Goosebumps: Episode 3 The Cuckoo Clock of Doom

I'm not sure if the child actors in this film are bad, or if they're just badly directed with poor dialogue. Notably, the actor who plays the main character (John White) is still working as an adult. This makes me inclined to think its not the director's fault.

That said, the premise of this episode isn't terrible. It's an idea that's both relatable and frightening. An act of sibling rivalry leads to our protagonist being punished. Even though I'm an only child, having been a kid at all I can definitely understand the desire for revenge on other children.

Our protagonist, Michael (White) has a younger sister named Tara (Kristen Bone) who seems to take joy in his suffering. She intentionally embarrasses him at his birthday party in front of his crush, tripping him so that he face-plants in his cake, and shooting him with a Super Soaker full of gunk and running to his parents when he chases her. These are really the only examples we get, because the episode only has twenty minutes after commercials, but it gets the message across: Tara is a little monster, and his parents don't see it.

Then, his father (Larry Mannell) gets a Cuckoo Clock. Mannell is the only actor in this episode who I like without qualification. His performance actually seems to change in subtle ways over the course of the story, as we see him at different points in his life to reflect his maturation as a parent. In the present he's very no-nonsense, in the past he comes across as making more vain attempts to relate to his child on an equal level, something clearly impossible.

And with that, I've given away the conflict: Michael overhears his father threatening to punish Tara if there is any damage to the clock, assuming it would be her. Michael, naturally, sees his chance for revenge. Sneaking out of bed, he twists the head on the cuckoo around, and the next morning wakes up to a repeat of his birthday party.

I'm a little unclear on what happens at the party. It seems to be implied that Michael is somehow forced to relive the most humiliating moments, even with foreknowledge of them, but later in the episode he seems to have complete free-will within the past. Maybe the clock just decided to have fun in this scene.

At first, Michael assumes he's caught in a time loop, circling the same three days over and over again. No such luck, as he wakes up as a six-year-old the following day. This is the point when it hits Michael: if the clock continues to send him back in time he could very easily cease to exist. He attempts to get to the antique shop where his father purchased the clock, and we get a false scare involving a creepy stranger. While the clock is there, the shop is closed for the day, and he finds himself dragged back home by his father.

While Michael assumes that's that end, we as an audience know both that there's time left in the episode, and that it would hardly be an acceptable conclusion if he never reached the clock. So, he gets one last chance...as a one-year-old. I'm not sure if his parents actually went to the antique shop on his first birthday, or if the clock wanted to give him a chance. I lean towards the latter, actually, it seems a bit more satisfying to think the Clock merely wanted to teach young Michael a lesson.

I also find it unlikely that the parents of a one-year-old in a shop full of expensive things would leave him alone in his stroller long enough for him to get out of the stroller, walk over to a clock on his one-year-old legs, and twist the head of a cuckoo-bird back into the correct direction (yes, it's backwards before he twisted it in the future, just go with it). With that, Michael finds himself back in the future, being lectured by his Dad that he shouldn't touch the clock.

This is one of the few, if not the only, Goosebumps episode where the twist is actually to the protagonist's benefit. The final twist: Tara no longer exists. The clock had a series of panels that listed the years, and in the shop Michael accidentally knocked off 1988, the year that Tara was born. The episode ends with him contemplating that he should find a way to bring her back, but seems extremely uncertain if he wants to.

I'm not really sure how to interpret this final twist. Is the clock's magic completely without sentience, just wiping out important events in Michael's life that happened in 1988? Did the clock decide to reward him for some perverse reason? Or did it simply fail to realize that removing Tara would not be a proper punishment for the brother who hated her? I really don't have an answer that I like.

The episode isn't bad, I can say that much. It's cheesy, could use better direction and dialogue, and as with many kids' shows seems a bit rushed at times. But, it actually has some moments that are unsettling as an adult. And the actions of our protagonist do feel like something a kid would do. If you want to revisit this show, give it a watch.

