#37. "Jason Lives: Ft13th VI" (1986, McLouglin)
By Eivind Langdal
14th January 2010

I believe it was Roger Ebert who said it best when he pointed out that Jason Voorhees, the psychopathic monster of Crystal Lake, would be better off selling his memoirs for millions of dollars instead of going around chasing kids in the woods and chopping them off in various imaginative and unimaginative manners. Of course, Ebert was joking, as he, like any other sane person, knows that Jason doesn’t choose his actions. They choose him. He doesn’t kill because he wants to. He kills because it is in his instinct.

Sometimes I wonder if the creation of the films in the Friday the 13th series is based on instinct too. Perhaps they simply must be made, even though there is no particular reason for it. I certainly can’t see any reason to make the films. They are not original, they are not inventive, they are not particularly enjoyable for me at any level, and, most importantly, they are not even scary. Now, how the hell is it possible to have created so many horror films and not have managed to create a single scare, let alone a scary film? I mean, I am a person who gets very easily scared, and yet Jason has not frightened me a single time. He is as menacing as a glass of milk to me, and honey, I don’t find glasses of milk particularly scary.

Except that one time when… no, wait, never mind. No good can come from me telling that story.

Admittedly, if I met Jason in real life, I would probably soil my shorts. But that’s not the point. What is scary in real life isn’t always scary in films, and what is scary in films isn’t always scary in real life. A good filmmaker, though, can make a lot of things scary. Take for instance the excellent Paranormal Activity (previously reviewed in this column), which is a low-key horror film with no blood, no gore and no hockey mask-wearing sociopaths. That film scared me. It scared me to the bone. It wasn’t necessarily the subject of the film that was scary. It was more the presentation of the subject. I’m sure it’s possible to make Jason into a very scary character. I really do. But I have yet to see proof that this is possible.

Some of you might ask, why the hell do I keep watching the Friday the 13th films? Can’t I take a hint? Have I really not realized that they are not for me? Am I too blind to realize that they aren’t going to get any better? First of all, I can take a hint, and I do realize that I might find myself watching all the films in the series and have the same kind of reaction to them every time. The reason I watch all the films is simple: I want the Horror Basement to be a place for all kinds of horror films. Good or bad, it doesn’t make a difference to me. This is not a “Hall of Fame”-like dome with reviews of nothing but excellent scare fests. I mean, Christ, it’s called “The Horror Basement”.

One of the things that I loved about the Scream films was that, while the villains never survived any of the films, the heroes did. For each film we not only got the guilty pleasure of trying to guess the killer, but we also got to watch the development of people we could both sympathize and empathize with. In the Friday the 13th films, it’s the opposite. The only real link between the films, besides the identical plots, is Jason himself, a character so stiff that I were to describe him in porn metaphors, he would be a… uh… on second thoughts, let’s not go there.

They makers of the films always have to reintroduce new characters, as Jason kills just about all of them in each film, save for a one or two who needs to put him out of his misery. For the most part, the survivors in one film in the series are the first to die in the next. This time, though, they try something else, as the character Tommy Jarvis (who made his first appearance in the fourth film), comes back for the second time (meaning it’s his third in total). It does help a little to have a character that we from before know in one of these films, but in the end, it’s not much of a comfort.

I’ll commend the film for one scene though. It’s not a particular good one, but it does contain a line that I really didn’t expect to hear. The scene is one where two camp counselors are driving in the woods when they suddenly find Jason standing a few feet in front of their car. The female counselor says that she has seen enough horror films to know that a mask-wearing psycho in the woods is not something you want to mess with. Now, would you look at that; a character in a horror film made before Scream who has seen horror films. Now, that’s rare. If only the creators of the films in this series had done the same.