Friday the 13th Part 5
Friday the 13th Part 5 is the Halloween III of the Friday franchise. Some fans – one might call them “purists” without much exaggeration – hate the movie because Jason isn’t in it. That’s the only real reason it's hated, and it’s a petty one, because much else of Part 5 is similar enough to the other movies to leave little to bitch about.
The prologue, despite being a dream sequence, leaves no doubt that Jason is dead. Tommy has a nightmare in which two men dig up Jason for obscure but obscene reasons, are perfunctorily killed, and then Tommy wakes up. Tommy, it seems, has been rather traumatized by Jason over the years – which are many; Tommy is now a young man – and has been in and out of several mental hospitals over the years. The man playing Tommy looks like David Foster Wallace, oddly enough.
Two men of unspecified occupation are now taking Tommy to a halfway house, which is such a loosey-goosey facility it might as well spare us the pretention and be a summer camp instead. The patients – if one may call them that; they appear quite normal, with one glaring exception – are allowed to roam freely, a fact that causes foreseeable problems.
The halfway house is run by Dr. Matt and Pam; Dr. Matt doesn’t do much, but Pat does quite enough to wear out the remote control of any teenage boy watching this and Silk Stalkings on cable TV. Among the patients, we have a Goth girl, a horny couple, a horny nerd, a not-so horny nobody, a true psychopath, and Joey. It is Joey’s over-refined sense of manners that will kick-start the plot and cause every death; he is the primum movens, as it were, of this little unhappy universe.
There’s no shortage of ancillary drama in this movie, which starts up right after Tommy is dropped off when two rednecks manifest themselves in great rage over a territory dispute. The horny couple – Eddie and Tina – abscond regularly to have wild, untrammeled sex on the redneck's property. Ethel, the main antagonist, is such a caricature that she comes off as a parody, and her son – Jr. – is no better if not worse. The each meet a bad end, but not bad enough for having put up with them.
Unrelated but unintentionally hilarious drama follows quickly on Ethel’s heels. Joey loves chocolate, but isn’t satisfied with being selfish about it and wants to share his candy bars with the girls. They reject both the candy bars and Joey wholesale and in no uncertain terms. This leads Joey to proposition the psychopath, who is chopping wood with an ax. Joey’s pathetic, but really – you can’t say he didn’t have it coming eventually. He’s far more stubborn with the psychopath, who looses patience and puts the ax through Joey’s back. Joey is taken to the morgue by two paramedics.
The next plot point reinforces the notion that this movie is following soap-opera logic, which eerily conforms to the slasher formula in unexpectedly pleasant ways. The threats from Ethel, as unmistakable in their Karen ferocity as they could be, are nonetheless unheeded by Eddie and Tina, who frolic off once again to “screw each other's brains out” in the woods. Their deaths are worth dwelling on for a bit. This scene is nearly an exact duplication of a murder scene in the Burning, with the exception that in that movie the kids were losing their virginity, but here it is obvious that Eddie and Tina have already fucked each other well beyond the point where normal people grow a little tired of each other and fuck on the couch. Eddie goes further in the woods to pee – amazing he held it – and while he is gone, Tina is killed with garden sheers as the killer plunges them in her eyes and then snaps them shut. Then he wraps her back up in the blanket and leaves her for Eddie to find, which he does, and then Eddie himself is killed in perhaps the most brutal way in the series. The killer wraps a leather strap around his eyes from behind a tree and tightens it until, I suppose, the pressure breaks his skull. Ethel would have just shot them with a shotgun. Too bad.
Later, Reggie – the son of the cook – goes to visit his brother Demon with Tommy and Pam along for the ride. Tommy is accosted by Jr., but not to worry. Apparently, Johnny Lawrence must have done a stint in a mental facility, where he met Tommy and taught him some Cobra Kai. Tommy beats the piss out of Junior, who runs along home screeching. Once there, he rides his motorcycle around the yard screaming until the killer decapitates him from behind a tree. I might as well spoil the ending and say that the killer is one of the paramedics, who is taking revenge for Joey’s death because Joey was his son. Why he killed Jr., and then Ethel, is a good question: they had nothing to do with Joey’s death, and if left to their own devices, would have eventually murdered one of the patients and provided good scapegoats for the killer’s own murders.
