Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood!!

Spoilers throughout.

Part 7 immediately endears itself to the series connoisseur because it opens with a "previously..." narration by Walt Gorney, the actor who played Crazy Ralph. Whether this is Ralph's spirit speaking to us from beyond the grave, or his son grown up to take his place, we'll never know. We then get a nice intro in which young Tina flees from her fighting parents onto a boat on Crystal Lake. Her father runs out after her but in her upset state she manifests telekinetic powers that bring the front porch down on him, knocking him into the lake.

Don't you hate it when that happens?

Flash forward to the present day, which we'll call 198X. The signs no longer identify Crystal Lake as Forest Green, so this is obviously some time after Part 6, but it's also very obviously still the 80s. Tina, now a teenager, has come back to the lake with her mother and sleazy therapist. She's now played by Lar Park Lincoln, who sounds like a nu-metal band.

"I am Lar" - how this chick introduces herself

The therapist has ostensibly brought her back to resolve her guilt complex over her father's death, but is secretly trying to agitate her to make her show her powers. This is like one of those old meme South Park gnome plans:

Step 1: piss off budget Carrie.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: profit!

The real reason in plot terms, of course, is so she can raise Jason from his watery grave to kill again for no particular reason.

It's a fair response to being woken up imho 2bqh

Director John Carl Buechler also did the makeup effects and it's obvious that's where most of the attention went on this one. The characters are mostly an afterthought, extremely lazily sketched out stereotypes haphazardly jammed together into one group, including a bitchy preppy, stoner, "nerdy" girl with big glasses, and so on. Their antics are phoned in and pointless and a ton of characters are telegraphed arriving on scene only to be killed. This is the first entry in which the filler feels like filler, as opposed to comfy ambience or quirky retardation. The only enjoyable oddball is this goofy fuck:

"I've been rejected by some of the finest science fiction magazines in the continental United States" - G. Fuck

It really comes through as an effects picture though. The final fight between Tina and Jason is great and Jason has never looked better before or since, with his skeleton showing through after all the years of beatings, mutilations and floating around on a chain at the bottom of the lake he's been through.

He looks fine by UK standards.

He also seems to be really obsessed with switching up his weapons this time out. After finding Tina's mom and the sleazeball shrink out in the woods, Jason spears her but then presumably goes all the way back to the house to grab a weed whacker with which to whack Fink Freud. Does Jason have OCD? Probably not, as he starts to get really attached to his machete in later instalments, but it took him long enough. Maybe he just hadn't found the right machete.

"Some kills just feel like weed whacker kills, you know?" - Jason

Anyway, one thing leads to another and Tina magically brings her long-drowned father back to life to drag Jason back down into the water. Or it just happens, idk. It's no more nonsensical than the endings of most of these pictures, but it definitely got a good laugh out of me the first nine times I saw it.

So it's a film of two halves. It was the best of films; it was the worst of films. I think I'd place it top of the lower tier (so below 1, 2 and 4) maybe narrowly beating out 6. Then again, Jason still has yet to go to space and fight Freddy, so we have all that to look forward to.

License To Kill

Taking a further step into the gratuitously edgy, Dalton's second and unfortunately final outing as 007 features Bond's best friend Felix Leiter (a character so wallpaper I can't remember a single thing he's done in any of the other films he's been in) having his wife raped and murdered and an arm and a leg chewed off by a shark. The villain also beats his mistress with a whip and at one point a Klansman dropkicks a puppy into a gas chamber (OK I made that one up). Despite this, it's still a pretty good movie, if you look at it as Bond Vs Scarface in much the same way that Moonraker was Bond Meets Star Wars.

We need to bring back this aesthetic too.

The Bond Girl this time is Pam Bouvier, who is pretty much the ideal modern (2019) heroine, except that she's good looking and likeable. But she can kick ass(tm) and don't need no man(tm), except for Bond of course because this is still sort of a Bond film (they weren't totally not Bond films until Cr**g). She even backsasses Bond constantly like a Twitter thot, and yet there's a charm to it, very much unlike a Twitter thot, perhaps because it was the 1980s and dystopia still seemed very far away.

This scene where she demonstrates "shaken not stirred" is a perennial favourite.

The best stunt involves a car on fire shooting off a cliff and narrowly missing a plane, but Bond also does a wheelie in the cab of an oil tanker and waterskies without skis, and the baddy has an iguana, so personality abounds in general. The atmosphere is very much 80s/90s actioner though, with a bar brawl, credibly sleazy goons and big orange fireball explosions. There's even a cult leader/televangelist who works as a front for the cartel out of a cool temple, which borders on heavy-handed social commentary but is fine because he's actually pretty funny.

