Crystal Lake Countdown Day 6: Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D (1982)

Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D was the first installment of the series where the formula started to show its limitations. What worked so well in the first two films was already starting to seem too familiar. Even though initial discussions on Part 3 involved the idea of continuing the story of Amy Steel character of Ginny from Part 2 as she dealt with her trauma in a mental institution, that new direction never took hold. Instead, a choice was made to stick to the elements that were proven to be popular with audiences. Part 3 would once again see more kids spending time at Crystal Lake and meeting inventive deaths at the hands of Jason.

With so little to differentiate Part 3 from the previous two installments, though, the Friday producers felt they had to look for a hook to draw audiences back for more of the same old, same old (notice that every subsequent Friday always incorporated some gimmick - whether it be promoted as a "Final Chapter", a "New Beginning", or a change in locale, like Jason Takes Manhattan or Jason X). Luckily for the Friday the 13th crew, 3-D was on the rise again and it seemed like the perfect match for a Friday film. I remember the incredible hoopla around this movie when it came out and in the summer of '82, it was definitely the film all the cool kids wanted to see.

This time around, the new batch of kids heading to the slaughter aren't camp counselors but just a bunch of friends looking for a weekend getaway on the rustic grounds of Higgin's Haven. You'd think that these yahoos would've had second thoughts about partying around Crystal Lake as the grisly events of Part 2 have happened just days earlier. But clearly a little mass murder isn't going to stop a bunch of fun-loving kids like these. So with everyone in the van and committed to getting trashed and/or laid, it's off to the woods with no one troubled by the events of the last film. Little do these chumps know that Jason doesn't just go to work on Friday the 13th. If you thought Friday the 13th was hard to survive, look out for Friday the 20th!

Speaking of survival, we learn an important new "don't'" in the Friday the 13th universe in Part 3. Some might find this unnecessary to be explained but when you survive an encounter with Jason, don't test your luck with a rematch. Case in point is the character of Ali (Nick Savage) - the bad-ass black biker dude who isn't going to be satisfied until Jason fucks him up permanently. I loved it when Ali first took on Jason in the barn and got beat down - sure he lost but this was the first character who really tried to get hardcore on Jason so that was something to see. But the best moment of the whole film for me is when he pops up again towards the end, distracting Jason from his attack on Final Girl Chris (Dana Kimmell). When Ali reappears ready to throw down with Jason again, it's like - "Shit, he isn't dead?". I guess that was Jason's reaction, too, because he instantly chops off Ali's right hand, like "This is what I get for only half-fucking you up before. Let me fix that." The reaction of Ali as he looks at the stump where his hand used to be is priceless. It might be this moment where Jason became a superhero of slaughter rather than just a slasher.

Of course, this is also the film where Jason found his signature look with his iconic hockey mask making its debut (RIP Shelly!). Even though we take it for granted now, at the time no one knew what a hit this look would be with fans. The Friday series fell ass-backwards into its own mythology over the course those first few films but this is where it all started to get locked down.

This is also the first Friday to establish the tradition of bringing in random victims outside of the core group of characters just to put up bigger numbers for Jason. If you liked the banana-eating hitchhiker in The Final Chapter, or any of the many 'walk-on' victims that have appeared in the films over the years, thank Part 3. It was with this film that the producers realized that it was always better to fill screen time with someone getting killed - no matter who it was or what part they played in the film. Hence, in Part 3 there's Harold, the luckless shop owner (played by the late Steve Susskind) and his nagging wife as well as the biker gang led by Ali who runs afoul of Jason. Screen time that in the previous films might've been spent on moments of character development with the main cast (Strip Monopoly, Marcie's 'shower dream') was now used to deliver more of the moments that audiences expected from Friday the 13th. No more listening to Bill strum his guitar, or sitting at a bar bullshitting about the legend of Jason - Part 3 changed the pace of the series. This practice of shoe-horning in more and more kills reached its apex in A New Beginning with its staggering body count of seventeen (twenty-one, if you count the death of the bogus Jason along with his son's death and two dream deaths in the pre-title sequence).