Well, not everyone has a criminal mind it seems -- not even murders.
Demon, meanwhile, is killed in an outhouse after eating too many enchiladas. Ditto his girlfriend.
The rest of the movie follows the killer as he stalks and murders the remaining patients, with mostly unsatisfying kills. Mostly, that is, because the Goth girl has one of my favorite deaths. The killer catches her Robot dancing to Joy Division and impales her against the wall. There’s nothing really remarkable about the murder; I just enjoy seeing people caught unawares Robot dancing to Joy Division. A 90s movie would have had her moping over a yearbook and listening to Mazzy Star.
The finale involves Reggie and Pam trying to outrun the killer, a large part of which features Pam in a wet white T-Shirt that might as well have not even been there considering all the boobs we’ve already seen, but – given the slyness of 80s sleaze – was probably there to escape the notice of censors and get away with as much nudity as was then possible on USA Up All Night. At some point Reggie gets into a tractor that shouldn’t be at a halfway house at all and that he least of all should know how to drive, and slightly runs over the killer. There’s another chase that ends in a barn, where – after embarrassingly hiding with no overall plan – they manage to push the killer off the ledge. He lands on spikes that shouldn’t have been there, and his identity is revealed.
The last scene is stupid and should have been cut. Tommy and Pam are in the hospital, where Tommy puts on Jason’s mask and is now “possessed”. It’s a dumb idea that should have died right there, but was unfortunately for everyone remembered and made the conceit of Part 9.
All in all, Part 5 isn’t too good, but it has some entertaining kills and more nudity than any Beautiful Agony video of comparable run-time. It’s not particularly memorable except in these respects, which is why the boobs and gore tend to get confused with the other boobs and gore in the other movies, leaving this one singularly memorable as “the one without Jason”. But it holds it’s own as a welcome tangent from the main series, and it’s copycat premise is at least something new. I don’t think it could have been improved much even if the killer was Jason himself, since the killer dresses as Jason and kills with Jason’s superhuman MO anyway. But, for that reason, many see the copycat premise as a cheap gimmick, which it probably is.
The best conclusion is to enjoy it like the others: laugh at the highs, struggle through the lows.
I give it three and a half stars.
Friday the 13th Part 5 is the Halloween III of the Friday franchise. Some fans – one might call them “purists” without much exaggeration – hate the movie because Jason isn’t in it. That’s the only real reason it's hated, and it’s a petty one, because much else of Part 5 is similar enough to the other movies to leave little to bitch about.
The prologue, despite being a dream sequence, leaves no doubt that Jason is dead. Tommy has a nightmare in which two men dig up Jason for obscure but obscene reasons, are perfunctorily killed, and then Tommy wakes up. Tommy, it seems, has been rather traumatized by Jason over the years – which are many; Tommy is now a young man – and has been in and out of several mental hospitals over the years. The man playing Tommy looks like David Foster Wallace, oddly enough.
Two men of unspecified occupation are now taking Tommy to a halfway house, which is such a loosey-goosey facility it might as well spare us the pretention and be a summer camp instead. The patients – if one may call them that; they appear quite normal, with one glaring exception – are allowed to roam freely, a fact that causes foreseeable problems.
The halfway house is run by Dr. Matt and Pam; Dr. Matt doesn’t do much, but Pat does quite enough to wear out the remote control of any teenage boy watching this and Silk Stalkings on cable TV. Among the patients, we have a Goth girl, a horny couple, a horny nerd, a not-so horny nobody, a true psychopath, and Joey. It is Joey’s over-refined sense of manners that will kick-start the plot and cause every death; he is the primum movens, as it were, of this little unhappy universe.
There’s no shortage of ancillary drama in this movie, which starts up right after Tommy is dropped off when two rednecks manifest themselves in great rage over a territory dispute. The horny couple – Eddie and Tina – abscond regularly to have wild, untrammeled sex on the redneck's property. Ethel, the main antagonist, is such a caricature that she comes off as a parody, and her son – Jr. – is no better if not worse. The each meet a bad end, but not bad enough for having put up with them.
