A Scream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

Year: 1997

Director: Robert Kurtzman

Cast: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Robert Englund

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's that time of year again, folks! Every October I begin a brand new deep dive into a franchise I've never covered on the blog before. Now, consider this fact: Sergio and I are now doing a lot of franchise marathons on our podcast Scream 101. So when I was picking out what series to do this year, I had to select one that was flat-out vetoed from being on the show, so the quality of these movies (which have in the past included infinite Amityville and Children of the Corn sequels) might be dropping precipitously. Pray for me. 

I hope against hope that I have struck a rich vein this year, because at the very least my favorite director Wes Craven is the producing entity that launched the franchise. I'm not saying I have any faith in the man's producing (he also made Dracula 2000, lest we forget), but at least his work is something I have a vast amount of context for and interest in. So. The Wishmaster quadrilogy. I guess we're doing this.

Here goes nothing!

Wishmaster tells the tale of an immortal djinn, so of course it starts off in a wildly misguided ancient Middle Eastern sequence. Nevertheless we learn that the titular master of wishes (Andrew Divoff) is not the babbling blue Robin Williams you've come to expect from genies in bottles. For one thing he's trapped in a gemstone. For another thing, he is a malevolent force of ancient pure evil, and if he grants three wishes to the person who releases him, he will break the veil between the human world and the djinn world, causing the apocalypse I guess. It's not super clear what the djinn would do to our world, but I'm pretty sure they're not just here for the sightseeing.

Oh, also the djinn is powerless unless somebody makes a wish, which he can then misinterpret to accomplish his desires. Upon which point he also steals their soul, which powers up the gemstone. There sure are a lot of rules for a movie about an evil genie. Anyway, jewel appraiser Alexandra Amberson (Tammy Lauren - who some people thought was too controversial to star in a horror movie about genies) releases the Djinn by... rubbing the gem on her shirt? Had nobody done this in millennia? He bursts from his gemstone prison, in the process killing her best friend/wannabe lover Josh (Tony Crane), then wanders around granting random people's wishes in a bunch of slasher setpieces before setting his sights back on her.

All while being dressed to the nines.

It is perhaps now I should mention that director Robert Kurtzman is much better known as one of the makeup effects gurus behind the KNB EFX group, a special effects company that has dominated the horror world from Elm Street 5 to Scream to The Walking Dead. As with most films directed by a special effects wizard, Wishmaster is packed to the grim with drippy, practical gore gags that still look phenomenal.

The two party scenes that bookend the film, in which all hell breaks loose during the Djinn's final bid for power, are pure, unfiltered movie mayhem. Glass shatters faces, skeletons burst out of their bodies and run around, creatures emerge from people's chests to devour other people, statues come to life and smash ancient weapons into skulls... It's chaotic, but an excellent built-in reel for KNB's next pitch meeting. 

These scenes (as well as most of the slasher setpieces that have no bearing on the actual plot) are going to be pure candy to any gorehound. Ditto the endless slew of cameos from horror icons like Robert Englund (given the meatiest role - thanks, Wes! - as a rich collector who orders the statue containing the Djinn's jewel), Kane Hodder (as a security guard, the role he was apparently born to play when not smothered in latex), Tony Todd (as a doorman, which is insulting), Angus Scrimm (as the narrator, which is perhaps less insulting because at least it's a cool trivia tidbit), Ted Raimi (as, guess what, a weaselly assistant), Reggie Bannister (as a pharmacist who gets "cancer" AKA boils that explode and kill him) and (for true devotees of cult film) George "Buck" Flower (as a bum, which he has extensive experience playing considering he's done it over 25 times since the early 80's).

Do you think he's just mad he's constantly forced to face off against people who played villains more famous than him?

And the detail in the Djinn design is something to behold. He's grotesquely organic, full of squishy parts that wiggle and move of their own accord (my favorite moment is when he's facing away from the camera and you can see a pulsing heartbeat in his back), counteracting the slight stiffness of his latex face with pure, realistic nightmare fuel.

Unfortunately, other than appealing to the basest lizard-brain instincts of the horror fan (the Where's Waldo of Horror game continues with an Easter egg Pazuzu statue in the background, etc. etc.), Wishmaster just doesn't quite have the juice to go anywhere. There's a little bit of fun to be had when the Djinn is in disguise trying and failing to trick Alexandra into making wishes, and Andrew Divoff has a blast chewing the scenery into tiny little splinters ("If you can't beat 'em, burn them... baby"), but their interactions are mostly dull as dishwater. When the film's budget briefly cools its heels late in the second act and they're required to match wits in some anonymous apartment, my interest wanes severely.

You see, there's almost nothing compelling about Alexandra as a protagonist. She's trapped in a bland Friendzone Love Story and does nothing but stumble ass backward into revelations about the Djinn despite having a convenient psychic link to him every time he makes a kill. This element is the most Wes Craven-y of a movie that quite openly suckles at the teat of Craven's filmography, and it is the most poorly handled. When a dude gets his jaw ripped off, I don't want to waste time cutting back to Tammy Lauren bulging her eyes, pursing her lips, and fainting left and right. All the interstitial bits between the horror scenes needed a punch-up or two or three before they hit the silver screen, because connective tissue isn't supposed to be tissue paper.

But there's a scene where a dude gets his jaw ripped all the way the fuck off, so who's complaining, you know?