As with Part 2, director Steve Miner stages another exciting final chase here with Richard Brooker's Jason pursuing Chris over every inch of Higgins' Haven. With Jason still being portrayed as a backwoods psycho in these early films, rather than some kind of zombie, Brooker gets to display some moments of human rage during this chase - as when he throws a fit when it momentarily looks like Chris has eluded him. It's moments like these that suggested another dimension to Jason that didn't need to be realized with glasses or gimmicks.

Crystal Lake Countdown Day 5: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

From the moment that New Line - the home of Freddy Krueger - gained the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise, there was never any question of if Freddy and Jason would meet on film, it was just a matter of when. In 2003, long years of development on the part of New Line paid off with a horror event first teased to audiences at the end of 1993's Jason Goes To Hell.

After Jason Goes To Hell's release, I remember reading in the pages of FANGORIA about the early attempts to get Freddy vs. Jason rolling and feeling that, well, any day now it'll happen. I mean, it's a movie that a whole generation or two of horror fans were crying out for - how long could they hold it up? But as time rolled on, activity would spark on the project then die off. Finding the proper reason to motivate the melee between Elm Street's dream stalker and Crystal Lake's carnage champion was no simple feat. Eventually, after a reported eighteen drafts by screenwriters including Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga (of Star Trek: New Generation fame) and David J. Schow (Leatherface, The Crow), it was writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift who became the duo to make it happen with rewrites courtesy of David Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins).

Given all the years of waiting, after all the aborted treatments, and all the hands this project passed through (I really wish that this could've been Fx master Rob Bottin's directing debut, as it was almost slated to be at one point), Freddy vs. Jason ended up being about as satisfying as anyone could've reasonably hoped. Coming in 2003, however, long after the prime of both series had passed, Freddy vs. Jason can't help but feel out of its element more than it would've in, say, 1988. Ideally, this needed to be made during the height of Freddy and Jason mania (of course, realistically, it's the kind of project that could only be made when both franchises were so down and out that they needed each other). Even if it had been a botched effort back in the '80s, it would've it would've felt of a piece with the Friday and Nightmare films of the time (and undoubtedly would've boasted a righteous heavy metal soundtrack with contributions from every hair band on heavy rotation on MTV). Freddy vs. Jason however, in tone and style, feels like it exists outside of both series (ironically, even though it was made just six years ago, Freddy vs. Jason somehow feels more dated now than any of the '80s Friday or Nightmare sequels - go figure).

That odd-man-out vibe might've been alleviated by bringing back Kane Hodder as Jason to preserve a sense of continuity. Hodder's films weren't my favorites but even though his Friday films were some of the most disappointing of the series, his presence as Jason gave them a unified feel and this should've been his swan song to the character. At least Robert Englund got to reprise Freddy one last time here (it's undeniably strange, though, to see Englund stalking characters played by actors who, in some cases, weren't even born when the first Nightmare was released). Rather than the beginning of a new franchise, this feels like a last hurrah for the classic versions of these characters and Hodder - who spent more time beneath the mask than any other actor and who kept the character alive with fans on the convention circuit even when the film series was lying stagnant - should've been there for it. The new Jason, Ken Kirzinger, did a decent job but he didn't project the same power that Hodder's Jason did - Hodder's body language would've been a far better fit for this film. At the time I didn't think the switch from Hodder to Kirzinger was such a big deal but looking at Freddy vs. Jason again, it does hinder the film. I know there was talk about how the producers and Yu wanted Kirzinger because he could deliver the empathy factor better, that there was more soulfulness in his eyes or some such nonsense but Hodder's 'star power' is what this Jason needed.

That said, director Ronny Yu works hard to make this a blood-soaked battle royal that pops off the screen and the climatic fight is definitely the knockdown, drag-out, Hall of Fame battle that it should've been. Yu stages the lengthy fight as the brawl to end ‘em all and neither combatant pulls their punches. Every stab goes deep - blood spurts out in geysers and limbs fly across the screen. If you didn’t see this with a full theater cheering on each and every blow, then you missed out. It just isn't the same experience at home.

For Friday fans, the biggest criticism to be made here (outside of the absence of Hodder) is that this is much more slated towards a Nightmare picture than a Friday the 13th. From the start, it feels like Jason is a guest in a Freddy film. Perhaps inevitably, due to the demands of getting both characters together (or just because of Yu's sensibilities as a director), this is way more fantasy-orientated with even the kill scenes given a cartoonish spin. On the upside, it's all grandly gory and most importantly, Jason doesn't punk out against Freddy. Their fight mercifully doesn't come down to a disappointing draw and our boy Jason is the last slasher standing. Freddy may have his wisecracks but Jason lets his machete do the talking and that machete can get awfully loud.

