Stayvun Goes to Hell: The Final Friday!

Today is a very special day, when Jason's birthday actually falls on Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, I already recapped all the Friday the 13th movies, so here's a Stayvunpoast instead. No, this has nothing to do with Friday the 13th, but then neither did the Friday the 13th TV show, so consider this a 4D clever meta-commentary on that.

Happy birthday, Jason!!!1

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Friday the 13th!!!

Note: I hadn't realised I wrote this ten million years ago when I was covering the Friday the 13th series but never published it, so here it is:

Everybody loves Jason, but before Jason was even in junior league hockey, someone else was killing camp counsellors at Crystal Lake. Who could it be??? Well you probably already know, but in case you don't, this article contains spoilers.

Glass shattering titles, fades to white and cutaways of clouds crossing the moon were all cool little motifs that tied the series together before they just forgot to do those.

Friday the 13th concerns Steve Christie's ill-fated attempt to revive the summer camp that was shut down in the 1950s after a boy named Jason drowned and two camp counsellors were subsequently murdered. Everyone in town is shit-scared of the place, calling it Camp Blood, possibly because the greatest character ever, Crazy Ralph, spends all his time cycling around drunk off his face telling everyone they're doomed if they set foot in the camp grounds.

IDK if he was even in the script, or just wandered onto the set while cameras were rolling.

Most of the movie is taken up with the camp counsellors killing time until the kids show up (presumably they never do, given the state of everyone at the end of the movie, although I like to think one family set off from across the country and arrived before they ever got the message). The counsellors are blissfully unaware of anything going on, but everyone else in Crystal Lake is on edge. A motorcycle cop stops by the camp and goes on a left-field rant about pot and people going crazy at the full moon. I love this character.

The Village People were never the same after the great schism of June 13th.

Friday the 13th is in a tradition of stories taking place over a day (minus the pre-titles sequence, which takes place in 1957) that includes Slacker, The Breakfast Club, Halloween, Prom Night, and Waiting for Godot. It's a slice of life punctuated with murder. The camp counsellors go swimming, whack a snake, play strip Monopoly (a poor choice since, as we all know, Monopoly never ends), and talk about disturbing dreams.

On one level, dropping her off by the cemetery is just film-school foreshadowing, but on the other hand shooting this flick in a town called Hope makes it a cemetery for hope, which is much darker.

Who is the killer? Is it Steve Christie? Crazy Ralph? The motorcycle cop? No, it's someone we've never met before! If this is a deliberate subversion of murder mystery conventions, it's kind of brilliant. Of course the killer is Mrs Voorhees, Jason's mother, who is typical of concerned parents everywhere in that she's perfectly willing to go to ridiculous extremes to prevent another death, like killing multiple people. Yes, she says she couldn't let them open the camp again after what happened to Jason, so she kills everyone instead.

The movie, uh, cleverly misleads you by casting a blatant man as her double in all the pre-reveal scenes.

Mrs Voorhees is a great killer and it's sad that she's so overshadowed by her son. She may have a shaky grasp of her own motive, but she's a good shot with a bow and arrows and she has the patience to wait under a bed while Kevin Bacon gets lucky before killing him. She also seems to be able to pass for normal or indeed forget about her spree killing ways in between camp openings, because she's known to Mr Christie, and has managed not to kill him until Friday the 13th rolls around. This is why I want to see a prequel series set in Crystal Lake featuring Mrs Voorhees, Mr Christie, Crazy Ralph, the trucker who says "Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed" and others living in the town. It would be like Twin Peaks.

>falling by julee cruise starts playing

Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th: The Remake!

The 2000s were particularly overrun with horror remakes, most of which were terrible. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a neat visual style everyone else later ripped off, and 2009's Night of the Demons was a fun spin on an overhyped original. But other than that it was one disappointment after another, except that no one had any expectations for horror remakes, so more accurately it was just one turd after another. The Nightmare on Elm Street remake managed to make the surreal world of dreams boring and prosaic (something not even the astoundingly awful Freddy's Dead did) and the Rob Zombie Halloweens were just a too-long look into the tiny imagination of a grown man who wears Hot Topic shirts.

But fortunately, based Friday the 13th is immune to the normal desecration implied in a remake, partly because every Friday the 13th movie after the first was essentially a remake with one added gimmick (Jason, 3D, being the last one, Scooby Doo Jason, Zombie Jason, Jason Vs Carrie, Jason Takes Manhattan, being the last one, space, and Freddy, respectively). In this one, the gimmick is that it's 2009, and film as an artform is essentially on life support (it's since died), so why not remake an unremakeable film?

You can't really tell but he has hair this time.

The first scene is the end of the original film, and unnecessarily clears up that Jason wasn't drowned at all and saw his mother go on a killing spree and get beheaded. Not that it matters, but I liked the ambiguity in the original series, and I always preferred to think he really drowned. But whatever, this is the remake so they can do what they like.

