Trick or Trailers: Jason X (2002)

Man, it feels like these October days are just burning away faster and faster. Honestly, how is it possible that we're little over a week away from Halloween? I'm telling you, there's just no keeping up! But anyhow, as much as this Halloween season (along with the rest of 2020) is feeling like a dismal wash, one bright spot this month has been the arrival of Scream Factory's glorious Friday the 13th box set. 

The fact that I own all of these movies many times over in various formats doesn't diminish any of my geeky excitement over having them all together for the first time in one beautifully designed package. The box, the casings, the discs themselves, it all looks wonderful - such a difference from the "who cares?" attitude that Paramount always seemed to bring to the original eight films. 

Warners/New Line was always a little better in packaging their entries but having all twelve films together in a set that shows real care across the board is awesome. The only reason any fan will ever need to upgrade now is if the legal obstacles to a new film are ever cleared and we finally get Friday the 13th Part 13. I have to imagine it will happen at some point. I mean, come on, how could it not? 

In the meantime, though, having this set is compelling me to revisit the entire series (which is only making it seem even less like October - I associate Friday with the spring and summer, not the fall!) and, of course, all the trailers. 

One of the best of the bunch, in my opinion, remains Jason X. 

 

What a splendidly cheesy trailer this is! While there's an automatic eye roll effect that happens as soon as fans hear a slasher series is heading to space, I love that this trailer doesn't care about that. It leans into the premise and sells it hard, like it's the coolest thing that ever happened.  

Sure, one could say that it gives away too much. It could be argued, I suppose, that it would have been better to keep Uber Jason under wraps as a surprise to be delivered by the movie itself but I say to hell with that. Far better to just put it out there. It's the movie's big selling point so why hide it? You can't have your tagline be "Evil Gets An Upgrade" without showing what that upgrade's gonna look like.  

Of course, all the coolness of the Uber Jason design aside (how much of a bummer is it, by the way, that we never got a Jason X 2? I would have loved to have seen Kane Hodder come back and rock that look at least one more time), it's really the Drowning Pool song that makes this trailer. It was a stroke of genius on whoever it was in the New Line marketing department who thought to slap "Bodies" on this. 

Call that song corny if you will but as soon as it kicks in, it's like "Oh yeeeeaah!" And from the vantage point of 2020, hearing it now brings on a such warm rush of early '00 vibes. 

Back then, those years did not feel like such a great era but, you know, we got through 'em and so now that time has its own kind of nostalgic glow. Let's hope we'll be able to say the same about this time we're living through now one of these days. No matter what, as Jason X shows us, we've always got to keep our eyes on the future. 

Chances are, some cool shit is likely to go down there.   

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

In Scream 4, the film kicks off with spoofs of the fictitious Stab series - the films within the Scream films. Apparently, in the Scream-verse, Stab has chugged along to something like seven or eight installments. Unfortunately, unlike Stab's witty recreation of the events of the first Scream wherein Heather Graham was substituted for Drew Barrymore's character and Tori Spelling for Neve Campbell and the restaged scenes were given a glossy Hollywood horror sheen, the clips of these later-day Stab sequels prove to be soggy spoof material. Mostly they're just there to set up a pair of fake-outs as we think we're watching the opening of Scream 4 with two female friends alone in a house being stalked by Ghostface only to have it revealed that it's a Stab sequel and then the gag is repeated again with another pair of potential victims before Scream 4 properly begins.

The content of these mock Stab sequels is so banal, it made me wish that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson would've tried to have some real fun in imagining where the phony Stab series might have progressed. If only they had seized on the starry precedent set by Hellraiser: Bloodline, Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Jason X and gave their bogus Stab sequel an out-of-this-world setting. Even John Carpenter had once lobbied for a Halloween sequel in which the indestructible Michael Myers would be shot into space (whether he really thought that was a good idea or if he was purposely out to undermine the series, who knows?) so taking a horror franchise out of earthly orbit is enough of a reoccurring theme to warrant spoofing. Yes, it would've meant that the fake-out scares of Scream 4 would've had to go by the wayside but I believe it would have been a worthy sacrifice.

