The Cool Channel DVD Review: Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan, Disc 3 Posted by J.D. Dunn on 03.14.2006
Bubes and zombies! What more could a man want?
From Crystal Lake to Manhattan, Disc Three Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
D: Danny Steinmann W:Martin Kitrosser, Danny Steinmann & David Cohen Starring:Melanie Kinnaman, John Shepherd, Shavar Ross, Juliette Cummins, Tiffany Helm and Debisue Voorhees Runtime: 92m. MPAA: [R]
The Film:
After the events of "The Final Chapter," Tommy Jarvis (now played by Shepherd) is sent to a sort of mental halfway house to recover from the trauma of the ordeal. He's plagued by dreams and visions of Jason and acute melancholia. He barely talks and withdraws from everyone he meets outside of a young boy, Reggie (Ross, he of the high-pitched woman scream), who's visiting his grandpa at the institution.
The inmates at the institution are all young —late teens/early twenties — and none of them seem to suffer from serious problems, outside of Vic (Mark Venturini) who's clearly a homicidal maniac. When Vic is interrupted from his wood-chopping duties by a well-meaning Joey (Dominick Brascia), he becomes enraged and chops the kid to pieces.
Vic is taken away by the police, and the paramedics come to collect the Joey pieces. One of them, Roy (Dick Wieand), seems rather rattled for someone who must deal with this kind of thing on a routine basis.
From there, a mysterious killer starts targeting random people around the institution — a pair of greasers as well as the ambulance driver and a nurse. Meanwhile, the visions continue for Tommy, and it doesn't help when jokester Eddie jumps out at him while wearing one of Tommy's masks. Tommy reacts violently with his apparent mastery of martial arts. Could it actually be Tommy who's been killing people? Perhaps he was set off by the sight of Vic's carnage.
When police find the bodies, the sheriff theorizes that it is Jason Voorhees. After all, the M.O. is the same. The mayor reminds him that Jason was cremated, although he admits he didn't witness any cremation.
It doesn't take long for the rest of the kids to get dispatched. Tina and Eddie, who seem to suffer from nymphomania more than anything else, get killed while sneaking away to have sex. A peeping drifter also gets it. Even redneck malcontent Ethel and her mama's boy son who live nearby don't escape the violence (ew, right in the stew).
The formula plays itself out as one of the counselors, Pam (Kinnaman), Reggie, and Tommy find themselves on the run from a hockey-masked killer bent on slaughtering them.
Much like Michael Corleone, Paramount found themselves pulled back in every time they thought they were out. They fully intended to kill the franchise off with "The Final Chapter" after outcries from the MPAA, critics, and parents' groups, but box office receipts talk louder than self-important child psychologists, so we get this sequel.
Oddly enough, this film nearly did kill the franchise by taking Jason away from the fans. Although you wouldn't think it would be such a big deal, considering no actor had returned to play the killer. He didn't even really look the same from one film to the next, despite the fact parts 2, 3 & 4 take place in the same week. Still, fans had been following a storyline of this tragic retarded killer, so when Part 5 went its own way, fans didn't care to follow.
One thing Part 5 does offer is even more nudity and sex. Nurse Lana's flashing is so blatantly gratuitous that it's almost played as a joke (almost, but not quite). Then, there's the luscious, buxom Debisue Voorhees (no relation to the killer). Even Juliette Cummins gets in on the act, taking her top off before unknowingly getting into bed with a chopped up corpse.
This is widely considered the worst of the Friday films for wedging in an imposter and coming up with a plethora of silly, uninteresting characters to kill (a pair of Fonzies and a DeBarge wannabe?!). I can't say I disagree. D+
Friday the 13th: Jason Lives (1986) D:Tom McCloughlin W:Tom McCloughlin Starring:Thom Matthews, C.J. Graham, Jennifer C. Cooke, Tom Fridley, Darcy DeMoss, Kerry Noonan and David Kagen Runtime: 86m. MPAA: [R]
The Film
Desperate to quell the outrage of fans who wanted their Jason and traditional Friday films back, Paramount responded by releasing this film and "April Fool's Day," a film closer to the original Friday pedigree, in the same year.
