Guilty Pleasures: Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives

In a few days it’s going to be Friday the 13th, a day infamous for bad luck and (for me) horror movie marathons. When you have a film franchise named after any day of the week, you can expect that people will watch it on that day year after year. The Friday the 13th series is full of ups and downs but it’s generally assumed that you can mostly stop watching the series after Part IV: The Final Chapter, where Jason is killed once and for all. However, just because Jason was dead didn’t mean the franchise wasn’t.

In order to properly explain and defend Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, I need spoil the endings of Parts 1-5. If you’ve never watched a Friday the 13th film you may want to  get caught up before reading ahead.

In 1980, Friday the 13th was released. While it was critically despised, it was one of the most profitable films of the 80s (being made for $550,000 and making over $39.7 million). After Camp Crystal Lake counselors get killed off and only Alice remains alive, it’s revealed that Mrs. Voorhees (the mother of Jason, the boy who drowned years earlier) has been killing the counselors. Alice decapitates her but (huge surprise spoiler) is still attacked by Jason at the end of the movie.

The next year, Friday the 13th Part II came out and Jason Voorhees became our main villain. At the end of Part II, while our lead scream queen Gina escapes, she doesn’t stop Jason (now sporting a potato sack over his head and tripping all over himself), leading us into Part III. Again, in Part III there is a survivor but Jason has still not be killed.

By 1984, the horror genre was getting an extremely poor reputation. Due to this, Paramount decided maybe it was time to put an end to Jason. They called it The Final Chapter and Tommy Jarvis (played by Corey Feldman) kills off Jason once and for all… or so we thought. Paramount looked at the $33 Million that it pulled and suddenly decided that horror’s reputation wasn’t all that bad. They quickly worked on releasing another sequel.

While Movies 1 through 4 were never award winning, they were fun. Furthermore, you had to give them credit for never killing Jason at the end of the movies. While I love the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, they kill Freddy at the end of every movie and then he usually comes back without an explanation. At least the Friday the 13th films kept a narrative consistency, except that in their desire to keep this general consistency they eventually made a huge mistake.

Here’s the situation: Jason is dead. We have a new Friday the 13th movie, but how do we explain the return of Jason? You don’t bring him back. You create a copycat killer. Fans were not amused by Friday the 13th Part V (although it does include Geekscape EIC Jonathan London’s favorite scene of any Friday the 13th: when Miguel A. Núñez Jr. (playing Demon) is killed in a port-o-potty after duet-ing with his girlfriend AFTER getting the shits from those “damn enchiladas”).

This brings us to Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Originally the purpose of Part V: A New Beginning was for the copycat killer to drive Tommy Jarvis to kill and take over the Hockey Mask. However, the intensely negative reaction to Part V immediately led to the decision to bring the original Jason back. 

 

Many Friday the 13th fans will tell you this is the best film in the franchise and they’d be correct. However, many fans also strongly dislike this film for it’s usage of humor. Critics thought it was better than the previous films, but still were not wowed by it and other folks tend to not acknowledge any of the sequels (NOT EVEN FRIDAY THE 13th Part 3-D!).

As I stated previously, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives incorporated lots of humor and even winked at the camera in a meta sorta way years before There’s Nothing Out There and Scream. Jason is brought back from the dead in the same vein as Frankenstein’s Monster and Martin the Gravedigger looks at the camera accusing the audience of being sickos. While Jason tears his way through unsuspecting campers he leaves bloody smiley faces and face imprints in his wake.

After this film, the franchise took a swan dive, having Jason battle Carrie and traveling to Manhattan, Hell and Outer Space. Jason Lives, however will always stand out as an under-appreciated horror sequel that should be as loved and respected as Dream Warriors is in the Nightmare on Elm Street fanbase, but tends to be looked at as unfairly as Season of the Witch is to Halloween fanboys, simply because of the unfortunate company it kept in the lower-quality sequels that surrounded it in the series.

 

 

When he’s not watching awful movies Matt Kelly is blogging, tweeting and hosting his podcast The Saint Mort Show