DVD Review

Reviewed By Adam A. Donaldson

Looking for the perfect Christmas gift for the slasher fan in your family? (I can’t believe I just wrote that.) Well, look no further than this limited edition box set of the first eight films in the Friday the 13th franchise. Each disc comes with its own unique set of special features, while the box comes with a collectable Jason Voorhees hockey mask replica. Now obviously, these films aren’t exactly high art, but they can occasionally be entertaining as hell. Quite literally. Below, I break down each film in the collection along with a hockey mask rating out of five.

Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Perhaps nostalgia drew me to review this one first. The release of the eighth Friday was about the time I became aware of the franchise, the iconic poster art of Jason literally clutching the skyline of City of New York, with his knife at the ready, sparked my imagination. Of course, I was profoundly disappointed years later when I finally saw the film and realized that only the last third of the movie actually takes place in Manhattan, and at that, only about three minutes of those scenes was shot in an actual New York location—Time Square. (The rest was shot in Vancouver and Los Angeles.)

From the word go it seems like the producers and filmmakers aren’t even trying; there’s no justification for Jason’s latest resurrection, no motive why he’d get on a cruise ship full of teens heading to NYC for their senior trip, and the logistics of how said boat travels from the very Pacific Northwest-y Crystal Lake to New York Harbour is incomprehensible at best. And that’s as good a word as any to describe the ending, which involves toxic waste and a bizarre transformation, while the rest of the characters seem just like re-named and re-purposed paper dolls from previous Ft13 instalments.

Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood

In terms of Fridays, Part VII is somewhere in the middle of the road. In the behind-the-scenes documentary, director John Carl Buechler explains that he wanted to give Jason a proper nemesis, which in this case was the psychically-empowered Tina played by Lar Park-Lincoln. Part VII also marks the first time that Kane Hodder slipped on the hockey mask and cover alls of Jason Voorhees, as he would continue to do through till the end credits of 2002’s Jason X. Hodder brought a slightly different physicality to Jason, he was a bit stockier with more muscle, which made him a bit more imposing a Jason than slashers’ past. The disc has a wide range of deleted scenes, which are mostly the more graphic deaths cut from the finished film by MPAA decree, all of which are no where near as grisly as the stuff from the last Saw movie.

Jason Lives: Friday the 13^th Part VI

You know what’s bizarre? This is a thoroughly entertaining entry. The show kicks off with Jason’s Frankenstein-like resurrection by lightening bolt, which is doubly improbable since someone in Part V says that Jason was cremated after his “permanent” death in Part IV. The camera zooms in on the black of Jason’s eye, and the killer walks into the frame James Bond style and slashes his machete, splattering blood across the screen. From there, the film delivers over the top kills, tongue and cheek dialogue, and just a generally fun slasher flick that almost makes you want to cheer along. It’s not often that a movie like this embraces it’s own lunacy, but I give full credit and kudos to writer/director Tom McLoughlin for taking the ball he was given and running with it to a rare touchdown.

Friday the 13^th Part V: A New Beginning

How do you know it’s not Jason behind the hockey mask in this one? The stripes on his goalie head gear are blue, not red. The sojourn of Tommy Jarvis continues in part five, albeit without the role’s originator Corey Feldman; a scheduling conflict with the then shooting Goonies meant that the 14-year-old actor couldn’t do more than a cameo. In an effort to add some depth to the teen victims in this round, the characters aren’t campers, but rather residents of a halfway house for troubled teens. Director Danny Steinmann and his team put forth a genuine effort to inject some new blood in A New Beginning, but part five of Friday inadvertently becomes the Halloween III of this franchise: an interesting experiment, but we miss the big man with the knife.

Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter

It’s the Friday that combined two living legends of the 80s: Corey Feldman (The Lost Boys) and Crispin Glover (Back to the Future). But more importantly, this was supposed to be the last in the series, a final, grisly send off for Jason where he meets his ultimate fate—at the hands of Mouth from Goonies. (I suppose it could have been worse, it could have been Chunk.) So convinced were they that this would be the last Friday that make-up master Tom Savini was inspired to return to the franchise to give his creation Jason the right kind of send-off. But the popularity of the series endured thanks to The Final Chapter’s over the top kills, and its degree of humour with itself. Still, one wonders if all it took to kill Jason was for Tommy Jarvis (Feldman) to hack him up with a machete, why didn’t the 17 some-odd wacks to the head with a hammer that Tommy’s big sister Trish gave Jason do the trick?

Friday the 13^th Part 3

This is the reason to get this set: old-school 3-D! The set comes with two pairs of old-fashioned red and blue lenses for your viewing pleasure, and because the film is done in that classic 3-D style, there’s a constant array of things flying out from the screen at you, be it a yo-yo, a machete, or a detached human eye ball. The plot picks up the very next day after Part 2, as a group of young people arrive at Crystal Lake, completely oblivious that there was a massacre down the road. In this film, Jason upgrades from a sack to his famous hockey mask, but everything is more or less the same from the first two films, right down to the sort-of, freak-out dream ending. What makes this one a winner is the novelty of 3-D, but if the novelty wears off, so a 2-D version of the film is also included.

Friday the 13^th Part 2

The first sequel to the venerable franchise was more or less a carbon copy—or hack and slash—of the first film. Once again a group of campers gather at the venerable Camp Blood, er, we mean Camp Crystal Lake, and on a dark and stormy night a knife-weilding psycho starts to have their revenge. This film introduces to Jason, the supposedly dead son of first film villain Mrs. Voorhees, a victim of drowning when left unsupervised by sex-starved camp councillors. Sack-masked Jason does his thing, and slaughters his way through a group of councillors that stay behind at the camp as others have a night on the town. How do you know which ones will stay at the camp and await a grisly death by Jason? They’re the ones with lines. However, the film does get a gold star for having Ginny, the film’s heroine played by Amy Steel, using clinical psychology against Jason in order to save herself.

Friday the 13^th

It’s the one that gets it all started, so it can’t be denied. As noted in one of the special features, producer/director Sean S. Cunningham set out with the express purpose of ripping off John Carpenter’s Halloween, and the result, Friday the 13th was an unmitigated success. Of course, the film struggles for much of the first hour as the group of relatively interchangeable teens are pursued by an unseen killer. But from the moment Betsy Palmer hits the screen as Mrs Voorhees there’s a new manic energy. It’s delightfully bizarre to see Palmer chase Adrienne King through the woods with a knife, egging herself on into greater degrees of murderous rage by personifying the spirit of Jason. On a more trivial note though, Kevin Bacon gets the second best death of a future A-lister in an 80s slasher movie after Johnny Depp and the fountain of blood in Nightmare on Elm Street.

Written by :

Adam