Seeing Ghostface lurking on a space station would've been a wonderfully cheesy way to kick off Scream 4. And honestly, I wouldn't have minded if it had been the real story to Scream 4, either. It would've been ridiculous, yes, but I have to say I miss the days when horror sequels would stray into strange, misguided territory. Back in the day, it frustrated me to see a phony Jason behind the hockey mask or to see the real Jason fighting a telekinetic teen or stalking Times Square or to have the Halloween series derailed by the odd mythology of the Cult of the Thorn (having already been really derailed by the machinations of crazed mask maker Conal Cochran) but in hindsight I appreciate the room for spontaneity that existed then. As inept as some of those sequels were, and as much as they showed a deep misunderstanding of the creative properties involved, I miss the willingness to deviate from the program.

In the '80s and '90s, there wasn't much thought as to whether fans might be affronted or outraged by the direction of a sequel but the keepers of today's franchises always stay on script (with the sole exception being the Child's Play films, but that series has sadly been on hold since 2004's under appreciated Seed of Chucky).

The Saw films never took any zany detours (no Jigsaw Goes To Washington, for example) and likewise, for however long the series lasts you'll never see Paranormal Activity spring any surprises on viewers. At least the Final Destination films can keep ballooning its set-pieces to increasingly absurd levels but in general, the days of horror franchises doing anything to challenge or test their base are over. Walking out of a movie like Jason Goes to Hell, I would've told you that's what I always wanted but I'm not so sure anymore.

Being too cautious is ultimately what gutted Scream 4. I enjoyed it myself but as I said in my review, it's a movie that favors the old guard over the new blood and horror is always about new blood. That's how it's continued to survive. As confounding as some of the horror sequels of the past were, in hindsight I like that they only followed formula to a point. It's true that most of the creative leaps those sequels took didn't pay off but at least the attempts were memorable. It's easy to tell one Friday the 13th from the other - but can anyone other than the most attentive Saw fan tell those sequels apart?

While the box office for Scream 4 on its opening weekend wasn't exactly dismal, it was definitely lackluster compared to its predecessors. The series now ironically finds itself in the same position of the '80s warhorses it used to mock - a once thriving franchise whose audience has shrunk. If another Scream comes around, maybe they'll decide to throw caution to the wind and set their sights a little higher.

Like, maybe as high as the moon even.

Countdown To Crystal Lake

With the release of the Friday the 13th remake now just thirteen (!) days away, I thought I should give a proper shout out to the original series. For the next eleven days, I'll be counting down my favorite Fridays and by the time I hit number one it'll be the eve of the new Friday the 13th. That's the plan, at least - hopefully I won't have to miss a day but we'll see if luck is on my side. It might be a bad idea to commit myself to a daily countdown that I might not have the time to follow through on but for the sake of my favorite franchise, I'm gonna give it a shot anyhow. That's the thing with Crystal Lake - you've got to jump in with both feet and either you'll sink or you'll swim.

Don LaFontaine, R.I.P.

Just the other day, I was waxing nostalgic about legendary announcer Ernie Anderson and now, sadly, it's been reported that voice-over artist extraordinare Don LaFontaine has passed away at the age of 68 due to complications from pneumothorax. While every movie fan has their favorite memories of hearing LaFontaine's voice long before they knew the name behind it, the trailers that stay with me the most are for the first four Friday the 13ths.

When I was twelve, I saw the trailer for the original Friday the 13th on The Movie Channel while on an out-of-state family visit to my grandmother's home in New Hampshire. I had seen the Friday TV spots previously to this, when the film was released in theaters, but seeing the full trailer really got my attention. Thanks to LaFontaine's ominous baritone inaugurating Friday's trademark body count as bold red numbers flashed on the screen, I thought this was the most intimidating preview for a horror movie I had ever seen. And as it took at least another year for me to be allowed to watch the film itself, it was this preview and LaFontaine's voice that kept me determined to see it. I just knew I couldn't be a true horror fan until I had.

I love the trailer for 1981's Friday the 13th Part 2, because whoever wrote it didn't even try to get their facts straight about either the original Friday the 13th or Part 2! As we see returning heroine Alice (Adrienne King) nervously creep through her apartment, we hear LaFontaine intone: "On a June night in 1980, Friday the 13th, twelve of her friends were murdered." Well, if outside of Steve Christie you mean "people she just met that day" (including one she never met at all!) instead of "friends", then sure. And if by "twelve", you really meant "seven", then that'd be true. And even though the sequel takes place five years after the original, which would make it 1985, LaFontaine asks "why should Friday the 13th, 1981 be any different?"

