So, yes, let’s start with the title. The X of “Jason X” has three meanings. First, this is the tenth Friday the 13th movie. So, X, as in the Roman numeral. I still think you pronounce it as “ecks” rather than “ten” or “the tenth,” though. Second, Jason becomes a cyborg science-fiction monster in the film’s climax, the kind of research project that’s so dangerous and exotic it earns a nickname of “X” — same energy as Chemical X from Powerpuff Girls or Planet X from Edgar Ulmer’s film. Lastly, as a film that came out in 2001, this is a decidedly “X-treme” take on Friday material — set in outer space with the most badass Jason ever.

(Note: I realized after completing a draft of this review that Kinemalogue’s review of Jason X also opened with a discussion of the “X” in the film’s title, so shoutout to Hunter A.)

I would be lying if I said Jason X is a good movie, and I would also be lying if I said that I care too much. It’s about as fun as a bad movie can be while still being bad; this is not “secretly good,” but it’s also a chuggable flavor of dopey. You see, what if Friday the 13th… but in space! Bingo! (This kind of “Friday, but *insert gimmick*” is what I had in mind when I started watching the series and saw it ran twelve long. Only about half have pitches have a pitch like that, filling in the blank with “in 3D,” “vs. Carrie, “on a boat,” and “at prom” — the latter two in the same movie.)

In the near future, which is actually now the past, 2010, both Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) and a government scientist named Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig) get locked in cryogenic stasis. (I have neither the time nor the inclination to make sense of whether this falls into a coherent chronology and mythology for the Friday the 13th series.) Some four centuries later, both of them get unfrozen on a spaceship. Jason promptly starts killing the college kids on board, while Rowan intervenes by making helpful suggestions like “we need to stop Jason!” Meanwhile, a greedy academic, Professor Brandon Lowe (Jonathan Potts), smells a big pile of space bucks in hauling Jason’s body to market rather than dumping it into space, and a security detail led by Sergeant Elijah Brodski (Peter Mensah) discovers that bullets are more of a suggestion than a deterrent to this version of Jason .

In some ways, this is a return to Friday form after the dismally dull and uncharacteristic Jason Goes to Hell. The passengers of the spaceship are described as students, which would line up with the usual Friday sacks of stabbable flesh. But I guess they’re the crew, too? They mostly seem like the kind of cast you imagine on a basic cable sci-fi series. Whether this crew is specifically a knockoff of Alien, Star Trek, or just a general industrial space-travel vibe, I’m not versed enough in my sci-fi to say. Regardless, this is perhaps the silliest Friday movie and more squarely in the slasher formula than Jason Goes to Hell.

In some ways, Jason X’s kin is Halloween: Resurrection: both are thrill-ride slashers that make self-deprecating meta jokes and have a tint of quippy comedy thanks to the success of Scream. (And in both cases I think I’m higher on the film than the average slasher fan.)

Among the crew members to be (mostly) mutilated include the android Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder), built and doted on by tech whiz Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell). We also briefly get to know the aforementioned Professor Brandon Lowe. Security on the ship is led by Brodski (Mensah, though it took me half the movie to realize it’s not Tony Todd). The ship’s two pilots are Kinsa Cooper (Melody Johnson) and “Fat Lou” (Boyd Banks), who is easily identifiable due to his fatness. More generic crew members and engineers include Janessa (Melyssa Ade), Waylander (Derwin Jordan); Crutch (Philip Williams); Adrienne (Kristi Angus); Dallas (Todd Farmer); and probably a few others. I’ll be honest, I lost track of most of the characters. One fun cameo comes in the form of Dr. Aloysius Wimmer in the 2010 timeline played by body horror maestro David Cronenberg.

The highlight for me, personally, is Doig — the woman whose name I can never spell correctly without looking it up. (It’s like the word “sheriff.” You could tell me there are any numbers of “r”s or “f”s in that word and I’d believe you.) I can’t say this is because she gives a world-class performance — it is a massively adequate turn as a space-age final girl — but because she (and Kristin Kreuk) were basically exactly who 12-year-old me imagined having as a girlfriend some day, and I still feel a twinge of preteen affection when she’s onscreen despite my 13 happy years of marriage (yes, to a brunette…).

But more rationally, the movie’s standout is Ryder as Kay-Em 14. She simply has the most to do — sarcastic sex-bot, Xena-inspired super-soldier, robot becoming sentient through the power of love, and, finally, dismembered android head. It’s one of the few times the movie really leans into one of its kooky conceptions and turns it into a truly fun version of itself, as opposed to settling for something half-baked. Other highlights include Campbell, who is a frazzled but likable dweeb, and Mensah, who gives Brodski some gravitas deserving a film more serious than one that features a character saying “hi, hand!” to his own severed limb. Lastly, Hodder is huge and terrifying as our titular murderer — he makes a terrifically imposing Jason.