Even though Freddy vs. Jason has it's share of faults (among which is some of the worst performances in the history of either franchise - lead actress Monica Keena is especially atrocious), it does a lot right and it gives more respect to the characters than one might've expected. This could've been done as a quick cash-in but the final product shows more care to both franchises than that. Yu has fun incorporating the iconic imagery of both series while adding a few indelible sights of his own (seeing a demonic Freddy leap from Crystal Lake is just awesome). For fans of a certain age, this film was nothing less than horror history (watching it again, I still found it cool to hear the Nightmare theme segue way into the Friday ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma as a blood red version of the New Line logo appears). And in the pantheon of vs. movies, well, this might be the one that best delivers. As the final appearance of Jason before the reboot, Freddy vs. Jason is like watching a last sunset on Crystal Lake before a new bloody day dawns.

Crystal Lake Countdown Day 4: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

For horror fans, the decade of the '80s did not end on a proud note. By 1989, the titans of terror - Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers - who had once ruled over the box office had all frittered away their popular appeal along with their street cred. Arguably the most grievous fall of the bunch was with Jason and Friday the 13th as the series disappeared up its own ass with Jason Takes Manhattan. Time heals all wounds, though, and although I never thought I'd say so back when I saw this at a midnight show opening night, I now have something of a soft spot for Friday VIII. Of the four Kane Hodder films, it easily stands as my favorite. Call me cheesy but I can't help but get a rush every time this movie begins and the best lame late '80s rock tune to grace a lame late '80s horror movie - "The Darkest Side of the Night" by 'Metropolis' - kicks in ("Neon shadows that point the way/Never lead you out/It's a game they play").



At the time of its release, I was put out that this was such a softball movie. I mean, come on - where was the horror? Now as the world has become a darker, more dangerous place in the years since, Jason Takes Manhattan's innocuousness is a great part of its appeal. When the film opens in NY with the sight of the Twin Towers occupying their iconic place in the former Manhattan skyline as a radio DJ says "You can't get the adrenaline pumping without the terror, good people", it's hard not to look at Jason Takes Manhattan more fondly than we once did as a keepsake of a simpler, safer era. And with subsequent shots of generic street punks posed around their boom box intended to represent the threatening, 'hardcore' side of NY, Jason Takes Manhattan is a welcome - and sometimes amusing - reminder of what truly mild times we used to live in.

Nostalgia aside, the movie itself holds up slightly better than it should, thanks to some solid directing by Rob Hedden (who had cut his teeth on several episodes of TV's Friday the 13th: The Series). Among the original group of Paramount Friday movies, it's arguably the most visually stylish (particularly in regards to Jensen Daggett's surreal flashbacks). Friday VIII's main fault, as is often cited, is the fact that the title is so bitterly misleading.

The idea of Jason stalking victims among the familiar landmarks of Manhattan is brilliant and had the budget allowed for it, it would've kicked ass (even as it still would've been called out in some quarters for being too mainstream). But what we get instead is Jason stalking kids on board a ship until he gets to the mean streets of Vancouver, with just one amazing 360 shot of Jason standing in the midst of the actual Times Square as a bone tossed to fans waiting for Jason to "take" Manhattan. Had they called this, say, "Death Cruise" and included the Manhattan material as a bonus on top of it, who knows - the film might've played slightly better.

The MPAA was at their most heavy-handed in the late '80s so - as was the trend in the later Fridays - Hedden doesn't spill much blood but he finds inventive ways around it with some of the better "dry" kills in the series. Kelly Hu's dance floor death is staged well, as is Jason's pursuit of Peter Mark Richman's character. Richman plays an arch-weasel who flees from Jason into a building and not a moment later, he's being hurled out of a second floor window by Jason who has somehow already gotten into the building - and onto the second floor, even! - well ahead of him. Hedden has fun with Jason's by-then unquestioned ability to be in all places at once, and it's easier to appreciate that intentionally tongue-in-cheek approach now than it was in '89 when it simply seemed corny.