Spilling over that border like a caravan of human traffickers, however, is the gleefully reactionary vigilante plotline, as Bond is explicitly out for personal revenge and is in theory wanted by the British government, but by the final scene all is forgotten, possibly because they realise they'll need Bond to stop a nuclear war or something next week. If I'm being fair I would give a Cr**g joint shit for this, but it's different because in the pre-Cr**g days Bond actually did save the world on the reg so he can pretty much get away with the odd unsanctioned murder spree.

nothin personnel...ese...

The Living Daylights

Concluding the brief but fondly remembered (by me) 80s pop-rock era of Bondkino, The Living Daylights is also the first outing of Timothy Dalton in the role. Universally forgotten and ignored by pop culture bloggers and general audiences, Dalton was notable for being Craig before Craig, except better in literally every way. His Bond is terse, serious, brooding, edgy and grimdark. Crucially however no one else is, including old friends like Q, amiable villain Brad (this is, in fact, his name), and undisputed series Best Girl Kara the cellist, who is a qt3.14 and uniquely marriage material among Bond thots.

PROTECT

The plot involves a defecting Russian general, because it is the Cold War once more, except this time with an appropriately nervy sense of suspicion and mistrust, like it's actually the Cold War and not the friendly sport it's mostly been portrayed as heretofore. There's even an hilariously cringily poorly aged subplot in which Bond teams up with the Mujaheddin to fight the bad old Russkies, which either makes him Rambo 3 or a contemporary Democrat.

Well boys, we found it: the most horrifically badly aged joke of all time.

The action in the Dalton outings is extremely good and real-feeling, but still makes use of fun gadgets such as a car that slices other cars in half with lasers. You know, something fun, instead of having a nerd in glasses lecture us about how gadgets are silly and not grimdark enough, like in the Cr**g joints. There's also tits for, I believe, the first time ever in a Bondkino, which seems odd somehow but that's how it is.

Hilariously, Bond ripped off her robe to create a Bugs Bunny tier distraction for the guy he's knocking out in the corner.

Though overshadowed by 1996's Goldeneye and, sadly, 2005's Casino Royale, The Living Daylights was a nice, refreshing change of pace in its day, and in the Berenstein timeline where 9/11 never happened and there is no Jihad, it's probably fondly remembered and viewed in flying cars on autopilot to this day.

A View to a Kill

Notable for Duran Duran, A View to a Kill is also the second instalment in Bond villains doing absolutely nothing wrong, as nominal baddy Christopher Walken's plan is to destroy Silicon Valley, thus ensuring no Zuckerberg, no Jack and no McInternet as we know and loathe it today.

Because no actual person is as based.

His defeat is therefore the second most unwittingly tragic ending to a Bond film after Moonraker, in which Drax planned to wipe out the dysgenic hordes and replace them with models, saving the environment and bringing up the average human from a 5 to like a 7. I mean honestly his perfect specimens weren't actually that great, but whatever, it's the thought that counts.

The man's aesthetic sensibilities were unimpeachable regarding set design, but he had yet to discover thicc girls.

Walken should also have survived for the simple reason he has a blimp. Blimps are cool and all villains should have blimps, and I should have a blimp.

The movie ends in a climactic hand-to-hand fight on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a cool location and fun setpiece, but throughout the movie you're more worried Bond is going to die of old age because based Moore was like 200 years old at this point.

MY SPIIINE

The Moore era in general is overly maligned for its campiness. In reality the camp tone set in with George Lay-Z-Boy's cringe Carry On-esque antics in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and went into overdrive in Diamonds are Forever, so Moore really just inherited a well-established tone and rolled with it. Nevertheless he sold tense and dramatic moments such as the nuke-disarming in The Spy Who Loved Me excellently, and his Bond is a great character unto himself even if his actual films were all over the place in terms of quality. And this is what Bond should be: a consistent character who can find himself fighting Voodoo gangsters one week and metal-toothed giants the next, and retain much the same attitude of bemused detachment. Only one man has imbued a Bond with edge, grit, vulnerability and realism and not sucked utter balls, and his name is Timothy Dalton (up next).

Never Say Never Again

While Roger Moore was swinging through trees in Octopussy, Sean Connery came back one last time to play Bond in a competing, non-Eon film. This transpired because of the courts ruling that screenwriter Kevin McClory owned the rights to the plot of Thunderball and the characters of SPECTRE, Largo and Blofeld who appeared therein. While being tied down to the format of a remake naturally limits the new ground to be broken here, to McClory's credit he did do this with it:

Any movie starring Kim Basinger's cameltoe is alright with me.

Sweaty Baesinger aside, this is literally just Thunderball in the 80s, with Bond playing Largo at a goofy ass vidya gaem and jumping a horse off a tower, which has some truly amazing effects.