As a slasher, Jason X is store-brand replacement level material: better than some of the abysmally non-suspenseful slashers of recent years like It’s a Wonderful Knife, Time Cut, and Hell of a Summer, but with only a handful of moments that will make your blood chill. Speaking of “chilling,” the film’s signature moment among slasher-heads is when Adrienne gets murdered by having her face frozen in a sink full of liquid nitrogen, then smashed into pieces. The result is a de-face-itation rather than decapitation. (Another character gets killed with a one-punch beheading, perhaps a deliberate reference to Jason Takes Manhattan’s classic kill.)

Where the movie really flops and/or charms, depending on your perspective and appetite for spoiled cheese, is in the production, which is just the corniest Syfy (née Sci-Fi) Channel TV-movie-level effort. Bafflingly, the budget on this was on the high side for the franchise, but I suspect most of it went to spaceship CGI rather than inessential stuff like sets and props, which are factory-themed-soundstage 101. At one point, Jason gets recharged with some goopy medical nanobots (or something), and he emerges as “Uber Jason,” looking like a Power Rangers villain, and that’s not an exaggeration. I mean compare him to Lord Zedd:

I don’t too much mind — in fact I appreciate — that Jason X is not the most dread-inducing, mortality-pondering example of the slasher form, that it has a deep silly streak. What really keeps me from giving the film a thumbs-up is that it so rarely follows through with its fun ideas. For example, part of the climax involves trapping Jason in a holodeck that recreates the premise of the original Friday the 13th in a very heightened, postmodern manner, which sufficiently distracts him for a few minutes. This is a really fun meta-joke with the potential for layering self-parody and twisting over-familiar tropes with real in-universe danger, yet the film goes no further than laying out the idea of a micro-simulated Friday before it’s on to the next beat. Everything about Jason running amok on a spaceship feels closer to half-baked than ready-to-serve.

And yet, I can’t be mad about it. Jim Isaac’s direction keeps things moving, Todd Farmer’s script at least commits to the dumb space jargon, and Harry Manfredini shows up and seems to understand the assignment. It ends with a silly stinger suggesting an eternal cycle of Friday murder sprees and campfire scary stories — honestly closer to the post-credits scene of Wish than you might expect. The whole affair has very little dead weight, so I at least had a painless time. Jason X is the epitome of Not High Art cinema, but space is cool and this movie is harmless.

Cunningham faced many roadblocks to get this film made. First was the tiny matter that he did not control either franchise. New Line Cinema, who owned the Nightmare movie rights, signed on, clearing the first hurdle. New Line tried to get the Friday the 13th rights from Paramount, who was loath to give up their old moneymaker even though they had no immediate plans to use it. In the end, the distributors reached a compromise: New Line and Cunningham could use everything except the “Friday the 13th” name in their spinoff.

The next challenge was that New Line got cold feet on a Jason vs. Freddy showdown film. They permitted Cunningham to set that film up, but his first outing would be a Jason solo number. Thus this is essentially an outsourced part 9 of Friday the 13th moreso than the launching point of a big cross-series showcase.

The third problem was recruiting talent. Hooper and Die Hard maestro John McTiernan both said no. Eventually, Cunningham brought in a lackey of his own, John Marcus, presumably with the thought that Marcus would bow to Cunningham’s whims. Marcus and Cunningham dispute many details of the film’s production, and honestly, the final product is not interesting enough to care too much about how the creative decisions were ultimately made.

The main thing to know about the resulting film is that it’s not really a Friday the 13th film. You see this in the title, of course — Cunningham and New Line get around their title-rights predicament by presuming audiences are smart enough to apply “the 13th” when they see Jason and Friday in the title. But more to the point, this really doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie, barely at all. It’s most reminiscent of the godawful Halloween entries that wrapped up the first continuity: the killer becomes the victim of a violent curse chased by a mysterious man-in-black. Jason Goes to Hell is at least better than the worst of those dregs. It pulls in bits of other horror and sci-fi textures. The overall vibe is kinda X-Filesy. The setting of a small town with dark secrets  (not to mention the cafe) evokes Twin Peaks. The creepy, gory critter in the climax made me think of Evil Dead. And whenever the audience and protagonist are unsure who the Jason curse has possessed for a scene, I naturally leapt to The Thing.

But before Jason Goes to Hell gets to all that stuff, it has its standalone opener, which is easily the best and most Friday-esque part of the film. We follow a lone, beautiful woman (Julie Michaels) as she retreats to a cabin in… Crystal Lake. (The camera lingers on the road sign. Manfredini’s score jangles. Our blood chills; whether because of fear or PTSD from crappy sequels is unclear.) Soon enough, we’re waiting for Jason Voorhees to start popping out and stabbing her. Every mirror shot and rounded corner becomes a moment of suspense. At last, after she’s stripped down for a shower, he finally appears, and he chases the towel-clad woman into the woods.

