The Screengrab

After six grisly films, Jason Voorhees’ modus operandi had become so ludicrously predictable – crush a guy’s head, throw a body through a window, stab a sexpot through a bed mattress, etc. – that the only way to keep the franchise alive was through pure, unadulterated outrageousness. And as this week’s third and final recap reveals, there was plenty of ridiculousness to go around in Friday the 13th’s last four chapters.

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

Following Part VI’s no-seriousness-allowed lead, The New Blood concentrates on a psychically powered teen who, as a kid, accidentally used her abilities to drown abusive boozehound dad in Crystal Lake. Years later, she tries to resurrect him with her mind but (oops!) winds up reanimating chained-underwater Jason instead. It’s a hilarious Freudian-infused set-up, but the paint-by-numbers script rarely exploits its paternal-hang-ups premise for sufficient laughs or scares. Rather than an inventively kooky battle-of-the-paranormal-titans, what the visually well-framed film mainly offers up is scene after scene of dimwits getting perfunctorily slaughtered (usually pre-, during or post- sex) either in a cabin or while running around the forest at night. Kudos, however, to an ending that seems to relish its own amusing preposterousness, and to the filmmakers for recognizing that, if they could no longer make Jason frightening, they could at least force his victims – namely, Susan Blu as the psychic girl’s mother – to sport some truly terrifying ‘80s hair.



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

Is Part VIII’s decision to predominantly set its action on a boat rather than in NYC meant to upend expectations in a way Jason’s killings don’t? It would be nice to think so, though Rob Hedden’s film is so uniformly chintzy that the real reason for the story’s delayed arrival in Manhattan is likely due to an apparent $67 production budget. After an eternity spent watching electricity-resurrected Jason dispatch party cruiser passengers, a girl who once escaped little Jason’s underwater clutches and a boy with daddy issues make their way to the Big Apple (via rowboat!), which – full of leather-jacketed hoods doing drugs, mugging people, and then tossing their empty wallets into rat-infested trash cans – looks like something out of Street Smart. That a junkie injects the film’s heroine with heroin is a humorous touch. Less sensible, however, is giving Jason the power of teleportation (how else to explain his movement from one shot to another?), or the idea that coating the serial killer in shit – in a fitting finale, Jason is drowned in sewage – might somehow magically turn him back into a little boy.



Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

The first Friday the 13th not made by Paramount, Jason Goes to Hell has the distinctive feel of (as well as a gloved-hand cameo from) New Line’s trademark horror franchise, Nightmare on Elm St. Ignoring the fact that, when last we saw him, Jason had morphed into a nude child, this “final” Friday commences with Jason getting blown up and then magically possessing a number of host bodies in order to reach Crystal Lake and be resurrected through his last living relatives: sister Diana (Erin Grey), niece Jessica (Kari Keegan), or Jessica’s baby. The notion that Jason can only be born again through, or killed by, his kin is explained by a bounty hunter (21 Jump Street’s Steven Williams) who’s randomly well-informed about this suddenly made-up mythological guideline. A mortician chowing down on Jason’s beating heart expertly kick-starts the gore, but far too much body-jumping, unmasked zombie villains, and shots of spirit-energy flying into or out of Jason make this the series’ second worst installment after Part V.



Jason X (2002)

Unlike his prior two outings, in which Jason barely visits Manhattan and never kicks ass in Hell (respectively), the supernatural fiend spends most of Jason X where advertised: in space! After being cryogenically frozen, Jason is thawed out 450 years later aboard a spaceship and immediately commences his usual slicing and dicing of young adults. Continuity gaps the size of a small planet regularly crop up, yet prove no more distracting than the intergalactic crew’s penchant for spouting 2002-era colloquialisms (“Know what I’m sayin’?”). A fembot eventually blasts Jason to smithereens, mainly so the filmmakers can have him rise again as a cyborg, a sci-fi turn of events that pushes the series about as far as possible from its modest kids-murdered-in-the-woods origins. Still, upon closer inspection, Jason’s transformation into a literal killing machine actually makes perfect sense, given that the Friday the 13th franchise’s defining characteristic always was its mechanical approach to hack-and-slash horror.