TL;DR: Wishmaster is fun as far as turn-your-brain-off practical effects movies go, but it doesn't have too much to offer beyond its baseline pleasures.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1131
Reviews In This Series
Wishmaster (Kurtzman, 1997)
Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (Sholder, 1999)
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (Angel, 2001)
Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled (Angel, 2002)

Nothing's Fine, I'm Corn

Year: 1998

Director: Ethan Wiley

Cast: Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Eva Mendes

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I always knew we'd hit the quality valley at some point in our Children of the Corn marathon. For a franchise with only one and a half entries that got released theatrically, something had to give eventually. The only surprising thing about the fact that it finally happened is how long it took to get here and how short the fall was. Granted, no Corn movie is, like, a masterpiece, but the dip from "surprisingly watchable" to "mostly watchable" isn't as steep as I've been fearing.

I'm just really scared that the longer we wait, the more it's gonna sting when the other shoe finally drops.

In Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, after we see two different couples murdered by possessed child Ezeekial [sic] (Adam Wylie of Child's Play 2) and his gang of corn kids, a group of four college  kids (although one of them is explicitly 17, so she must be one of those Young Sheldons) on a road trip to spread their dead friend's ashes break down in the middle of a corn field just outside of the town of Divinity Falls (lol geddit?). This is the most blatant slasher movie setup we've seen from any of these movies, so the only shocking thing about this structure is how very very long it takes for the murders to kick in after this.

Luckily, we do get our share of shocking plot twists along the way involving the main girl Allison (Stacy Galina), who realizes that her long lost younger brother may have been inducted into the cult of children who worship He Who Walks Behind the Rows (he's back, by the way!) at a local farm run by Luke Enright (David Carradine, who sits down for this entire performance). The other kids have their own sort of drama, but we all know they're just here for body count: we have Greg (Alexis Arquette, rocking a Jamie Kennedy look pre-transition), the nerdy annoying guy whose presence in this group can probably be attributed to the fact that he owns a car; Tyrus (Greg Vaughan), the requisite horndog asshole; and Kir (Eva Mendes, the third recognizable name in the credits, and by far the famous at the time of writing), the girlfriend of the deceased who's a shallow Clueless-esque princess with a rambling pile of hair that you just long to get lost in.

I desperately hope that she and Ryan Gosling have gotten drunk and watched this movie together.

Probably the most interesting thing about Fields of Terror is just how un-interesting it is. This was a slasher film released in 1998, two years after Scream done changed the game and made it a requirement for the genre to be laden with in-jokes and meta humor. This is the year that gave us Bride of Chucky, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween: H20, and Urban Legend, for crying out loud, and this franchise has the audacity to give us a straightforward rural breakdown slasher as if we were still deep in the trenches of 1986. There's something almost wholesome and charming about how unpretentious and standard this whole concept is. Almost.

But let's not forget that the bog-standard DTV slasher flick is exactly my comfort zone, so I'm not pretending that a movie being a mediocre entry in the subgenre brings me anything but joy. I think it's pretty objectively the worst film in the Corn franchise thus far, but it operates at a low simmer that renders it at least mildly entertaining for the bulk of its run time. It doesn't hurt that the cast still features a surprising cadre of reasonably famous actors (Kane Hodder also has a cameo as a bartender in town). Nobody here is saving the movie like Karen Black or Naomi Watts in the previous one, but the sheer act of recognizing a face in one of these movies is satisfying in its own way.

And even the faces you don't recognize are VERY pretty.

And at the very (very) least, director Ethan Wiley (whose previous feature was the infamously titled House II: The Second Story)  is trying his best to spice up the proceedings. Sometimes this means some harsh blue lighting intercut with lightning flashes that creates a pretty sinister mood in an early murder sequence. Sometimes this means turning the camera sideways for no apparent reason other than to have the camera be sideways. It's on and off, but the first shot (a rather elegant slow motion image of a rose being plucked from a corn field) is a pretty solid exemplar of what Wiley is going for an intermittently achieves.

Unfortunately, while no Children of the Corn has been bursting at the seams with cash, the budget seems to have truly strangled this one. There is exactly one showstopping effects sequence that recalls the terrific work accomplished in Urban Harvest, but the way it's shot and edited is too muddy and garbled to really make it worth the effort, and nothing else in terms of effects or kills is especially memorable. There is a silly moment involving dumping a severed foot into a body bag that's fun, I suppose. It's just not really bringing it in terms of the kills, which are oh-so important to the slasher format and oh-so absent from the larger part of this movie.

And it's far too much to ask this film to be scary in the least, but I will say that Adam Wylie easily plays the best child cult leader since John Franklin's Isaac four long movies ago. He doesn't quite manage "creepy," but the flinty command in his voice makes the power he holds over the other kids (especially those older and taller than him) completely believable. It's a potent performance without much nuance, but it's certainly the best in the film, and we all need something to latch onto in a movie like this where creepy subplots constantly crop up and slither away from reach before they can resolve themselves (there's literally a line about a bungee jumping accident maybe being an elaborate suicide that is completely forgotten, when the whole movie could have just been about that).