Then the twist: the woman is an FBI agent, and this is all a set-up. A SWAT team rappels from the trees and starts plying Jason with bullets like he’s Sonny Corleone at a tollbooth. They even drop a bomb on him, and his flaming head launches off his body in slow-mo. It’s a terrific and ballsy opening: this Friday the 13th reboot opens with the obliteration of Jason Voorhees. And it’s just a nice little piece of horror filmmaking, tense and surprising and well-shot with a few moments of expressionistic lighting.

The next sequence is pretty fun too, though it spirals rapidly downward from there. We meet with the coroner doing an autopsy on Jason’s mutilated corpse. We wonder how, exactly, will Jason come back from this? Surely he will. (I expect that Cunningham, Lucas, and co. are having some fun with the film’s title, letting the audience ponder when, exactly, Jason has fully descended to hell.) The answer comes not from the corpse itself resurrecting but from the coroner (Richard Gant, imposing and looking halfway between Samuel L. Jackson and Ving Rhames), who is abruptly enchanted by the charred remains. He grabs the heart, and starts devouring it.

Thus, he becomes Jason, and the essence of Jason Voorhees is now a curse that hops from body to body; but also, like an actual fleshy mass? It’s not clear; or if it is clear, it’s not interesting enough to really matter. We meet some other morgue workers we know are doomed to eminent demise, but rather than show us their deaths, the film smash cuts to news coverage of their bloody deaths (another clever bit of expectation reversal). Thus the hunt for Jason (Or is he Jason? Yes, he is.) is back on.

Now the film proper and the disappointment proper can begin. We meet a couple of protagonists: Diana (Erin Gray), Jason’s half-sister (Halloween II much, ya hacks?); Diana’s daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan); Jessica’s boyfriend and baby-daddy Steven (John D. LeMay); and bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams). For one non-compelling reason or another, Jason is intent on hunting down his bloodline, so the chase is on for his three living relatives: Diana, Jessica, and Steven and Jessica’s infant daughter Stephanie (a wee Brooke Scher).

What unfolds is simultaneously rushed and tedious, a catastrophe of pacing. The film clocks in at under 90 minutes, but that includes the rather extended intro and coda, meaning the actual story gets about 70 minutes; and yet there’s still not enough to do. The scenes within are padded and repetitive, and the film hits its action climax very abruptly, like screenwriters Jay Huguely and Dean Lorey hit their target page count and just stopped writing.

The more memorable sequences are the bizarre ones, like when the sentient guts of Jason go skittering across the shadowy floor or Duke Creighton inexplicably breaks Steven’s fingers as “payment” for helping him hunt Jason. But much more of it is bland, replacement-level horror filmmaking. A few stalking shots are nice, but the bread and brother is run-of-the-mill pop out-then-grapple sequences. It’s not aggressively bad so much as aggressively forgettable. In true Friday the 13th spirit, every character is an empty nothing, with the lone exception of the wacky, cowboy hat-clad Duke.

Finally, there’s the coda, which is a sequel hook for the crossover with Nightmare on Elm Street that was the very impetus for this project in the first place. If you were a horror-head in the pre-IP-conglomeratization, it must have been a shocking thrill to see a Jason and Freddy clash teased. Some Friday fans I’ve encountered say witnessing this final shot was the most memorable moment of watching the entire series for them (though it hardly would have been a surprise if you knew the production history). Now it barely registers an eye roll, but you can see why people would have left the theater buzzing.

The end result is a movie that inspires basically no reaction whatsoever in me. It’s too segregated from the original Friday template to even draw real comparisons; change the “Crystal Lake” signs, take Jason’s hockey mask away, and the bulk of it would be unrecognizable as a product of the franchise. It’s not bad in a goofy, baffling sort of way like Jason Takes Manhattan. It’s not a curious high concept or cash-in like Part 3 or The New Blood, nor an outright clusterfuck like A New Beginning. It doesn’t take the Friday template at face value like Parts 2 and 4, nor try to remix it like Jason Lives. It’s just a bland void of a horror film batting below the Mendoza line with no character of its own.

All that’s left in the Friday series after this are odds and ends. Freddy vs. Jason would be stuck in development hell for a decade. A futuristic sci-fi take on the series limped to theaters in 2002. And a full-on reboot sharing a name with the original hit theaters in the late 2000s, which was the style at the time. In some ways, this film’s terrific opening is poetic: a brief resurrection then careless mutilation of Jason Voorhees as a horror icon.

Nonetheless, I kind of wish that this was three different movies, or at least two: “Friday the 13th on a Boat” is a premise I could probably go without seeing, but “Friday the 13th at Prom” is very much my idea of a good time, deserving more than a handful of scenes exploring the idea. And “Friday the 13th in New York” is the most compelling of these: This last half hour is not good, but it at least offers a vision, a compellingly garish and caricatured portrait of an urban hellscape, as if writer-director Rob Hedden’s view of city life comes entirely from prime time news bites and movie trailers.

This film is also the end of an era: It’s the last of the eight Friday films produced by Paramount Pictures, as this one failed to turn much of a profit. All good things — and all middling things too — must come to an end. The juice had been squeezed; the dead horse beat; etc. Yet we’ll be back four more times: three times with New Line Cinema, once with Warner Bros.