Goosebumps: Episodes 1-2 The Haunted Mask

I knew when I started blogging I’d need some easy filler posts to stay ahead. When I first started my plan was to go episode-by-episode through a season of Z Nation every year. That was after the first season, when the show was firmly established as my favorite show. When I wrote my first draft of this review, in February 2016, after the second season definitely took a bit of a tumble as it’s become clear that the writers never expected to get a second season and had no idea what they were doing for most of it. Furthermore, I’m not sure if I want to subject what little readership I have to a show so obscure that it could only be called a vanity project for me.

And now as I write this final draft (Layers upon irritating layers. Sorry if it’s a tough read.), in late July of 2016, I’ve made the decision to go back to school while still working full-time. Because of this I’m going to have to wildly redirect the focus of my blog to make sure I have time to continue it. Rather than my original intention of one season of a show per year, I’m going to be focusing mainly on a wide variety of anthology shows, tackling them in season-long chunks, with whichever movies I’m able to get watched lumped in-between.

I’d love to tell you that I chose this first series after careful consideration of many shows, but sadly no: Goosebumps is well-known among people my age, has four seasons and plenty of episodes for me to cover, and is easy to write about because the material is intended for children. It shares these traits with Are You Afraid of the Dark? The tie-breaker is that the copyright to that show are owned by people who care about it, so the episodes available on Youtube are sporadic. Goosebumps is much easier to find.

Now that I’ve admitted what a cheapskate I am, discussing the actual show, I’d say that Goosebumps doesn’t hold up very well to nostalgic expectations, even when compared to its aforementioned competitor. Watching this first episode it’s pretty evident why: this is a series adapted from a book series that was heavily based on inhuman monsters that had to be adapted with a television budget. AYAOTD, on the other hand, was more easily able to create scripts and monsters suitable to a television budget. Being on cable probably didn’t hurt either.

The entire premise of this episode would be difficult to film, even without the restrictions of the Network. The titular Mask is horrifying to anyone who sees it. The mask does not simply startle people with a jump-scare. Just looking at it creates real terror. That alone is going to make it difficult to film, since no possible mask could scare everyone.

Does this mean that the episode is “bad?” Not really. I’m sure by now you all know that I tend to focus on the negatives first. To talk about the positives, this is an episode that takes the Power of Love cliché and turns it into something terrifying. Most entertainment for children make love out to be some great force for good, rather than the complicated and potentially dangerous emotion that it really is.

Most brilliantly of all, though: the Power of Love still saves the day. While I don’t think many children consciously got the point, it’s an idea we can come back to as adults: Love is amoral. It has no interest in the happiness of the people it effects, and can be just as destructive as it is useful.

Now to talk about the actual episode, I give them props for having the only good child actor present as the lead. Kathryn Long plays Carly Beth Caldwell, a girl with a reputation around her school that she’s “scared of everything.” She’s the target of constant bullying by two boys (George Kinamis and Amos Crawley). While the dialogue isn’t great, Long does a good job of portraying a girl constantly on the brink of a panic attack.

So for Halloween she goes to a mask shop looking for something that can scare the two bullies. She stumbles across a group of grotesque masks in the back, which the shop owner (Colin Fox) refuses to sell her. In desperation, Carly Beth steals one and runs out.

The Mask isn’t exactly bad, and Carly Beth knows how to get a bit creative. She carries a plaster copy of her head that her mother along with her on a stick to complete the costume. Even in real life, this would probably have gotten a few points for effort in any neighborhood. However, once Carly Beth goes out for Halloween the effects are underwhelming. The mask apparently changes her personality, but the effects seem to be limited to her saying mean things, and jumping out at people.

I strongly suspect the network is at work here. One mother (Anne Marie DeLuise) threatens to call the police because Carly Beth makes an obnoxious comment to the woman’s children. This is a story where the protagonist needed to do some property damage,

After getting her revenge on the bullies in an extremely satisfying scene where they’re forced to apologize to what they seem to believe is their victim’s decapitated head, Carly Beth discovers that she can’t take the mask off, which seems to have melded into her skin. In desperation she returns to the mask shop to be told “I was expecting you.”

Fox’s performance is easily the most chilling thing in the episode. He has the demeanor of a man long-since jaded to evil, and irritated by the stupid kid who stumbled into it. It’s clear that he’s willing to help, but isn’t going to waste his tears if the mask can’t be removed.

