we the audience know what happened between Jason and Paul. Is Paul okay and still in the cabin? Is he dead and Jason has disappeared again into the woods? Hopefully Part 3 will give me those answers.

What's All This Then? | Friday the 13th (1980)

I'm not a slasher movie fan. I prefer my horror to be creepy and spooky and subtle. I love living in the tension of what might happen. Gore doesn't scare me, it just grosses me out. 

But I do love world-building and epic stories and I'm fascinated by the idea of slasher sagas like the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th films. They scratch the same itch that corporate superhero comics do. The business is propelling the story machine so that it has to keep rolling, so how do the storytellers accomplish that? It's often clunky, but equally as often interesting to me as a writing exercise. 

I already looked at the Halloween saga a long time ago and got started on (but never finished due to my lack of access to the movies at the time, not lack of interest) the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I need to go back and wrap up Nightmare at some point, but in the meantime, this year I want to finally see all of the Friday the 13th movies and how they connect to each other. 

SPOILERS BELOW

I've seen the original Friday the 13th two or three times before, but I always forget how good it is. It's super cheap and none of the actors are very professional (only Kevin Bacon would go on to have any kind of career), but the characters are believable, the story is extremely well paced, and it wisely keeps its killer's motives a mystery until the very end. It doesn't rely on jump scares and the gore is minimal. It spends a lot of time letting the killer stalk the victims. The murders also start right towards the beginning of the film and since the whole story takes place in a single afternoon and evening, it breezes through like summer wind through a stuffy cabin. That and all the red herrings around the murderer's identity keep me super engaged for the whole run time.

It's a common criticism of teen slasher flicks to say that they specifically punish sexual promiscuity and reward the purity of the Final Girl, but that's not always true and it's not for Friday the 13h. Jack and Marcie are the only characters to actually have sex. Ned is obsessed with it, but he's every bit as virginal as Final Girl Alice, who's right in there playing strip Monopoly with Brenda and Bill. And the film's first victim is Annie, who doesn't have time to do any kind of messing around with sex or substances. 

All that helps keep the movie fresh for me. These are young people alone in the woods doing things you might expect unchaperoned young people to do, but it's an overstatement to say that their fates are tied to their actions. That might be more true in the sequels or other slasher films, but I think it's cool that it's not in this one, which is arguably the prototype for the genre even more than Halloween is.

I've gone back and forth on how I feel about the ending and the killer's revelation of herself. On the one hand, it's awfully convenient for exposition's sake that she show herself and explain her motives to Alice. The audience needs to get that information somehow, but this seems like an inelegant way to do it until I realize that as insane as she is, Mrs Voorhees does have incentive for wanting someone to know why she's killed all of those people. She sees it as retribution/justice for the death of her child, but part of justice is having someone know that justice has been carried out. Mrs Voorhees obviously can't have everyone knowing that it was her or why she did it, but when she's down to her last victim and is about to safely get away with it all, I understand why she goes for it. (Speaking of her motives and insanity, I also love the reversal of Psycho with the mother creating a homicidal alternate personality of her dead son.)

Outside of the general cheapness of the production (the motorcycle cop is especially hard to believe), my only complaint about Friday the 13th is its wanting to leave open the question about whether or not Mrs Voorhees' son Jason is still a threat there at the bottom of the lake. The dream sequence with him attacking Alice in the canoe is fine, because it's a dream and it feels like the kind of thing she might be afraid of after the night she's had. And I don't care too much about her vocalized fear that "he's still there." She's in shock and it doesn't have to mean anything. 

Except that the movie clearly wants it to mean something with its focusing on the surface of the lake right after her declaration. It's clearly setting up a possible sequel, but there's no rational reason to believe that Jason is anything but a resting corpse at the bottom of the lake. Up to then, this has been a straightforward mystery about a mass murderer. It's only at the very end, after the climax, that it decides to introduce a potentially supernatural element. I don't like that.