It's certainly the most frustrating and least appealing of these movies, but a meat-and-potatoes supernatural slasher sequel at least fills you up. I won't be revisiting this one for any reason other than to gaze in wonder at Eva Mendes' hair, but I'm not upset that I've seen it, which is more than I can say for a lot of films in, say, that Amityville marathon from last year.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror is a mediocre direct-to-video effort, but it certainly has its share of corny charms.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1151
Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Houston, We Have A Sequel

Year: 2001

Director: James Isaac

Cast: Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So here we are, the end of Jason Voorhees. No, not the last film in the franchise. That cash cow's udder might be drawing blood, but Hollywood will keep squeezing it until it snaps off. The tenth Friday the 13th sequel, Jason X, is the final film in the continuity of the original series. 

Granted, that's not saying much.

Consider this fun fact, which I read on a F13 trivia post last week: Jason has died in 6 Friday the 13th films. He has been resurrected in 3 of them. And that's all you need to know about the franchise. Narrative consistency is the redheaded stepchild of Crystal Lake. Nevertheless, Jason X is the tenth and final film of a series dimly recognizable as a whole. The 2003 followup Freddy vs. Jason was a crossover picking up loosely after part nine, and the 2009 remake scraps everything and fills in the cracks with pretty people.

They might as well have renamed Crystal Lake to "Michael Bay."

Now that we're revisiting the de facto swan song for Friday the 13th, let's take a moment to reflect on the franchise as a whole. After young zombie/ghost boy Jason was introduced in Sean S. Cunningham's indie fright flick Friday the 13th, he was taken on by Paramount, who gave him human form in Friday the 13th Part 2 and his iconic hockey mask in Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D. He was summarily offed in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, palely imitated in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and desperately resurrected in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives at the behest of axe-sharpening fans.

In Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Kane Hodder donned the hockey mask to battle a bargain basement Carrie, then took a cruise to Vancouver, briefly stopped over in Times Square, and was destroyed by toxic waste in the Day-Glo nightmare sewers of the Big Apple in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. For some inexplicable reason, audiences didn't respond well to that classic entry, so Paramount upped sticks and sold off their cash cow for some magic beans. 

New Line took on the burden, stripping the franchise of its name and putting the villain front and center, at least in the title. They then burned the whole affair at the stake in an attempt to Nightmare it up with the Lovecraftian body-hopping demon worm fiasco Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. When that film also inexplicably failed to resurrect a cult following, the franchise lay dormant in the New Line basement for over half a decade. While the planned Freddy vs. Jason crossover was being turned over hot coals in Production Hell, New Line decided to renew audience interest with a new installment to the long defunct Jason saga by sending him to space and tossing an acid-trippingly massive $14,000,000 budget at him.

Really, it's a miracle that Jason X even made it into theaters, let alone with that kind of money at its disposal. Naturally, the filmmakers, acknowledging the massive respect involved in being trusted with such a (relatively) gargantuan coffer, made the worst film in the franchise. Seriously, Jason X is the butts.

Not even the good kind.

Jason X begins by immediately retconning JGTH, which isn't the worst decision. It opens with Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder for the fourth and final time) totally alive and evidently fished out of Hell, restrained in the futuristically chrome Crystal Lake Research Facility, which is the worst decision. Sexy researcher Rowan (Lexa Doig of Andromeda) is the leader of a team that has tried executing the mass murderer via every method under the sun, including firing squad, which seems like more of a formality than anything. However, his psycho/zombie/plot device body keeps regenerating itself to full health like the world's least adorable Pokémon.

Her team wants to put Jason into cryogenic sleep until they can figure out what the hell to do with him, but some Evil Capitalists, led by David Cronenberg, want to exploit his regenerative abilities for monetary gain. When they enter Jason's holding cell, obviously their team is eviscerated within seconds, and Rowan uses herself as bait to lure Jason into the freezing chamber. After Jason punctures the chamber with the sturdiest machete in the known universe, they are both frozen until they are discovered by an exploratory team of students four and a half centuries later in the arbitrarily chosen year of 2455.

The crew brings the two bodies onto their spaceship, where they resurrect Rowan and leave Jason to thaw, believing him to be dead like so many Paramount executives back in the day. As the Space Teens scatter to get it on in their bunks, the filthy magic of premarital sex goes to work and Jason rises from his stasis, good as new. He grabs a standard-issue Space Machete off the doctor's table and goes to work.

This sounds like the setup to an awesomely cheesy "psycho killer in space" movie. Don't be fooled, my child. Once upon a time, putting Vanilla Ice in a movie sounded like a great idea too, and look where that got us.

Although I think we can agree that necking next to a serial killer's corpse is NEVER a good plan.

There's far too many useless characters floating around the movie to provide for its record-breaking body count, but let's Meet a selection of the Meat, shall we?

Joining us today is the crew of the good ship Grendel, including Azrael (Dov Tiefenbach), the annoying Space Stoner who proves that history is doomed to repeat itself; Janessa (Melyssa Ade), who is apparently a skilled recombinant DNA researcher, but is more important to the story as a Space Slut - the patriarchy will never die; Professor Lowe (Jonathan Potts), who will sacrifice any number of his young students for his own financial gain; Sgt. Brodski (Peter Mensah), who is the leader of the ship's security squadron and Jason's biggest opponent; Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell of Stargate: Atlantis), who is an expert robotics designer and whom I called "Matt" in my notes because not only are these future names confusing, they are also mumbled; and Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder), Tsunaron's female android/love interest with a Corey Feldman haircut.

