Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Written by Puño Estupendo
Oh man, I'm just going to throw out the stinker alert right now and get it over with. Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is not on my list of any horror movies I would recommend to a friend that asked me for suggestions on what to watch. Actually, I think it has now made my list of "films to never bother to watch again." Even if all you're looking for are the staples of formula that everybody makes jokes about, you're going to be very disappointed. People getting picked off, yes. Teenage sex, sort of. Counselors and Crystal Lake, yeah, it's got that too. But what this film absolutely doesn't have are naked people, any kind of scares, or (worst of all) any gore!
Tommy Jarvis continues his participation from Parts IV and V, heading for the cemetery that is the burial place of Jason Voorhees. He wants to know for sure that Jason is dead so he digs up the grave and proceeds to stab the body repeatedly with a rod from an iron gate. Look out though, there's a storm that's moved in. The fence rod that is stuck in Jason's corpse is hit with lightning, and damn if that lightning doesn't bring that guy back to life.
Jason's machine must also be coming up triple 7's because Tommy, and the pal he brought with him, also brought Jason's hockey mask with them. I'm telling you, if Voorhees had even given a shit, he would have bought a lotto ticket, bet on some horses, sat in at a high-stakes poker game, and had all the unprotected sex he could manage, cuz everything was coming up Jason that night.
Tommy escapes, his friend doesn't, and when he tries to warn the local yokel sheriff about Jason's return, he gets thrown in jail for his troubles. Add some camp kids and counselors, and a pretty hefty secondary cast of characters to kill, and you've got one pretty lousy movie. Nobody believes poor Tommy except for the sheriff's daughter. Yeah, the sheriff's daughter…the only thing that separated the sheriff and his daughter were about five years and a mustache. She frees Tommy from his imprisonment and they set out to stop Jason.
At this point, Jason has already built himself a sizable nest egg of kills, but they all sucked visually. Some of the set-up was okay for the deaths, but there was no gore at all! Boy did that piss me off. The only thing you could have enjoyed about this movie would have been the gore, but seriously, there is none. One of the few scenes where they actually showed something other than blood splattering on to the surface of something, it was a knife stuck in somebody's head. If it had been a throwing star instead, it would have matched the gore level of an old kung-fu flick.
There are also a bunch of little visual gags like Jason walking past the camp signs that say "virtue, friendliness, etc." This just showed me that even the director didn't take this shit seriously, so why bother watching it. There's kill scenes with no gore and sex scenes where people seem to manage to stay clothed. The acting is bad (even for a movie of this kind) and it just isn't fun in any ways I could figure out. Stick with the first four but leave part six alone. Tie a boulder around it's neck and drop it in the middle of a lake, only this time, make sure not to come back to it later.