Anyways, Part 8 opens with Rennie (Jensen Daggett) reluctantly boarding a high school graduation party boat that’s also a ferry to New York City. Our second lead is Rennie’s boyfriend, the annoyingly handsome Sean (Scott Reeves), whose dad is the captain of the boat. The other attendee of note is our old pal Jason, who is resurrected by electric shock again, and kills two graduating seniors before hopping aboard.

The next hour or so flips between nautical-themed kills and high school trope-themed kills, none of which are particularly memorable, but are often decently gory. The order of the characters’ demise feels particularly chaotic this time around: the Cyndi Lauper-esque rock guitarist JJ (Saffron Henderson) goes almost instantly; and the not-so-mean girl Eva (Kelly Hu) falls before the slutty mean girl Tamara (Sharlene Martin). I guess Tamara had some more dramatic potential to realize, as she frames the uptight biology teacher (Peter Mark Richman) for sexual impropriety.

And then we get to NYC proper (shot in Vancouver) and things get real loopy. The surviving characters make it about 20 steps into the city before they’re mugged by a group of raping, drug-dealing gangbangers. The film milks some perverse comedy in the city’s obliviousness to Jason’s murderous rampage, as if they see worse shit every day. And this section has the kill that made me laugh the hardest out of any in the series to date — martial artist Julius (V.C. Dupree) gets decapitated with a single punch in a boxing match with Jason.

This city-set section gets some tremendously fun production design of a dystopia: buckets of glowing industrial waste on every corner, steam shooting out of vents, broken glass windows, a deep grid of alleyways, etc. I reiterate that I wish the whole movie had explored this setting.

As if the movie didn’t have enough on its plate, Part 8 also dips its toes into a weird mystical curse subplot where we learn that final girl Rennie saw the drowned body of Jason in Crystal Lake as a kid and is haunted by aquaphobia and visions of a corpse ever since. Then, in the final scene, Jason inexplicably reverts to his human child form after getting drenched by a river of acid. It’s a deeply forgettable and underwhelming plot thread.

Where Part 7 is so laser-focused on its high-concept premise and Part 6 is guided by such a clear authorial voice, Part 8 is reminiscent of Part 5’s more-is-more, spaghetti-against-the-wall mindset. The body count has to be close to Part 5’s, though the sex and nudity is pretty median for the franchise. We also get the series’ first hard drug usage, if I’m not mistaken, with some coke bumps.

Some discipline would’ve helped Jason Takes Manhattan tremendously. The resulting mess is strange enough that it remains watchable the whole way through, but it also is borderline non-functional; a pretty incompetent piece of filmmaking half-formed and slapped together like it’s another episode of a weekly TV show. And that’s basically what Friday the 13th had become by this end of its first 8-film run: a nearly-annual outing meant to be consumed and forgotten to burn an idle evening, not a sacred slasher text revisited 35 years later by weirdos like me.

On the surface, I like the supernatural twist of Part 7 even more than Part 6: this time the final girl has Carrie telekinesis powers. That’s pretty cool! And the film delivers the pitch exactly: no more, no less. The horror-comedy sketches have been abandoned in favor of a more serious tone. There’s some loss of buoyant fun as a result, but it feels more like a “classic” entry (i.e. parts 1-4). The only time the filmmakers are really exercising their creativity is during the protracted climactic showdown, which is admittedly quite good.

The story opens with Tina Shepard (Lar Park Licoln) using her emerging psychic powers to collapse a dock and drown her drunk father who is in the midst of assaulting Tina’s mom (Susan Blu). It’s an opposite of a save-the-cat moment for Tina’s dad, but the rest of the movie he’s treated like a fallen hero whose death is a constant source of guilt. There’s no interrogation as to whether Tina’s defensive actions were justified or if she and her mother are better off without her dad, which is some half-assed writing.

Years later, Tina is a teen and still suffering from psychosis. Her mother hires shady-as-hell Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser), perhaps the most contemptible character in the franchise to this point, to provide therapy to her daughter. His real plan is to psychologically wear her down to further bring out her powers, then use her case as his own claim to psychologist fame.

The next 45 minutes are textbook Friday the 13th — partying teens whose characters are crafted along a single dimension alternately canoodling and getting disemboweled. (My favorite this time is a sci-fi geek named Eddie played by Jeff Bennett, who would definitely be a chubby balding guy at comic cons in 2023 and have strong opinions about The Last Jedi if he hadn’t taken a machete to the neck here.) Their house is next door to Tina’s, and she gradually gets roped into their mischief by the handsome and kind Nick (Kevin Blair).

It’s all executed just fine by journeyman horror director John Carl Buechler, neither ineptly nor with any sense of invention or joy, at least until the climax. The final 25 minutes — and it is indeed a pretty extended conclusion, as the normal final girl segment is normally about half as long — is the real “promise of the premise.” Tina uses her telekinesis to create obstacles and dangers to slow Jason, eventually applying her full powers on him directly. In a mirror to the opening scene (and to the twist jump-scare of Part 1), her dad’s zombie spirit hops out of the lake to finally bring Jason down to the depths.