It’s implied that he’s in some way deformed, and created beautiful, perfectly-realistic masks to hide his face, but over time the masks decayed and became hideous. The face he presents to us is one of these, in the early stages of decay. Whether he’s a scientist or a magician isn’t elaborated upon. His scenes avoid making the rules of the Mask explicit, but manages to convey them fairly well by implication: the first time worn the mask can be removed (an event that happened at Carly Beth’s house), the second time only a Symbol of Love can remove it, and the third time the mask will remain on permanently.

And my mention of the Power of Love? The masks are called “The Unloved Ones,” because no one will ever want or love them. No one, that is, except a girl desperate to create fear. The masks are drawn to Carly Beth because she is the only person who could love them. In fact, to give us a more exciting climax, the other masks start flying and come after Carly Beth (not a clue how that happens). She uses the cast of her head that her to fend them off, and finds that she can remove the Mask through the power of her mother’s Love.

On a technical side, the episode isn’t horrible. I think the Mask’s mouth gains more mobility over the course of the episode, which makes sense. If there is a problem it’s that we’re told multiple times that Carly Beth’s voice sounds strange. Honestly, she sounds like…a girl lowering her voice. I’m amazed they didn’t ADR a deeper voice. It certainly would have been a cheap effect.

As scary stuff aimed at kids goes, you could do better than this episode, but you could also do a lot worse. It’s cheesy, and held back by networks standards, but it’s clear there was effort. It’s not the best of the season (that title will eventually go to A Night in Terror Tower), but it’s in the top half, and probably more thematic than any other episode to come.

And one thing I have to mention: The actress who played the main character was Kathryn Long. Her best friend is played by Kathryn Short. What are the odds?

Goosebumps

Another chance to do a regular review on a film I originally reviewed when it premiered. Looking back at my original review, I don't really disagree with anything I said. In fact, I consider this an extension of that review, so I find myself talking a lot about the characters. I still feel I would have been happier with an anthology. However, in re-watching I find myself warming to this interpretation.

It's clear that, while this isn't my vision of a Goosebumps film, it was someone’s. The acting is solid, the story is well-written, and the humor is actually funny. I really feel like the people behind this movie came into it giving their all, and determined to produce a film that children and adults could both enjoy.

I mentioned that the protagonists of this film were much better developed than most Goosebumps heroes and heroines. I still stand by that. They fall into general stereotypes, but not painfully so. Jack Black is the arrogant author as R.L. Stine, but his dialogue is absolutely hilarious. Odeya Rush, as Stine's daughter Hannah, is a clever, funny female character, who is annoyed by chauvinistic attempts to protect her, while avoiding Mary Sue status. Ryan Lee is absolutely hilarious as Champ (real name “Champion”), the overconfident nerd dragged into this mess by our hero, who at times seems to forget he's supposed to be afraid while facing down the monsters from his childhood.

And then we have the aforementioned hero, Zach (Dylan Minnette). He's probably the least interesting of the main cast, but manages to keep his character diverse and active enough to avoid seeming superfluous. The film makes it clear he's generally familiar with the Goosebumps series, but isn't especially nerdy, so he walks a line between the jock and the nerd hero. His romance with Hannah seems natural enough, and the two have decent chemistry.

As an aside I should also mention Jillian Bell as Zach's Aunt Lorraine, who's in relatively little of the movie, but strikes up a romance with Stine. I wasn't familiar with Bell, but she left me wanting more. She plays that energetic, clumsy aunt, that remains lovable, even while embarrassing her nephew.

At this point the twist of the story is fairly well-known: Hannah was the titular character from The Ghost Next Door, who Stine brought into the real world to fight off loneliness. When Stine and Zach realize the only way to trap the monsters is to write a story containing all of them (the very adventure they're living), they're forced to write the story with Hannah, and trap her with all of Stine's other creations. However, Stine writes a final story with Hannah, freeing her, and burning the book to keep her from being sent back.

