Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

1984 was probably the year most agree that the slasher died. It had an amazingly productive and successful (financially more than artistically) run for studios as they pumped out slasher after slasher with little to no budget. Despite these miniscule budgets, the films still made a good amount of money for the studios. As we’ve talked about already, Friday the 13th was the first film to really kick of the idea of the must-have sequel, and what followed was a torrent of films that adhered to the tested and true template laid out by the original Friday and its sequels (most specifically Part 2). Feeling that the subgenre was nearing its end, the producers of the Friday films felt they needed one last hook to bring in the waning audiences: in Part 3 it was the tired, old 3-D gimmick, and for the fourth entry in the series, the producers decided to name it The Final Chapter. Yep, they were going to kill Jason. That was their promise. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter isn’t as gimmicky as the Friday films that follow, but it’s the most apathetic of the first four films; a film so blatantly and lazily adhering to a template without a care for its characters or its audience. The filmmakers present the Meat, they present Jason, and then there’s a whole lot of killing, and then there is the most goddamn annoying ending that would be repeated ad nausea in subsequent Friday films.

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th, Part 3

By 1983, “the template” – that which the original Friday the 13th helped create and, more importantly, make profitable – had pretty much been sucked dry. We knew the score: psycho killer seeks revenge, group of sex-hungry teens meets somewhere remote for the weekend, and psycho killer finds group of sex-hungry teens and quickly dispatches of them in ways that in 1983 were beginning to feel rather ordinary. And that’s the thing with the third entry in the Friday series: it (being the producers) knows that simply offering up another tale of teenagers being slashed might not be enough (even though they would continue, familiarity be damned, for TEN more movies), so how do they try to make this already old chestnut seem like a fresh and new entry? 3-D, of course! In what has to be one of the most laughable of all 3-D films to be released during that weird era in the ‘80s, Friday the 13th, Part 3 (no I will not say Part 3-D, I have standards here) is one of the more laughably bad of the lot (and this is a lot that contains Jaws 3 and Freddy’s Dead). Friday the 13th, Part 3 is bad, bad, bad; however, it’s cheesy and harmless enough that if you watch the film with a group of friends, you can get yourself through it. But make no mistake, aside from Part 5 and maybe Part 8, Part 3 is arguably the worst of the series.

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Sydney Pollack: Jeremiah Johnson

“I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist.”

That quote is from Sydney Pollack, referenced in Roger Ebert’s obituary for the director, and it’s an apt description of the director's style that he would more or less stick to throughout his career. We’re a ways from the end-point in this retrospective, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself; however, I couldn’t help but think of that quote as I watched Jeremiah Johnson, a film that so badly wants to be an epic western. The film is good, even great in certain moments, but it’s a little too strained in its approach to be an epic (the movie is not even two hours and it contains overture and an intermission complete with “entr’acte” title card) in the same vein as other anti-establishment, Vietnam era westerns like Little Big Man and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Each film is different in tone, sure, but they all share something similar in that modern society does not allow for man to peacefully enter into nature and try and not only understand it but become one with it – to get away from all of the violence and self-imposition; society is always seeping in to corrupt and impose its own will. Those are the moments that are brilliantly effective and play to Pollack’s strengths as a director. When Pollack isn’t meandering from one scenic view to another (struggling to make the film visually poetic), Jeremiah Johnson is a beautiful, introspective western akin to something felt while reading Thoreau (there’s even a line where the character says, “the Rockies are the marrow of the world,” echoing the famous line from Walden). It is in those small, and often quiet, moments that Jeremiah Johnson works. 

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th, Part 2

A few things right out of the gate: Friday the 13th, Part 2 is not only better than any other films in the series – including the much beloved but horribly dull original – but it’s one of the best slashers to come during the subgenre's peak period (1981-1984); the reason for that is because Steve Miner is a better director than Sean Cunningham, the villain is a lot more effective (duh, we’re introduced to Jason), and the film contains one of the very best Final Girl sequence I’ve seen in any slasher film. The film is not without its faults (what slasher film doesn’t have faults?), but I will gladly look over those faults and sing the praises of Part 2 because it is, in almost every conceivable way (with the exception of the missing Tom Savini), better than the first film.

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th (1980)

Since we have a Friday the 13th coming up next week, I thought I would, gulp, look at the series for the Summer of Slash series. Here we go...

I don’t really want to be that guy, so let me just get this out of the way: Friday the 13th took everything from other, better, movies. Setting, kills, style, everything. It’s only as famous as it is because it was the first American film to make a shit-ton of money using such a low-budget, exploitation-y premise; it’s not famous because it’s a good horror movie. There. This way I don’t have to spend tons of time invoking Bava’s Bay of Blood or other films of its ilk that American audiences didn’t know about yet, but that Friday the 13th cribbed from. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about these Friday movies, shall we. I’ve spent a lot of time this year and last talking about all of the films that were influenced by Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (primarily by the fact that thanks to all the money Friday made, more and more studios were willing to bankroll what would become known as the slasher film), but I haven’t taken the time to actually cover the film. Friday the 13th is probably the only film of its kind; meaning, it’s probably the only film ever to be this influential and spawn better movies of its ilk. Oh, don’t get me wrong, during the glut of slasher films (1981 – 1984) there were some doozies – some of the worst films ever made no matter the subgenre – but the good ones really showed what the subgenre was capable of stylistically and allowed for filmmakers to be creative with a subgenre of film where, all of a sudden (thanks to Cunningham’s film), all bets were off.

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Sydney Pollack: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Sydney Pollack’s adaptation of Horace McCoy’s Depression-era novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is as engrossing and affecting as I’m sure it was when it was released in 1969. The existential look at the celebrity machine and the producers (here in the form of a dance competition coordinator) that exploit the hopeful masses of one day “making it” differs from the source material (the film is definitely a little more frenetic than the book), but what film doesn’t take liberties with its source material? The fact the film is a little noisier and busier and kinetic than the sparse prose of McCoy’s novel doesn’t equate to it being a bad, ineffective, film; no, the film is still able to resonate and acts as an easy marker in Pollack’s career for one to point to and say, “this is where Sydney Pollack arrived as a filmmaker.” 

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Summer of Slash: Superstition

Watching nothing but straight forward slasher movies for an entire summer can be a bit of a slog; this is why I prefer mixing it up by finding different kinds of horror movies with elements of the slasher. Earlier in this series I covered the sci-fi/slasher hybrid Without Warning, and last year I tackled The Boogeyman – a weird mix of supernatural horror that often detoured into slasher tropes. That brings us to Superstition; a film very similar in tone to The Boogeyman in that it mixes (not nearly as well, unfortunately) the supernatural horror film with the slasher. 

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