It's like Her, but with more gratuitous nudity.

There's about 8,000 more characters bouncing around the Grendel, but these are the only ones who make any sort of impression. The rest are mere fodder for the gore sequences, which are generally quick, fumbled, and in the dark, like all of James Franco's sexual encounters. The one thing I can say about Jason X is that, what with all the faces, places, and kills whirling past the screen, it's over before you know it. Its episodic scene structure pushes and shoves you through what would have otherwise been a supremely boring slasher flick.

There is no aspect of the film that isn't riddled with leaden incompetence. Sometimes a moment or a line of dialogue will shine through the gloom like a beam of sunlight in the eye of a storm, but then the maelstrom sweeps everything away again.

Perhaps the most waterlogged area of Jason X is its special effects. Although three of the kill sequences are instantly memorable classics, the rest are indistinct and brief, relying on state-of-the-art  early 2000's CGI technology that has aged about as well as The Baha Men. The computer imagery (and the astoundingly varied sets) sucked the budget dry, so the moments that are practical hit with all the force of a wet tissue. A spaceship crash looks more like the opening theme song to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the bionically enhanced Über-Jason of the third act (which, yes, is a thing that exists) wouldn't look out of place in a Mattel catalogue.

Jason Voorhees, now with triple-action kung fu grip.

And before that atrocity is unveiled, Jason's costume is the laziest bit of design in a series for which the high-water mark is denim short-shorts. Honestly, it looks like they literally just jammed a hockey mask on Kane Hodder's face with no touch-up work at all, not even attempting to disguise his terrible late-90's mullet.

In those eyes, you can see the forlorn weariness of a man who has been on the set of Jason Goes to Hell and lived to tell the tale.

Typically Hodder is the best actor on any Friday the 13th set, but he is sleepwalking here, surrounded by the worst cast in a series made famous by poor acting. Perhaps it's the expectation created by the distinctly sci-fi setting that causes the performances to seem so hyperbolically shrill and unbalanced, but the Teen Meat has never been more aggravating. The fact that very few of them seem to die at all is even more frustrating.

Only Jonathan Potts' obsequious professor and Lisa Ryder's cheerfully badass android rise above the muck. And considering the fact that Ryder brings a human warmth and nuance to a role intended to be robotic, maybe it doesn't even count after all.

The Final Girl is vaguely badass but empty, the frequent attempts at comedy fall flat save for one scene set in a virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake, and the action sequences mostly comprise the floor shaking and knocking the cast down like bowling pins over and over and over. It'd be a great pinball game, but it doesn't make for a memorable film.

At least Harry Manfredini's music isn't too self-indulgently spacey. It's nowhere near the frenetic charm of his best franchise work and it scarcely includes the iconic CH-CH-CH motif, but it doesn't sound like Space Mountain, and I'm going to have to put that in the plus column.

At the end of the day, it's still Jason and he's still killing horny teens so it's not the worst horror flick ever invented, but sometimes that just isn't enough. Jason X is without a doubt the nadir of the franchise, and one I would only recommend to the most hardcore Jason fanatics. 

I've seen it three times.

Pray for me.

Killer: Jason Voorhees/Über-Jason (Kane Hodder)

Final Girl: Rowan (Lexa Doig)

Best Kill: Adrienne has her face frozen by liquid nitrogen and slammed on the counter. It shatters into a million bloody pieces and is the only truly memorable gore effect in the film. But it's still one of Jason's career best kills.

Sign of the Times: Apparently in the future, the hot new retro fashion is to dress like you're about to be kicked out of Lollapalooza.

Maybe I should start including fashion victims in the body count.

Scariest Moment: As the crew investigates a rattling door, Jason bursts through a glass window behind them.

Weirdest Moment: Janessa sleeps with Professor Lowe to improve her midterm grades. Future Sex apparently involves having your steel nipple rings twisted by a comically giant clamp. "You pass!"

Champion Dialogue: "I couldn't be with a girl whose balls are bigger than mine."

Body Count: 25; not including the entire population of the space station Solaris, three virtual reality aliens, or Über Jason, who, let's face it, is probably fine.

1. Private Johnson is choked with a chain.
2. Guard #1 is smashed in the head with a machine gun.
3. Guard #2 choked and tossed into gunfire.
4. Guard #3 has his face bashed in with a noose pole. 
5. Guard #4 is choked with a chain.
6. Dr. Wimmer is impaled by a noose pole.
7. Sgt. Marcus is thrown through a steel door.
8. Adrienne has her face frozen in liquid nitrogen and smashed on the counter.
9. Stoney is stabbed in the gut.
10. Azrael is snapped in half.
11. Dallas has his head crushed against a wall.
12. Sven has his neck broken.
13. Condor is impaled on a mining drill.
14. Geko has her throat slit.
15. Briggs is impaled on a large hook.
16. Kicker is sliced in half.
17. Fat Lou is dismembered offscreen.
18. Professor Lowe is decapitated offscreen.
19. Kinsa dies in a shuttle explosion.
20. Crutch is smashed into a control box and electrocuted.
21. Waylander dies in an explosion.
22. Janessa is sucked through a metal grate.
23. Virtual Camper and
24. Virtual Camper #2 are smashed together in their sleeping bags.
25. Sgt. Brodski dies falling into Earth 2's atmosphere. 

