FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 6: JASON LIVES @ 40

Tommy from Parts 4 and 5, returns to Crystal Lake (now Forest Green) from his stay at a mental health hospital to kill the already dead Jason Vorhees to prevent him from ever returning. He and a friend dig up the grave and Tommy impales Jason with a fence spike which catches a bolt of lightning which brings Jason back to lethal life. Good one, Tommy.

And then it's kill kill kill, thrill thrill thrill and then the credits. Except that this part takes up the challenges of the previous one (which I won't be spoiling) and runs with them. The franchise holds its own from the first to the fourth better than most comparable horror franchises of its time. The second sequence begins with an acceptable twist but then we're really only retreading the formula with a few threads of commentary on the times to extend it. Where once there were hillbilly families and bikie gangs there are now white collar paintball teams. The summer camp is back, having been absent for a few installments, and this time we get the kids who go to it, not just the counsellors, adding a potential quarry for the man in the mask.

Also, there's the Tommy thread which has to do with indentity and agency as defined by suspicions against him. This is difficult to detail as it involves spoilers for gthe previous two parts but I can say that it's treatment of Tommy's predicament lifts it from the generally disappointing Part 5. If you remember that this is part six of a slasher franchise, Jason Lives does its job with some inventive kills that include character setups sufficient to prevent the murders from simply adding to the kill count. And there is the line, early in the piece: "I've seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." Ten years on and that self-reflexivity became de riguer with Scream and its imitators.

What is there left to say about this installment in time, as its own film? It's lean and muscular and does what it says it will do. Neither particularly profound nor trying to be, ressurecting the monster and leaving him at the door to any number of sequels, the way everything should work.

I witnessed the origin of the F13 franchise as a one-off during Schoolies Week in 1980. It worked great magic. I'd seen Halloween the year before at the drive-in and its memory towered over this. Much later, when I relaxed my cinephilia with the admission that I love horror movies, I caught up with both franchises (along with Nightmare on Elm St, Hellraiser and a few others). 

Comparing the descendants of Halloween with F13 is a sobering exercise. While Halloween kept going off its own rails by copying the thing that copied it (F13) and strayed into potentially interesting territory with the third installment, once it relaxed into dishing up the kind of slasher movies that the original's imitators did, it lost touch with its inspiration and became the game it had changed. F13, for all its callous copying and base exploitation, kept showing it could try new things. That's pretty much why I bought a blu-ray set of the first eight plus the 2007 remake as I knew it would feel less try-hard than a comparable set of Halloween. F13 doesn't beg too much but does get on with it. That beats a fading current of nostalgia any time.