“Either you’ve got the car started, or you’re a dead man.” 

     OK, so the last Friday the 13th movie was called The Final Chapter, and Jason certainly appeared to die toward the end of the last instalment.  The last, terribly named instalment.  The big mystery in Friday The 13th Part V is whether or not Jason is, in fact, dead.  Corey Feldman, who appeared to kill the hockey-mask-wearing psycho at the end of the last one, appears in a dream sequence toward the beginning of the film, and then some other kid leaps up from the dream.  That kid is apparently the Corey Feldman character, several years later.  He still has nightmares about Jason.  Obviously.  He still makes his masks.  Again, the masks appear to be something that could be used later in the movie.  But again, no.

     So is this kid crazy enough to now believe he IS Jason?  Or has Jason risen from the dead in order to wreak more havoc and pile up more bodies?  Or is something else going on?  It’s a neat premise for about nine seconds, and then it’s done.  The rest of the movie is the same as every other movie.  Kids having sex, bodies thrown through the window, machetes and so forth.  The final, dramatic, “unmasking” of the killer is about the most disappointing and silly moment in the entire Friday The 13th cannon.  And that’s a tall task - there is a lot of competition for the distinction of the Silliest Moment.  (Perhaps only the moment in Part VIII where Jason punches off the boxer’s head can compete.)

     We are supposed to believe, because of the savagery with which Corey Feldman dispatched Jason in the previous instalment, that he could be the killer.  But that quickly goes nowhere.  We are supposed to believe that the Tommy character has aged about ten years since the previous movie.  But the filming and the music and the cars and the decor seem to indicate that only about nine minutes have passed.  Maybe they just couldn’t afford Feldman at this point, except in a cameo.  And every character who gets introduced in the movie is introduced only for the purposes of being killed off.  Or being maybe the killer.

     Not that any of this matters.  The fact is, the story is as awful as ever, the setting of a group home is nothing new - and provides the requisite hot young naked horny folks - the hillbilly neighbours are supposed to be funny but aren’t, (and they’re just going to die anyway), and the introduction of a Prince-like rockstar kinda guy is painful and equally useless.  The one moment, quickly dismissed and ultimately almost irrelevant, that actually steps outside the Friday The 13th formula, is a savage and out-of-nowhere murder committed by someone other than Jason.  Or the guy pretending to be Jason.  It’s not enough to save this movie.  Nothing is.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under 1985, Garbage, Horror, Reissue, Sequel, Slasher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.