The crowning kill of the film, of course, is the rooftop boxing match between Jason and V.C. Dupree as 'Julius' that ends with Jason punching Julius' head clean off his shoulders, sending it plummeting into a dumpster many floors below. A lot of fans cite the sleeping bag kill in The New Blood as Hodder's best kill as Jason but for me, the death of Julius beats all comers. Hedden puts us in the POV of Julius' severed head as it falls through the air and when I saw Mel Gibson use the exact same shot in Apocalypto as a sacrifice victim's head tumbles down the steps of the temple, I had to think "Hey man, Rob Hedden was there first!"

Part VIII's big finale in the sewers as Jason is felled by a flood of toxic waste and, in death, reverts to the innocent child he once was is still perplexing. I can appreciate the nod to classic monster movies that Hedden meant this to be - as in the Wolf Man or the Invisible Man films where the monster returns to normal as they die and find peace - but it just doesn't work in the context of the Friday the 13th universe.

Jason Takes Manhattan turned out to be an era-ender in many ways. It was the last of the Paramount Friday the 13ths, the last Friday the 13th of the '80s - and in the mind of many fans, the end of the original continuity of the series (I side with those who look at the subsequent New Line films as taking place within their own separate universe) - so it's hard not to favor this flawed curtain call as a souvenir of the original days of Friday fanaticism. The '80s wouldn't have been the same without these movies to look forward to.

Crystal Lake Countdown Day 3: Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

When New Line acquired the rights to the Friday the 13th series, I couldn't have been happier. Paramount never seemed comfortable with the franchise, always looking to distance themselves from it and never quite understanding the following that the films had. New Line, however, was The House That Freddy Built. Their history was all about genre films and franchises and if anyone was going to run with the ball on Friday the 13th, surely it was New Line. That wasn't quite how things panned out, though. At least not initially. Right out of the gate, New Line's first Friday was slated to be the last - The Final Friday.

I doubt if anyone ever believed this would be the real end of the series. After all, we had already been down this road before with The Final Chapter in '84 and here we were, four more films later. Calling this "The Final Friday" was just a way to get audiences to show up after the last few entries in the series had seen waning attendance. New Line definitely had a better handle on how to sell this stuff more than Paramount did. The poster for Jason Goes To Hell is one of my favorites - you just can't beat the sight of that metal hockey mask against a background of flames with the drooling demonic worm wriggling in and out of the eye holes. Right off the bat, the poster signaled that this was going to be a very different from the Friday films of the past.

Written by the young crew of Jay Huguely, Adam Marcus, and Dean Lorey with the twenty-three-year-old Marcus himself assigned first-time directing duties, Jason Goes To Hell reflects - for both good and bad - an entirely new take on the franchise. For the first time, this is a Friday film made by people young enough to have been raised on the series. Marcus was a close friend of Sean Cunningham's son Noel and as a kid, he was present on the set of the original movie. Alone in the series, Jason Goes To Hell feels like a work of fan fiction, an alternate reality take on the character that creates an elaborate new mythology for Jason and the Voorhees clan (a host of random Easter Eggs for the horror crowd are also scattered throughout the film, with the Necronomicon from The Evil Dead and the "Antarctic Expedition" crate from "The Crate" episode of Creepshow making cameo appearances). In some ways, this makes Jason Goes To Hell an interesting film with a sensibility that none of the other films share, in other ways, a maddening one.

At the time, it probably seemed like a great idea to really shake things up with the franchise. The series was dying a protracted death at the box office, and no one really seemed to know what to do with Jason anymore (hence the sale to New Line from Paramount). And maybe at the time, it seemed like the audience might crave some answers as to how Jason is able to survive so much trauma (like, for instance, death) in film after film. In hindsight, however, the new abilities and backstory for Jason that Jason Goes To Hell introduces just points to how far astray from its roots the series had gotten. Jason was now some fantastical creature who not only couldn't die but who's body was just a vessel from which he could transfer his evil essence from one host to the next. Marcus has said that he and his co-writers hadn't seen the 1987 sci-fi thriller The Hidden when they wrote Jason Goes To Hell (which had an alien possessing identical body-hopping abilities to the ones they gave Jason) but whether it was an original idea or a rip-off, it doesn't matter much anyway - history has borne out the fact that this just wasn't the right way to go.