There’s not much to complain about beyond the overall feeling that the movie was designed in a fifteen minute brainstorm. I can practically imagine a Don Draper-type suit scrawling “Friday the 13th Part 7: Carrie vs. Jason” with dollar signs next to it in front of a boardroom and getting a round of applause.

The film’s most glaring flaw relative to the rest of the series is the absence of Harry Manfredini, who had composed the score of all six previous Fridays. As much as I think Manfredini score is easy to overrate due to Stockholm syndrome, it at least provided some bedrock consistency in a franchise that often flops around like a fish out of water in all other aspects of the craft.

So it’s not objectionable, and I suspect an upper-half entry to the series, unless Parts 8-12 somehow manage to raise the series batting average, which I highly doubt. But I can’t quite muster the enthusiasm to give it a thumbs up in spite of the fun high concept.

Much of that focus and coherency derives from a fresh new voice for the franchise: journeyman Tom McLoughlin serves as the director and lone writer, meaning he controlled the entire vision of this outing. It’s the first time the series has even a hint of auteurism to it, as if the film comes from the mind of a creative trying to tell a specific story rather than a committee calculation on how to get butts in the seat.

The film opens with an absolutely terrific 15 minutes that might be the high point of the series to this point: Tommy Jarvis (recast as Thom Mathews), still haunted by the trauma of his encounter with Jason back in Part 4, breaks into a cemetery, digs up Jason’s coffin, and pries it open to Jason’s decaying, maggoty corpse. In a fit of rage he stabs the corpse with a crowbar, only for it to get struck by lightning and Jason to rise like Frankenstein. It’s a brilliant, grimy pastiche of Gothic horror. The subsequent kill scenes are shot almost expressionistically in a creepy rainstorm, Jason’s figure looming in mist and darkness like he’s a Universal horror creature.

The rest of the movie plays out alternating between goofy scenes of teen camp counselors – this time with actual child campers to look after; egads! – and some of the series most novel kill scenes yet. There’s a particular corker in an RV that ends with a fire-lit Jason staring in the distance that’s just a blast.

Jason Lives has a meta-slasher humor to its edge in which Tommy and his friend (the surprisingly non-final girl-ish Megan played by Jennifer Cooke) try to “think like Jason” — i.e. deconstruct how a slasher villain would operate. They want to prove to the police chief (Megan’s dad, played by David Kagen) that Jason is alive, that it’s not just another copycat killer stabbing people.

Another “meta” twist: The final takedown of Jason occurs with Tommy luring Jason into the water to relive the iconic zombie jump scare of Part 1, but with a hellish tint. This self-referentialism and commentary on genre tropes make Part 6 a bit of a proto-Scream.

Notice in my mention of the film’s humor that I haven’t described any of it as “funny.” It’s not aggressively anti-laughs the way the comic relief of Part 5 is, but Part 6 thrives more on its light, funny-ish tone than any of the actual comedic content. As with the best Friday the 13ths, the biggest laughs come from outrageous murders rather than the other shenanigans or punchlines: The body print in a wall as Jason murders someone in a closed room, is terrific, e.g., while the slapstick paintball fight is a tad too goofy.

Part 6 breaks some of the cardinal rules of slashers that I don’t especially care about. Namely, there are some characters who are obviously not dying (outside of the final girl), most especially the child campers: The film gets a lot of mileage out of having Jason cross paths with kids, but this is obviously just a tease. This is not the type of movie to murder an innocent child. If you want your slashers to be nasty and dangerous, Jason Lives will probably piss you off.

That’s not me, though. I like this one. Overall, it’s one of the more satisfying entries in the series to this point in its run. It’s got a goofy bent to it that feels well-developed, and it’s very well-shot. And it just feels more idiosyncratic and personal than the previous entries, a much-needed tonic after the flavorless Part 5.

Nonetheless, I actually like the clear demarcation between Part 4 and Part 5 of the series. There was indeed a thematic sendoff of sorts in The Final Chapter, in which the pure simplicity of the format, as outlined in Part 1 and gradually refined over the subsequent three entries, reached its apex. With Part 5, we have Friday the 13th trying on a bunch of different hats to find a new identity.

The end result, I regret to say, is a big ol’ messy bummer. The failed gambles start with the very premise: This outing is set at a halfway house and putative resort for teenaged head cases. This mere setting, with teens whose issues lie beyond the easy-going frivolity of the characters of previous entries, casts a pall over this entry. David Steinmann, the director and co-writer, has little sense of how to make these darkened characters fun to spend time with, especially juxtaposed with the off-putting comic relief the movie includes.

A New Beginning also attempts to build out a larger world and even some continuity with previous entries in the series, moreso than past sequels. The protagonist is the now-older-teen Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd), a.k.a. the tween played by Corey Feldman in Part 4 who smashed Jason to a bloody pulp in the climax. In fact, Feldman briefly reappears in a nightmare that opens the film.

