1988: Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood
The plot: A stressed-out telekinetic teen joins her friends at Crystal Lake under the advice of her psychiatrist, but a misuse of her powers draws Jason out of his watery tomb, at which point he commences to slaughtering…
The victims: …a group of horny teens who…
Series motifs: …smoke pot and skinny-dip and fool around in bitchin' vans. And like Part III's practical joker and The Final Chapter's Crispin Glover, The New Blood has its own awkward nerd: a sci-fi/horror buff who says things like, "I've been rejected by some of the finest science fiction magazines in the continental United States," and "The Battle Of The Gargantuan Throng is a work of genius!"
The style: Despite the attempt to give Jason a worthy adversary and to give that adversary a love story, The New Blood quickly falls into the usual patterns of screw-and-slash. Only much tamer. The heyday of sex and violence is over here at the end of the Reagan era. The nudity is now scant, and the gore effects relatively tasteful At this point in the evolution of Friday The 13th, the movies have more in common with action movies like Predator.
1988 signifiers: One chaperone sports her best Markie Post hairdo. Also, when one of the kids leaves the room, he says "I'll be bock" in a Terminator accent.
1989: Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
The plot: Dredged up yet again from the bottom of Crystal Lake, Jason makes his way aboard a cruise ship headed for New York, and does in a handful of high school students on their senior trip. In a possible sop to A Nightmare On Elm Street fans, the murders are a little wilder: death by hot spa rock, death by kickboxing, and so on.
The victims: On the boat, it's a diverse group of high schoolers including a horror fiction writer, a hair-metal chick (who gets crushed by her own flying-V guitar), and an alterna-dude with a video camera permanently perched on his shoulder. Off the boat, it's the backlot version of New York street toughs, with the ubiquitous torn clothes and bandanas.
Series motifs: The "ki-ki-ki" sound returns to the soundtrack, the fake-out scares return to the script, and the drug of choice? Cocaine again. The film also gets back into the jokey mode of Jason Lives, especially when the bad guy steps off the boat and takes a hard look at a billboard for the Eastern Hockey League. The series has also stopped giving much of a reason for Jason's existence. At one point, an authority figure explains, "Every now and then, the murders just start up."
The style: This is one of the few Friday The 13th films with a three-act structure, and since the heroes become aware of the threat fairly early on, they get to grow and confront their fears and do all those things that screenwriting seminars were pitching hard at the end of the '80s.
1989 signifiers: It's all about the hair: Shoulder-length Sunset Strip 'dos for the dudes, and L.A. Law helmets for the ladies. Also, in this pre-Giuliani era, New York is depicted as the ultimate hellhole.
- Comments