Friday the 13th should stick to telling the same story about a psycho in the woods out to protect his turf. The more you get away from that, the more the series loses itself. What saves Jason Goes To Hell is the enthusiasm behind it and the commitment - no matter how wrongheaded - to taking the series someplace different. There's plenty of weird bits here never seen before or since in the Friday universe - like Jason strapping down a naked prospective male host and shaving him with a straight razor before transferring bodies or the sight of Jason in satantic slug form making his way between Erin Gray's legs. I also liked Steven Williams' character of Creighton Duke - a larger than life bounty hunter who knows everything there is to know about Jason. As a director, Marcus went all out with the visuals in a way that no Friday helmer ever had up to that point and with Jason Goes To Hell featuring more shoot-outs and action-style moments than any other entry in the series, Marcus even offers up some John Woo moments (before Woo's style became trendy in the US - Jason Goes To Hell was in fact released the week before Woo's US debut, Hard Target) with characters firing their guns in slow motion as they dive through the air. Honestly, I'm surprised that Marcus hasn't gone on to do much more in the genre, or with directing in general, as this film showed he had some serious chops.

In the end, I can't help but maintain a fondness for Jason Goes To Hell. It's a nutty entry, to be sure, but I appreciate its audacity. If nothing else, it had the most crowd-pleasing final shot in the series. I don't think I've heard a louder reaction from a theater audience than I did from the opening night audience I saw this with when Freddy's glove bursts from the ground to drag Jason's mask beneath the dirt. Total hysteria. For that moment, at least, a theater full of Friday fans were in horror heaven.

Crystal Lake Countdown Day 2: Jason X (2001)

Going into space didn't herald great things for Jason's horror brethren Pinhead or Leprechaun so the idea of sending Jason to slay among the stars didn't seem like a promising next step for the series. The previous Jason entry was the controversial Jason Goes To Hell, which got a mixed response from the fanbase and audiences, so maybe a back-to-basics move might've been more sensible - especially as Jason Goes to Hell was released in 1993, making the gap between that film and Jason X the longest between any Friday entries to date. Maybe audiences were due to be reminded of what originally made the Sultan of Slaughter the brand name that he was. So was it really a prudent move to take him so far from his element - like off the planet altogether?

The answer, as it turns out, is "kind of". From a commercial standpoint, Jason X was a failure, being the smallest earner of the entire Friday series to date. So the 'hook' of putting Jason in space wasn't the draw that the producers might've hoped it to be (although in fairness, due to studio politics, Jason X was held back from release for two years, during which time the movie was widely bootlegged, cutting into potential revenue). But as a film, Jason X exceeded most expectations. Directed by Sean Cunningham protege James Isaac (who also directed the Cunningham-produced The Horror Show) and written by the future scribe of My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Todd Farmer, Jason X is far from the debacle some might've feared it to be. Farmer has stated that he's unhappy with the many rewrites done to his script, and I imagine a better movie was initially in the offing here, but the final product isn't so shabby.

Set for the most part in the far-flung year of 2455, after both Jason and a Final Girl (Lexa Doig as Rowan) frozen in cryogenic suspension back in our time are revived by a team of students on expedition to Earth, Jason X proves that the future offers several new challenges and opportunities for Jason. Challenge-wise, Jason learns that dismemberment isn't as effective with robots as it is with people. He also learns that there's a lot more firepower to contend with in the future. But yet the future science of nanotechnology gives Jason a new, more resilient body. Reborn as a gleaming gladiator of gore, the so-called Uber-Jason is Jason X's lasting claim to fame. I love the look for this costume - it's goofy but in just the right way. It reminds me of specialized action figures where characters like Batman or Spider-Man will be outfitted for some environment that they never actually encounter in the movies or comics, like Scuba Spider-Man or Artic Camouflage Hulk. That's how this Uber-Jason strikes me - like an action figure that they happened to build a movie around.

