Back to mid

As you know, two years ago during October, I watched all the Halloween movies I hadn't seen yet, which was all but three of them, and the first one I rewatched just to put myself back in the mindset. I didn't rewatch Halloween III or the Rob Zombie remake, though I did watch the sequel to that remake.

So naturally, I'm inclined to compare the experience of watching all those movies with the experience of watching all the Friday the 13th movies (except the remake) this October. 

It seems that Halloween had higher highs but lower lows. There were a handful of movies in that series that I have positive feelings about, and the original and Halloween III are surely better than any Friday the 13th movie I've seen. But the Halloween stinkers? I think I gave at least four movies in that series only a one-star rating on Letterboxd. I really, really disliked them. 

Nothing has gotten that low in Friday the 13th. Maybe I'm two years softer in my ratings tendencies, but I haven't gone as low as one star on any of the seven movies I've watched. I've gone 1.5 stars three different times, but the two lowest ratings -- one star and the dreaded half star -- have thus far been avoided.

When I really liked Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, I thought maybe, just maybe, the series was steering itself into positive territory. I thought this could be the kind of streak of good ideas and interesting filmmaking that sustained itself for a couple movies.

Nope. We're back to mid with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. But at least it is mid -- two stars -- and not just plain bad.

While we're on the topic of Letterboxd, I just wanted to say the series is starting to get janky about having any consistency with its naming conventions. Since I'm looking at them back to back on my Letterboxd diary, I can see that the last movie is called Jason Lives - Friday the 13th Part VI, while this one, as the poster above will confirm, is Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood. Not only is there the switching of whether the franchise name comes first or second, but I swear they used to use colons rather than dashes. For now, I'm just using the convention I've written above, which involves a colon. I'll sort the rest out with my personal List Gods later on. 

It's not that they didn't try to do something new with this movie. As the title promises, there is indeed new blood, and you can see half of her face up there alongside Jason's mask. That's Tina, played by Lar Park Lincoln, an apparent replacement for the protagonist of the last three films, Tommy Jarvis. Tommy did not die, by the way, so either they gave him a happy ending, or he'll be back in one of the four more movies I still have to see. 

The thing about Tina is that she's telekinetic. Her backstory is that after her parents had an argument when she was young -- I think her father actually hit her mother -- she goes out into a boat on, you guessed it, Crystal Lake. When her father comes to the dock to try to bring her back in, with apologies and promises never to do it again, Tina's emotions get so heightened that she destroys the dock with her mind and plunges her father into the lake. Where, I suppose, we're meant to believe he sustained a head injury and didn't resurface, though I have to say, it's the sort of event that shouldn't have necessarily killed him. 

Some number of years later -- the actress was 27 at the time -- we follow Tina as an adult, though I think she's supposed to be a late teen or early twentysomething with how they treat her and the fact that the father's death is still weighing on her enough to talk about how much she misses him. (Her abuser father, who hit her mother when he got drunk. Maybe he had some other good qualities.) Anyway, the funny thing about this is that her therapist, who is always doing tests to bring about her telekinesis so she can control it better, is played by Terry Kaiser -- none other than Bernie Lomax from Weekend at Bernie's. (And yes, he does ultimately become a corpse here.) 

The problem with this conceit for the movie is that it creates a second supernatural element that has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees. Generally speaking -- and this is something recent superhero movies have exploded -- you want the main supernatural element in the film, the thing that distinguishes it to begin with, to be the one thing that's different from our normal world. Generally speaking, you don't want a movie about vampires where there is also time travel. 

You could argue, though, that they already threw the rules out in some of the previous movies, maybe nowhere more notably than the movie I liked most in the series, Jason Lives. Not only is this a world where people can return from the dead through unexplained posthumous reanimation, but it's also a world where a specific action -- the strike of a lighting bolt into a conducting piece of metal -- can create reanimation, like it did for Frankenstein's monster.

Then again, those are variations on the same theme. Telekinesis is entirely different. 

And naturally, Tina's telekinesis is going to factor into the finale. But I was pretty disappointed with the way they used it. For one, she has to use it about four different times, with each one creating the impression that Jason might be, could be, really dead. The most comical of these is when she brings the roof of a house down on him and then tells another character that she's killed him, when that is about the least likely thing to kill Jason of anything that has occurred to him in these seven movies. We get to the point, with these multiple fake-out endings, where we just don't actually feel optimistic that anything she's doing has any hope of ending the Jason threat. 

I will say, though, that there's a fun bit at the end that I won't spoil that works as a callback to something earlier in the movie that we've basically forgotten, and that this was one bit of true cleverness in the script.

Everything else? Not so hot. We're back to horny young people (calling them teenagers, as I have been doing, is probably aging them downward by five to ten years) getting coitally interrupted by a Jason sharp object. Ho hum. Enough characters are introduced to give the film its requisite body count, but as usual, we can't distinguish them and they are generally not killed in interesting ways.

So I'd say that basically all the oomph, related both to Jason's character and to the filmmaking, that Tom McLoughlin brought to the previous film is gone. This is back in the mold of the uninspired first five movies of the series, with the telekinetic providing a few flickers of interest but generally not adjusting the core dynamic of the series.

The thing I might mourn the most is how Jason reverts to having no personality. The personality he shows in the previous film was subtle but evident; not enough to make the film actually jokey, but enough to give him a presence other than what I called him in a group chat with some friends, a "transitional basic brute." He did transition to something else in the last movie, but he's lost that momentum in this one.

I suspect I'll have an entirely different comic sensibility to grapple with in the shock to the system that will likely be Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.