Jason X (2001)

 "Be glad you weren't alive during the Microsoft conflict..."

It's the tail end of a tired slasher franchise, known for its very straightforward take on the genre. The last instalment was eight long years ago. Things have fizzled out. So what to do? Put Jason Voorhees.... in space. yes, it's utterly bonkers. But it really works. However mad an idea mayu be, if the execution is good, the end result is good. And this film, laregely devoid of big names (despite a rare acting cameo from David Cronenberg, no less) is one of the finest instalments in the Friday the 13th series, rivalled only by the sixth film.

I have, perhaps, been overly kind to this franchise in the past. A slasher film lives and dies by its characters more than any other genre of horror. We need to get to know them for the deaths to have meaning. And too many of the earlier instalments failed in this regard. I gave them too much credot for the fact they are from a pre-Scream era when the slasher genre was less associated with the fourth wall.

This film, of course, has a good few metatextual moments (love the reference to weed, alcohol and pre-marital sex), but these are not the real focus. What really impresses is the lived-in, well-designed future world with robots, nanotech medicine, interstellar travel and a new Earth to replace the environmentally devastated old one. There are nice little ironic comments on what we expect from the future- the mention of "beaming up" gets a puzzled look.

Yet people in 2455 are the same as ever. There is greed. There is denial. There is fear. There is cowardice. These feel like real people. Human nature doesn't change. Yet there is also courage, integrity, nobility. Regardless of the future, space setting, the core of this film is its characters. That gives meaning to the threat Jason poses.And it's why this film is such an unexpected gem.

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

 "Planning on smoking dope, having pre-marital sex and getting slaughtered?"

So it's the '90s, as the fashions and the cars clearly indicate. I turned sixteen in 1993, and can attest that this way of dressing was once considered normal. This feels odd, of course, because this is the decade's only Friday the 13th film. And the first one not to feel like a regular instalment- despite the sequel-stealing final scene, this film has a blatant self-consciousness that it may be the last one that no previous instalment has had.

It isn't, of course. Nor is it the promised exploration of Jason's backstory, which is superficial indeed. It's a B movie. Yet, in the context of this franchise which, in an inversion of the usual pattern, started as nothing special and took until the sixth instalment to get good, this is fairly decent in context. It has no stars, no actors I recognise whatsoever, nor does it have anthing other than B movie performances, yet it pretty much manages to be entertaining enough.

It makes token attempts to be self-referential, most notably the opening sequence with a trap for Jason, but ultimately relies on the conceit of Jason (only briefly a returning Jason Hodder) jumping from body to body. It also relies on both melodrama and the intriguing, behatted, moderately charismatic, if cliched, character of Creighton Duke, as much as it relies on the usual jump scares.

It works. It's not a bad film. But I wouldn't use higher praise than that.

Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988)

  "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.