Movie Scum

Everytime someone does a ranking of Friday the 13th sequels is wrong. The reason: I have never seen Part VI, Jason Lives , at the top.

After the news of Michael Myers’ triumphant return in the stupidly titled “ Halloween Returns ,” Myers’ contemporary slasher villains are not going to sit on their laurels. I wonder where the saturation point of dredging up old 80s and 90s franchises will land but apparently not here as both Freddy and Jason have rumored continuations in the near future. A Friday the 13th series is apparently in the works at the CW which will feature the masked zombie/undeadish thing rather than whatever that anthology bullshit was that the previous series tried to pass off. According to IGN , the series will take place around the infamous Crystal Lake that “takes a more “sophisticated” approach as a horror/crime thriller.” There is also talks of gritty and grounded. To that I say: how the hell can one make Jason Voorhees a gritty and/or realistic/ and/or grounded character considering he’s been dead for about seven movies? The series will apparently focus on a detective searching for his ...

Well, it appears the new Friday the 13th TV series featuring non-Jason has inspired Jason-Jason to kill again. Even though they are dirt-cheap to make and generally pull in a decent chunk at the box office, Platinum Dunes has been sitting on the Friday the 13th series since their reboot/prequel/something back in 2009. But now, Michael Bay and his frat boys have pulled the mask and machete out of the closet and tapped TV's Hannibal producer Nick Antosca to pen a new story about drug-smoking, pre-marital sex having teens getting offed in the woods. V/H/S director David Bruckner is attached to direct the supposedly found-footage based tale (ugh, this trend hasn't died yet?) which producer Brad Fuller has threatened will delve into the mystery of with Jason can never be killed. I'm sure that and the shaky cam garbage will go over well. Surprisingly though, the Platinum Dunes remake was a thoroughly decent if not remarkable entry into the series so I'll give t...

Maybe I knew of this at one point. Perhaps I didn't. But the veritable Friday the 13th series is getting a real TV series. Well, kind of? According to Cinema Blend , series producer Sean Cunningham indicates that the show will take a "meta" approach (all the cool kids are doing it nowadays) and be set in a town, not terrorized by the cinematic version of Jason Voorhees (or that fake one from Part 5 either apparently), that 'inspired' the series but with their own mishaps and mysteries surrounding their own murderous local-types which inspired F13. Which ... what? So the series takes place in a fictional town with a fictional killer that inspired a fictional killer in a fictional town in their fictitious universe. Everyone got that? Apparently The CW has shown interest in the series because all the cool kids go to hang out there now too. So, perhaps, not-Jason Jason will be terrorizing not-Crystal Lake on your TV screens in the near future.

Written by: PBF Unlike the previous reviews, I will not be giving you a recap of the finale of Freddy vs. Jason. Only because it has nothing to do with the continuity of the Friday the 13th. For this is a re-something involving several of the early films. During the credit sequence of this film we see Pamela Voorhees chasing a a young girl. It is June, 13, 1980. She tells the girl that she must pay for letting her son Jason drown. Unfortunately for her, the young girl chops her damn head off. After the credits end, we transplanted to “present day,” which is 20 years later according to some dialogue. A group of young people are hiking, and stop near Camp Crystal Lake to find some marijuana that they heard was being grown in the woods. As tradition dictates, there is an obligatory camp scene and the legend of Jason is told. The same poor choices are made; some have sex, some wander off and find Camp Crystal Lake. Jason kills everyone except for Whitney. He keeps her. Flash forward ...

Written by: PBF We are going to travel back in time, but first, a briefing of what happened to Jason in Jason X, which chronologically(thus far) was his final adventure. He awakens on a space vessel in 2455 after being frozen years earlier. He begins to murder the folks aboard and actually almost is destroyed, but is rebuilt in to Super Jason. He has some kind of Cobra Commander looking new metal mask and is now a cyborg. Jason ends up literally “in” space floating at a very high speed about to collide with the survivors, but Sgt. Brodsky flies towards him and they both start heading toward Earth II where they are sucked in to the atmosphere. Thankfully, lakes exist on Earth II and we see two young people at one as they watch a shooting star fall in to the lake.  It’s Jason’s mask! Wooooo! What will happen next? Oh, yeah, we go back in time and visit another troubled town. If you recall, at the end of Goes to Hell, Jason was defeated and in fact sent to hell. Suddenly, Freddy...