I don't actually remember if I've ever seen Part 2 before, so if I have, I definitely don't remember how it handles Jason's resurrection or how much it explains. But I can imagine a scenario in which Mrs Voorhees' deep connection to her dead son would allow her spirit to possess his corpse and bring it back to murderous life. I can also imagine an explanation in which she never really created his alternate personality on her own, but was actually possessed by him. But that's not as cool to me.

Of course, Mrs Voorhees' possessing her son's corpse would only give her a teenaged body to run around in and that's not very threatening, so I expect something completely different for the next movie. I'm looking forward to seeing what that is.

What's All This Then?: The Freddy Krueger Saga, Part One

A couple of years ago I started a feature around Halloween called "What's All This Then?" The idea behind it was to try to catch up on bits of popular culture that I've been lax about visiting and see if I think it's worthy of all the fuss. The first (and until now, only) subject was the Halloween movies (parts one, two, and three). Since it's getting to be Halloween again, I thought I'd bring WATT? back from the grave and take a look at another classic horror-series that I'm not all that familiar with.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)



Before this project, I'd seen three of the Nightmare films: the odd-numbered ones, for some reason. Like the Halloween series, what attracts me to the Nightmare movies is the desire to see how it works as a complete story. I enjoyed the Halloween series a lot more than I thought I would, but it didn't end up working well as a continuing story. Important elements kept getting added and dropped depending on the whims of whoever had the most power over the latest flick. I'm curious to see if Nightmare is handled any better.

SPOILERS BELOW

Just in case you're even less up on Nightmare on Elm Street than I am (though I don't know how that's possible), the story's about a group of Elm Street teenagers who are all having similar dreams about a horribly scarred man with a clawed, metal glove. When one of them - Tina - is murdered by an invisible attacker while in bed with her boyfriend Rod, her other two friends Nancy and Glen (Johnny Depp's first role) start to realize that there's something more going on than just dreams. Nancy quickly becomes the focal point of the film as she uncovers the story of a child-murderer named Fred Krueger who was himself killed by the Elm Street parents.

It's been years since I last saw the movie and I was surprised by how few deaths there really are and how - relatively speaking - tame they are. Only four people die. Tina's the worst, getting carved up in her bed as she sleeps. Glen's death features a geyser of blood, but his body goes off-camera before that happens. Rod's is tamest of all. He's in jail under suspicion for Tina's death when Krueger ties a sheet around his neck and fakes a suicidal hanging. I'll get to the last death in a minute.

I can see why audiences took to Krueger right away. Even though he's a horrible, sadistic killer, he's way more interesting - at least on a surface level - than the silent, personality-less Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. Krueger's jokes aren't really funny, but that he's cracking them at all is pretty revolutionary for a slasher film. He's also a lot quicker and more active than at least Michael Myers. (Next year I'll have to catch up on Jason's story; I don't know much about how he operates yet.) He was such a different horror villain that Wes Craven didn't need a particularly high body count to spice up the movie.

More important than Krueger's personality though is Craven's genius in making something as essential as sleep an object of fear. Nightmare on Elm Street isn't harrowing to watch because of gory deaths. It's exhausting because everyone can relate to the need for sleep and everyone can imagine how frustrating and maddening it would be if falling asleep meant death. Much scarier than kids getting chased through dark basements by a wise-cracking serial killer are the scenes of kids terrified to fall asleep because they know what's waiting for them there.

Still, even though Craven tapped into something real and primal for the movie, it's always been hard for me to like it because of a couple of things that happen at the end. Before he dies, Glen shares with Nancy something he read about our nightmares' being powered by fear. That's not exactly a revelation, but what he extrapolates from that is that if you stop being afraid, the nightmare goes away. And that ends up being how Nancy beats Krueger: she turns her back on him and he disappears. I always thought that was really easy and stupid, and it is, but what bothered me even more was the final scene.

After Nancy beats Krueger, we get a scene of her leaving the house for school. Glen, Tina, and Rod are all still alive and pick her up in a convertible. Then the roof goes up on the car and it's the same pattern as Krueger's iconic sweater. Nancy and her friends scream in terror as the Krueger-mobile drives them down the street, presumably to their deaths, while Nancy's mom waves from the front door of the house. Then Krueger's arm reaches from inside the house and yanks Mom back inside. The End.