TL;DR: Jason X is a tiring, shallow mess unworthy of the Friday the 13th name.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 2085
Reviews In This Series
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLouglin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

This Franchise Has Gone Straight To Hell

WARNING: This film is batsh*t insane and this review contains spoilers for many key WTF moments. If you are the one person in the world who has genuine interest in watching the ninth Friday the 13th film sight unseen, leave now or forever hold your peace.

Year: 1993

Director: Adam Marcus

Cast: John D. LeMay, Kari Keegan, Kane Hodder

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's the early 90's. You are a New Line Entertainment executive. After Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan flopped miserably in 1989, Paramount decided to up sticks and sell you the rights to the franchise. The Friday the 13th title has been sucked dry by one too many trips to the well, but you think you can squeeze one last droplet of box office gold out of the Voorhees name. What do you do?

Was your answer "stick a stake in the franchise by turning Jason into a Lovecraftian hell demon, keeping Kane Hodder offscreen for as long as possible, claiming it's the final film, then sending Jason to space a decade later"? If not, congratulations. You are not a New Line Entertainment executive in the early 90's. Though maybe you should have been.

In this scenario, Jason represents the F13 series and the other guy represents what New Line did to it.

Wanting to bring a little bit of that New Line charm by injecting some Nightmare into a cut-and-dry franchise, they completely lost sight of why anybody wanted to watch the damn things in the first place. Jason Goes to Hell is insane enough to be worth spending some time with, but it's about as far away from a Friday the 13th film that a flick with a double digit body count can be.

The film opens reasonably enough. A young woman drives up to a cabin on the edge of Crystal Lake, fixes a broken light bulb, then steps into the shower. Considering when last we left our dear Jason (Kane Hodder), he was a nuclear waste-infected dead child in the Manhattan sewer system, one might reasonably expect some incredibly bizarre Rube Goldbergian chain of events to bring him back to life. One is about to experience the first of many disappointments as Jason shows up alive and well for no apparent reason, other than the fact that he really really hates it when a woman commits the cardinal sin of owning breasts.

He chases her through a laundry list of slasher clichés, teleports in front of her in the woods, and... she dives into the bushes, whereupon the hockey-masked behemoth is promptly blown up by the FBI.

This is but a taste test of the weirdness yet to come.

I think it's interesting that the FBI realizes the only way to lure Jason is to send a lithe female agent to a cabin to open and close a medicine cabinet a couple times, but the rest of the film ignores this kind of genre-savvy quality. Anyway, during Jason's autopsy his heart begins beating again, possibly because he finally learned the true meaning of Christmas. Falling into an age-old slasher trope, the coroner picks up the heart and takes a huge bite out of it - wait what? I think that violates the Hippocratic oath.

What all this boils down to is that Jason is a body-hopping demon worm who needs to find a member of the Voorhees bloodline to be reborn, temporarily occupying other bodies on his quest for resurrection. If he gets to slice up some horny campers along the way, all the better. Life is about little detours. 

All of this insane exposition is handily explained to us by Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), a bounty hunter with an open mind who has been following Jason for years. A sleazy TV shock jock named Robert Campbell (Steven Culp) offers Duke a hefty sum to bring down Voorhees once and for all. Or at least until the sequel gets greenlit.

Action converges onto the town of Crystal Lake, where "Jason Is Dead" celebrations are ramping up at the local diner, courtesy of local business owner Joey (Rusty Schwimmer) and her totally straight husband Shelby (Leslie Jordan, who is basically the gay equivalent of Danny DeVito). When Jason (in the body of the sheriff, his hockey-masked self only revealed in reflections) murders a waitress named Diana (Erin Gray), her daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan) rushes to town, bringing her boyfriend Robert and new baby in tow. 

When will my reflection show who I am inside?

Jessica's baby daddy Steven (John D. LeMay, the only person to appear in the Friday the 13th TV show and one of the films, ring a ding ding) is accused of Diana's murder, but I'm more concerned with his sense of style. His glasses, voice, chin, and hair paint him as a stereotypical high school nerd, but he seems to be about 30 and wears a letterman jacket so I honestly have no clue what's going on with him. I know I shouldn't be concerned with Steven's hypothetical archetype when the townspeople are being murdered by a Lovecraftian worm demon, but just look at this.

Nerd.

Jock.

Nerd.

Jock.

Muppet Baby Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It's like all the male characters of The Breakfast Club were in a horrific automobile accident and the doctors combined all the surviving parts into one dead-eyed monstrosity.

Regardless of Steven's classification, the film lumbers along its loopy way, weaving through three entirely separate genres: along with the Clive Barker-esque supernatural shenanigans, the writers also see fit to toss in a traditional Friday the 13th replete with naked campers (and ample male ass - progressive!), as well as a small town family soap drama. This is not a storytelling format the ceaselessly formulaic franchise is equipped to handle. Jason Goes to Hell is hardly good enough to tackle one of these genres with full steam, but with so many disparate threads to keep track of, it lolls drunkenly back and forth with a plodding monotony.