Written by: PBF Holy shit! Did you see what happened at the end of Jason Goes to Hell (if you managed to sit through the whole thing)?! Freddy Kruger’s arm came out of the ground and took Jason’s mask to…hell? Wait, is Freddy in hell? I guess that makes sense. I mean he certainly would not be in heaven. But how does Freddy know about Jason? Is there news in dreamworld or hell? Did one of his victims get wind of the Crystal Lake murders and dream about it? How am I expected to keep track of all of this?! At least Jason X will answer these questions. Oh, wait. No it won’t. See, Freddy pulled Jason in to development hell. Somehow he managed to escape long enough to travel in to the future and appear in Jason X. But what happened last episode? Well, Jason killed his half sister Diana. He tried his damnedest to posses his niece Jessica so he could be reborn, but could not. Instead, his heart, morphed in to some weird baby looking creature crawled in to dead Diana’s vagina. Reborn! The...

Written by: PBF Jason Takes Manhattan just filled my head with all sorts of new questions. The most obvious one being, “Why does this film exist?” But also, did I really just watch Rennie get chased by two Jasons? Rennie, the main protagonist of part VIII (or not) had never been able to swim. When she was a young girl, her uncle took her out in a boat on Crystal Lake many times to try and teach hear, but she was always too afraid (of swimming, but I guess she was fine with the Jason legend that she was floating on top of). During one of these attempts, her uncle pushes her in the water to force her to learn. A young (and surprisingly clean looking) Jason tries to pull her under and drown her, but she survives. Unless it was in her mind. Which it may have been becausee the body of Jason was never recovered. So why would he still be in the lake? Either way, she is plagued by visions of the young boy that tried to drown her while on the trip to Manhattan. Then the real Jason shows up ...

Written by: PBF Dr. Crews was a bit of a douche bag, wasn’t he? I mean, he wanted to exploit Tina’s powers, he gets her mother killed. I was quite happy when he died. But that was pretty exciting. Tina did a pretty good job fighting Jason. I mean, not before a dozen people were killed. But it was exciting to see him get set on fire, electrocuted, fall into a basement, have a roof collapse on him. All of this does nothing of course because JASON IS A ZOMBIE AND NEEDS TO BE SHOT IN THE HEAD. Despite of this, Tina does what she meant to do at the beginning of the oddly titled sequel and uses her powers to raise her dad from the lake, who pulls Jason back under, which again, according to some book Tommy read in part VI, is the only way to kill him (as long as there are no blondes walking around firing off telekinesis all willy nilly). Then our heroes wake up in the morning and are carted off by an ambulance. Now, I don’t know about you, but I can’t fathom that Jason can come back after...

Written by: PBF Hooray, Jason’s back! In Jason lives, the Forest Green (formerly Crystal Lake) Sheriff was convinced that Tommy was killing people to fabricate a story that Jason was alive. Little did he know that he was alive. I am sure he was convinced of this when Jason folded him in half like he was closing a suitcase. So now that Jason is the undead, how could Tommy and his new lady friend Megan, stop him? Shoot him in the head? Nope. Chop him up as he has done to others so many times? No. During the massacre, Tommy had time to buy, or check out from the local library, some books on the occult. From these, he gleans that the solution is to return Jason to the site of his death; the lake. They do this (thankfully before Jason kills any of the little children campers) and chain him to a boulder so that he is stuck under water. Jason “drowns” and the kids are saved! Hooray! At the very end, as we see Jason floating underwater, he opens his eyes and glares at us right before the c...

Written by: PBF Wow, what a mind fuck that last picture was! It wasn’t Jason at all! In case you skipped that one (as you should), allow me to fill you in on the events of A New Beginning. As Tommy is “recovering” at Pinehurst, a halfway house type place that employs a similar set of rules as Pablo Escobar’s self built prison, the townsfolk are being murdered by an unknown killer. The killer makes his way to Pinehurst to kill all the people there as well. We finally get to see who it is, and it’s Jason! Right? No? Well, let’s see. He is wearing a hockey mask like Jason. But it has blue on it rather than red. Did he get a new one from a sporting good store? He certainly has the same M.O. as Jason. Killing everyone and having a special distaste for teenagers. But alas, it is not Jason. Tommy gets the better of him and kills him. His mask comes off and we see that it is Roy, one of the ambulance guys. Quite a shock, as every time Roy was on camera, he had the goofy facial expressions,...