We then flash forward to the present, except it's 2009 so paradoxically we actually flash forward to the past. For 2000s kids, this is what will have to pass for nostalgia.

This image has been censored for nudity.

So this chick with the frightening bolt-on tits and her friends get sliced up by Jason after stumbling into his weed field because Jason is a stoner in the remake. The only survivor of the massacre is Whitney, whom Jason spares and imprisons in his underground tunnels because she looks like his mom, I think, except not how he'd remember her but OK.

Then Whitney's brother comes looking for her, running into a new batch of walking corpses including a guy who keeps insisting he's unlikeable to the point that I like him out of spite. I forget his name but I'll call him Brad because it's probably something like that. Remember when Tucker And Dale Vs Evil called their evil Chad guy Chad? That's what is known in writing as "on the nose" which means it's too apropos. It makes you look actually bitter you're not a Chad instead of being funny. Whatever, I'm Team Brad for this movie.

Based Brad.

Meanwhile Jason comes across a man who has an intimate relationship with a mannequin, and kills him. In the man's house, sack-wearing Jason (the Part 2 component of the remake) finds a hockey mask, so he wears the hockey mask instead. This is what's known as the origin story of the hockey mask, but it's so half-assed and no one cares where the hockey mask came from anyway, so the scene just stands out as being really self-conscious for no reason.

"At last I have a mask with which to strike terror this Friday the 13th: The Remake" - Jason

I mention this because the writing team are the same guys who wrote Freddy Vs Jason, and have spoken a couple of times about things they wrote that got changed around, so maybe they had a more elaborate story planned for the mask but even that is distressing to me because it would mean they thought the mask was in itself important, as opposed to just being something J-Dog wears because he's self-conscious about his appearance because he's mentally a child. Then I realise I'm actually thinking about story and character in a Friday the 13th flick, and I wonder whether if I weren't like this I might have been an engineer or an astronaut or something gay like that.

One of the things the writers mentioned that got switched around later was this girl's death: she was originally meant to slowly drown because she was too scared to swim for shore while Jason was standing there watching her. This would have been a great and very different way to kill someone off. It could have been really sad and dark and exploited deep-seated fears people have about the water and the wilderness. Instead she just gets stabbed through the head, which is so unmemorable that until I rewatched the remake for this article, I had thought they actually did the drowning scene. A scene I never saw was more memorable, but was cut. This type of decision blows my tiny mind.

Team Brad has the best pitsluts.

There follows an inexplicably lengthy secks scene, featuring this semen demon played by Julianna Guill and best boi Brad the douche, intercut with NPCs dying left, right and centre, to which Brad and Stacy are probably unintentionally funnily oblivious. The fact that Brad alone - whom we're supposed to dislike - gets to smash before dying makes me wonder whether the writers changed their minds and became Team Brad during the second draft or something. Don't get me wrong, this is a Christian blög and sex is for marriage, but it's just weird in a good way to see wanton celebration of normative heterosexuality in a movie anymore. Expect the next remake to feature two beanmouthed xirs scissoring through a hole in a sheet.

Finally Jason shows up to kill everyone and Whitney's brother finds her and blah blah blah who cares. Friday the 13th isn't about resolution. It's about moments. It's about the clouds crossing the moon like in Un Chien Andalou, and ominous dreams about raining blood, and strip monopoly, and the sadness of wasted youth. If you're a tryhard film snob who thinks the original is some bullshit slasher, watch it back to back with the remake, and then kill yourself. The remake is everything it needed to be, but it only highlights what we've lost as a culture, and it was all downhill from here. One day, if it survives the cultural revolution, our descendants will look back at this one and feel that same loss.

Freddy Vs Jason!

If there was one good thing about 1992's Jason Goes To Hell (there was), it was the very final scene. After sitting out most of his own finale before being dragged under the ground by rock monsters, all that remains of Jason is his famous hockey mask, which is then grabbed and dragged down by Freddy's equally famous knived glove. More than a decade of blue balls later, Freddy Vs Jason finally dropped.

Colour coded for your convenience.

Freddy Vs Jason is the best Freddy Vs Jason movie anyone could reasonably have hoped for. If you doubt this, check out some of the absolutely awful script ideas that were floated in the development process, including Fred and Jay fighting as gladiators in Hell and looking for the Holy Grail (????). Every one of these scripts was basically Jason Goes To Hell Part 2: unnecessary convoluted plotting with a false sense of its own importance filled with hurr hurr humour and what the fucc moments that would have been a total disaster.

One of the least bad ideas had a young Freddy being one of the bullies who fucked with Jason at camp, just because that seems like something Freddy would do.

Instead we got exactly what we needed: an action movie with horror characteristics featuring pro wrestling style exaggerations of the classic characters beating the hell out of each other and slaughtering any 25-year-old teenager that got in their way.

