The 1980s were a glorious time for entertainment, and one big reason why I consider the ‘80s to be the glory days is the fact that there was a new entry in my all-time favorite movie franchise, the Friday the 13th slasher series, almost every year during that decade. 1980 brought the release of the original Friday the 13th, which told the story of a vengeful mother, Mrs. Voorhees, knocking off Camp Crystal Lake counselors one-by-one because she didn’t appreciate that the camp was being re-opened years after her young son Jason drowned in the lake there. Movie-goers who enjoyed that one only had to wait one year for Friday the 13th Part 2, which was set five years later and found a woods-dwelling, adult Jason killing counselors-in-training to avenge the death of his mother (just go with it) at the end of the previous movie. 1982 brought Friday the 13th Part III to the screen (in 3D!) and showed Jason acquiring his iconic hockey mask. The franchise missed the year of my birth, 1983, but an attempt was made to wrap everything up with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter in 1984. That was such a success, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning followed in ‘85 – and since fans didn’t like that there was a copycat killer in that movie, Jason was brought back from the grave for ‘86’s Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI. ‘87 was another loss, but ‘88 brought Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan closed things out in ‘89.
Then, the troubles began. Paramount, the distributor of the first eight movies, had their fill of the franchise and passed it over to New Line Cinema. Oddly, even though there were plans to have Jason cross paths with New Line’s home-cooked slasher icon Freddy Krueger, there was another attempt made to wrap things up with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which didn’t reach theatres until 1993, four long years after the previous film. If you thought those four years were excruciating, you hadn’t seen anything yet. Freddy vs. Jason spent so much time in development hell, another Jason movie was made in the interim – but it didn’t get released until 2002, with Freddy vs. Jason following in 2003. In a perfect world, we would have gotten a lot of direct follow-ups to Freddy vs. Jason, but instead it was sort of the end of the original iterations of both of those characters. Friday the 13th got a reboot (which you can slot into the existing timeline if you really want to) in 2009, while Freddy got a poorly received remake in 2010. Paramount and New Line had teamed up to bring us F13 ‘09, and it was successful enough that they quickly announced a 3D sequel for 2010 release. But, as mentioned, we don’t live in a perfect world, and that sequel fell apart because Paramount and New Line didn’t want to have to split profits on another movie.
Years passed with no progress on Friday the 13th front. Then Christopher Nolan, who Warner Bros. had worked with on the Dark Knight trilogy, set up his sci-fi movie Interstellar at Paramount. WB wanted in on the action, so in exchange for being allowed to get involved with the Nolan film, they handed the Friday the 13th rights over to Paramount for a period of five years. Paramount would be allowed to knock out as many F13 movies as they could between 2013 and 2018. The Paramount of the '80s would have produced three or four movies in that window of time. How many Friday the 13ths did the modern Paramount make? Zero. They just dragged the franchise through development hell for five more years, resulting in a stack of unused scripts, including one by Nick Antosca and one by Aaron Guzikowski.
Things only got worse from there, although we did get an excellent Friday the 13th video game in 2017. Unfortunately, updates on that game stopped earlier than expected because original F13 screenwriter Victor Miller filed a lawsuit against Sean S. Cunningham to gain the copyright to his script in the United States, as is allowed by U.S. copyright law after 35 years. The lawsuit dragged on for half an eternity, but when it came to an end, Miller did indeed have the U.S. copyright in his hands. The rest of the franchise rights are in the hands of Horror Inc., which is headed up by Robert Barsamian, who was an investor on the original movie. So now, Miller, Barsamian, and Miller’s lawyer Marc Toberoff have joined forced to start building what they call the “Jason Universe,” which is supposed to bring us “new Friday the 13th activations will span a wide range of platforms from entertainment, games, immersive experiences, merchandise and more.”
Post-lawsuit, a prequel streaming series called Crystal Lake has made it into production – and since that show is going to focus on Mrs. Voorhees, Jason Universe also decided to bring us some fresh Jason action, sixteen years after the release of his last movie, with the short film Sweet Revenge, sponsored by the Angry Orchard hard cider company.
Written and directed by Mike P. Nelson, who previously directed a reboot of the slasher Wrong Turn and has a remake of the slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night coming our way later this year, Sweet Revenge has a set-up we’ve seen multiple times before in the Friday the 13th franchise: a carload of youths head out to Crystal Lake for some good times, somehow unaware of the area’s dark history. This time around the group consists of Eve (Ally Ioannides), who seems to be quite dizzy over her new engagement to Kyle (Toussaint Morrison), even though he appears to be losing interest in her already, and their friends Troy (Tim James White) and Dana (Natassia Wakey), who don’t get much chance to show what their characters are like before things fall apart. After all, this short film is only 15 minutes long – 13 minutes if you discount the end credits.