This is the first Friday the 13th entry that attempts to be a joke-filled horror comedy. Previous entries were, of course, often funny, but in the blackly comic nature of the premise: exaggerated teen caricatures getting stabbed by a psycho in increasingly outrageous manners and circumstances. Here, the series is out of its wheelhouse trying to evoke laughs with stock characters and punchlines more out of a traditional comedy than a campy funhouse thriller.

Alas, nothing that tries to be funny actually lands, meaning significant portions of the script are nails on a chalkboard. The worst offenders are the white trash caricature duo of Ethel (Carol Locatell) and Raymond (Sonny Shields); or maybe it’s the jive-talking Black stoner named Demon (Miguel A. Nunez Jr.), who gets digestive issues after eating Mexican food. In the latter case, at least we have the amusing payoff of him getting stabbed through the wall of an outhouse.

The one wrinkle in the story that actually shows promise (if not execution) is the series’ embrace of whodunit storytelling: Previous entries, especially Part 1, had been shot in such a way to conceal the identity of the killer, but none of them embraced the structure or intrigue of the mystery. Part 5 gives us some real looming tension over whether Jason has come back from the dead. If so, how? If not, who’s killing? The idea of a slasher’s mask being a tool for obfuscating the identity of the killer would form the basis of the Scream movies a decade later.

The upshot of having so many fresh ideas and gimmicks is that there is a huge ensemble of characters to show nude and to kill. This film has an absolutely ridiculous body count (and body count, if you catch my drift — Steinmann had directed adult films in his past). Characters are stabbed left and right to the point that I often couldn’t remember who a character was when they died because we’d only seen them once before. And only a couple of the kills have any gnarly or visceral impact, making the actual stabby portions a drag, too.

It adds up to pretty easily the worst of the series up to this point, dropping down past Part 3, which at least had some gimmicky fun and a strong ending. Fingers crossed the sense of experimentation continues in upcoming entries. Heck, maybe some those experiments work will actually work next time.

This is the most serious of the Friday the 13ths to this point. It’s still operating in the same tonal space as the first three, but there’s more heft to the darkness. Jason is played by Ted White, a giant of a man (apparently only 6’4”, but shot to look like Goliath), more daunting than any past Jason. And the flavor is just a bit less campy and more cynical, though not much.

I also watched Part 4 after reading Hunter’s comment on my review of Part 2 and watching the animated special The Halloween Tree, which probes the historical and cultural undercurrents of “spooky season.” It had me reflecting on why, exactly, Friday the 13th movies work on a psychological level. Hunter suggests the series is “a metaphor for the inevitability of death,” which is true. I’ll go even more specific and propose that these movies, and slashers in general, further reflect the the changes of adolescence. It’s the phase of life where humans typically become aware of both death and sex for the first time in real ways. Many of us lose our grandparents as teens, and we start seeing the previous generation not just as caretakers but as aging relics. Bodies and urges and change so fast, it’s hard not to see it as violent and incomprehensible and as scary as the Grim Reaper (whether he wears a black cloak or a hockey mask). The end of childhood meeting the end of life: stabbing of flesh as an act of sex or an act of violence.

Part 4 interlocks these ideas, bringing them to heightened, direct levels befitting the slightly-more-ambitious tone: For no good reason except metaphor and thematic comparison, the teens’ party house is next door to a suburban home with a family in which each person is reckoning with an existential crisis: a single mom desperately protecting her threatened kids; preteen Tommy (Corey Feldman!) stuck between childhood and sexual awakening, completely obsessed with visages of death; and a repressed teen, Trish (Kimberly Beck), drawn to the raucous, young adult fornicators next door.

We also meet the franchise’s first teen victim character of any compelling dimension, someone I legitimately wished we could have spent more time with: Jimmy (Crispin Glover), an unlucky-in-love loser trying to rebuild his confidence after a bad breakup. Glover gives such a funny and sincere performance that I could see this character being in some sort of teen comedy or drama where he’d be more than flesh to get stabbed. Jimmy spends the whole movie reckoning with his lack of skill in bed — trying to shake the reputation of being a “deadfuck,” which is basically a perfect one-word summary of slashers.

As is the template, there’s more to say about the setup than its unfolding or resolution: this falls pretty squarely into the pattern, with only a couple of wrinkles. Much of the climax takes place in Trish and Tommy’s house. This is less interesting for suspense matters than it is for thematic ones: The tranquility of the nuclear family upended by violent trauma and coming-of-age/coming-of-death. Tommy undergoes a transformation as he witnesses true death and darkness for the first time. It’s not quite as thrilling and carefully constructed as the climax of Part 2, but its slight strangeness makes it just as memorable.