In his last outing as Jason, Kane Hodder does a great job selling what might've otherwise been been a too-ridiculous alteration to the character. From the start, Hodder always imbued Jason with a little bit of a superhero vibe (it probably helps that his first Friday was a comic book-style thrown down against a telekinetic teen - Hodder's Jason was never from the down n' dirty Friday era, there was always a fantasy element to his installments) so it doesn't seem out of character for his Jason to become an even more exaggerated powerhouse. As for his kills in Jason X, however, they aren't his best. The highlight comes early on when he dunks a victim face first in a sink of liquid nitrogen, then proceeds to shatter their frozen face against a counter. The rest of the movie's body count is more on the lame side of the galaxy. Jason's dispatching of a crew of hardass space troopers (including writer Todd Farmer in a cameo role) is all right (giving Jason a good adversary in the form of Peter Mensah's hard-to-kill Sgt. Brodski) and the virtual reality return to '80s-era Crystal Lake as Hodder reprises his famous sleeping bag kill from Part VII is a funny bit.

By the end of the movie, I believe Jason X has burned through the novelty of its premise to the satisfaction of anyone who might care. I do wish that he claimed a few more victims before the end - the android played by Lisa Ryder really needed to be put down for good and her inventor shouldn't have slipped past Jason, either (you just can't call Jason "Slappy" in a Friday the 13th movie and live) - but it isn't the fiasco some fans feared. Save for The New Blood, I prefer his Earth bound adventures but Jason X wasn't just a case of Jason being lost in space.

Crystal Lake Countdown Day 1: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

In the late '80s, just as the the Nightmare on Elm Street series was exponentially increasing its cultural clout with state-of-the-art FX and MTV-driven visuals, the Friday the 13th franchise proved unable to hold the same currency with audiences. The '80s, sadly, were moving on without Jason. We didn't have the phrase 'jump the shark' in the popular vocabulary back in 1988 when Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood was released but in hindsight, this is where it happened for the venerable series. Some might say that 1985's A New Beginning better deserves that dishonor but not only do I think there's some unappreciated qualities to A New Beginning, but the series also rallied from that slight stumble with one of its strongest entries - 1986's Jason Lives - which only made the next step of The New Blood that much more notable of a failure.

Maybe it was the loss of continuing character Tommy Jarvis that left the producers confused as to where to take the series next. After all, Friday Parts IV-VI had been a loosely connected narrative all its own where Jason finally had his first ongoing nemesis to contend with. But with the conclusion of the 'Tommy Trilogy', there didn't seem to be an obvious next direction to take. Originally, The New Blood was going to be the showdown between Jason and Freddy but negotiations between New Line and Paramount fell through, leaving that project to go on the back burner (as much as I enjoyed what eventually became 2003's Freddy vs. Jason, I do wish the project had been done back in the heyday of both characters - even if it had been terrible, it would've had that '80s vibe to it). With no Freddy to fight, Jason was pitted against a telekinetic teen in the form of Lar Park-Lincoln's traumatized Tina Shepard.

As The New Blood opens (after a lame pre-credit recap of the series narrated by Crazy Ralph himself, Walt Gorney), we see the character of Tina as a young girl living on the shores of Crystal Lake with her long-suffering mother and her disappointment of a father. Her dad, apparently, isn't all bad - he just likes to slap Tina's mother around too much. But when her dad gives her mom one whack too many, an angry Tina gets in a rowboat and starts drifting out onto Crystal Lake. When her dad runs out to try and get her back, Tina unwittingly unleashes her psychic fury, sending her dad plummeting into the lake along with the dock that he's standing on. That this might kill a man, I can accept. That no one in the days, weeks, or years after would ever drag the lake to recover this man's body is much more of a stretch. I mean, it isn't as though he was lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during a monsoon. The guy fell into a lake - and not even an especially enormous lake - so even if the dude was a total asshole, you'd think that some passing effort would've been made to get his body back. Maybe the filmmakers felt that a precedent had already been established that when someone drowns in Crystal Lake, they just stay there until they come out on their own. After all, if the local authorities couldn't be bothered to retreive the body of a young camper, it's likely that they wouldn't bother to pull anyone else out of the water.

Cutting to the present, Tina is still struggling to deal with her guilt over causing her father's death as well as trying to harness whatever mental powers she has. To do both, she's coming back to her old home on Crystal Lake along with her mother Amanda (Susan Blu) and shady psychiatrist Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser, later to be known as Bernie in the Weekend At Bernie movies), who has his own agenda. Luckily, for those coming to see a Friday the 13th movie, the house next to Tina's place is filled with the usual assortment of horny, drunken teen waste. And when Tina takes a stroll out to the lake's edge to wish her father back to life, guess who she resurrects instead?