Both their signature weapons are bumped up in size for the sake of spectacle.

The plot is simple: Freddy has been wiped from the collective memory of Springwood by its cops and doctors. If nobody knows about him, nobody's afraid of him, and without their fear powering him, he can't come back to fuck with them in their dreams. To reignite belief in him, he poses as Jason's mother and sends him on a mission to Springwood to drop some bodies. The plan works but Jason keeps killstealing like a neccbeard so Freddy hatches a new plan to get him asleep so he can take him out on his own terms. We understand that this is all just a setup for a big climactic fight scene, so this covers everything we need logistically to get there.

Jason gets a powerup numetal theme song at this point, just in case you didn't get that this is WWE.

Objections to this absolute masterpiece abound among the Reddit population: it breaks continuuuuity! It doesn't make sense in the uuuuuniverse! Such whining can be dismissed with extreme prejudice. There is no real internal logic in these movies and internal logic doesn't even make sense as a concept in the context of A Nightmare on Elm Street films because they are examples of surrealism. "But Jason wasn't afraid of water in the other films!" Yeah, but he also turned into a little boy in Jason Takes Manhattan and a possessing Mini Boglin in The Final Friday, and I don't hear you bringing that up. Maybe the fear existed at a deeper level of his unconscious mind waiting to be triggered, or some other gay psychobabble explanation, but it doesn't matter because the real purpose of that scene is to hammer home the fact that Jason is the babyface and Freddy is the heel. Only big-brained redditeurs don't seem to get this.

Something about this image is really unsettling and beautiful. I think it has something to do with the background receding into nothing.

With that said there are a few things you could reasonably nitpick about the film. Freddy dominates the fight a little too much while Jason has nearly all the kills, even toward the end. This could have been evened out a little. It would also have been nice to have a bit of a suspenseful stalking sequence once they get to Crystal Lake, as very little use is made of the woods and it would be fun to see the protagonists trying to escape not knowing where either of the killers was hiding.

More of this would have been nice.

But this isn't really a horror movie anyway, it's gory actionkino and it has a deliberate accelerating pace to keep up. The fight is varied and inventive and the buildup has momentum and never feels too much like filler. The characters are all pretty stock and given just enough definition that we remember them and kinda-sorta care but not really because we're really here for the main event, but the fluff adds context to it and is satisfying in itself. Some people (who don't bathe) insist they wanted the whole thing to be Jason and Freddy with no mortal characters at all, and I just don't know what to do with people like that.

"Ew, less of this" - someone

The idea of the town using drugs and censorship to keep the memory of Freddy under wraps, and their inevitable and disastrous failure, is fun and creative and not so pointed as to be didactic, and setpieces like Jason's cornfield massacre are gr8 too. The soundtrack, poised just between the ebb of numetal and the ascendancy of metalcore, is gr8 time capsule stuff, like an update of the Dokken and Alice Cooper songs that graced the 80s films. The celebrity casting of Kelly Rowland, slick production values and pop culture nods to shit like Scooby Doo and Jay and Silent Bob also ties in neatly and makes this sort of the last gasp of the late 90s/early 2000s slasher wave and, along with New Nightmare, kind of bookends that era nicely as well.

Now we just need Ghostface Vs Parka.

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Jason X!!!

Jason X is the best early 2000s slasher movie in spehss you could ever hope for. Back when it came out that would have sounded like faint praise, but as we've previously discussed, the late 90s to the early 2000s were the last good era, and this flick is very, very early 2000s. So much so that I would almost say it's as quintessentially early 2000s as the old Friday the 13ths were quintessentially 80s. For the pop punk/postgrunge/numetal generation, this is nostalgiakino. Nothing ever looks as much like its era as its depictions of the future.

In 2055, the hospital patient's gown has been replaced by gloriously slutty chainmail for some reason.

The Final Girl this time out is a former Jason researcher who accidentally gets cryogenically frozen along with him in the near-future of 2001 (2010). Despite being revived four hundred years in the future, she proves to be much more capable than the people who have grown up on spaceships, and even seems to know the layout of their ship better than they do. This is typical of lazy Mary-Sue type writing, but maybe the point is more that people in the future are really stupid due to their overly convenient lifestyles. They reattach limbs and bring people back to life with nanobots so casually their survival instincts have dropped off to nothing. They're basically Elois from The Time Machine, and Jason is the based Morlock here to knock some sense into them, and by sense I mean a machete.

A condition in my will is to be stuffed in this position with my trusty blade.

Our based incel is thawed out and revived by the suspicion that two Eloi normalfags are having wanton secks somewhere on board, and throws a characteristically righteous murder spree in protest. He starts by whacking this galloping Stacy by freezing her head. Gamers: 1, thots: 0.

Serious question: is this the first time Jason's been to second base?