I was never able to figure that out, because I always assumed that it was Nancy's dream. And that doesn't make any sense because Nancy's supposedly defeated Krueger. His invading her dreams again in the very next scene completely destroys the point of the climax. I was quite ready to give the movie two out of five bathtub drownings, but then I saw the second movie and figured out that the last scene in this one wasn't Nancy's dream at all.

Four out of five bathtub drownings.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge



It was Nancy's mom's dream.

This movie picks up a few years later (though it came out only a year after the first). Nancy's old house has been vacant until the Walshes recently moved in. Teen-aged son Jesse starts having nightmares immediately.

He soon learns from friends at school about Nancy Thompson and her mom. The public story is that Nancy's mom killed herself in the living room and Nancy went crazy, which totally explains the final scene of the first movie. Nancy did defeat Krueger, so he just went and killed her mom instead.

What's different about Nightmare 2 - and the reason it doesn't work as well as the first one - is that it's not about dying when you fall asleep. Krueger's not trying to kill Jesse; he's trying to possess him. It's a clever angle and leads to some potentially interesting dilemmas for Jesse as he goes around slaughtering people in his sleep, but it's never explored very well. Outside of personal guilt over what he's doing and fear of what he's becoming, there aren't any real consequences for his involuntary actions. He flees murder scenes - presumably leaving all kinds of evidence behind - but the police never so much as question him. When he talks to his girlfriend Lisa about it, the conversations are all about Jesse's resisting Krueger's influence and Lisa's belief that he can do it. There's never any talk about turning himself in or getting some help.

More damning than the lack of consequences though is that Jesse's only real danger is metaphysical. His body's being taken over by Krueger, so that's a kind of death I guess, but it's way less dramatic than being sliced apart by the boogie man. And way less scary.

There's also another final scene that seems to come out of nowhere. Jesse and his friends - those who've survived the slaughter anyway - are on the school bus and Krueger attacks them. It's obviously meant to remind us of the last scene from the first movie, but unfortunately it also does that by making as little sense as that one did. Krueger hasn't been attacking people through their dreams in Nightmare 2, so how does he pull this off? Has he possessed someone else? I've got no idea and my vague memory of Nightmare 3 isn't helping. I may adjust this rating after I've seen more if it makes sense, but for now...

Two out of five pool party massacres. (And one of those is simply because Kim Myers is absolutely gorgeous as Lisa.)

What's All This Then?: Michael Myers and Halloween, Part Three

Part One
Part Two

If you haven't seen these movies, SPOILERS BELOW.

Halloween: H20

I can see what all the fuss was about. It was about the time of H20 that I started thinking that maybe I should check out the Halloween franchise. Like Michael Myers, just when you thought it was dead, back it comes. And this time with Jamie Lee Curtis returning as Laurie Strode.

It was cool to learn in the Making Of featurette that the movie was actually her idea. It's too bad that John Carpenter and Debra Hill couldn't also be involved, but then, I don't know if I would've enjoyed it as much if they had been.

Maybe it's because I've gotten used to Jamie Lee Curtis playing a certain kind of character, but I was surprised to see Laurie so vulnerable and frightened through most of the movie. Curtis has a powerful presence and even in movies where she's supposed to play someone who's not totally in control of her situation, she gives strength to those characters that lets you know she's going to be okay in the end. In H20, she's a mess right away.

Her relationship with her teenaged son (played by Josh Hartnett in his first movie role) is completely messed up because she's so afraid that Michael will find them that she over-protects him. She can't function in a relationship with her boyfriend because she has this deep secret she can't share with him. The only thing that seems to be going right in her life is her job as dean of a private school where her over-compensating, domineering personality is an asset. (It was great to see Janet Leigh in a supporting role as Laurie's assistant -- and to see her get into her car from Psycho in one scene.) I honestly doubted that Laurie would ever pull it together once Michael found her and showed up at the school.

She does pull it together though, and I love the scene where she sends her son and his girlfriend away from the school, then -- armed with an axe -- locks herself inside the school grounds with Michael. And the ending...

