Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Those roman numerals in the titles count up the episodes, in case you thought it was a daftness factor inexorably ratcheting up, a reasonable mistake given things are dafter than ever in this eighth installment - as daft as the acting is bad (try to decide which death scene is the most lethargic) - with a resurrected-from-his-Camp Lake Crystal-grave Jason Voorhees - sodden, moldy, mute and ridiculous, not scary -  plodding around a NY-bound ship (it sometimes resembles the Love Boat but at other times looks like a weather-beaten paddle steamer), killing one-by-one a group of high schoolers who are on as unlikely a cruise as you are ever likely to see - 'unlikely' because it is a school group with a supervising teacher but the students on board nonetheless participate in full-gear boxing matches; they take saunas; they honeytrap their Principal and film it with the canera equipment they've brought with them on the trip; they pack in their luggage electric guitars so they can jam in the boiler room; and other really really daft things-to-do while they wait, like the bored audience, for Jason to, well, not so much 'strike' as 'lumber heavily, tiredly in'.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

This slasher series doesn't just follow a formula - each episode is a cookie-cut repeat of the last 'FtTp n - 1' episodes - so the sense of same you get watching it extends beyond the Camp Crystal Lake impalings, which happen one after the other in cookie-cutter fashion, and makes the whole series of seven parts (that I've reviewed to this point) feel like one interminable movie showing what may as well be the same death - the death of Barry, stabbed in the stomach by Pamela Voorhees in the opening scene of the original - over and over and over and over, and this episode's attempt at injecting something new - a telekinetic heroine - is, like the copycat of Part III, the resurrection in Part VI, the kidnapping in the reboot, just a different coloured flag in the hand of a stationmaster: the same sluggish train lurches forward and heads along the same tired tracks to its same destination and - surprise! - you're back at the departing station, ready for part FtTp n + 1.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th (2009)

The first twenty-three minutes, a lead-up to the titlecard and effectively a mini-movie that shows just how short and efficient these Friday the 13th episodes could actually be, may be too much for some viewers - it is a nasty, distressing sequence - but for the gluttons for (torture porn) punishment who resist the urge to switch off, the next 70 minutes prove to be the same old 80s business enlivened by naughties' production values, with better actors and a Jason Voorhees who is more gigantic than ever but also more nimble - we never see, but scene-to-scene this lumbering hockey-mask-wearing mute exhibits a wuxia lightness-on-his-feet that sees him cutting effortlessly and silently across vast expanses of woods, moving from underground tunnels to Camp Crystal Lake jetties to rooftops and toolsheds in split seconds-flat to dispatch more bong-smoking, copulating teenage prey.

★★☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

Part VI is the one where Jason Voorhees, the serial killer with a hockey mask for a personality, is finally turned into an undead, something that happens in the opening scenes by way of grave robbery and a lightning rod, but don't get your hopes up that the series too will lurch to life with the electric jolt because although it benefits from some tonal shifts - and even some laughs not yet seen in the series - Part VI is the same plodding slasher - it's just that now and forevermore the writers can think even less when they are considering bringing Jason back to our screens..

★★☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning (1985)

Most people will have given up on this slasher series long before Part V but if, say, a global pandemic has you housebound and your local movie network is working through the series by way of Sunday night double features, and if you haven't long ago been driven away by the irritating "tch-tch-tch-tch" soundtrack, then you might be able to sit through this, one more instalment, and discover your opinion that the series to date is an entertainment-free string of impalements of irritating characters who die in the middle of such charming activities as "taking a crap" in the woods or shitting in a "disgusting shitbox" or "washing up" at a swamp after picnic-rug sex....confirmed - yes, like a big, dumb flat-footed serial killer, cinema's least fun slasher series plods inexorably on.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Like its deranged killer Jason Voorhees who keeps getting up no matter how many times he is knocked on the head with an axe, this slasher series just keeps shambling on - lifeless, flat-footed, and with nothing to say - and from the end of the original to the end of this Part 4, the series has been free of anything constituting a plot or interesting development, although this Part 4 offers a marginally more interesting string of impalements than Part 2 and 3 given the victims here are a more diverse bunch - not just teen camp counselors - all again gathered nearby Camp Lake Crystal.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)

Wikipedia tells me there are eleven movies in the Friday the 13th series, so Friday the 13th the 13th is an interesting series development not too far off that everyone can look forward to, but back in 1982, Part 3 had no such special quality and is a movie virtually indistinguishable from the 1980 original or the 1981 sequel, except to say that each successive episode surprises by being even worse than the previous one; here, advances in 3D film technology over the course of the year to 1982 mean viewers can enjoy even more explicit impalings and the most anyone has done to try to make these impalements interesting is to vary the implements Jason Voorhees uses - a knitting needle, a rake, a spear gun, a shovel, and so on, and so on.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

This sequel to 1980s Friday the 13th is just the first movie spat out again not a year later sans any creative effort, with a group of different-but-the-same teens heading out into the woods to train as camp counsellors unaware that it is camp counsellors the now adult Jason Voorhees blames for, um, well, not his drowning death - he's alive - and not the beheading of his mother - he dispenses with Alice in the opening Scream-inspiring scene - but because, well - who knows - he's just stomping flat-footed around the woods with nothing better or new or creative to do, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th (1980)

For a movie that spawned eleven sequels (and counting) plus numerous spin-offs like Freddie vs Jason, this 1980 slasher is fairly derivative with Camp Lake Crystal (the setting where a bunch of young adults kumbayah around a fire, have sex, and generally have great times before being mercilessly picked off one-by-very-grisly-one) now a slasher movie cliché and the climax, which eveeeeeentually comes, heavily influenced by twenty years of film since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

★★★☆☆

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Freddy vs Jason (2003)

By pitting Nightmare on Elm Street's dreamstalker Freddy Krueger against Friday the 13th's undead serial killer Jason, this largely incoherent slasher contributes nothing lasting to the mythology of either horror icon, only detracts, and in the end proves not as scary as it is unpleasant with its constant refrains of "bitch", "faggot" and "sweet dark meat" to describe victims.

☆☆☆☆☆

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