The Friday the 13th films have been continually the victim of studio censors editing out some of the film’s especially violent shots — I certainly have noticed that the films often don’t linger on the gore to show off their full production artistry. But Part 4 is the first time I feel like it caused a serious detriment on the film: the camera quickly hops away from the slasher action and violence, noticeably undercutting the sense of squirmy catharsis and shock throughout the film. It’s especially a bummer because Tom Savini has returned as the gore effects artist, and he’s doing some terrific work. (I know there’s a deep well of deleted scenes for this franchise in the Shout Factory box set, and if I ever revisit the series I’ll probably investigate alternate cuts.)

It’s not really higher art than any of the previous entries, but it has more heft to it; or maybe I was just in a thoughtful mood. Regardless, it’s my favorite of the Friday the 13th series so far, beating out the frothy, dopey fun of Part 2.

I kicked off a binge of the series in 2023. Using the curriculum of renowned slasher enthusiast Brennan Klein, I watched the Screams in 2021 (somehow two more have released since then). In 2022, I watched the sprawling Halloween series from start to finish. And now I hit the next curriculum item on Brennan’s list, the Friday the 13th series. (The fact that 2023’s October has a Friday the 13th is pure coincidence.)

Friday the 13th Movies By Release Date

The Paramount Films

1. Friday the 13th (1980) (Nearly Good)
2. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) (Good)
3. Friday the 13th Part III (1982) (Not Very Good)
4. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) (Good)
5. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) (Not Good)
6. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) (Good)
7. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) (Nearly Good)
8. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) (Not Very Good)

The Post-Paramount Films

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) (Not Very Good)
10. Jason X (2001) (Nearly Good)
11. Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
12. Friday the 13th (2009)

Friday the 13th Movies, Ranked

As I watch and review, I’ll expand this ranking

1. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) (Good)
2. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) (Good)
3. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) (Good)
4. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) (Nearly Good)
5. Friday the 13th (1980) (Nearly Good)
6. Jason X (2001) (Nearly Good)
7. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) (Not Very Good)
8. Friday the 13th Part III (1982) (Not Very Good)
9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) (Not Very Good)
10. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) (Not Good)

Review Index

The film has subsequently been released both in its original 3D form and in traditional 2D which just makes the obtrusive subject of 3D rendering seem like an odd bit of camera focus rather than a object flying out of the screen towards you. Shout! Factory’s well-regarded Friday the 13th box set also includes a transfer of this film in stereoscopic 3D, the technology used by the wave of 3D films that came another 30 years after this.

It’s certainly possible to use 3D as a storytelling tool rather than a vessel for cheap thrills and gee-whiz effects, but you won’t see it well-used here. Friday the 13th Part 3 is quite simply a film serving a gimmick, not vice versa, for 80+% of its runtime. It’s a shame, because there are a few nuggets of fun ideas that the film half-asses and burns through so we can get to the next shot of a yo-yo flying at the audience’s face. Seriously, though, the majority of the 3D effects are applied to harmless, inane things like broom handles. We inevitably get some slashing blades shot at us before the film closes, but why bother with the effect if you are going to waste it on pointless subjects so much of the time?

At this point, we know the drill well: A bunch of teens gather in a cabin on a lake for increasingly hand-waved reasons. They indulge in youthful excesses, especially sex, drugs, and alcohol, before getting hunted one-by-one by a mostly-unseen assailant. Then, one slightly more chaste and complex young woman manages to escape and eventually take down said killing force.

Among the crew of teens ready to be slashed, there are a bunch of forgettable faces, and one remarkably UNforgettable one: Shelly (Larry Zerner), a relentless prankster whose self-sabotaging puckishness is both a thorn in the side of his friends and what prevents him from getting laid (though he prefers to blame his ugliness and slight chubbiness). Shelly’s favorite prank is to pretend to be horribly murdered, which is a gag at both the expense of his friends and the audience, setting up a bunch of cheap fake scares but one excellent boy-who-cried-wolf payoff murder. I can see the case that Shelly is too cartoonish to enjoy spending time with, but in the case of Friday the 13th, standing out from the crowd is a good thing. He’s a mashup of every ’80s loser stereotype: fat virgin prankster with a white boy ‘fro. (He also is responsible for Jason’s iconic hockey mask, so he at least has that going for him.)

Even beyond Shelly’s shenanigans, Friday the 13th leans far too heavily on fake-out jump scares: something pops out, but it’s not Jason Voorhees, it’s some friendly face. It makes for a cheap and flimsy film, especially the first half. The pacing is a real problem this time around: the actual kills take too long to get going, and so much of the story until then is just wheel-spinning and half-assed gags. (The sleaze is toned down, too; like Part 1 there’s lots of suggestion of sex with very little of it on screen.)

There’s one fun wrinkle from the early stretch that I quite enjoyed: A biker gang who gets in a feud with the group of teens. When they finally come to take revenge on the teens and get slaughtered by Jason, it kicks off the significantly more compelling second half of the film, but it still feels a bit wasted by the film as a narrative thread that could have been the basis for a whole movie. Why introduce rivals and kill them off before any good back-and-forth escalating pranks?

