Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (

1986

) ½

When you imagine a Friday the 13th movie in your head, you probably think of Jason, an undead killer in a hockey mask, massacring camp counselors in the woods. Yet, it is only the 6th film in this series that actually delivers this premise. Friday the 13th (1980) had camp counselors in the woods being murdered, sure, but they were killed by Jason's mother, not the infamous hockey-mask-wearing revenant. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) gave us more camp counselors in the woods, this time being slaughtered by Jason Voorhees, but here he was a living man with a sack over his head. The next two sequels would give Jason his iconic hockey mask, but kept him mortal (though there was really no way a normal man should have survived the climax of Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)), and while he was still killing rambunctious youngsters in the forest, none of them were camp counselors. It was interesting to watch the Friday the 13th series, knowing what form it would finally take, but being largely unaware of the twisting road it would take to get there. Before I sat down to watch the films, I knew about Mrs. Voorhees being the killer in part 1, but I had assumed zombie-Jason would show up, hockey mask and all, for part 2. Little did I know that it would take him five movies to find the hockey mask, get killed off, be replaced for a film, and then be accidentally resurrected by the boy who killed him.

After establishing Tommy Jarvis as Jason's successor in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), Jason Lives quickly retcons that away, and turns Tommy back into just a traumatized victim of Jason. This isn't the first time that the series has pulled this kind of move, nor the worse (having Jason live to adulthood in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) takes the cake on both accounts as it completely undoes Pamela Voorhees motivation in the Friday the 13th (1980)) but boy is this a clumsy reversal that was clearly driven by the (mostly reasonable) fan backlash against Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985). It's made all the more clumsy by the fact that Jason is 100% confirmed as dead thanks to the events of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), so to bring back the famous masked killer the series will have to finally introduce the supernatural elements it has been toying with since the stinger of Friday the 13th (1980). Still, I have to give the film credit, having decided to bring Jason back from the dead, it commits to it with zeal, having Tommy dig up Jason's moldy old corpse in a bid to cremate it (you know... Just to be sure), only to have Jason be struck by lightning and resurrected as an unkillable zombie. Boy, talk about screwing up your one job. I could quibble about how it doesn't make sense for there to be any meat left on Jason's body, as by this point, he must have been dead and buried for over a decade, but this whole sequence of events is far too silly to even start to try and take seriously.

Having inadvertently raised the long-dead serial killer as a zombie, Tommy wastes no time in running for help and goes straight to the office of the cankerous Sheriff Garris. Garris, despite being the top cop for a sleepy little town in the backwoods, acts more like he's been given the roughest beat in 1986's Los Angeles. The first thing he does is pull his sidearm on Tommy and threaten to paint the walls with the kids' brains. It establishes his character nicely, as Garris will spend most of this movie threatening Tommy with various cartoonish acts of police brutality. He's also completely convinced from the start that Tommy's story about Jason coming back from the dead is utter baloney, presumably because his predecessor, Sheriff Tucker in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) was run out of office after he blamed every murder in the county on Jason's ghost. If we could switch these two sheriffs around, both of their respective movies would probably be 60 minutes shorter!

Tommy immediately antagonizes the loose-cannon cop by giving up on explaining the situation to him and grabbing one of the shotguns hanging up on the rack instead (just a heads up, Sheriff Garris, the heavy ordnance should probably be secured in some way). At this point, Garris has gone from his usual resting state of “pissed-off” all the way up to “blindly furious.” So he claps Tommy in irons and then locks him up. Tommy may have been able to get help had he moderated his description of the event a little bit; rather than saying that the local serial killer is back as a zombie, he could have just said that he and his friend were attacked in the cemetery by a maniac. I'm sure that Sheriff Garris would still be an asshole about it, but with that kind of report, he would have to at least take a look. Going off on a rant about how Jason is back from the dead is only going to make Tommy look unhinged. It's the Santa Jaws (2018) problem all over again.

Once Tommy is confined to his cell, Garris is visited by his daughter, Megan. Megan, being your typical teenage girl, is immediately attracted to Tommy because he pisses off her dad (I guess he's cute too, though that's a secondary consideration). As a result, she's somewhat amenable to Tommy's warning about the rampaging Jason, though not so much that she's going to quit her job as a counselor at the newly opened Camp Forest Green, built on the rubble of the old Camp Crystal Lake. Garris responds to this tentative romance between his daughter and the lunatic as you would expect, with increasing threat of violence made towards Tommy if he so much as looks in his daughter's direction.

Out of nowhere, though, the Sheriff decides that he's sick and tired of seeing Tommy's face, so rather than keeping the deranged youth who tried to steal a gun from the station locked up, he opts instead to run Tommy out of town. I mean, it worked so well in First Blood (1982). Amazingly, he sticks to this plan after Tommy makes a break for it and takes a beeline towards the cemetery, hoping that if Garris only sees the scene of the crime, he will relent. This is probably the single most clumsy bit of writing in a movie that is all around rather oafish and incompetent. The film needs Tommy to go free so that he can research the occult by reading a couple of library books and come up with a way to seal Jason away (but not kill him, Paramount wasn't going to make that mistake twice). So they need Garris to improbably let Tommy go after he has spent the entire film threatening to imprison or kill him. Surely it would have been better for Garris' character and Tommy's semblance of competence to have the boy escape custody. Garris, in short order, will start to suspect Tommy is behind all the murders that Jason is committing (maybe he saw the end of the last movie), so the rest of the movie wouldn't even require a rewrite.

In the meantime, Jason is off doing what he does best, massacring idiots in the woods. Here, though, he does not confine himself to hunting down and exterminating horny camp counselors (though a pair of counselors in a Volkswagen Bug are his first targets). He also massacres a group of sales executives playing paintball in the forest, the caretaker at the cemetery, and a couple of young lovers. The gore effects here are underwhelming, especially in a series that had made its name on gruesome and inventive death scenes. Indeed, the violence seems to have been deliberately de-emphasized in order to make the film less disturbing and more comedic.

This is Friday the 13th at its silliest, where it practically ceases to be a horror movie and instead becomes an outright comedy. The tone is set right from the start with the bizarre James Bond reference during the title drop, which has Jason stroll into the middle of a circle and toss his machete at the camera. The supporting cast is even more absurd than usual in these films, with a small-town sheriff who thinks he's Dirty Harry (1971), a bunch of sexist executives playing paintball, and characters who openly acknowledge that Jason looks like he's right out of a horror movie. There's even a meta joke where the cemetery groundskeeper stares directly at the camera and asks: “Why'd they have to go and dig up Jason? Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment.” The edges of the film have been softened as well to match the lighter tone; gone are the graphic murders of Friday the 13th (1980) and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), along with all the sleaze of entries like Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985). You don't even see a single pair of tits in the entire runtime! This is a wholesome, goofy horror film that is roughly the tonal equivalent of one of those late Universal horror sequels where the famous monsters of movie-land share the screen with Abbott and Costello.

Such is the fate of all horror icons; no matter how initially terrifying a cinematic monster may be, they cannot hope to inspire the same dread as time goes by. Frankenstein and Dracula went from fear-inspiring monsters to fodder for Saturday morning cartoons, and while Jason and Freddy have thus far escaped that fate, it is undeniable that they no longer frightened audiences as their respective franchises dragged on. As a species, we are frightened of the unknown, the novel, and the mysterious, and even the most imposing monster cannot remain intimidating after 6 movies. For me, this marks the end of the series' golden age and the start of its degradation into outright self-parody. That said, the buffoonery of Jason Lives is quite charming in its own way.