SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Well, if we have Freddy on, we need to give equal time to Jason! Interestingly, the one Friday The 13th movie on Netflix happens to be an out-of-character episode just like the one Nightmare on Elm Street was.
In a sense, this is standard Jason: He pops up out of the lake, walks around killing teenagers, and then gets stopped so he can re-awaken for the next movie. Plot over. The unique element here is that he is awakened by a girl with telekinetic powers, who ends up battling him with said powers. It's basically Jason vs. Carrie. Side note: this movie was originally planned to be Freddy vs. Jason (something they ended up doing later), but when they couldn't swing that, they came up with the telekinetic girl to replace Freddy. She is quite different from Freddy though.
This is really exactly what I expected from a Friday the 13th, except for the magical battle at the end. Jason is, as always, a zombie who isn't hungry, though he clearly exhibits full human intelligence. His motivation is nonexistent - he sees people, he kills people. His methods are nondescript - he grabs something sharp and stabs it into them. Boring. The kills are actually super tame, nearly always cut away before anything happens. This is done in a very clunky way that just looks like the tape got cut short rather than an artful edit. A little research told me that this is because the movie originally got an X rating, and they had to trim it way back, so all the good stuff was snipped (poorly). Seems like they went too far, but hey, it was the 80's.
The ending of this movie is totally honey nut clusters. Spoiler: the girl with the powers somehow summons the spirit/corpse of her dead father out of the lake to strangle Jason and drag him down. There's no way in which it begins to make sense, and the list of problems with it is too big to even start in on. It is the equivalent of the Monty Python foot coming down and squishing him.
Some quick notes from the movie:
- The Crystal Lake sign is written in one of my favorite fonts, Insaniburger. You can find it all over this website!
- This movie opens with a "Previously on..." montage, which is super weird for a movie to do, and not particularly helpful (much like the "THEN" montage that starts most episodes of Supernatural, but without the rockin' tunes)
- If Jason can stab through a person's body with his bare hand effortlessly, why is he wasting time with weapons?
- At one point, he kills someone by throwing a knife at them. This is entirely too human and skilled for him. It just doesn't feel right at all!
So in the end, we have a hefty body count of 16, and a well-earned
1 out of 5 Live-In Therapists. It's close, because they're both terrible, but I have to admit this might be marginally better than the awful Nightmare on Elm Street film from yesterday. At least it has a psychic girl to spice it up. Overall though, I will still rank Freddy a hundred miles above Jason anyday.
Here's a scribble of something that could be Crystal Lake.