The quartet have rented a cabin from an old creeper named Harold (Chris Carlson), who has an apple orchard near the lake. While this is, to some degree, a commercial for Angry Orchard hard cider and characters are shown drinking Angry Orchard, it’s apples that really get the spotlight in this short. Apples are to Sweet Revenge as marijuana was to F13 ‘09. Since Harold is a local, he gets to provide some information on the location’s history during a conversation with Eve. We’re told that he and his wife saved this lakeside location, which has several cabins, from demolition, and he says it has a troubled past: revenge, betrayal, murder. Lots of murder. That’s all the info he gives, but that’s enough for anyone who’s familiar with F13. Harold’s property doesn’t look like any location we’ve seen in the franchise before, but the filming location, Birch Island Lake in Wisconsin, was a good fit for Crystal Lake.
Left hanging by Kyle, Eve takes a canoe out on the lake – and less than six minutes into the short, our lead character appears to be taken out of it when our old pal Jason Voorhees launches himself out of the lake and drags Eve down into the water in a reworking of the original film’s jump scare ending. Then there’s a time transition, day to turns to night, and Eve comes splashing out of the water, gasping for air. I’ll be honest, the first time I watched this short, I thought this moment was simply a display of bad filmmaking, as I didn’t understand what the hell just happened. She got away from Jason, but it somehow took her hours to resurface, but she didn’t drown?
But Nelson decided to do something different here. He didn’t want to make a simple, straightforward “Jason kills camper” story, even though that’s exactly what most fans have been waiting sixteen years for. He decided to shake things up and make the final girl a living dead girl. It’s not quite clear why Eve comes back from the dead, and that’s my biggest issue with Sweet Revenge. If Nelson is simply saying that the lake itself is cursed and anyone who drowns in it is going to come back from the dead like Jason, well, I hate that idea. Other people have drowned in that lake over the course of the franchise and they didn’t come back from the dead. Jason Voorhees is a unique case, and I don’t believe he’s the result of a curse, I believe he’s driven by revenge. If the idea is that Eve is also driven by revenge, I could buy it, but the things that would cause her to become vengeful don’t happen until she has come back from the dead. She might suspect that Kyle and Dana are having an affair, but she’s already a zombie when her suspicion is confirmed. So anger over that is not what brought her back from the grave. It might simply be “cursed lake water,” and that sucks.
Whatever the case, the living dead Eve exits the lake to find some corpses scattered around the area, with some mutilated bodies being hung up on a clothesline in a way that I didn’t really like. Then she returns to the cabin just in time for Jason to show up and set his sights on her travel companions.
Now we have Jason back on screen – and while it was great to see him again after so long, I can’t say I liked this presentation of the character very much. 6′ 4½″ stuntman Schuyler White did a fine job for the most part, although he doesn’t quite have the right build for the character and former Jason performer Kane Hodder would not appreciate that he’s shown holding his machete in his left hand. The biggest issue is the mask. The Jason Universe, possibly for copyright reasons, have decided to redesign Jason’s iconic hockey mask, which always had 31 holes before and now only has 13 holes. That’s not the mask I’m been waiting to see, but it could still work... There’s just something off about it. The size, the texture. It doesn’t look right. There are a couple of shots of it that look okay, but there are also shots of it that look horrible. This thing needs some tweaks done to it before we see it again.
There are some nice moments of violence, with Eve and Jason both getting the chance to show off some undead resilience, and it’s somewhat surprising that we see Jason brush off getting impaled in this short, as the rights holders have stated that they no longer want the character to be presented as a zombie. Then things wrap up quickly, with Eve and Jason facing off for a showdown we don’t get to see.
If the “living dead final girl” idea had turned up in the first new F13 feature film we got after such a long wait, I would be deeply disappointed, as I just want to see the franchise return to the basics... but given that this is just a 15 minute short, I can go along with it. It makes the short stand out and hopefully allowed the rights holders to get this idea out of their system so we can get a more down-to-earth movie soon, minus living dead characters other than Jason.
Sweet Revenge is not the triumphant return I’ve been wanting Friday the 13th to make, but it was a fun way to let people know that Jason is making a comeback, and I appreciated getting something after so long.
No comments:
Post a Comment