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| Memorable moment where Jason looks down at a little girl. |
I wish I had a narrative or two after my first post but my thoughts were just all over the place. It was some sort of Piecemeal Frankenstein, but since Tom McLoughlin was inspired by Whale's masterpiece enough to bring Jason back from beyond the grave through lightning I guess my brain's cobbled together word monster can be set free on the blog.
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| My favorite moment of the entire franchise |
- This sequel, to me, is probably the easiest to feature on
television with few edits. And its pacing is such that McLoughlin keeps a body
count movie going but does it without too much gratuitous violence. There is
blood all over the place, such as the fate of Kerry Noonan’s Paula, in the
opening credits paying homage to James Bond (a machete, the slice, and blood
with Jason replacing 007 and his gun is clever), and a spray on the window of
the VW Bug owned by Goldwyn and the director’s wife, Nancy (as Lizbeth).
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| Tommy and Jason meet again |
- Along with my favorite Friday poster being from Jason Lives this has my all time
favorite Friday moment with Jason on top of the burning RV. McLoughlin really has an eye for how to frame Jason. Like when walking past the entrance to the camp with its signs of what to expect from its kids and adults alike or marching with purpose through the woods around Crystal Lake. Taking a red blob to the chest from a paintball gun, looking down at it, and not being very happy about it at all, there were all these wonderfully daft and absurd setpieces that were never even considered before. With five films before Jason Lives, McLoughlin was allowed to take the series in a different direction. So his fingerprints, personality, and sense of humor were imprinted on the franchise.
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| Paul and Sissy speak to worried Nancy |
- The rubber knife in Cort’s (Tom Fridley) ear was a bit
unfortunate, but perhaps worth some giggles and Darcy DeMoss’ Nikki giving her
RV’s bathroom wall a “face lift” thanks to Jason’s abundance of superior
strength is a kill unlike any other. Once again Jason brings “interference” to
a couple’s rowdy sexcapade.
McLoughlin gets a lot of mileage out of Jason's presence
- Renée Jones’ Sissy, with her “Jason card game” and fluffy
animal slippers, getting her head popped off, Jason carrying her decapitated
body “somewhere”, after pouring soda on him (believing it was Cort) is a gore
gag I remember literally walking into before I had ever seen the film. I want
to say, if memory recalls, someone was watching the film when I walked in at
that moment. It caught me off guard, sufficed to say, but this scene more or
less nowadays would be laughed off the screen by horror fans accustomed to more
sophisticated special effects viscera. Prosthetic heads (as seen in something
like “He Knows You’re Alone” (1980)) back then weren’t as convincing. Effects
folks did the best they could. Sissy’s head sliding out of Megan’s (Jennifer
Cooke) car, as the children inside the cabins prepared to be “dead meat”, just
isn’t as impactful as I remember it being when I was a youth.
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| Tommy provides Jason with a hockey mask |
- While I realize many Friday fans often abandon ship after
the first few in the franchise, the opening of Jason Lives works even as a
stand alone because its graveyard opening is right in my wheelhouse as a Gothic
horror fan who is just a sucker for “zombies rising from the grave”. I was
reminded of Cushing returning in “Tales from the Crypt” (1972) as a rotted
Jason Voorhees reaches for Tommy. But just the first glimpse of a very dead
Jason, just grotesque wormfood, is so my jam. I love that we see how very dead
he has been. If Tommy had left well enough alone, perhaps he never would have
to deal with Jason again. But in the past two films, Jason’s presence in Tommy’s
psyche simply wouldn’t let him go without seeing Jason truly dead and no longer
a problem for him. Jason, cobwebbed with maggots falling off his rotted flesh
as rain starts to bathe him and Tommy (who can’t light his match to set Jason
on fire after dousing him with gasoline), is such a ghoul. He is very much the
boogeyman after McLoughlin gets done with him.
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| The whole gang |
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| Sheriff Garris, always annoyed |
- Cooke’s enthusiasm and energy is so captivating. I find her
so easy to watch and love her timing with the dialogue. She’s natural on
screen, has charisma that a lot of actresses in slashers don’t quite have, and
I was always so smitten with her presence. She’s in on the joke, though, while
Mathews plays it very straight, only occasionally cracking outside the “Jason
is alive! Jason is real! You have to listen to me!” She almost from the get-go
is into Tommy, while her father, the quipping sheriff (David Kagen), gets all
the really good lines. Cooke, though, has that great monologue about Jason
where she posits the idea that perhaps Jason is real…but he’s not near as scary
as the kids they will be in charge off once they leave the bus after it
arrives. The scene in her car where she holds Tommy’s head down and the camera
shoots her jeans crotch a couple times was always such a curious addition to
the short-lived car chase. Kudos to the series for actually including kids,
too. It was a nice and refreshing touch that broke from the mold. And this
sequel, much to the chagrin of those slasher fans who always hunger for it, not
featuring nudity didn’t bother me at all. Its tone wasn’t really right for too
much mean-spirited gore or nude skinny-dipping.
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| Wrong place, wrong time |
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| Creepy shot of Jason just after his resurrection |
With the sight gags such as the brilliant and funny Jason
realizing the arm was still holding the machete despite its dispatched owner
(and his bloody happy smiley face on a tree) being many feet away, and the
creative ways folks are making the image of Jason with chain around him
(holding to a boulder) down deep in Crystal Lake their own (Jason in fish tank,
Jason awaiting divers who unknowingly stumble across a replica from the film
while swimming about), Jason Lives did offer plenty of pop culture goodies that
I think allow the film to persevere its critical backlash of “Why can’t the
series just stay dead?” With Alice Cooper’s kickass songs such as “Man Behind
the Mask” and “Teenage Frankenstein” on a cassette I bought back in the 90s,
the self aware script with its nods and winks (names of locations after horror
icons, McLoughlin including a familiar credit card, McLoughlin’s wife
mentioning that she seen enough horror films with creepy guys in masks to know
that she wanted to drive the other way), Jason becoming more of a folktale to
anyone that arrives at the camp for the summer (that the sheriff emphatically
insists that Tommy quit calling out Crystal Lake instead of Camp Forrest Green,
always pointing his finger at the young man for his mentioning Jason Voorhees
as they have all tried to put the past behind them to no avail), the sheriff
and deputies actually being an entire part of the plot (Sheriff Garris’ police
station has as much time almost as Crystal Lake, his deputy even has a
highlighted scope with little red dot on the gun that means, “You bang”), and a
little girl (Courtney Vickery) who gets a ton of screen time, trying to tell
her counselors that a big scary man keeps popping up. Auto insurance employees
playing paintball contests (and losing limbs), with the series introduction to
the triple head decapitation, the grave digger mentioning how the bottle “would
be the death of him” (and is, thanks to Jason), an adult male lifted off his
feet by a gate spike and tossed with ease over Jason’s head, bubbling mud
puddle where a woman’s head used to be before Jason used his gate spike to
silence her (cold hard cash was not in Jason’s interest), and a “machete for
two” (not exactly the wedding gift an engaged couple in the woods was
anticipating) offer some unique death sequences for the franchise. What
McLoughlin does is open the doors for others after his film to go all out with
the use of Jason in scenarios never before imagined…a slimy, gooey corpse that
can withstand a lot of firepower, boulders to the head, shotgun blasts, fiery
flames, etc. And McLoughlin, also, took notice of the MTV era and got Cooper to
give his film that extra 80s rock pop culture pizzazz. So, despite every reason
to not exist, Jason Lives was the franchise reborn, the character very much
dead but still kicking…even if many just wished he’d quit coming back.
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| Favorite Friday poster |
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