Written by: PBF Wow. That last film was exciting, wasn’t it? We got to see Crispin Glover dance. We met the Jarvis family, who live in Crystal Lake. I guess the Jarvis family is like the really old couple from disaster films that refuse to leave their town no matter what danger might threaten them. We met Rob, the hunk that breezed into town to avenge his sister’s death. Most importantly, we saw twelve-year-old Tommy Jarvis give himself an incredibly bad haircut and then hack Jason up with a machete. At the end of the film, as he embraces his sister, he looks at the camera and give us a look that may imply that he is now mentally disturbed, and may possibly hack someone else up. Although I don’t think Tommy would snap that quickly after the events of the film, I did like the cliffhanger implication that Tommy might kill as well. Also, Jason must be dead. He has to be. I mean, Tommy was like Vince with that Slap-Chop, minus that headset. I think I did hear Tommy say, “You’re gonna l...

Written by: PBF The last chapter in our bloody journey ended rather poorly. Chris, who had come back to her father’s cabin 2 years after being attacked in the woods, had survived the latest bloodbath. After seeing Jason’s face, she realized the he was the one that attacked her. Chris not only hung the now hockey mask wearing murderer, but put an axe in his head. In an obvious dream sequence homage to the ending of part 1, Mrs. Voorhees jumps out of the lake and attacks Chris (I say obvious as Mrs. Voorhees had her head cut off, yet it is attached to her body here). We then see Chris, laughing hysterically, obviously now mentally disturbed, being taken away by the cops, who for some reason refuse to slash and burn the entire Crystal Lake area to prevent future killings. The Final Chapter opens with the police cleaning up the carnage from part III. Jason’s body is taken to the morgue. Now, as I mentioned above, Jason was hung and then had an axe hit him, and stuck, in the head. For...

Written by: PBF Previously at Crystal Lake, eight people had been killed in highly entertaining ways by a man wearing a sack on his head with one eye hole in it. It is clear that this person is Jason, the boy who everyone thought had drowned. Now he is all grown up. In trying to escape, Ginny runs across Jason’s shack in the woods. Inside, she finds the head of Mrs. Voorhees, surrounded by candles, as well as the body of Alice. There is a scuffle between her, Jason and Paul and Jason takes a machete to the shoulder (the obvious place you would chop someone if you wanted to kill them. I mean fuck, there is a severed head in the room, did that not give you any ideas?). As Paul and Ginny are back at the cabin recovering from the attack, an unmasked Jason leaps through the window and grabs Ginny. His hair is wild and unfettered. His face is deformed. He is quite ghastly. The next scene is during the day and Ginny is being placed in the back of an ambulance. This scene leaves us unsure ...

Written by: PBF So in the last installment, we saw everyone but Alice get killed by an unknown murderer. Alice runs outside and finds a woman who identifies herself as Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christys. Alice feverishly informs her of how everyone is dead. Mrs. Voorhees says that she is not afraid and goes in to investigate. After seeing one of the bodies, she tells the story of how Jason drowned due to the negligence of the counselors. Mrs. Voorhees was in fact working that day as a cook. She then drops the bomb; Jason was her son. Her niceness then morphs into psychosis as she repeats, “Kill her, Mommy!” and exclaims that Alice let her only son drown. At this point, it is obvious that she has been killing everyone. There is a chase and some biting, and they both end up at the lake. Alice cuts Mrs. Voorhees’s head off with a machete. She gets in a canoe, rows out to the middle of the lake and falls asleep. In the morning, the police find her and as they are calling her ...

Written by: PBF As a child of the 80’s, the Friday the 13th franchise is quite special to me. Most likely, the first time I ever saw a naked breast was in a Jason film. I became quite enchanted with the concept of summer camp: The sex. The drinking. The skinny dipping. Kevin Bacon. Not so much the machete-wielding psychopaths. Inspired by Halloween, director Sean S. Cunningham gave us the first of twelve Friday films, Freddy vs. Jason included. I am already starting to dread my trip back down this series of films because in comparison to the original, most of the latter sequels are complete garbage. This does not bode well as the first one is mediocre at best. Don’t get me wrong, this film does what it is basically supposed to do; make you laugh, perhaps a bit uncomfortable, maybe even disturb you at times. However, considering its legacy and the genre it helped popularize, it is less sensational than the sensationalism. If this film had been released in say, the late 90′s or ear...