Posts

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Image
                 Paramount Pictures, a company that distributed The Godfather , The Conversation, Chinatown, and Raiders of the Lost Ark , decided that they finally had enough of Friday the 13th . The films had become an embarrassment to their prestige and decided to end with a flash-bang finale. A finale with enough pathos to rival Return of the King .                   Jason Voorhees comes back to life, supposedly dead after the events of Part III , and returns to Crystal Lake to attack more teenyboppers and, this is the groundbreaking new twist, a family.                  This is my second time watching The Final Chapter , and I am a much harsher critic this time around. The only thing I remember about Final Chapter before rewatching it was the final showdown between Jason and Tommy Jarvis. And it is the only memorable part because it's ripping o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

Image
                     Why a goaltender's mask? What made that mask so legendary in horror iconography? , Shelly, the young fro-haired lothario, owned the mask and frightened Vera with it. Then, Jason killed Shelly, and grabbed the mask, like, "Yes, that'll do." It was a fairly simple acquisition. No complicated, mythological origin story. It was a convenient way to hide his horribly disfigured face. But this simple donning of a mask is now firmly set in popular culture.                      (Not to go off on a tangent, but that was one of the things that irked me about the latest Halloween  entry [the 2018 version directed by David Gordon Green]. In the original, Michael Myers had the iconic mask that he used simply to hide his face from the authorities. That fact that he looked creepy was just serendipitous. In the remake, he kills the two podcasters just to get his mask...
Post a Comment
Read more

Friday the 13th Part II (1981)

Image
                         All it took was one cheap jump scare to create an entire franchise. After the success of  Friday the 13th, there were suggestions as how to continue. An interesting suggestion, one that the Halloween  franchise took into consideration with Halloween III: Season of the Witch , was to have each entry have its own separate story instead of a long-running continuity. But producers had to put their sticky digits into the works and thought the next entry should be about the zombie boy jumping out of the lake at the end of Part I.                          It is, essentially, the same film. Taking place five years after the events of the first one (though the two movies are only a year apart........???), it follows a group of young teenagers training to be camp counselors at a facility near the dreaded Camp Crystal Lake. The teen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Friday the 13th (1980)

Image
                    During the 1980's, film critics suffered a particular phobia known as paraskevidekatriaphobia . That being, the fear of Friday the thirteenth. Its foggy, questionable origins go back to the New Testament, more specifically, the Last Supper. There were thirteen disciples who sat around Jesus Christ as he broke the bread and poured the wine. The thirteenth disciple was Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Jesus. And Friday being Good Friday, the very day Jesus was crucified at Calvary. Hence, a superstition brought about by a cadre of paranoid numerologists. This long-held superstition lends its name to a critically maligned movie franchise that ultimately changed the slasher film genre, at least in the financial sense.                       Friday the 13th, an indie slasher film released in May of 1980, continues to be seen as low-brow trash. A runaway cash grab...
Post a Comment
Read more