Well, the subtitle makes it pretty clear. Jason is back, and he's as violent as ever. Interestingly, Paramount recruited Tom McCloughlin, who was known more for comedy than anything else, to direct the film. It could have been disastrous, but it actually breaths fresh air into a franchise that was desperately in need of it.
What McCloughlin brings to the franchise is an appreciation of the old gothic horror masterpieces from Universal in the 1930s and 1940s (i.e., Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman). McCloughlin establishes that atmosphere right away by opening the film in a foggy graveyard with thunderclouds hanging overhead.
Tommy Jarvis (this time played by Matthews) brings his friend Hawes ("Welcome Back, Kotter's" Ron Palillo) to Jason's grave to cremate him for real. The sight of Jason's rotting corpse sends Tommy into a rage, though, and he jabs a metal fencepost into Jason's chest. Unfortunately, an act of…well, not God, obviously, but Mother Nature sends a bolt of lightning down, hitting the metal rod and electrifying Jason's body. And we all know what electricity did in those old Universal Frankenstein films…
Yes, Jason is reanimated, this time as what hardcore fans call "Zombie Jason." Hawes gets gutted, and Tommy runs to the police who, of course, don't believe him. Jason picks up where he left off, killing complete strangers at random (including McCloughlin's wife Nancy and future "Ghost" villain and Hollywood royalty Tony Goldwyn).
Things have changed back in town. It's no longer Crystal Lake but "Forrest Green." No one wants to be reminded of the Crystal Lake history, after all. That's why Tommy's ranting rubs the sheriff the wrong way. The sheriff's daughter Megan, though, thinks Tommy might rub her the right way, so she flirts with him just to piss her dad off.
Megan and her friends are also setting up a summer camp for kids (sound familiar?). Of course, none of them know anything about entertaining kids, so it's pretty boring outside of the slaughter. Cort (Fridley, nephew of John Travolta) gives the boys some BS story about Indian mating rituals before heading off to engage in a mating ritual of his own with sexy, Playboy bunny Darcy DeMoss. You can guess what that leads to.
Megan, meanwhile, seems to be the only adult willing to believe Tommy's story. She helps him break out of jail and takes him on a car chase that any straight, red-blooded American male would envy.
Tommy theorizes that Jason needs to be returned to the place he allegedly drowned — Crystal Lake. Tommy and Megan interrupt Jason's rampage, leading to a duel on the surface of the lake between the two old foes.
Genre fans are divided on this one, while critics, oddly enough, gave it a number of positive reviews. The humor either works or it doesn't for you. I personally like the lighter touch that McCloughlin brings. Also, he knows how to stage his death scenes more effectively than most of his predecessors. Although the budget is still small, this one looks like a much bigger production.
The cast brings more to the table as well. CJ Graham's Jason is arguably the best of the series (although Kane Hodder always gets the press). He plays him as an unstoppable Frankenstein's monster. No longer does Jason run; like Michael Myers, he patiently walks after his prey.
Thom Matthews is familiar to genre fans as the over-the-top hero from the horror comedy "Return of the Living Dead" and its sequel. He is perfectly in line with the film's tongue-in-cheek tone and has great chemistry with the film's heroine Jennifer Cooke.
Sadly, some of the scenes in the original screenplay that revealed Jason's father Elias was bribing the cemetery caretaker (Bob Larkin) to hide the fact that Jason wasn't really cremated, and an ending that says he knows Jason isn't really dead were never filmed. Paramount wanted no part of the father and scrapped the idea (which is why you see the random couple on the motorcycle wedged in to pad the film).
Although it doesn't really fall in line with what traditional fans wanted, it actually winds up being a much better film than the previous entries. B+
The 411: From one of the worst entries in the franchise to one of the best. At this point, political and creative pressures were taking a toll on the series, and Paramount was throwing everything they could think into the plots to keep the films fresh. New killers. Why the hell not? Electrified FrankenJason? Sure. Definitely check out Part 6 for some pre-Scream, self-referential, tongue-in-cheek humor.