In all the previous movies, I could always see how Michael might have escaped at the end, but not this one. As I watched it -- knowing that I still had Halloween: Resurrection to watch next -- I couldn't for the life of me figure out how Michael was going to come back for a sequel. It would've been the perfect ending to the series. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

My only complaint is that H20 tries to ignore everything after Halloween 2, which is no good for a guy who's just invested six or so hours watching those movies and liking most of them. I don't really understood why they did it either. I mean, I sort of do. They explain that Michael killed his sister on her 18th Halloween (she was 17 years old at the time, but when you do the math it was her 18th Halloween), tried to kill Laurie on her 18th Halloween, and now wants to kill Laurie's son on his 18th Halloween. It's a cool enough explanation for Michael's motives except for two things.

One is that it doesn't explain Michael's coming after Laurie's ten-year-old daughter in Halloween 4. You can see then why they'd want to pretend that never happened. But it also doesn't really explain anything at all. What's the significance of killing 17-year-olds on Halloween night? We're never told. It's just something that ties some of Michael's victims together and tries to explain why he waits until now before coming after Laurie's son. It doesn't explain though why he's never followed up on Laurie in the intervening years.

So, it's a shaky half-explanation and it doesn't add as much to the mythos as it tries to take away by getting rid of 4, 5, and 6. Putting that aside, it's a great movie. If they hadn't tried to do that, it would've been perfect.

LL Cool J as a school security guard was also a nice addition and added a sense of humor that the other movies in the series lacked.

Four out of five dead teens in dumbwaiters.

Halloween: Resurrection

Even though H20 should've been the last in the series, I gotta hand it to Resurrection for explaining how Michael could still be around in a completely plausible way. The writers deserve a standing slow-clap for that one.

The rest of the movie is okay, but it's really two movies in one. The first part wraps up H20, including the character of Laurie Strode. After seeing her emerge victorious from H20 though, it was disappointing to see her discarded so quickly here. She was still cool and her death was very nicely played, but it sucks that she fought through so much in three movies only to go like that. Still... he's Michael Myers and he's not to be screwed with. I'll miss you, Laurie.

Once all that's wrapped up, we go to a reality show where a bunch of college students (including Katee Freakin' Sackhoff!) are competing by spending the night in the old Myers house. Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks are the show's producers and add some humor and sexiness to the mix (though notice that it takes two of them to do what LL Cool J did all by his lonesome in H20).

The reality show is an interesting angle because it very much brings the franchise into the 21st century. Cell phones and the Internet are other, crucial elements to the plot. Unfortunately, that's all that's really interesting in this part of the movie. The characters are all stereotypes, though some (especially Sean Patrick Thomas') are nicely acted. And boiled down, this part of the movie is just Michael stalking and killing a bunch of teens in a spooky house. Nothing we haven't seen before.

Two out of five kisses on Michael's mask.

Halloween (2007)

I appreciate what Rob Zombie tried to do here. As I said in Part One of these reviews, we don't get a lot in the way of motive for Michael in the original Halloween. Zombie corrects that here and succeeds in turning Michael into a sympathetic character. I loved Daeg Faerch as young Michael. It was heart-breaking watching him turn from this sweet, but troubled kid into a withdrawn, violent monster.

But as I also said in Part One, our not knowing Michael's motives makes him unpredictable and that much more frightening. That's another flaw with H20's "18th Halloween" explanation. If Michael only goes after relatives on their 18th Halloweens, that lets the rest of us off the hook. If we can understand -- even just a little bit -- why Michael does what he does and what brought him to this place, it lessens our fear of him.

Now, Zombie does a lot to replace any fear that knowing Michael's motivations took away. Tyler Mane, who plays the adult Michael, is freaking huge. His size, plus the fact that you never see his face, makes him menacing as hell. He doesn't need to stand around and watch his victims for a while to increase tension. He increases tension just by being in the room.

That said though, I really missed the tension-building scenes from the original Halloween. Zombie spends so much time on Michael's origin story that he has to hurry through the Halloween-night massacre. It's a violent, gruesome mess and in keeping with what today's horror audiences are likely looking for, but I don't find screen violence and gore nearly as scary as the idea that someone may be in my house, just watching me.

