"OK, you big hunk of a man. Come and get me!"
I've reached the seventh film on eight years. The pace at which I'm watching the Friday the 13th film is a bit of a blatant clue in how bored I've been with them- although the fourth on was nicely metatextual.
Perhaps part of the problem is that ever since Scream, and certainly with The Cabin in the Woods, we've thought of the slasher genre (and it is a very trope-driven genre) in a very fourth wall-breaking way- sex means death; drugs mean death; nerdiness means death; going out in the dark means death... and that's all just literally from this film.
Halloween wasn't the first slasher film, as late as 1980. Psycho and Black Christmas were predecessors, and so the first Friday the 13th film turned up and proved to be a fairly perfunctory recital of previously established tropes. The sixth film stands out for the fact that it does as much violence to the fourth wall as to the characters, but the franchise is mostly meh.
And yet... this film cheerily announces its cheesiness with the voiceover during the opening recap. The conceit is that Tina, a telekinetic teen a la Poltergeist, has resurrected Jason through her passionate guilt at killing her father (who hit her mother and was thus irredeemable scum) and the shifty doctor who is "treating" her. There are no stars, as one woid expect for the seventh film in the franchise, but Tina's mum is Susan Blu- Arcee from Transformers: The Movie.
This film doesn't pretend to be anythng more than a B movie. But it's a sound, an fun, example of ts genre, far more so than it's firsr five predecessors. Even the writing is hack-like but solid. This is ctualky, and by far, my second favourite film after the sixth. However, I must confess that I have just imbibed a splendid bottle of classy Rioja.
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