OH NO I AM FALLING OFF A TOWER ON A HORSE

Look at it it's BLUE

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity here is to bring some closure to Bond's endless fight with SPECTRE. Blofeld appears (played by Bergman favourite Max Von Sydow) but doesn't do anything, while another, but boringer, iteration of Largo is the main villain. Why even use Blofeld if he has no impact on the plot? McClory only had the rights to this one plotline so it's not like he was being saved for a sequel. It would have been easy enough to have Blofeld fly out to meet with Largo to oversee the success of his plans only to run into Bond one final time, and would have given him a more fitting sendoff than the gag death of his stand-in in For Your Eyes Only.

What a waste.

This is really a footnote in the series because while it's decently entertaining, it's mostly nothing you haven't seen before, so here are some more pictures of Kim Basinger.

Octopussy

Octopussy is perhaps the only James Bond film in which the cold open is better than the rest of the movie. Bond is in Cuba to blow up some technobabble, is captured, escapes, flies a small plane back through the building with a heat seeking missile on his tail and escapes through the smallest gap in the closing doors leaving the missile to blow the hapless commies to hell. He then rolls into a filling station. This has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

This stunt is cooler than everything in the last twenty years' worth of movies combined.

The other best part of the movie is where the villains are pursuing Bond on a hunt through the jungle and he swings through the trees yelling like Tarzan. This is amazingly hilarious because Bond is completely just fucking with them in the most retarded way. I will never not laugh at this because it is the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Then again, since Roger Moore's stuntman looks absolutely nothing like him, maybe this is just Tarzan.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Octopussy, except for the fact that its title is a pun on octopus and vagina, which makes it sound like hentai, is the clash of tones. In the background is a tense, dark Cold War plot involving clown murder and an amazingly hammy Soviet general trying to get a nice war going by blowing up a nuke in a circus, while in the foreground is Bond larping as Tarzan and doing this:

BASED.

Each of these tones is ill-served by the other, and I wonder whether the two villains are really all that necessary, because General Ham & Cheese is much more fun than his partner in crime Kamal Khan and gestures manically in front of a doomsday map out of Doctor Strangelove, in this fucking amazing set right here:

If the Sovs had cool ass revolving panels like this I'd be unironically m*rxist-l*ninist.

a e s t h e t i c   af

This actor has the best body language ever.

Fortunately the movie ends with Bond hopping on the back of a plane as it takes off and scaring William Shatner by perching on the wing.

weeee

For Your Eyes Only

For Your Eyes Only opens with a meta-legal in-joke in which Eon, forbidden to use Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE (to whom Kevin McClory held the rights at the time), killed off a "suspicious man in wheelchair" with the bald head, accent and white cat all associated with the character from the early films, making this the James Bond film equivalent of that scene in Friends where Chandler dances in front of Joey saying "not touching, can't get mad, not touching, can't get mad".

Note the neck brace, which strongly implies that if this were Blofeld, this would be a direct sequel to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, not You Only Live Twice or Diamonds Are Forever. However, this is just a man in a wheelchair, what are you talking about?

A fun game you can play is to start the movie at 05:29 and pretend this is just some guy and Bond just murdered him for shits and giggles.

Unfortunately the rest of the movie is played much more straight in an attempt to win back naysayers of the previous film's fantasy elements. More fortunately, there is still an excellent chase in which Bond's gadgeted car is blown up and he has to escape in the Bond Girl's cheery yellow Citroën.

DA-Na-Da-NAA

This is the clear highlight, after which it's all pretty much down-to-earth generic spy action, not terrible, but very whatever. The ski chase goes on too long and the villains are all pretty boring, which casts an ironic light on the hilariously spiteful killing off of not-Blofeld, since his brand of quirks is much missed. The main henchman doesn't even have a gimmick.

Glasses aren't a gimmick.

It's an over-correction that foreshadows the Dalton and Cr**g eras, but it's not too bad, as in addition to the standout sequences mentioned above there is an excellent Bond Girl in Melina, who can't act for shit but has a cool crossbow and shows tits in the Buñuel film That Obscure Object of Desire.

>tfw no gf with crossbow (so she can kill me)

Another nice detail is that General Gogol of the KGB appears briefly as an actual antagonist, although he's nice enough to let Bond live having worked with him previously in The Spy Who Loved Me. General Gogol is such a nice cheery guy you could almost forget he was part of the organisation that murdered countless people and whose gay ops continue to fuck the west to this day.

Imagine this dude reporting to Beria.

This is also the only Bond film to tip its hand regarding its real life context by featuring then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher (played by a lookalike) in its final scene, who gets crank called by a fucking parrot.

R*dditers be like Margaret Thatcher is in the BOND UNIVERSE but what if instead Bond is in THE universe?