Movies of the Past: Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI

Another thing I plan to do for the blog. When there is nothing to report, I will try and post reviews movies of the past. They will not all be classics (which should be clear from this review), but they are basically just....older movies. I can't define what is considered "old" here. I could review a movie from the '70s, or I could review a movie from as recent as the early 2000s. I don't know. At least you won't really know what to expect. Anyway, on with the review.

This is a great mindless horror movie. This seems to be the part of the series where they just decided "Look, people don't watch these movies to be scared anymore, they watch them to see Jason cause carnage." So what do they do? Well for the most part they forget about the type of scenes where they hear a noise, and it turns out to be a cat or something like that. Then they throw in a bunch of corny humour, and last but certainly not least, bring back our man Jason and throw all his limitations out the window. Sounds like the perfect recipe to me.Yes, it has the most ridiculous plot so far in the movie, (Remind me to write in my will that before burying me, I want my family to have me struck by lightning a few times and see if that helps) but who really cares? It's all part of the fun.


It was offering something new to the series. As much as I love the other movies, most of them were all pretty similar in terms of plot, with characters that were hard to distinguish from one another, to me anyway. Sure the movies were all different in a couple of ways, but they still had a fair few similarities. Bunch of teens in a secluded area getting picked off one by one. Sure Jason Lives sort of has that, but it's a much smaller part of the movie.

A New Beginning tried something new, but it didn't really pay off for them. The thing about the other movies were they were essentially about the killer taking out the people for most the movie. The minor exception to that rule was The Final Chapter, which contained some awareness to the situation, but even that came under that profile for the most part. Jason Lives seems to focus more on the fight against Jason. There are characters who know what he is doing from the start.

Another thing I like about the movie is the fact that the kills seem a lot cooler to me. Normally you would just see characters see Jason, have a scared look on their face and get killed. Or a character killed so fast they probably wouldn't even realise that they are being killed. It's not a major problem but it wasn't really what I wanted to see every time. Now scenes in the range of someone firing rounds of shotgun shells into Jason is more like it. The movie has removed a fair few of the Friday the 13th series, such as bare breasts and drug use.

There is lots of awesome and pointless violence, heaps of lame jokes, and an awesome soundtrack (Alice Cooper! Hell yeah!) and just plain Jason being awesome. This is not a movie to watch if you want to be challenged intellectually or anything. It's a movie you watch when you want some mindless entertainment.

I will add that the mindless entertainment is what I like best about the series. If they can do that with the reboot of the series, then I have no problem with it. The franchise was never really more than a cash in on the slasher genre, so I don't see why people have such a problem with the movie being made. It may be lazy, but I also see them trying to do some different stuff with the series. I'm looking forward to it. If it's as fun as Jason Lives then I will be happy.