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

Mad Max Ripoffs: Radioactive Dreams!

You remember the nuclear war in 2010, right?

Albert Pyun remembers.

The name Albert Pyun is well-known among B-movie dorks for his various cyborg flicks, but it's clear that his real love is Walter Hill's top kino Streets of Fire. Pyun even filmed an unofficial sequel to Streets in 2012, which I have yet to see because I'm not honestly sure it was ever released, and checking would mean opening a whole other tab.

Rejects from The Warriors or rejects from The Lost Boys? You decide.

Nonetheless, the spirit of Streets pervades this 1985 Pyunkino every bit as much - perhaps more - than that of The Road Warrior. Like Streets, this movie mashes genres, lurks in deep shadows, and has dramatic scenes set to diegetic female renditions of Jim Steinman-esque anthems.

Seldom has live-music-based nightlife enjoyed such a resurgence after the bomb.

Philip and Marlowe are brothers who sat out the war in a bunker stocked with pulp detective novels and emerge into the post-nuke world expecting it to be like 40s film noir instead of 80s shoulderpadcore, leading to a number of high-larious misunderstandings, mostly revolving around the different meanings of the word "dick".

Fortunately the idea of the 80s collectively shoving the 40s in the locker is funny enough to sustain even the 106-minute cut of this thing.

While it would be easy for the reddit letter media fan to dismiss Pyun's work as kitschy drivel, Radioactive Dreams has a pretty strong throughline of coming-of-age, innocence lost and wisdom hard-won that puts anything released post, say, 2019 to shame. Give it a spin (or don't).

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: a couple show up on extras.

SHOULDER PADS: the bikers at the start have them.

CUSTOM CARS: nah.

MUTANTS: two kids are referred to as "The Disco Mutants", though they don't look mutated to me. There's also an enormous rat the size of a bus.

GOGGLES: Also sported by the bikers.

TOTAL: 4/5 - Pyunkino

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: Friday The 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan!!?

What is there to say about Jason Takes Manhattan that has not already been said? If you're a fan of Friday the 13th, you already know two thirds of it take place on a boat, the New York scenes are mostly Vancouver, and it's the one where Jason punches a guy's head clean off.

The physics of this are mind bending to consider.

So much of this flick concerns water that you would think some deep thematic significance could be inferred from it, and so would the writer, but you'd both be wrong. Apparently inspired by Tina's psychic trauma and douchey psychiatrist from 7, this one features as its Final Girl one Rennie, whose professor uncle once pushed her into Crystal Lake to try to teach her to swim, using fear of the little boy Jason who drowned there to motivate her.

I learned from this movie not to do this.

Once in the lake, she either sees or hallucinates little boy Jason trying to drag her down with him. As with pretty much everything in these flicks, noone knows if this is meant to actually be happening or not, and even more noone cares. If this were the opening scene, it would probably be creepy, but it's jammed in at random as a third act flashback, so instead it's just confusing and laughably silly.

I like how the makeup artist decided Jason's hydrocephalus and Down's syndrome weren't piling on enough so they gave him a cleft palate scar too.

Despite being hilariously ineptly handled, this scene is quite creative and at least the idea behind giving the heroine a profound personal trauma showed evidence of rudimentary effort, so let's call it a high point. Normally though when you do something like that in narrative terms, the heroine would overcome her trauma by confronting a similar situation later, using the personal strength she's accrued through a dynamic arc. Instead the payoff is that Jason gets deluged in toxic waste in the Vancouver sewers and turns into a normal boy, which isn't a payoff so much as it is a non-sequitur.

Only showing his face while melting was a smart way to avoid having to recreate the look from 7 exactly. I respect innovation in cutting corners.

Rennie looks unsure whether she's just had an arc or not.

So much for the deep lore, plot, and subtext (if any). Manhattan is more or less a succession of gags, a couple of which land, if your standards are low enough. Memorable-ish minor characters include a hair rocker with a hot pink guitar, and Kelly Hu (let's face it, The Scorpion King).

Not sure if cute, or a Ramone.

Most definitely cute, holy shit. Azns win this film.

Manhattan even tries to win your affection subliminally by reminding you of more popular entry Jason Lives. Sneaky!

Is Quayton the black Jason? Quayton spinoff when?

The most celebrated gag, however, must be the one from the Times Square scene, in which Jason kicks over a punk gang's 80s casette player and they menace him, only for him to scare them off by simply lifting his mask to reveal, presumably, his part 7 face.

ebin :DD

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2!!!

There are two types of people in this world: those who think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the late Tobe Hooper's greatest masterpiece, and those who have seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

The Breakfast Club knockoff poster is a clue that this is going to be on another level.

Where 1 was frankly restrained for a movie called "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", 2 lives up to the derangement implied in such an ostentatious title, opening with a high speed car chase in the middle of which Leatherface slices up these two fratbois' car.

Everything better on a moving vehicle.

Hearing their death screams as the fratbois' final moments are recorded on her radio show, Final Girl Stretch (played by Caroline Williams and her legs) decides to team up with Lieutenant Lefty Enright, a based Texas lawman played by Dennis Hopper in the same year he won acclaim for his role in Blue Velvet. Together they will set a trap for the murderous family of cannibals.

Hopper has a rather condensed arc in which he learns the very important lesson that to defeat a chainsaw-wielding killer you must yourself learn the art of the chainsaw. To this end we get to witness him shopping for chainsaws, which he tries out in an excellent scene by going apeshit on a log.

You fuck that log up Denny.

The movie then bravely dispenses with the customary second act and launches straight into an extended climactic sequence that takes up like two thirds of the runtime. This dude who I think is named "Chop Top" but is referred to at one point as "Chrome Dome" due to the metal plate in his head, breaks into the radio station and chases Stretch around with the questionable assistance of Leatherface.

This scene kind of goes on too long but it has a nice uneasy mood about it so paradoxically it works.

Leatherface corners Stretch who basically offers to fuck him if he'll spare her life, which Leatherface (whose IQ, to be charitable, might be in the 60s) seems to weigh up for a while. This scene is an hysterically funny satire of the film criticism cliché that killers' weapons constitute a phallic substitute, with Stretch basically grinding her crotch on Leatherface's chainsaw. Had the scene gone on a little longer this might not have been a Texas Chainsaw sequel, but a Pumpkin one.

This is what film critics actually believe.

However Leatherface is then called away to the family residence and Stretch, whom he neglected to kill, follows him there, only to become trapped in the family's lair: an abandoned theme park, which is one of my favourite movie sets.

Thank you Tobe, very kino!

Stretch meets Leatherface again, who's kind enough to give her a skin mask of her own, fresh from her station assistant, which she doesn't seem to appreciate too much.

Bride of Leatherface

Naturally she winds up at the famous family dinner table and the old grampa gets wheeled out to try and crack her head, at which he fails consistently, giving Lieutenant Enright time to show up and engage Leatherface in a chainsaw duel.

This is a correct use of the medium.