Unrelated but unintentionally hilarious drama follows quickly on Ethel’s heels. Joey loves chocolate, but isn’t satisfied with being selfish about it and wants to share his candy bars with the girls. They reject both the candy bars and Joey wholesale and in no uncertain terms. This leads Joey to proposition the psychopath, who is chopping wood with an ax. Joey’s pathetic, but really – you can’t say he didn’t have it coming eventually. He’s far more stubborn with the psychopath, who looses patience and puts the ax through Joey’s back. Joey is taken to the morgue by two paramedics.
The next plot point reinforces the notion that this movie is following soap-opera logic, which eerily conforms to the slasher formula in unexpectedly pleasant ways. The threats from Ethel, as unmistakable in their Karen ferocity as they could be, are nonetheless unheeded by Eddie and Tina, who frolic off once again to “screw each other's brains out” in the woods. Their deaths are worth dwelling on for a bit. This scene is nearly an exact duplication of a murder scene in the Burning, with the exception that in that movie the kids were losing their virginity, but here it is obvious that Eddie and Tina have already fucked each other well beyond the point where normal people grow a little tired of each other and fuck on the couch. Eddie goes further in the woods to pee – amazing he held it – and while he is gone, Tina is killed with garden sheers as the killer plunges them in her eyes and then snaps them shut. Then he wraps her back up in the blanket and leaves her for Eddie to find, which he does, and then Eddie himself is killed in perhaps the most brutal way in the series. The killer wraps a leather strap around his eyes from behind a tree and tightens it until, I suppose, the pressure breaks his skull. Ethel would have just shot them with a shotgun. Too bad.
Later, Reggie – the son of the cook – goes to visit his brother Demon with Tommy and Pam along for the ride. Tommy is accosted by Jr., but not to worry. Apparently, Johnny Lawrence must have done a stint in a mental facility, where he met Tommy and taught him some Cobra Kai. Tommy beats the piss out of Junior, who runs along home screeching. Once there, he rides his motorcycle around the yard screaming until the killer decapitates him from behind a tree. I might as well spoil the ending and say that the killer is one of the paramedics, who is taking revenge for Joey’s death because Joey was his son. Why he killed Jr., and then Ethel, is a good question: they had nothing to do with Joey’s death, and if left to their own devices, would have eventually murdered one of the patients and provided good scapegoats for the killer’s own murders.
Well, not everyone has a criminal mind it seems -- not even murders.
Demon, meanwhile, is killed in an outhouse after eating too many enchiladas. Ditto his girlfriend.
The rest of the movie follows the killer as he stalks and murders the remaining patients, with mostly unsatisfying kills. Mostly, that is, because the Goth girl has one of my favorite deaths. The killer catches her Robot dancing to Joy Division and impales her against the wall. There’s nothing really remarkable about the murder; I just enjoy seeing people caught unawares Robot dancing to Joy Division. A 90s movie would have had her moping over a yearbook and listening to Mazzy Star.
The finale involves Reggie and Pam trying to outrun the killer, a large part of which features Pam in a wet white T-Shirt that might as well have not even been there considering all the boobs we’ve already seen, but – given the slyness of 80s sleaze – was probably there to escape the notice of censors and get away with as much nudity as was then possible on USA Up All Night. At some point Reggie gets into a tractor that shouldn’t be at a halfway house at all and that he least of all should know how to drive, and slightly runs over the killer. There’s another chase that ends in a barn, where – after embarrassingly hiding with no overall plan – they manage to push the killer off the ledge. He lands on spikes that shouldn’t have been there, and his identity is revealed.
The last scene is stupid and should have been cut. Tommy and Pam are in the hospital, where Tommy puts on Jason’s mask and is now “possessed”. It’s a dumb idea that should have died right there, but was unfortunately for everyone remembered and made the conceit of Part 9.
All in all, Part 5 isn’t too good, but it has some entertaining kills and more nudity than any Beautiful Agony video of comparable run-time. It’s not particularly memorable except in these respects, which is why the boobs and gore tend to get confused with the other boobs and gore in the other movies, leaving this one singularly memorable as “the one without Jason”. But it holds it’s own as a welcome tangent from the main series, and it’s copycat premise is at least something new. I don’t think it could have been improved much even if the killer was Jason himself, since the killer dresses as Jason and kills with Jason’s superhuman MO anyway. But, for that reason, many see the copycat premise as a cheap gimmick, which it probably is.
The best conclusion is to enjoy it like the others: laugh at the highs, struggle through the lows.
I give it three and a half stars.