So, while I appreciate Zombie's attempt, I don't think that it improves on the original much. Except that the acting is infinitely better. Brad Dourif alone makes any movie better.

Three out of five beatings with a big tree branch.

What's All This Then?: Michael Myers and Halloween, Part Two

Part One

If you haven't seen these movies, SPOILERS BELOW.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

At the end of Halloween II, it looked like Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis were both burned alive. Fortunately for the franchise, that wasn't actually the case, so here we are several years later and Michael escapes captivity again and decides to go after Laurie Strode's daughter, Jamie Lloyd (named after Jamie Lee Curtis, no doubt). Even the considerably less resilient Dr. Loomis managed to escape the flames.

Since little Jamie is only ten years old, we need another teen-aged girl for Michael to menace. Fortunately again (funny how these things work out), Jamie is a foster child to the Carruthers family who just so happen to have a teen daughter named Rachel.

Laurie Strode is said in this movie to have died in a car crash, but we find out in Halloween H20 that she faked her death. Kind of a jerky thing to do, leaving her daughter to a foster family instead of taking her into hiding with her. Of course, H20 wants to ignore the three movies I'm talking about today so that Jamie doesn't even exist in them, but it's not that easy as far as I'm concerned. I'll talk more about that next time though.

I liked the element of Michael terrorizing a younger child. Not because I'm sadistic, but because I knew that she wasn't going to die (that's against the rules of these things) and I enjoyed watching her match wits against this hulking man who's arguably childlike in his mental development.

Speaking of "this hulking man," I was a bit confused at the DVD documentaries on this movie and the next one where they kept referring to Michael Myers as The Shape. That's not something he's ever called in the films, so I got curious about where that came from. According to Wikipedia (for what that's worth), "Some fans and even cast and crew of the films sometime call the character The Shape, which is what some of the actors playing the character are credited as. This dates back to the script for the first film in which Michael Myers is referred to by name only twice, in the beginning and end scenes; at all other times, with the exception of dialogue, he is simply referred to as a 'shape' due to his face not being visible." So, the way I figure it, calling Michael "The Shape" is the Horror Nerd equivalent of referring to the Marvel Universe as OU812 or whatever it is that Marvel Nerds call it.

The relationship between Rachel and Jamie was really sweet. Rachel isn't played as a complete saint who willingly sacrifices her whole social life to take care of poor, troubled Jamie. She does sacrifice, no doubt, but she has to be reminded occasionally by her dad that that's the right thing to do. Which is nice, because it makes her even more heroic when we realize that she's actually giving something up to watch over her foster sister. And for Jamie's part, she's not just a frightened, little girl. She's also very sweet and funny. I really enjoyed watching the two of them interact.

I haven't mentioned Dr. Loomis much because frankly his role here is the same as it always is. He runs around telling everyone how dangerous Michael is and shows up at the end to freak out and preside over Michael's apparent demise.

The cliffhanger to this one was cheesy, but amazingly effective. It was cheesy because Michael abruptly goes from being simply deranged to being this supernatural force whose Evil Essence can be transferred to Jamie when she touches his supposedly dead body. That's dumb. But seeing her reenact Michael's opening scene from Halloween with her foster mom made me really anxious to see Halloween 5 and find out what was going to happen next.

Four out of five shotgun blasts to the chest.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Unfortunately, the payoff to 4's cliffhanger is lame. Jamie hasn't gone completely evil and her foster mom (inexplicably referred to as her step-mom all through this movie) isn't even dead; just injured. Jamie hasn't spoken since the incident though and has been committed to the mental wing of the local children's hospital.

Michael, who obviously didn't die last movie (I mean, it wasn't even convincing as you were watching the last movie), has spent the last year letting an old hermit nurse him back to health. But it's Halloween night again, which means that Michael suddenly decides to kill the hermit he's been living with for a year and go looking for Jamie again.