There is a large cast to provide a suitable body count, but most of the deaths are cheap and general (if I see one more body smeared with blood but lacking a discernible slash wound, I might just grab a machete myself), and the film can't even keep track of its protagonists, let alone the minor characters. The baby subplot is an enormous waste of time with no impact on the narrative in any way (in fact, the central couple walks away from the rubble after the climactic showdown, having apparently forgotten that there was a small human accompanying them before), and random characters fulfill requirements of the plot with absolutely no motivation or agency. This occurs most execrably in a scene where Joey's teen son provides Steven with a getaway car out of the blue, a moment so unfounded that it accidentally shoots the script off into the avant-garde. 

And I'm beyond questioning why Jason performs his killing on the people he does, but way too many victims are outside of his range of focus. It's just distracting.

There are only two genuinely good moments in the entire film. The first operates on a cinematic level, in which Jason is lit by a car's blinker lights. The second operates with humor, during an exchange between Steven and his cop friend on the side of the road. Other than that, Jason Goes to Hell is a downright mess at a fundamental level.

Did you think I'd let you escape without seeing the gross demon worm?

The film is only saved (and slightly, at that) by its pure commitment to the inexplicable. Some gore gags surrounding Jason's body-swapping are truly unbelievable moments that need to be seen to be believed. And every new plot point, homoerotic shaving scene, diner shootout, or musical kazoo sting slathered onto the complicated screenplay like too much barbecue sauce furthers the tremendous, indecent weirdness of the entire thing. It's not quite bizarre enough to reach a truly bad-good register, and it inexcusably wastes Kane Hodder, who is the best thing to ever happen to the godforsaken franchise. But it's at the very least watchable, and for a film this unequivocally broken, that's a very very good thing.

Killer: Jason Voorhees, the Body Hopping Demon Worm (Kane Hodder)

Final Girl: Jessica Kimble (Kari Keegan)

Best Kill: As Deborah has sex with her boyfriend, she is impaled with a spike and split in half. That's what you get for not using a condom.

Sign of the Times: The wordless, copyright-free "rock" music that Steven listens to in the car uses actual guitars.

Scariest Moment: After Jason abandons Josh's body, it disintegrates into a gooey puddle of nightmares.

Weirdest Moment: A police officer checks someone's wrist pulse and announces "He's breathing!"

Champion Dialogue: "That makes me think of a little girl in a pink dress sticking a hot dog through a donut."

Body Count: 23; not including five more Jason-style murders that were reported on American Case File.

1. Coroner is possessed and disposed of.
2. Coroner's Assistant is pushed into a metal grate and stabbed with a probe. 
3. Security Guard is killed offscreen.
4. Mullet Security Guard is killed offscreen.
5. Alexis is slashed with a straight razor.
6. Deborah is stabbed in the back with a barbed wire spike and ripped in half.
7. Luke is killed offscreen.
8. Edna gets her head slammed in a car door.
9. Josh is possessed by Jason and messily disposed of.
10. Diana has a knife thrown into her back.
11. Robert is possessed and impaled on a barbecue skewer.
12. Officer Ryan has her head bashed against a locker.
13. Officer Mark and
14. Officer Brian have their heads smashed together.
15. Ward's arm is broken and he dies because he's a loser.
16. Diner Patron #1 is crushed against the counter.
17. Diner Patron #2 is shot with a shotgun.
18.  Shelby has his face cooked in a deep fryer.
19. Joey gets her face bashed in.
20. Vicki is impaled on a barbecue skewer and has her head crushed.
21. Randy is possessed, then gets his neck sliced with a machete.
22. Creighton Duke is hugged to death.
23. Jason Voorhees is stabbed with a ceremonial dagger and finally dragged to Hell. 

TL;DR: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is tremendously weird, which is the irrevocably broken film's saving grace.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1719

Reviews In This Series

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)

Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)

Jason X (Isaac, 2001)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

Docu-Mental

Year: 2006

Director: Scott Glosserman

Cast: Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals, Scott Wilson
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Scream changed everything. For better or for worse, Craven's teen horror masterpiece revitalized slashers with a postmodern spin. But droll self-awareness and a jokey attitude began to choke out the genre. That kind of tone-hopping is best left to the masters and the inept handling of its knockoffs meant that the horror of the late 90's began to wane once more until the emergence of The Blair Witch Project in 1999.

By the mid-2000's, torture porn was occupying cinemas for the time being, allowing Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon to slip by unnoticed. And it's a darn shame, because Behind the Mask is the single best meta slasher this side of Kevin Williamson, combining the satirical tone of Scream with the low budget visual impetus of Blair Witch.

And, seemingly, the face of Spencer from iCarly.

Behind the Mask is a found footage movie like you've never seen it before, comprised of documentary footage shot by a grad student crew led by go-getting Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals). Their subject is one Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel - who has since moved from behind the mask to behind the camera as an editor on Storage Wars), an aspiring slasher villain.

You see, this is a world in which the cinema of the 80's has come to life. Freddy, Michael, and Jason are all real killers, notorious across the country. Their brand of terror has inspired new killers to take up their mantle, providing the evil backdrop against which the good of the world can be measured, all through routinely slicing up groups of teens in remote areas.

It's a tough concept to wrap your head around with merely a two-paragraph summary, but this conceit drives the entire movie and is the element which elevates Behind the Mask to neo-classic status. Any old movie could make some jokes about its generic elements, but only writer/director Scott Glosserman has been creative and intelligent enough to take that one step further, giving us a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of the life of their killer as he prepares to stalk his virginal victim, curates spooky legends around himself, and explores the phallic and yonic imagery of his murder spree.