By the time 1982's Friday the 13th 3-D rolled around, Jason was already on his way to being a full-blown icon. This was the first Friday trailer where LaFontaine got to call Jason by name ("These are Jason's woods...") and it instantly validated Jason as a movie monster to be reckoned with.

Finally, four years of mayhem came to a head with 1984's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter ("Three times before you have felt the terror, known the madness, lived the horror. But this is the one you've been screaming for"). This trailer rocked with LaFontaine delivering his most dramatic lines of all the Friday trailers to date ("...He moves like a shadow, dark and silent. He never utters a word. He doesn't even seem to breathe. He simply, mindlessly, mercilessly...kills.). I feel that this one trailer did more to evoke a sense of character for Jason than the movies themselves ever did. And even though the series was back in business in just another year and LaFontaine was still narrating the trailers, it never quite seemed the same.


LaFontaine's contribution to the world of movies was one that we took for granted, even as over the course of his career he helped scores of films of every genre find their audience. Among those thousands of films, the Friday the 13th movies may have been just a drop in the bucket but his voice on those trailers helped make me a Friday fan for life.

If You're A Ninja And You Know It, Clap Your Hands

As Crazy Ralph would tell you, Camp Crystal Lake is cursed ground. For decades after the accidental drowning of her son, former camp cook Pamela Voorhees made it her mission to avenge Jason’s death and keep future generations off that Hell-marked property. After putting her unsightly man-hands to work on committing a pair of murders, setting a mysterious fire, and poisoning the camp’s water supply, it looked like the camp’s reputation was permanently fried and Mrs. Voorhees’ work in Jason’s name was done.

However, in 1980 when stubborn dreamer Steve Christie decided that Camp Crystal Lake deserved another chance to succeed and he hired a staff of young counselors to make it happen, Mrs. Voorhees had to redouble her efforts. That meant that acts of minor vandalism were yesterday’s tactics. Property damage wasn’t going to cut it anymore. No more half-measures – it was time to unleash the beast and kill every single person on the camp grounds (instead of “They Are Doomed”, the poster for the first Friday could’ve read: “They Fucking Asked For It!”).

But when Mrs. Voorhees’ jihad against the horny teens of Camp Crystal Lake was cut short – along with her head – and Jason himself was left to pick up the bloody baton from his mother, fans immediately started asking questions. Had Jason been alive the whole time and been living in the woods? Was he a zombie? Why couldn’t he be killed? Why did he bother putting a door on the filthy bathroom in his shack in Part 2 – was he expecting company, like ever? Why does someone who was born to shit in the woods even have a toilet in the first place? And does anyone know why his face looks completely different in every movie? And while those questions have persisted in fan circles over the years, no one ever seems to ask the real question: What the Hell was Mrs. Voorhees supposed to be?

When the original Friday the 13th was released, it was regarded as a pretty straight-forward tale. This unbalanced mother had suffered a terrible loss and no body count would be too high to atone for it. Yeah, the death of Jason was her motivation – that’s understood. The major contributing factors in that death, such as premarital sex and recreational drug use – those were grounds for execution. Yep, gotcha. But I want to know – how the hell did this middle-aged woman physically accomplish the acts she committed in Friday the 13th? I mean, seriously – how? With few exceptions, these are not the kills that most women her age could pull off. These aren’t even the kind of kills most robots from the future could pull off, frankly. What Mrs. Voorhees does in Friday the 13th is way outside the strength league of someone of her size, stature, and planet of origin.

Think about it: what woman could thrust an arrow through the bottom of a mattress, completely penetrate that mattress, and then drive the arrow even further all the way through the neck of someone lying atop the mattress? None, really – unless Ivan Drago underwent a sex change. And that’s not all. Somehow Mrs. Voorhees was also able to single-handedly raise an average-size dude – not a midget, mind you, a real guy – off the ground, hold his body against a wooden door and impale him against that door with arrows that she penetrated straight through this grown man’s body and into the door behind him with enough force to keep the body nailed against it. And she did all that shit in record time, too!

Mrs. Voorhees also hurled another chick’s dead body through a window and managed to place Steve Christie’s body up a tree. Come on – does any of this sound normal to you? After watching the original Friday the 13th more times than I can remember, and trying to make sense of what I was watching, I realize now that there’s only one possible answer:

Mrs. Voorhees was some kind of ninja bitch.

There’s no other explanation. If she isn’t supposed to be a ninja, then the movie is total bullshit. And no movie I’ve spent so much time watching could be that bullshit.