Dr. Loomis is still around, and he of course (because he's just about as crazy as Michael, I've decided) interprets Jamie's reoccurring dreams about Michael as evidence that Michael's still alive. Which just provides further excuse for Loomis to run around raving about Michael in yet another Halloween movie. Really, Loomis is tiresome, but not as much as he deserves to be just because I actually like Donald Pleasance in this role. I didn't care for him as Blofeld in You Only Live Twice and he's unconvincing as the President in Escape from New York, but I like him in these movies. He's annoying, but he's also always right about Michael, so I cut him some slack.

Rachel Carruthers is back briefly in this one, but she's killed pretty quickly. The new teen screamer is Rachel's friend Tina who also has a really sweet relationship with Jamie. Unlike Rachel, who was sort of bookish in the Laurie Strode tradition, Tina is a partier. She's the kind of girl you expect to be killed quickly in slasher films because she's always ready for sex and nothing sets off a psychopathic killer like a girl who's just had or is having or is intending to have sex.

(Speaking of which, why is it that teen couples always have such screwed up relationships in these movies? It's always the same: the guy is a total self-centered, drunken butthole and the girl constantly reminds him of it and calls him names, even as she's taking off her shirt for him.)

Anyway, back to Tina. Though she likes to drink, smoke, and fool around, she's written against type in her devotion to Jamie. She visits Jamie at the hospital all the time and talks to her like a normal person, even though she knows Jamie's not going to answer her. It's very endearing.

The cliffhanger on this one is just as good as on 4. Partway through the movie a guy gets off the bus in Haddonfield. We never see his face, but we know he's cool because he wears a black duster and black, silver-tipped cowboy boots. And we know he's mean 'cause he kicks a dog as soon as he's off the bus. When the police actually capture Michael Myers, we see the mystery man go into the jail and then we watch helplessly outside as chaos erupts inside. There's screaming, gunfire, and explosions, then Jamie goes inside to check it out and finds Michael's cell empty with the bars all mangled, leaving a gaping hole.

Who is the mystery man? What does he want with Michael? Why does he have the same tattoo as Michael? Why is that mark also scratched into a wall in Michael's house? Stay tuned!

Four out of five pitchfork impalements.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

This one's most notable for starring Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle, the kid Laurie Strode was babysitting in the first Halloween. Thanks to Friends, Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Knocked Up, Rudd can pretty much make me laugh just by standing there. Not that this is a funny role for him, but the fondness was already there and I was eager to see him try to kick Michael's butt.

Michael's victim this time is a relative named Kara Strode who's moved with her family into the old Myers house. It's never really explained how these Strodes are related to Laurie Strode, which is kind of frustrating, but between their last name and their new home, they're destined for trouble.

We learn early on that the mysterious man from 5 was a member of a Druidic cult (gotta work that Halloween connection!) and that Michael is their servant-assassin. He was possessed almost from birth by an evil spirit called Thorn that now threatens to possess Kara's son Danny. Also, Jamie -- who I guess was also taken by the mystery man at the end of 5 -- has been raised for the last several years by the Druids and was raped by them in order to produce a child that they could sacrifice. When Jamie escapes with her baby, pursued by Michael, she manages to get the child into Tommy Doyle's hands and the battle lines are drawn. The rest of the movie is Tommy, Kara, and Dr. Loomis (who for some reason no longer has the nasty burn scarring that he's been sporting for the last two movies) trying to keep Danny and the baby safe from Michael (also no longer scarred) and the Druids.

Unfortunately, the Druids aren't really that scary. They are at first, but we eventually realize that they're just businesspeople who hope to use the occult to tap into whatever power Michael has. Just how that's going to work isn't really explained. And Michael's basically acting as their flunky diminishes him. He'd be a good flunky to have, no doubt, but it's sad to see him reduced to that.

Fortunately, he doesn't stay that way for long. Pretty much as soon as we learn the true, disappointing identities of the Druids, Michael decides he doesn't want to work for them anymore and starts hacking them apart. At that point, the movie gets really good again.

Three out of five electrocuted deejays.

Next time: Laurie Strode returns in H20 and Resurrection.