Carol J. Clover would be proud.

So not only does Behind the Mask bring a sense of winking familiarity with the genre, it applies a knowledgable analysis to its satire. It also beefs up the limitations of the found footage genre in a huge way, interspersing the documentary footage with staged footage of the "movie" Leslie Vernon is creating when he stalks and kills his victims.

It is so elegant and shrewd that the seams in the film's reality are only visible to the grumpiest of viewers. They are certainly present (compounded with an unfortunate use of the phrase "survivor girl" in lieu of the widely acknowledged "Final Girl"), but by that point the film has any audience member worth their horror salt wrapped firmly around its finger.

This is largely thanks to its marvelously unique approach to the genre, but it also helps that the movie is chock full of genre references both brazen (Freddy, Michael, and Jason are nigh on mythic figures in this universe) and subtle (name-dropping the producer of Friday the 13th among others that I won't spoil here). The references don't hit with the sledgehammer efficacy of a Williamson script, allowing the horror-inclined viewer to approach them in a more organic and rewarding way.

And the cameos are top notch including Robert Englund as a Dr. Sam Loomis type character, Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein as a librarian, and Kane Hodder in a blink-and-miss-it appearance at the real Nightmare on Elm Street house.

1428 N Genesee Avenue. You're welcome.

Behind the Mask gets far with its premise, although its budget proves to be a liability in the performance department. Most of the teen actors are almost unwatchably bad. Honestly, I don't even care if this was intentional. When not just one, but all of your teen actors are bad enough to the point that I, the man who is in the process of watching every 1980's slasher film known to man, woman, and turtle, take notice, something has gone very wrong.

And the criminal lack of funding renders even the goriest kills a little tame, augmented by some truly troublesome digital effects. But the fact remains that, although these flaws would send a lesser film six feet under, Behind the Mask has such a strong conceit that it hardly amounts to a scratch. 'Tis but a flesh wound, I suppose.

And Nathan Baesel is such a revelation, it would take an entire army of community theater enthusiasts to take the bite out of his performance. He truly gets the script, bringing a warm humanity to the role that jars the audience, sending the humor skyrocketing.

Behind the Mask is a slow burn, and a subtle one at that, so I wouldn't advise breaking it out at your next slumber party, but I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who deems themselves as a true fan of horror.

TL;DR: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is wicked clever, an inspiring satire of the slasher genre.
Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 890

Census Bloodbath: In A Vancouver Minute

Year: 1989

Director: Rob Hedden

Cast: Jensen Daggett, Kane Hodder, Peter Mark Richman

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

We just hit the first anniversary of the Census Bloodbath project a couple days ago and I see no better way to celebrate that milestone than the last Jason Voorhees picture of the decade, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. 

Although it could be quite easily argued that the slasher genre had run out of steam long before the 80's gave way to the moist, grungy decade that followed, the franchise pictures of 1989 provide incontrovertible proof that the once teeming pond had been polluted beyond all hope. Jason Takes Manhattan was the first of these by a hair and though it is not the worst, it is a great example of the pictures that populated the slasher's long, drawn-out death rattle.

The MPAA had long since exerted its dominance but continued to bully the genre, slicing off more gore than poor Jason could have done in a thousand lifetimes. The well of good storylines was dry as a bone and only the threadbare enthusiasm of the franchise fans kept the corpses of Freddy, Jason, and Michael shambling along.

In fact, after Part VIII tanked, Paramount took Friday the 13th out back and shot it in the head, selling it to Paramount, who wouldn't do anything with the property for years to come until they decided to lay it to rest with the Lovecraftian oddity Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.

Needless to say, things were looking bleak.

And the actors' hair was beginning to dwarf the profits.

Here's another, in case you needed more proof.

The eighth Friday movie was never going to be good, let's get that out of the way right now. But the ways in which this movie is completely mind-bogglingly terrible provide much more entertainment value than the milquetoast splatter pictures of the late decade, robbed of their splat by the moral majority. That's not exactly a recommendation, but Manhattan can be a fun watch under the right circumstances (bring friends - your life depends on the quality of their wisecracks).

Let's begin at the beginning. Jason is back in the watery grave where he belongs, rotting under the wreckage of a Crystal Lake pier. That is, until horny couple Jim (Todd Caldecott) and Suzi (Tiffany Paulsen) dredge things up again with their pelvic sorcery. When the anchor of their houseboat/portable sex dungeon drags along the lake floor (I'm pretty sure anchors aren't supposed to float aimlessly, but then again I'm not a maritime expert. We'll just have to trust writer/director Rob Hedden, whose qualifications include the screenplay for Clockstoppers, so he definitely knows all about this whole "science" thing.), it snags on an electrical cable and tears it, shocking our boy Jason (Kane Hodder for the second time) to life.

But two measly teens can't quench the thirst of a fan favorite serial killer, now can they? Luckily enough, Jim and Suzi are but two minnows in the school that is Lakeview High, whose senior class is celebrating their graduation with a cruise to New York on the good ship Lazarus.

It makes you long for the good old days when kids could be kids and New Jersey lakes connected to the Pacific Ocean via a serenely beautiful mountain range.

