Ki ki ki...ma ma ma
Four movies in one review? I must be crazy. Not really. Look, these movies are all essentially the same thing. We all know the formula, a bunch of teenagers keep going to that damned Camp Crystal Lake and Jason Voorhees (most the time) will pick them all off one by one. Only one girl will be left at the end and she'll manage to take him out only for one last scare to hit the audience before the credits roll. Oops. Spoilers.
While these movies are all pretty much the same thing, they do manage to vary in quality. The first movie is, surprisingly enough, not my favorite. Most people know at this point that Jason is not the killer and that does kind of set it apart. It doesn't do a whole lot to build the tension though, it tends to fall into this thing where teens are going about, doing what teens do and suddenly they're dead. None of that delightful playing with the audience that better slasher movies do, like in Alien or Halloween. The second entry in the series does fix that for the most part, and it's the first one with Jason as the killer. No hockey mask yet, however, instead he wears a bag over his head with one eyehole cut out in it. It's actually pretty creepy, but that could be the long lasting effects of playing so much Resident Evil 4 since he reminds me of those chainsaw guys. Scarred for life by those bastards. The third one is in 3D (of course!) and that's how I watched it. I'm glad I did since that's what the movie is about when you get down to it. Absolutely nothing else going for it, and even the 3D wears thin as you could imagine, though I do kind of dig the intro theme. Then you have The Final Chapter, which as we all know, isn't. It's actually pretty fun. It's the most 80's of the bunch, which scores points with me by default, it's got Tom Savini doing the effects, and it has Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman in it. Man, would I love to watch a buddy cop movie staring the two them.
So why am I just talking about the first four movies and not the whole series? Well, those are the ones that were in the DVD set I picked up for next to nothing. Simple as that. See, I never saw these in their entirety up until recently. I caught the end of the first movie on TV one Halloween night many, many years ago, and at that point I hadn't seen a whole lot of horror movies to have come out past the 60's. At that point in my life, yes, it creeped me out. Watching it now though...nothing. Which makes sense, these were made for teenagers. That's not to say that they aren't entertaining in their own completely shallow way, but they really are terrible. Yet Jason Voorhees is a legitimate cultural juggernaut at this point. Personally, I credit it entirely to being at the right place at the right time.
SCARE RATING: 1/5 (a 2 for the end of the first movie though, that part does kind of rule)
OVERALL RATING: 2 (with a couple 3s in there, but even then I'm sort of embarrassed to be giving them)