What's All This Then?: Michael Myers and Halloween, Part One

I watch a ton of TV and movies, but there still seems to be a buttload of stuff that apparently everyone else in the universe but me has seen. A lot of it seems to be Japanese (Godzilla movies, Akira, Ringu, or any film Kurosawa ever made), but there's also plenty of domestic stuff that I either missed out on or just wasn't interested in when everyone else was. So, I'm starting a new feature called "What's All This Then?" in which I'll try to catch up on bits of popular culture (both Western and otherwise) that I've been lax about visiting. And then I'll tell you if I thought it was worthy of all the fuss.

One thing I've wanted to check out for a while was all those '80s slasher flicks. I'm not interested in the slasher genre per se, but I love mythos and continuity, and franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street all have me curious to see just how they keep the story progressing from movie to movie. In fact, I had zero interest in the Saw movies until I recently saw a trailer for Saw 4 that came right out and said that new Saw movies are now an annual, Halloween tradition. With four in the can and the promise of more, I'm suddenly interested in seeing how the whole thing works together.

So, to kick off my investigation of slasher franchises, I thought I'd start with the first one (not counting Psycho) and watch all nine Halloween films. If you're the only other person in the world who hasn't seen these, be warned: SPOILERS BELOW.

Halloween (1978)

Halloween has bad acting, horrible dialogue, and a ridiculous, early shot of Michael and his parents standing in front of the house as the camera slooooowly pulls back from them. Michael stands there, motionless, holding his bloody knife while his folks patiently wait for a response to their questions that never comes. The movie's also got one of the worst cases of "telling, not showing" that I've ever seen. We get zero insight into why Michael Myers does what he does. I kept trying to make connections between his victims and the idea of babysitters neglecting their charges, but I might have been way off. The sequels certainly never explored that idea. All we have by way of motivation is Dr. Loomis' running around telling everyone that Michael's Evil. I guess we're just supposed to take that at face value.

However, our not knowing Michael's motives makes him unpredictable and that much more frightening. And in spite of it's heavy flaws, Halloween is undeniably spooky. I love that Carpenter makes us wait a good, long time before Michael starts killing. Before it ever gets dark, we're treated to scene after scene of him just standing on street corners and in the bushes, watching his future victims. Even when night falls, Michael spends a lot of time just watching people in their homes. Sometimes from outside; sometimes from in. It totally taps into that irrational fear that Someone's In The House. The killing is a necessary payoff, but it's secondary to the tension that Carpenter creates early in the movie. Some people criticize Halloween for being slow, but I loved that about it.

Also, that cliffhanger ending was teh awesome.

Four out of five knife stabs.

Halloween II

I like that this picked up right where Halloween left off, but I was mostly disappointed. It looks like Carpenter just wanted to keep it going after the success of the first one and because he'd left himself an opening to. Like I said before, the babysitter connection to his victims is discarded and now it becomes all about finishing the job he started with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the first movie.

In the DVD commentary for H20, Carpenter admits coming up with the Laurie-is-Michael's-sister angle on the fly while writing the script because he'd gotten stuck and didn't know where to take the story. It shows. Halloween II is just Michael following Laurie to the hospital to kill her, but going through the rest of the Emptiest Hospital on Earth first in order to pad the movie out to an hour-and-a-half.

Still, it had some nice, scary moments, so:

Two out of five hot tub drownings.

Halloween III: The Season of the Witch

I knew going in that Halloween III wasn't about Michael Myers, but I was convinced that I wouldn't let that taint my view of it. I would just watch it on its own merits and review it that way.

In concept, it wasn't a bad idea to keep the series going. Instead of making all the movies about Michael, make it an anthology series. Just switch the story to another madman trying to kill a bunch of kids on Halloween.

Only they made the madman an evil mask manufacturer who was planning to sacrifice all the trick-or-treaters to the pagan gods by having their masks turn their little faces to alien-insect-infested goo at a particular time on Halloween night. They never did explain how that works. Or why he used manbots as minions.

Actually, the plot is cheesy enough to be awesome if you're expecting it and willing to just have fun with it. But it's not scary at all. It's not a horror movie, it's an awful scifi thriller. So:

One out of five head melts.

Next Time: The Return, Revenge, and Curse of Michael Myers