I'm not sure what to make of this one. For the sixth installment of a horror franchise, it's actually pretty decent. The major characters were pretty good, it had some good suspenseful moments, everyone wasn't being an idiot, and it almost came off as believable.
On the other hand, what the heck is with the James Bond parody at the beginning? Anyone who knows me knows I have a thing with James Bond. I like it. Got the whole set. As soon as Jason walked across the odd looking circle at the beginning, I said to myself, "Oh no..." and sure enough, he turned the camera and swipe with the knife, we get the red screen.
Anyway, back to the film itself, we open with Tommy Jarvis (a character in his third film and third actor) going to Jason's grave to a) make sure he's there and b) burn his corpse. It's therapy. Seriously. Anyway, the beginning here is probably the most contrived scene in the whole film because when the casket is opened, Tommy is compelled to tear a section of a iron fence off and stab Jason's corpse with it...wait, an iron fence? Um, okay. So there's this long iron rod sticking out of Jason's body when lightning hits it...twice. Jason climbs out, picks up the mask that Tommy kindly returned to him (complete with the axe cut from 3) and proceeds with his usual modus operandi.
Ok, now take a deep breath. It gets better from here. The story follows primarily Tommy as he tries to convince the sheriff and his idiots...er, deputies to follow up on his stupid act of bringing Jason back to life. Now Crystal Lake was renamed Forest Green to get rid of the dreadful memory of what happened in the past films, and as luck would have it, Camp Forest Green has recently opened to a new set of campers with a new set of counselors.
Fortunately for the plot, most everyone in this film belongs where they are, and they behave is a fairly realistic fashion. We still get our share of token death characters who don't survive their only scene of the film, and some of these characters are given some measure of introduction during their scene -- one even remarking when they see Jason that "I've seen enough horror movies to know that some guy wearing a mask is bad news." Most, however, are just there and get hacked pretty quickly thereafter.
One of the cooler character moments for Jason (yes, I said Jason) was when he walked into the cabin with all the kids. The first time he looked at a little girl who was scared to death and prayed; the second was with every kid in the camp, and they all screamed and ran into a corner. In neither instance did Jason kill anyone. Guess what? It tied back to the original plot. Originally, it was the camp counselors killed to prevent the camp from being opened. The kids were never touched because they weren't part of the problem. Some of this has been lost sight of with Jason claiming the lake region as his own and wiping out everyone around it for no real apparent reason, but this moment was so good, that it overshadows nearly every other moment in the film.
Moving on, most of what's left is pretty standard for a Friday flick. Lots of people are killed in a variety of different ways. Our hero finds a way to get rid of Jason "once and for all" (heh, uh-huh). And of course, the girl survives.
What sets this one above the other films is the way people act and react. In only one instance does anyone say "wait here while I go check it out." He walks around a bush, sees some carnage and takes off telling his girl to leave whatever she wants to grab so they can go. Yeah, they die anyway, but it's an improvement. We get a few names thrown out when someone is wondering where that sound came from out of the darkness, but again, not as bad as previous, and it fit in the instances where it happened. Jason wasn't a magic man flitting from place to place is a complete ignorance of the fundamental rules of time and space; he was in one place at a time, and that place was around the lake where he lives.
My final bit of weirdness has to do with the boat propeller at the end. I'll try to talk around this to not spoil what happens, but let's just say for this to actually work, the propeller on a motor boat engine would have to extend about 4-5 feet down into the water. Your typical motor boat propeller rests usually less than 12 inches below the surface, and 12 is long.
So this was definitely one of the better installments in this franchise right up there with the first one. It was not without its problems, but it's a vast improvement over the shlock that has come before it.
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