Friday the 13th - Part III (1982)

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Dana Kimmell, Paul Kratka, Richard Brooker, Tracie Savage

Have I Seen it Before: Maybe? Don’t they all bleed together? At this point, I get more and more excited at the prospect of Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), just to get something a little bit different going on.

Did I Like It: That last sentence probably tells you everything you need to know. The best I can say about this series at this point is that they have managed to finally trip over some iconic imagery. Jason (Brooker) finally has his goalie mask*. So what? Not much of anything, really, but it is sort of a marvel that it takes three movies for a series to look like itself. If I’m going to reach for anything more nice to say, I can at least say that the film—unlike its predecessors—is no longer trying to shamelessly imitate other, better films. Even the Hermann-esque score of the first two parts is replaced by a disco riff that I can’t imagine made its way into dance venues in the late summer of 1982.

If things weren’t bad enough, the cinematography has taken a plunge. This film would have looked vapid if I was still able to see it in the originally intended 3D. Knives fly at the frame, other weapons are lunged in our faces, and even baseball bats that have nothing to do with the rest of the scene are all a prolonged practice in perspective that looks like someone just took an introductory drawing class.

All we’re left with is a dearth of tension (ingenues scream on cue, but otherwise don’t move or emote like someone facing a mortal dilemma) and mindless violences, cheaply and profitably produced.

*Although here he also sports a fashionably conservative jacket and khaki slacks. Minus the hydrocephaly and the machete, it almost reminds me of Kelsey Grammer’s fashion sense in the revised Frasier.

Friday the 13th - Part II (1981)

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Adrienne King, Amy Steel, John Furey, Betsy Palmer

Have I Seen it Before: I dunno… Maybe?

Did I Like It: At the end of my review of Friday the 13th (1980) I lamented the prospect of watching the rest of the series. How much can they wring out of a willfully pale imitation of the Halloween series?

I’m sort of heartened as I finish the first sequel, if for no other reason than the adventures of Jason Voorhees are to the horror canon as Star Trek: Voyager is to the Star Trek canon.

Let me finish.

Voyager really isn’t all that bad, but it does have its challenges, but even during those long stretches where the show doesn’t seem the least bit interested in being an engaging series, it is wonderful white noise. I got an entire paper for grad school—with citations and the whole deal—while this movie was playing itself out.

That has to have some kind of value, right?

That certainly sounds like damning the thing with the faintest of all possible praise, and I’m even having a hard time arguing against that conclusion. There just isn’t a lot of “here”, here. Betsy Palmer returns for a spell to be be Jason’s (Steve Daskewisz) hallucinations of his mother, although it would have been even better if the best actor of the series (sorry, Kevin Bacon) had decided to play the severed head of her former character, but that probably would have been too much to ask from a franchise that doesn’t yet realize it is going to have to be far, far weirder than this to survive.

But, really? A burlap sack is the best they could do as they launch their marquee maniac into our cinematic hearts? Here’s hoping that they come up with something a little bit better for the next movie.

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Michelle Williams, LL Cool J

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I do remember the first time I ever heard about the film. Jamie Lee Curtis was presenting at some awards show, and was introduced as the star of the upcoming Halloween: H20. I was naturally intrigued that Curtis was returning to the series, but based on the title I assumed Laurie Strode had become some kind of latter-day Jacques Cousteau and her brother had come to hunt his sister on some seabase on the ocean floor, like Sphere (1998) meets the original Halloween (1978)…

…actually, now that I think about it, that wouldn’t be the worst possible conceit for a movie. A slasher movie on a submarine. I kinda want to do that now. I might very well do it now.

Anyway…

Did I Like It: The Halloween series, after the wobbly, disjoined affair that was Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) was doomed to follow the path set by other Dimension properties—like Hellraiser*—to direct-to-video depths.

I can’t help but wonder if that might have been better for the series as a whole. The movies—free of meeting corporate requirements for a wide theatrical release—could have gotten a lot weirder. Halloween has never been better than when its being completely ignored by the world at large.

But that’s not the world we live in now, nor is it the world where Thorn governs Michael Myers’ predilections, and every employee of Smiths Grove (except that one) was in on it. This is the world where Jamie Lee Curtis decided to become nostalgic for the beginnings of her career.

The movie that results is slight before it is anything else. Indeed, it has the shortest running time of any in the series, owing largely to the fact that an entire subplot revolving around the detective called to investigate the murder of Nurse Chambers (Nancy Stephens) and his hunt for the Shape.

And yet, there’s an argument to be made that the film could be even shorter. Something has happened to my Blu Ray over the years since I bought it, and it skipped it’s way through several sequences. This didn’t take anything away from the experience, though. That’s not an exceptionally strong endorsement for the movie, I realize. I’m tempted to think that it owes too much to Scream (1996) (which, in turn, owes too much to the original Halloween). A copy of a copy won’t be as sharp as original. Multiplicity (1996) taught me that much. Also, the one-two punch of Halloween: Resurrection (2002) and Halloween (2018) rendered any of the films strengths mostly moot.

And then there’s the mask… As much as I complain about the mask in previous sequels, here it looks mostly okay. Until it absolutely doesn’t. Some reshooting after test screenings necessitated the mask being grafted on via CGI. If there’s one thing that CGI in the 90s did really well, it was recreate things that were already real objects at other points in the film.

You can try to explain to me why they couldn’t just use a single mask, or at least a single mold of a mask, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.

*At one point, after Freddy vs. Jason (2003), there was even talk of forcing the Shape to go toe-to-pin with Pinhead. Let us thank Thorn that we avoided that, or at the very least, that I have avoided having to write about.