Ideally, The New Blood might not have been so lousy (then again, ideally no movie should be so lousy) but this just didn't have the budget needed to effectively realize a psychic assault against Jason. Setting aside the fact that bringing in this type of sci-fi element wasn't the best fit for Friday the 13th in the first place, I think with enough funds to do it right, this could've been a spectacular installment for the series. Unfortunately, Tina's abilities are a little on the low-rent side with Tina coming across as the bargain aisle Jean Gray.

Park-Lincoln herself is fine - although she lacks the natural charisma of the better Friday leading ladies - but as a psychic warrior, she isn't especially formidable. More damaging, in the wake of the likes of Carrie, The Fury, and Scanners, psychic powers had already had been impressively realized on film and The New Blood isn't able to come close to matching or surpassing those efforts. Tina's powers most often manifest themselves by hurling objects across a room - and these objects (including such lethal projectiles as a potted plant) don't even move all that fast. That means that Jason has to stand in place unable to react while a TV or whatever else Tina is using her whammy on slowly bobs through the air towards him. Jason will then be momentarily staggered, step forward a few feet and then have to patiently wait while Tina unleashes her next crushing attack.

I also feel that the makers of The New Blood dropped the ball in showing Jason's ability to cope with a new type of foe. To encounter someone who can do the things that Tina can surely must blow whatever's left of Jason's mind. But rather than see Jason in a scenario where he might be defeated by an adversary, then have to regroup, strategize, and come back with a new approach - he simply meets Tina once, proceeds to take some abuse, then their conflict is over. I would've liked to have seen their battle take place over at least two separate rounds and seen some cunning on Jason's part in a rematch instead of having him simply stand there flat-footed.

On the upside, this was Kane Hodder's debut as Jason and his gung-ho performance enlivens the film somewhat. One of his fan favorite kills is here (the sleeping bag victim - a scene trimmed in all its home video incarnations down to one whack against the tree as opposed to the six that was originally seen in theaters) and the physical look for Jason here is one of the most elaborate and effective of the series, with director and makeup artist John Carl Buechler playing Jason's undead status to the max. For the first and last time, Jason looks truly dead and decaying - even to the point of an exposed spine being seen through his tattered clothes (awesome!). There's also a prolonged fire gag with Jason completely consumed in flames that's one of the most impressive stunts in the series. Unfortunately, this was the most infamously edited of the Fridays, with the MPAA forcing Buechler to neuter the film's potentially stronger moments, like Terry Kiser's should've-been legendary death at the hands of a Weed Wacker.

Where The New Blood really loses it is at the end, where Jason and Tina are facing off on the dock on Crystal Lake and Tina's ace up her sleeve is to bring the body of her father from the depths of his watery grave to drag Jason back down with him. When I saw this in the theaters, that was a deal breaker and it hasn't gotten any better with age. I mean, the movie had been pretty piss poor up to this climatic moment but I hadn't quite hated it. For this to be the big ending, though, was just too much. In all fairness to Buechler, he had wanted to have the father's body be a nasty, decomposing corpse - that, at least, I could of lived with. But the forces that be at Paramount blocked that. That means the father returns from his extended stay at the bottom of Crystal Lake looking as though he drowned just an hour earlier, rather then over a decade ago. I mean, when young Jason came out of the lake at the end of the original, he looked more or less like someone who had believably been at the bottom of a lake for many long years. When Tina's dad comes back at the end of The New Blood, he looks like he just skipped through a lawn sprinkler.

With The New Blood, the Friday franchise had started to go too far from what made it work in the first place. It was mistakenly trying to incorporate the kind of fantasy elements that played perfectly in the context of the Elm Street series but were all wrong for Friday the 13th, which should've held fast to its straight-forward slasher formula. At the same time, however, the splatter FX that was Friday's bread and butter was being curtailed by the MPAA to the point where it was impossible for the series to deliver like it had in the past. The Elm Street films could get away with turning teens into cockroaches but Jason couldn't jam lead piping through someone's skull. In 1988, the game was changing, and it wasn't in Jason's favor. He found himself fighting foes a lot stronger than any psychokinetic teen, and for the first time he was on the ropes.

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.