This ample collection of Meat includes J. J. (Saffron Henderson), an electric guitar enthusiast who decides that a sea vessel is the best place to bring her amps; Wayne (Martin Cummins), J. J.'s friend and an avid filmmaker, although he would rather be filming Tamara (Sharlene Martin), a coked out hottie whose idea of a good time is knocking the nerdy shy girl into the ocean; Eva (Kelly Hu aka Lady Deathstrike from X2), Tamara's best friend and reluctant drug buddy; Julius (V. C. Dupree), a spunky boxer who wears a hilarious track suit for nearly the entire run of the film; and Miles (Gordon Currie), a blonde human that exists solely as a foil for Sean Robertson (Scott Reeves, also of a whopping 198 episodes of General Hospital), the hunky son of the Captain.

Scott has the hots for Rennie (Jensen Daggett), whose androgynous name and connection with the chaperone/twelve-time Champion Douchebag title-holder, Charles McCullough (Peter Mark Richman) mark her beyond a shadow of a doubt as our Final Girl. The fact that she has a tendency to hallucinate about Jason as a child is just icing on the cake. In due time, Jason hitches a ride with this merry band and knocks them off one by one as they celebrate in their own unique ways (boxing, saunas, snorting coke off a mirror in the cabin hold, trying to seduce your creepy biology teacher who looks like an elderly Bill Nye, to each their own).

People should really think about inviting him to these things. Maybe he wouldn't be so angry.

Perhaps you have noticed that Jason doesn't appear to be taking anything, especially not Manhattan. Ay, there's the rub. You see, nobody actually gets to Manhattan until the final half hour, at which point it is played by Vancouver save for one scene. Honestly, I don't mind the boat setting at all - it's a claustrophobic change of pace - but false advertising is false advertising and people were rightfully upset.

Luckily the scenes set in New York largely make good on the premise, at least at the most basic level possible. It's not mind-bogglingly difficult to come up with a few cool things for Jason to do in a city. So despite the criminal deficit of artistic merit or even popcorn movie merit displayed by the film, it's smart enough to stick Jason in a subway, have him face off with muggers, and send him careening through Times Square.

There's a lot that's wrong with this movie, but it's not exactly dissimilar to the rest of the franchise - the kills are watered down so late in the game (most kills are cutaways or look like a stunt guy stabbing a pillowcase), the production values are so thin that the fashion industry wouldn't even take them in, and Jason moves according to the whims of the script, at times literally teleporting across rooms (at least, according to the editing) like some kind of magic man. 

And the loss of composer Harry Manfredini (who composed the first six and whose work was rearranged with additions for the seventh) removes even that sheerest veneer of class provided by the previous installments.

Reminder: This is the type of movie I'm referring to.

But this is a Friday the 13th picture we're talking about. Quality isn't exactly of highest priority. The plot is engaging enough that the weak kills don't feel as punishing as The New Blood and the breaks from formula are refreshing. And Kane Hodder is still in tip-top shape, providing Jason a bubbling rage that fuels him throughout, apparent even from beneath the mask and heavy make-up.

However, what recommends Jason Takes Manhattan above all else is its horrific vision of New York once they actually get there. Part VIII's Big Apple is a dilapidated DayGlo nightmare of graffiti and crime, where barrels of toxic waste are strewn across the streets and any visitor will be immediately accosted by thugs. The film's attitude toward the city can be summed up in one of the worst (this is remarkable considering its company) compositions in the film, a rap song called Livin' in the City (Ain't No Big Deal) which states that "if the crack don't get you, the hookers will."

This childish secondhand approach to depicting one of the world's most well-known cities is riveting, compounded with the heady nonsense of the more supernatural plot points (the ending especially is an endless source of bemusement). So, although Jason Takes Manhattan doesn't quite take you away, it can still be a fun outing if you're willing to overlook the superficiality of the thing and meet it on its own terms.

Killer: Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder)
Final Girl: Rennie Wickham (Jensen Daggett)
Best Kill: Julius learns his lesson about boxing with mythical serial killers.

Sign of the Times: J. J.'s Joan Jett influence lies in more than the name.

Scariest Moment: Baby Jason comes out of Rennie's mirror and grabs her.
Weirdest Moment: That Ending [Not only are we supposed to believe that the New York sewer floods with toxic waste every night at midnight, we're supposed to have no qualms about the fact that this kills Jason and turns him into a little boy.]
Champion Dialogue: "Gorgeous guy at ten o'clock. Look sensual."
Body Count: 19; not including a ship's worth of passengers that drowned.

1. Jim is stabbed with a spear gun.
2. Suzi is stabbed with a spear.
3. J.J. is bashed in the head with an electric guitar.
4. Boxer gets a hot sauna rock in the chest.
5. Tamara is stabbed with mirror shards.
6. Carlson is harpooned in the back. 
7. Admiral Robertson has his throat slit.
8. Eva is strangled.
9. Crew Member is accidentally shot by Wayne.
10. Wayne is electrocuted on a control panel.
11. Miles is impaled on an antenna.
12. Deck Hand is axed in the back.
13. Gang Banger #1 is stabbed through the back with a syringe.
14. Gang Banger #2 has his head bashed on a steam pipe.
15. Julius has his head punched off.
16. Irish Cop is killed offscreen.
17. Colleen is blown up in a car.
18. Charles is drowned in a barrel of sewage.
19. Sewer Worker is bashed in the head with a wrench. 

TL;DR: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is frothy nonsense, but great fun to watch.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1616
Reviews In This Series
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)