Jason then proceeds to hack his way through the rest of the crew who keep forgetting things like where there's a large unprotected glass screen he can easily break through, and to fill in this bluescreen:

Maybe it's just meant to be blue, considering they didn't correct for the light spill, but nothing except bluescreen is that shade of blue.

Eventually they fight back using such tricks as a modified fuccbot in a pleasingly The-Matrix-is-still-current-and-hip outfit, who blows off Jason's limbs and head, which seems to kill him pretty dead, although we're told the people of 2010 couldn't figure out a way to kill him and the firepower isn't noticeably more powerful than weapons we have today.

Psshhh...nothin personnel...Jason...

Nonetheless the crew, including Final Girl, seem satisfied she's put him down for good and get to Skyping with a possible rescue vessel leaving the ship to revive him as a cyborg for no fucking reason. Maybe the ship is run by a HAL type computer that's secretly Team Jason.

There's no way they didn't laugh out loud when he first tried this on.

The cyborg version, called, in the credits, "Uber Jason" (at the time this didn't make him sound like a taxi driver) is even more unstoppable than regular Jason, so to slow him down, Final Girl and the based autist who built the fuccbot waylay him into a holodeck in which he's confronted by some slutty campers, who he naturally kills.

Censored to avoid offence.

Eventually our hero is dishonourably tackled into Earth 2's atmosphere where he begins to burn up. Is this the final end of Jason? Well at least part of his mask makes it to the new Earth, where it falls, fittingly, in a lake. I leave it up to your imagination whether or not Jason survived and solo'd the entire new host planet of the normalfaggot locust, but I think we all know what we'd prefer. Jason X is dumb as shit, but in a fun way. Everything about it has that slick, cool blue-grey look everything had in the early 2000s and it's even directed like an episode of Star Trek, with that small-screen overreliance on closeups and sterile future, so it's like watching Jason whack Wil Wheaton and the chick who reads emotions for the benefit of the autistic audience.

The survivors: an autistic white man, a hot Asian woman and a sex robot, as God intended.

The only thing that sucks about this movie (in the bad way) is the quippy Marvel/Josh Whedon/Jar Jar Abrams tier dialogue, especially from the character Janessa. However, it wasn't as omnipresent back then and we're supposed to root for Jason against the crypto-redditeurs anyway, so I'll let it slide.

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday???

Jason Goes to Hell has about as much to do with Friday the 13th as the average Hellraiser sequel has to do with Hellraiser, which is ironic because Jason Goes to Hell has a lot in common with Hellraiser, such as this inexplicable gay bondage scene in which Jason, possessing a doctor, shaves a guy:

Clive Barker doesn't get made fun of enough.

There are two good things about the ninth instalment of Friday the 13th. One is the opening sequence, which should have been the whole film. A woman arrives at a cabin in the woods, gets naked and steps into the shower, but the power cuts out and Jason shows up to slice her with his machete. She runs into the woods and he chases her into an ambush in which a large unit of federales light him up with excessive force including a mortar or something which blows his entire body to bits.

Based Agent Hotty so pleased she's forgotten all about her gushing wound.

You can stop watching there to be honest. It was a fun opening and it made sense they would do that eventually, and flipped the script on the expected helpless victim without being a bore about it. Sadly, there was more to come. For some reason, even though it had never even been hinted at before, the writers chose to make the "real" Jason a Mini Boglin who lives in his heart and possesses people. The coroner who gets to deal with Jason's body bits decides for no reason to eat the heart and thus becomes possessed, and then proceeds to pass the Boglin on through several other hosts until blah blah who cares this movie sucks.

"Om nom nom" - a medical professional

The correct amount of lore in a Friday the 13th flick is none to negative (negative meaning it erases the ending of a previous film, which they nearly always do). This one way overcompensates with a stupid backstory about a magic dagger that can only be wielded by a Voorhees and a bounty hunter character who, I don't know, knows all this for some reason. It's so hard to care, and I'm not trying very hard. The Boglin looks like this, and at one point it crawls into his sister's cunt. I am by no means making that up:

Imagine being a professional actor and being told to wrestle with this rubber chicken looking piece of shit.

This is supposed to be a tie-in to some other flick but fuck that, Marvel sucks.

Boglin incest necrophilia is the next frontier in civil rights, but you're a monster if you like normal tits.

Eventually Jason pops back up looking exactly like he did before exploding, hockey mask and all. Blah blah they stab him and he goes to Hell, as the title already suggested. It looks something like this, if you're curious:

What a flamboyant way to die.

Fortunately nothing from this instalment was ever mentioned again, with the exception of the second good thing which eventually culminated in the last (to date) good movie in both this and the Nightmare on Elm Street series:

"Yoink" - Freddy Krueger

But don't get too wet for it yet, because there's one more Friday the 13th to go before we get to it, and it is out of this world.