The following post contains spoilers!
After the fan backlash over Friday the 13th : A New Beginning which attempted to take the franchise in a different direction where Tommy Jarvis turns into a killer following too much trauma, Jason Vorhees was brought back from the dead in the sixth movie.
Incidentally, the fifth movie made more money compared to its meager budget as compared to the sixth movie which actually received better reviews. So, when you can make a lot of money off something that doesn’t cost much, why not keep it going?
By 1987, the third Nightmare on Elm Street had restarted the franchise, plans were on the way to make a Freddy vs. Jason movie. Yet, New Line Cinema was still considered an independent studio while Paramount (which had handled the Friday movies) weren’t willing to come to an agreement on how the characters would work around each other.
So, rather than leave Jason at the bottom of Crystal Lake with a chain around his neck attached to a huge boulder, he had to return. (And let’s not forget the continuity error that at the end of Jason Lives, he was just about 50 yards from a camp which is nowhere seen.) Jason is brought back by Tina Shepherd (Lar Park Lincoln) who has telekinetic powers. In a prologue, she accidentally killed her father when he had assaulted her mother, Amanda (Susan Blu), during an argument over his drinking.
Tina and Amanda have returned to the Crystal Lake area on the recommendation of Tina’s psychiatrist Dr. Chris Crews (Terry Kiser) who has a different motive other than Tina, now a teenager, coming to terms with her past. The trauma of being back causing Tina to send a force that breaks the chain and Jason is back to kill more people.
This is the first time Kane Hodder would put on the hockey mask. There was some talk of bringing back C.J. Graham, who played the character in most of the sixth movie but director John Carl Buechler had previously worked with Hodder on the movie Prison as a special effects artist. And it was a good call. Hodder has been one of the best performance especially considering Jason is now undead and his body is not only in decomp but also affected by being underwater for a long time.
But there were already problems brewing behind the scenes. Paramount had greenlit an anthology series Frank Mancuso, Jr. had spearheaded but gave it the title Friday the 13 th: The Series even though it had no connection. And Mancuso was more involved in the series during the movie’s production, yet still had final say. But with the first season of the show broadcast in syndication at the same time the seventh movie went into production was a perfect storm of problems.
As in previous movies, pre-production started using fake titles. In this case, it was “Birthday Bash.” Lincoln was encouraged to audition for Tina on the intuition of her late husband, Michael, who guessed correct it was a Friday movie. She had to audition four times to get Mancuso to sign off on her. However, many other actors would’ve noted that Lincoln, who passed away from breast cancer last April, was very difficult to work with. And that explains why her and her love interest, Nick Rogers, played by Kevin Blair have little chemistry together.
Kevin’s cousin, Michael (William Butler), is on his way to the lake house for a surprise birthday party as Kevin has arranged another group of sex-craved young adults to be potential victims. The premise is the same as the third and fourth movie in which a group of teenagers going to the lake to party down eventually get sliced and diced.
Exterior shots were mostly filmed in the southern Alabama area near Mobile because they could film cheaper with a non-union crew and also keep some of the details of the movie off Page Six. Susan Jennifer Sullivan who plays the Mean Girl Melissa Paur later said that people on the set and off were doing cocaine a lot. Also, several of the male actors are gay so they were having sex with each other and other crew members on the set, even though it was filmed in Alabama.
Also, since it was so close to the Gulf Coast, there was the danger of alligator attacks in the waters where they lived. Ergo, the production had to hire an experience marksman to be on set at all times to shoot at alligators if they did pose harm to the cast and crew.
To make matters worse, Buechler pretty much ignored most of the cast only speaking to Lincoln and Blair. One of the producers, Barbara Sachs, didn’t like horror movies and argued with Buechler and the other producer Iain Peterson over the tone. Even though writer Daryl Hanley had come up with the basic premise, Paramount and the producers hired another writer to rewrite it. Yet that writer took his name off the credits using the pen name Manuel Fidello. Nearly 40 years later, the identity of this writer remains a mystery.
And the worst was yet to come.
When the movie was finally edited, it received the dreaded X rating from the MPAA. The ratings board had a lot of issues with the violence leading to many cuts being made. Amanda’s murder by Jason was cut as well as the infamous scene where Jason kills camper Judy Williams (Debora Kessler) by slamming her in her sleeping bag against a tree was shortened. Originally, he beat her against the tree numerous times which seems too comical. The death has divided fans but this was one cut that helped the movie. Buechler said the MPAA “butchered” his movie as it had to be submitted seven times. There also were restrictions about acts of violence happening during sex which explains why most of the characters go off somewhere post-coital to be killed by Jason, even though this seems to track back to the second movie where Jason murders a couple having sex with a spear.
Despite all these problems, the end result is still thrilling when Tina and Jason duke it out. Hodder, who suffered severe burns over half of his body in the late 1970s, actually agreed to be set on fire for a record 40-seconds, while he was underneath a burn suit of course. He also moves in a way that is more menacing. Hodder said he would move in a way in which Jason had every clue of what he was doing. (It should be noted that Lincoln and Hodder had appeared briefly before on screen the previous year in House II: The Second Story.)
I’d also say that Kiser really makes you feel like he’s worse than Jason as the psychiatrist who wants to exploit Tina’s powers. Kiser was a long-time character actor before he would famously play Bernie Lomax in Weekend at Bernie’s and its sequel. He had famously played a sleazy tabloid journalist Al Craven in a few episodes of the early seasons of Night Court. When Jason finally gets him with a brushcutter after he uses Amanda as a human shield, you feel like he got what he deserved. (I think this has led to the misconception that Jason uses a chainsaw as he never does. It could also attributed to the fourth Police Academy where David Graf’s Tackleberry using a hockey mask and chainsaw to pull a prank on cadets.)
There’s also the hilarious performance of Eddie McCarlo (Jeff Bennett) as a terrible science-fiction writer who thinks he’s great. And Sullivan really nails the bitch-role of Melissa who has the hots for Nick. Yet, the movie kinda cops out at the end by having Tina’s father, John (John Otrin), come up from the waters and drag Jason back underwater doesn’t really work. Crystal Lake is not the Atlantic Ocean (even though it’s apparently nearby). Surely, they drug the bottom of the lake to bring up John’s body.
Also, I read the movie is set seven years after Jason Lives which was set sometime after A New Beginning which is supposed to be set in 1989. So it’s mostly set in the late 1990s. That might explain why the children’s camp is gone as one of the originals ideas was to have shady land developers wanting to use Crystal Lake as a way to develop condos. But even one year underwater with marine life taking a nimble or two off Jason’s body would’ve resulted in his more grotesque appearance.
When it opened on May 13, 1988, it won the opening weekend slot with over $8 million. The final box office would be $19.2 million against a $2.8 million budget. And there were plans to bring Tina back for the eventual eighth movie. But studios took a different route – New York City by the way of Vancouver.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 