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.

Hellbent for Letterbox Hitchin' Post | Curse of the Undead (1959)

In this special Halloween Hitchin' Post episode (meaning we just talk about the movie without any of the usual, full-episode segments), Pax and I stake our claim on the Universal horror western, Curse of the Undead, about a vampire gunfighter.

Download or listen to the episode here.

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. 

Seriously Felicity | The Last Stand

Kristi and I crash Felicity's counselor appointment to talk about overbearing parents, killer roommates, and admissions essays.

Download or listen to the episode here.

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.

Interview | The Sample Chapter Podcast

Jason Meuschke is a Hellbent for Letterbox listener who has a great podcast of his own. It's called The Sample Chapter Podcast and it's all about the process and business of writing. Each episode, Jason interviews a different author about their writing life and then invites them to read a sample chapter from their work. Jason's a great, fun host and I had a blast talking with him. And then I had a blast reading from Kill All Monsters, describing panels, doing sound effects, and generally just being a giant goof.

Take a listen and then check out Jason's archives for interviews with Lou Diamond Phillips and Diane Franklin (aka Monique from Better Off Dead).

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.

Hellbent for Letterbox | Bandidas (2006)

Pax and I definitely wanted to watch Penélope Cruz, Salma Hayek, Steve Zahn, Dwight Yoakam, and Sam Shepard in Bandidas. Pax also reads the graphic novel Calamity Jane: The Calamitous Life of Martha Jane Cannary by Christian Perrissin and Matthieu Blanchin. And I get in the Halloween spirit with Curse of the Undead.

Download or listen to the episode here.

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.