And apparently she wasn’t the only ninja bitch at Camp Crystal Lake that night. Mrs. Voorhees should’ve picked her prey a lot more carefully because even though Alice looks like the average girl next door, the average girl next door can’t decapitate a human being with a single swing of a machete, can they? No, not even if they use two hands. I mean, really – it took Conan at least two or three whacks with a sword to take Thulsa Doom’s head off at the end of Conan the Barbarian but in Friday the 13th, Alice separates Mrs. Voorhees’ head from those burly shoulders with one swing as cleanly as a lawnmower slices off the head of a daisy. And that says ninja to me.

I feel serene now that Friday the 13th makes sense to me. I just can’t believe it took me so long to put it together. But I probably shouldn’t be so hard on myself. After all, if ninjas were that easy to spot, they wouldn’t be ninjas.

And for anyone who might have cause to wonder – no, ninjas don’t usually resort to acts of biting and hair-pulling. But there’s nothing that says two warriors have never tried to settle their shit street-style.

The New Jason

At the start of 1986's Jason Lives, the sixth entry in the Friday the 13th series, Jason was depicted mimicking the famous opening to the James Bond series. The moment rated as a nice tip of the hat to Jason's status as a pop icon but unlike the many actors that have famously carried on the mantle of England's premiere super-spy through the years, when it comes to Jason Voorhees, the man behind the mask has always been an anonymous figure to all but the most hardcore geek set. But whether or not it's news outside of the FANGORIA crowd, the new Jason for the upcoming Friday the 13th remake has just been revealed to the world. The lucky candidate to don the hockey mask this time around is Derek Mears (see photo above).

For some, the news of a new Jason will be greeted with a shoulder shrug - after all, couldn't any big dude fit the bill? For instance, I felt that Rob Zombie was just blowing a lot of smoke in trying to say that he cast Tyler Mane as Michael Myers in his Halloween remake because he really needed someone who could ACT as opposed to going with a stuntman. Well, having seen that film I strongly disagree. Mane did fine, sure, but I didn't see much in his performance that previous Shapes like Dick Warlock or Brad Loree didn't pull off just as well. If you're playing Michael Myers, you can only get so far from Nick Castle's original portrayal before it doesn't seem like Michael Myers anymore. With Jason, however, there's a little more leeway for the personality of the actor to show through.

To that, some might say "Jeff, do you ever get tired of being stupid?" but bear with me. To the untrained eye, to the casual observer, there may not be much difference between the loping, lumbering hillbilly hustle of Steve Dash's Jason in Friday the 13th Part 2 and CJ Graham's lightening-charged, zombie superhero in Jason Lives (with that film, Jason was no longer just a creepy mongoloid skulking through the woods, he was elevated to a more mythical status) but I stand here today to tell you that there is.

In Friday's 2, 3, and 4, in particular, Jason seemed really scary to me (sure, my young age probably had something to do with that, but still...). Despite the character's uncanny resilience to injury, Jason didn't come across as a supernatural entity in these films, he was just a tough bastard to keep down. He wasn't yet the stoic, Terminator-esque figure that he became in the hands of actors like Graham and Hodder.

I especially liked Richard Brooker's Jason from Part 3. Even if he hadn't been the first Jason to wear the hockey mask, and even if he hadn't been the only Jason to date to kill his victims in 3-D, I'd still be a big fan. For instance, I love the way he loses his shit and tears up a horse stable when it looks like a potential victim that he'd cornerned in a barn may have given him the slip. Seeing Jason get pissed is great! Brooker's Jason also added a patented Jason move to the playbook, being the first to hurl a victim's body through a window with enough velocity as though it had been launched by a missile.

Part 3 also features the best Jason unmasking of the entire series. When Jason is literally at the end of his rope towards the climax, hung to apparently fatal effect from a noose by Final Girl Dana Kimmell, Kimmell pushes open a set of barn doors to look at her handiwork. As Jason's body swings in front of her, twisting and turning with the wind, he suddenly reaches his arms over his head and moves to free himself. As the noose slides over his head, it dislodges his hockey mask, briefly revealing the gruesome visage underneath. It's a great moment, and Brooker's performance really sells it.

And it should also be mentioned that with Part 3 for the first time we had a Jason who possessed the tremendous upper body strength needed to crush a dude's head hard enough to make the crushee's eye fly out. After that history-making kill, all future Jasons were required to go the extra mile at the gym.

