Jason may have suffered a seemingly fatal axe to the head at the end of Part III, but as The Screengrab’s continuing Friday the 13th recap confirms, it takes much more than that to permanently vanquish Camp Crystal Lake’s most infamous attendee.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Regardless of this fourth entry’s title, the series was just getting started with The Final Chapter, a lazy, formulaic tale of – you guessed it! – horndogs being terrorized in the woods around Crystal Lake. Though now an expert in the art of murder, Jason’s stabby slayings are particularly uninventive here. Fortunately, picking up the slack are Crispin Glover as a spastically dancing nerd taunted by his friend for being a “dead fuck” (aka a “lousy lay”), a hunky hitchhiker whom the film embarrassingly attempts to suggest might in fact be Jason (despite his non-deformed face), and a young Corey Feldman as a kid named Thomas who knows how to fix car engines, excitedly peeps at a next-door couple having sex, makes professional-grade monster masks like a mini-Stan Winston, and develops a strange bond with his hockey-masked pursuer.



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

Building upon The Final Chapter’s last-shot implication, A New Beginning spends most of its excruciatingly dull runtime insinuating that Feldman’s Thomas – now a twentysomething committed to a mental hospital near Crystal Lake – is the individual behind a recent string of Jason-style killings. In an out-of-left-field twist, however, the film’s conclusion [spoiler alert, for those who might care] fingers not Thomas but some random EMT who had previously appeared in a grand total of two scenes. Then, once again aiming to pull the rug out from under its audience, director Danny Steinmann subsequently does depict Thomas aspiring to become Jason’s heir, a bit of make-up-your-mind! indecision that’s indicative of this, the series’ lamest episode, notable only for its adherence to certain genre tenets – the prime one being: anyone who has sex or is a minority must die – as well as for featuring Diff’rent Strokes’ Dudley (Shavar Ross) in a key role.



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

Simultaneously trying to maintain continuity with, and break free from the idiocy of, Part V, Jason Lives kicks off with a now-sane Thomas venturing to Jason’s grave in order to once and for all destroy the brute’s buried corpse. To do this, he stabs the body with a metal pole, which is then struck by lightening, which in turn immediately reanimates Jason into a lumbering zombie destroyer. It’s hokum with a more overtly supernatural bent, which fits nicely with the filmmakers’ decision to wholeheartedly embrace wink-wink campiness in both dialogue (“Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment,” being one of the self-reflexive standouts) and characterizations (the archetypal victims include a jock, bad girl, barking-mad sheriff, mentally handicapped fat kid who loves candy bars, and assortment of hot-to-trot disposable teens). Jason Lives campily blends humor and nastiness, and if that combo was eventually mimicked by a glut of genre-degrading imitators, it nonetheless in this case oh-so-slightly reinvigorates Jason’s routine mayhem.