I thought I’d take this time to not review just one movie, but an entire series of movies. And I think it’s fitting this be done in October as we head toward Halloween.
When you say the words Friday the 13th, everyone from the youngest kid to the oldest grandma knows what you’re talking about. Okay, for some they might think the Ides of March, but for most others they’ll equate it to a pop culture legend.
Jason Voorhees.
Jason has appeared in over a dozen movies, beginning with the Friday the 13th back in 1980. Since then, Jason has gone to New York, gone to hell, fought Freddy Krueger and gone into space. In 2009, the year of the re-imagining of such movies as Star Trek, it makes sense that a new Jason movie wouldn’t just take off from where the others left off, but to go back to the beginning.
To revisit where it all began.
We’ve done something for the 2009 Jason that hasn’t been done in horror movies in a long, long time. Nudity.
Critics have been harsh over the Jason films. Sure, they’re gorey, they’ve got tons of sex, and it’s a constant slasher fest. But Gene Siskel needs to understand that he shouldn’t take films like Friday the 13th seriously. Siskel claimed the film was an immoral debauchery, that served no purpose. Jason’s films serve the ultimate purpose.
Entertainment.
“If you take these films to seriously, you need to go take a valium and do something else.”
The concept of Jason is one of ultimate escapism. There’s no way that a dead guy like Jason, or any of the other progeny of slasher icons like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and others, can actually exist in real life. Even the events in the movies are incredibly far fetched. They’re there so that people can, in some dark and twisted way, cheer on Jason as a hero that dispatches punishment against stereotypes that have affected us all.
Jason movies were the first slasher flicks that after a while I started to cheer for him. And rightly so. He’s iconic, recognizable all over the world and has appeared in numerous other media, and even parodied in shows like The Simpsons and South Park.
With Jason, there’s also formula about the movies. There is a group of young people that go somewhere, get involved in a little sex, a little drugs and then the fun begins. If you abstained, then you live at the end. And always, the survivor was a woman. It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth movie that the survivor included a man. I figure that because of Jason, there were a lot of people that decided to forgo having sex for a while until the thought of dying went away.
I didn’t have sex until 30 because of that mutherfucker. Jason is probably the best contraceptive around.
Today there’s kids that dress up at Halloween in the familiar hockey mask, and have never seen or heard of the movie, but they know damn well just who Jason Voorhees is. Friday the 13th is one movie series that will stand the test of time. And the best part, it doesn’t need a heavy plot or some political diatribe of the day to make it be enjoyable.
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