Kane Hodder remains the most famous Jason with four Friday's to his credit (he wore the hockey mask from Part VII through Jason X, cruelly being let go by New Line just before Freddy vs. Jason became a reality) but while Hodder's tenacious efforts on behalf of the series always made him an ingratiating presence on the convention circuit, I never loved his portrayal of the character. This isn't Hodder's fault as his tenure in the role was marked by a series of ill-advised alterations to Jason's iconic character (turning Jason into a zombie was questionable to begin with but turning Jason into a hell-spawned, body-hopping slug as well as into a half-man/half-machine cyborg was just too much change for the character to withstand). I much preferred the early versions of Jason when the character was just a crazy mama's boy running around the woods, playin' the fool.

That's the Jason I like and if the plan is for Mears' portrayal to bring that back, I'm all for it.

Crystal Lake Persuasion

There's many horror films that are disparaged upon their initial release but enjoy the satisfaction of an eventual critical reevaluation, but Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) is still regarded in most quarters as mediocre, despite launching one of most successful movie franchises ever. Even among today's generation of horror fans, Friday's classic status seems like more of an honorary gesture of respect, rather than a sign of passion for the film itself.

In contrast to Carpenter's Halloween, which is universally praised as the best of its series, a highwater mark for the genre, and which still has legions of new fans flocking to discover it, Friday the 13th's lack of play with contemporary audiences was addressed over ten years ago by the opening of Scream (1996) when Drew Barrymore's character failed to correctly answer the killer's trivia question: "Who was the killer in the first Friday the 13th?" Given that, it's not surprising to hear that the upcoming Friday the 13th remake will look to emulate the sequels more than the original.

But even though the perception is that it took a few films before the Friday series got all its pieces in place, for me it's always been first and foremost about the original. No other film in the series ever nailed the eerie sense of isolation that the original did. Once the sun went down on Camp Crystal Lake, it became a truly foreboding place. You really felt like you were out in the middle of nowhere with these kids. And Barry Abrams' photography has a grittiness to it that was abandoned by the slicker sequels. When it's night in this movie, it doesn't feel like the typical movie version of night time where the trees are perpetually backlit. You get the feeling that without a flashlight in these woods, you couldn't see your own hand in front of your face.

And there's an earnestness to the performances here that still plays well. I especially love the fact that these kids spend their last day on Earth doing such stupid, random shit (there's no activity too tedious for Cunningham to linger on, whether it be Bill strumming his guitar or Alice making herself a cup of instant coffee). It's endearing. It's also endearing that the kids play a risque game of "Strip Monopoly" that manages to not be titillating in the least.

Cunningham has never gotten much credit for whatever directorial touches he brought to Friday the 13th but even as familiar as this film's scares have become it's evident what a canny hand Cunningham had for goosing the audience. He shows just enough violence for it to have an impact and the reveals and the jump scares always come right when they should. Even though the climatic scare was cribbed from Carrie, I think that Cunningham actually improved on DePalma's final shock. So there.

And Mrs. Voorhees has always scared me way more than Jason. First of all, in several close-ups of her hands, we're actually seeing the hands of Tom Savini's assistant Taso Stavrakis so it appears that Mrs. Voorhees has hairy man-hands and that's definitely unnerving.

But it's the sick personal joy that Mrs. Voorhees derives from Final Girl Alice's terror that really creeps me out. Her mouth might be telling Alice "it'll be easier for you than it was for Jason", but her eyes are saying "ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma". It's not enough for Mrs. Voorhees to just kill Alice, she wants Alice to know full well what kind of butchering she's in for.

It would've been much easier for Mrs. Voorhees to stash Bill's body someplace, for example, rather than taking the time to impale him on a door with multiple arrows (a hideous defilement to which Alice can only say, "Poor Bill!") but Mrs. Voorhees prefers to go the extra mile. She's been getting away with this kind of shit since the '50s, after all, so there's no fear on her part that she'll drop the ball now.

When Alice does get the upper hand on Mrs. Voorhees during their final stand-off (apparently Alice is equipped with a bionic arm, by the way - how else to explain her ability to decapitate a person with one swing of a machete?), it's a true look of surprise we see on Mrs. Voorhees' face as she realizes that her reign of terror is at an end.

Come Friday the 13th, February 2009, the Friday remake will prompt more people than ever to disregard the merits of the original. But whatever its reputation, Friday the 13th will always rank with me as one of the all-time perfect horror films. A shocker of the first order.