From a craft perspective, this film is a big step down from Part 2: I’m actually surprised it’s the same director, Steven Miner. I’m guessing the crew was so focused on executing the 3D gimmick shots that they didn’t have much attention span for the usual lighting and blocking that a film crew would normally be thinking about. That, or Miner was just completely checked out on such an obvious cash-in.

I was ready to slap a really dire rating on this movie, but I must admit the final 25 minutes really pick up. With the last blast of intensity and a few fun murder set pieces, I ended not quite so moribund, but still have no hesitation calling it the worse than the first two parts. But it’s at least more fun than the gruesomely self-serious direction that Halloween drifted towards as it got deeper into franchise continuity. I’ll take goofy 3D broom handles over indulgent over-explained lore any day.

Thus, as important as Friday the 13th was for crystallizing slashers into a mass-producible commodity in a rigid formula, Friday the 13th Part 2 is nearly as important, executing on that promise of repeatable pleasures and profits. It puts into practice the ironclad logic that Friday the 13th is a movie that benefits from more – more ridiculous kills, more canoodling and oblivious teens, more frivolous dialogue and exaggerated characters, more jump scares.

It’s not just “more” of the formula, but better execution of it, too. Significantly better, in fact. Steve Miner, the journeyman horror director, takes the reins. The difference between a genuine craftsman like Miner and a businessman like Sean S. Cunningham who created the original is night and day: scenes have a clear cadence and shape, scares are well-timed and -blocked to have some actual tension and impact, etc.

The film is more sure of its identity, leaning into the sex and violence and trimming what little fat that Friday the 13th had. The credits are rolling by minute 90, and that includes a 5-minute intro that serves as a recap of and coda to the first film.

The film is also genuinely suspenseful in a way the original isn’t at all. There’s some honest-to-God thriller craft here, most especially in the outstanding final girl chase near the end of the film, but also in a handful of stalking sequences throughout. (I’m not well-versed enough in the canon to make such a declaration, but plenty of voices I respect call it one of the best-crafted final girl sequences in all of slasherdom.)

The story picks up five years after Part 1 by following Alice, the lone survivor of the Camp Crystal Lake massacre, and having her go through some PTSD visions that revisit important moments of the first film in case viewers couldn’t remember the story of a movie that debuted 357 days previously. Alice is promptly murdered, but by whom? Who cares! Let’s go find some teens ripe for the stabbing!

From a pure continuity perspective, Part 2 doesn’t really make much sense, and also I couldn’t really care less about it. Despite Jason Voorhees being canonically drowned two decades ago and semi-canonically a rotting zombie corpse from the final, possibly-hallucinated jump scare of Part 1, he is now a fully-grown adult living in the woods, shambling around with a burlap sack over his head. He has a little hut in the woods where he keeps his desiccated and decapitated mother’s remains (in other words, the reverse-Psycho twist from Part 1 has become a pure Psycho knockoff).

The group of cavorting teens and young adults meet at a cabin on the lake where the last murders happened, once again camp counselors for no particular reason except to tie back to the original, I suppose. I appreciate that this film leans into making the characters sharper and more exaggerated “types.” The original Friday the 13th gets a lot of simultaneous love-and-flak for having stereotyped characters, but I honestly didn’t think it even got that far – other than Alice, they all ran together for me as shallow partiers with no memorable traits.

Not so in Part 2. Here every character is distinctly “the ____ one.” The prankster one; the wheelchair-bound one, the scantily-clad one, etc. None of them are even remotely deep characters – in fact, their absence of depth is the appeal, making the film a gory black comedy at its core rather than a tragedy. It is darkly hysterical, for example, when wheelchair guy goes flying down the stairs with a machete stuck in his head. If I had any investment in him as a person, the moment might have elicited some dread. Here, big laughs.

The deaths, in general, are a bit more creative and well-designed in than in the original, but the gore effects themselves are a bit underwhelming. This can be squarely placed on the fact that Tom Savini, the not-so-secret X-factor of Part 1, did not return for Part 2 due to scheduling conflicts. His backup, Stan Winston, another titan of blockbuster makeup effects, backed out as well, leaving the job to third-stringer Carl Fullerton, whose work is just not quite so baroquely inspired as Savini’s.

Overall, it’s a strong execution on the formula, but not an iota outside the formula. Just how highly you rate the movie will depend mostly on how much fun you get out of the film’s shallow ambitions. I find its tone to be perfect: An indulgent, popcorn-flick sense of fun that never manages to feel too exploitative or grimy (as opposed, e.g., to the scarier but overly dour Halloween 4).

In fact, I’d say that Friday the 13th Part 2 represents pretty close to the Platonic ideal of Friday the 13th – the franchise model executed with almost no growing pains and no wrinkles. It is the baseline ’80s slasher. Incremental refinements might be possible, but it’s easy to see how the franchise could grow stale unless it starts innovating or throwing curveballs. Luckily, while I haven’t seen any of the 10 remaining entries in the series yet, I have it on good authority that curveballs are coming.