FILM 
MOVIE REVIEW
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives **½
by Jeremiah Kipp on June 12, 2009 Jump to Comments (1) or Add Your Own
Though it has the requisite murder every 10 minutes or so (including victims snapped in half and punched through the heart, and a triple decapitation), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives feels more like a harbinger for the Scream series with its self-aware jokiness. The first person who gets picked off by Jason is played by Ron Palillo, best known as Horseshack in Welcome Back Kotter, and various characters wryly comment on the familiar on-screen action, practically winking as they say stuff like, "So what were you gonna be when you grew up?" The pre-opening credits sequence harkens back to classic Universal horror territory, with regular Jason hunter Tommy Jarvis (Thom Matthews) digging up Jason's grave to make sure he's really dead and inadvertently bringing him back to life with a bolt of lightning. The graveyard is foggy, moody, and atmospheric, and Jason has evolved from a mutant hick goon into a kind of zombie Frankenstein, his skin all purple and green with maggots slithering around his pus-rotten face before he dons his hockey mask. While the characters remain somewhat cookie-cutter, the dialogue has a fast, hard-boiled snap and crackle ("Don't piss me off or I really will repaint this office with your brains!") and Tommy is mostly led around by a brassy, race-car driving, saucy bad girl (Jennifer Cooke) who makes a nice change from the goody-goody, virginal babysitter heroine established in Halloween and copied almost ever since. While there's a superficial been-there-done-that, why don't-we-just-mock-the-whole-thing quality to this entry in the series, it certainly livens up what has become by this point a stale franchise.
- Director(s): Tom McLoughlin
- Screenplay: Tom McLoughlin
- Cast: Thom Matthews, Jennifer Cooke, David Kagen, Kerry Noonan, Renee Jones, C.J. Graham, Tony Goldwyn, Ron Palillo
- Distributor: Paramount Pictures
- Runtime: 87 min.
- Rating: R
- Year: 1986
Comments
- No-Personality on June 30, 2010, 12:57 PM
-
Actually...the bad girl you're referring to is Jennifer Cooke (2nd cast name mistake I've noticed you've made—Betsy Russell in Friday the 13th? What the hell was on your mind when you wrote that, as if I had to ask). And- a harbinger to Scream? Wow; I hope not! Though both tried to appeal to teenagers, nothing in Scream was this low-brow ("screwing the pooh"? "Does he think I'm a farthead?" Gee, maybe they were appealing to the Monster Squad crowd instead).
I am a bit sorry you stopped reviewing last year's big horror discs. I was really waiting for you to do Night of the Creeps, Phantasm II, An American Werewolf in London, or the last two Friday the 13th films and you didn't touch any of them.
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