I haven't watched this entry in the Friday the 13th franchise in some time. Now...I remember it being truly bad...but not that bad. Still...it's not as bad as Jason X. But still...it's quite different than any of the other installments, and warrants some attention...and basically SOMETHING to have this film make some sense.With this film, at least some theory can be made to fix all the writing total lack of attention that has been given to the previous films.. Yes, Jason is now a creature of some sort. Yeah...you read that correctly. Sure, there's the Necronomican (from The Evil Dead) that was thrown in as an inside joke between the director and good pal Sam Raimi. With that, and the supposed idea that Pamela Voorhees went so far off the deep end she tried anything to get her son back, one could say that she used some passage to resurrect him after some amount of time since his death. He drowned, he was dead, some form of energy of him still haunted the place, Pamela brought him back via some occult method yet how was she supposed to know it worked? Is that good writing? Oh god, no. Is that far fetched? Sure...but...isn't the rest of the series?
Oh, by the way...Jason can now "body hop". Let's be honest, this character has been gaining more abilities since his introduction in part 2. First he's dead. Next, he's a grown man that many fans insist is just a regular human mongoloid. He possesses abnormal strength to the point of crushing skulls and taking multiple fatal injuries such as a broken neck, a slice into his shoulder and upper body that would have blood filling his lungs, and an ax to the head...as well as a slew of others.The guy somehow still lived. In The Final Chapter, he gets whacked in the side of the head with his own machete, it imbeds in his skull, and he falls on his machete which slices through his head. It's hard to say if he actually died then or not as he twitches. Bodies twitch sometimes right after death. Sometimes not. Tommy Jarvis then hacks at his body and he's now officially dead.
For some reason, his maggot filled, husk of a corpse is brought back to life thanks to lightning in Jason Lives. I don't mean he's now a living husk, but he's full of muscle. He's also even more stronger and durable. Eventually, he gains the power to teleport in Jason takes Manhattan. Yes, you can say it's bad film making, via very poor editing. Point is, he's either teleporting or moving at lightning speed here. By Jason X, it's discussed that he may have the power to regenerate his own cells despite lack of evidence in that film or the previous ones.
To think that if his body was blown up that there would be something else to this guy who's obviously supernatural to some degree not only at the start, but midway through the series isn't a stretch. It would be one thing if, say, Pamela was brought back in Friday the 13th II and was running around as a demon. That's a stretch since we went from completely normal human to that. With Jason, he's been evolving more ever since.
Voorhees daggers? Hell? Bloodlines? None of that is worse than what we've seen. There's always been some supernatural element to him and more so if occult methods are brought into play. Him having relatives should have been an assumption in the first place given that we're not told anything about Pamela's relatives nor his father and who he may have gone and slept with. Though still...just springing the whole 'sister' angle on us was a retarded move.
It's not like the other films. Seriously, you want to watch Jason hack off folks at a camp...watch the previous installments for those. By the time he turned zombie-fied, something was going to change..and of course not for the better. He can take the damage even more. The New Blood already took abnormal activities a step further introducing a Carrie-wannabe. VI-VIII all tried something different and they each have their fans. If you want the previous formula, those films are still around, but story wise it makes little sense for Jason to go through the same mess each time given his newly made up abilities.
Yes, this film just takes the path the previous entries made by trying new things. And to some degree there are plenty of reasons to condemn this one. The new supernatural element isn't a bother other than why didn't it appear when Jason was hacked up, but given that this series already had that type of element, it's nothing new. It even offers a window into explaining the terribly written history of Jason into something more coherent.
But still...it could have been executed a whole lot better.
No comments:
Post a Comment