Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

1985's Friday the 13th Part V took the franchise in a new direction by having someone other than Jason don the hockey mask. However, Paramount decided to bring Jason back for the next installment, which necessitated ignoring the previous entry.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives begins with Jason's resurrection at the hands of Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews), the boy who killed Jason in Part IV. Never mind the fact that Jason's body was cremated, or that Part V ended with Tommy going completely insane and preparing to follow in Jason's footsteps. Here, Tommy has gotten out of a mental institution and made his way to Jason's grave to make sure that his enemy is still lying dormant. Upon seeing the maggot-infested corpse, Tommy rams a metal pole through it for good measure, but lightning strikes, reanimating Sir Voorhees, who immediately punches clean through Tommy's friend. Now Tommy must try to convince people that he's not crazy and stop Jason once again.

Writer/director Tom McLoughlin seems to have given up on trying to scare people, instead relying on heaping doses of humor to entertain. One character comments, "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." A drunken groundskeeper rants about the sh!theads who've dug up Jason's body, looking directly at the camera as he comments, "Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment." He later asks, "Do I look like a farthead?" The camera cuts to a group of children screaming, "Yeah!" There's an interminable sequence involving a group of businessmen (and woman) playing a game of paintball in the woods. One is very hungry, one is upset that a woman gets to play the game, and one engages in Charlie Chaplin-esque shenanigans with a tree branch. Eventually, the men wear bandannas around their heads that say, "Dead." I almost expected one of them to break the fourth wall to say, "Ha! We're so clever! Do you get it?"

This entry deviates slightly from the previous films by actually having children at the camp, but of course, we know that none of the children will actually be killed. However, their presence does lead to a nice moment where one of the kids asks, as Jason rampages through the camp, "So, what were you going to be when you grew up?" The small children are actually much smarter than the teenagers. When one of the children tells the counselors she saw someone outside her window, a counselor tries to reassure her that it was just a dream. "No," she insists, "it was real, just like on TV." Later, she presents one of them with Jason's blood-stained machete as evidence, but is told that the other counselors must have been playing a joke.

Usually, in these types of movies, the kids are either completely oblivious or running around like idiots, never thinking to get the police involved. Refreshingly, Tommy goes straight to the cops here, but they don't believe him; in fact, Sheriff Garris (David Kagen) locks him up, enabling Tommy to meet the sheriff's cute daughter Megan (Jennifer Cooke), who bafflingly is attracted to this jailed mental patient. These are the only three noteworthy characters; everyone else is there to die (usually relatively bloodlessly, due to MPAA cuts). There's also a surprisingly effective moment where we don't see the actual kill, only blood spatter hitting the window, with the bloody aftermath revealed later. The best death scene involves a body being broken in half, but the rest of the kills are pretty forgettable. The RV kill itself isn't particularly memorable, but the character's reaction is; as a woman is screaming and kicking, trying to fight off Jason, her boyfriend comments, "Sounds like you're having fun back there! Mind if I join you?" As the struggle continues, he again asks, "Mind if I join you?"

The over-the-top humor might work for some, but I felt that it was too obvious and really not very funny. The characters weren't memorable or likeable, the death scenes were tame, and even the conclusion was unsatisfying. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives really makes me wish he hadn't.