Re-watching this movie gives me hope for the sequel that's supposedly in development. I don't know what they'll do now that virtually every major Goosebumps villain has been used in this film's mob, but I've heard that it could be Horrorland. Whatever it is, I really want to see these characters again. It's likely that the readers of this already know more about the project, as I'm writing it in January 2016, and don't expect it to go up until sometime in 2017. Whatever the news is, I hope it's good.

What We Do in the Shadows

What We Do in the Shadows is a fun movie. It’s a movie that’s unlikely to be remembered in twenty years as the state of the genre advances. But, if nothing else, it is fun.

The movie is a vampire comedy. It’s not exactly a biting satire, nor a genius character piece. The basic joke of monsters living in a flat in modern day New Zealand isn’t some great new innovation. Nor is the decision to present it as a mockumentary. Basically, we get The Munsters meets This is Spinal Tap.

This is a movie that doesn’t work on paper, but is somehow made to work by the talent of the people behind it. We have and hour and a half to follow these characters, five vampires a two humans. At times the story does seem a bit stretched, and I get the impression this would likely have worked better as several episodes of a mini-series. However, somehow the actors make it work and drive home every moment they’re on screen.

The movie starts with several vampires living as flatmates. The oldest is Petyr (Ben Fransham), an 8,000-year-old vampire with a Count Orlok look, who mostly keeps to himself and remains quiet. Viago (Taika Watiti) is an 18^th-century dandy who came to New Zealand from Europe pursuing a human woman, who eventually fell in love with someone else. Vladislav (Jermaine Clement) is a former master hypnotist and shape shifter who, while much younger than Petyr, seems to be a bit past his sell-by date, and is uncomfortable about his failing abilities. The youngest of the group, Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), is a former Nazi and a complete slob.

To the extend that the film even has a plot it revolves around Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer). Nick is brought into the house by Deacon’s human “familiar” Jackie (Jackie Van Beek), who mistakes him for a virgin. Running from the upstairs vampires, he accidentally stumbles across Petyr and finds himself turned into a vampire.

Nick’s presence is something of a mixed blessing to the group. On the one hand, Nick is a blithering idiot who proudly announces he’s a vampire to the world (the irony that the others would complain about this, while letting a documentary film crew follow them around, is acknowledged). However, he also brings his human friend Stu (Stu Rutherford) into the house, who introduces the vampires to modern technology, and quickly becomes more popular than Nick himself.

The remaining relevant threads are Jackie’s attempt to persuade Deacon to make her a vampire (it’s implied vampires regularly lie to their familiars to keep them enthralled, when they have no intentions of turning them), the buildup to an annual masquerade of supernatural creatures, and a vampire hunter killing Petyr because of Nick’s stupidity. If these threads feel like they have nothing to do with each other, that’s because they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The movie mostly functions as a slice-of-life. Most of the plot-points are eventually resolved, but those resolutions usually take mere moments.

Overall, this is a movie worth watching once. I don’t see myself coming back to it, but I laughed at the jokes. They’re not cutting-edge humor, but they were delivered with the wit and energy necessary to make me enjoy them anyway. Honestly, I’d kind of like to see a sequel, just to revisit these characters.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

I find myself struggling to identify why I liked the previous movies in this series, but didn’t this one. It’s tempting to just say that the formula was stale by this point, but I feel it was something more than that. I suppose if I had to give an explanation it would be that he film was unfocused. It seemed to feel that it had no requirements beyond reviving Jason and having him kill whoever happens to be in his path.

The plot of this film is that Jason (Ted White) wakes up in a hospital and kills some people, then goes back down to the lake to kill some people, then goes to a house where teens are having a party and kills yet some more people. I think by this point in the series we should have been exploring either new premises, or at least more original locations. The hospital is the only time when I felt that the atmosphere was noticeably different from the preceding films, and that atmosphere seemed ripped right out of Halloween II, which did the “killer in a hospital” set-up better, and three years earlier.

Beyond that, the movie seems to just throw characters at us for Jason to kill. In the first two entries Jason was attacking camp councilors, in the third he was attacking a bunch of pot-smoking teens on a farm. In this movie, Jason just kind of wanders around and kills whoever he happens to come across without any real rhyme or reason.

And then, of course, we have Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman). The young brother of our resident Final Girl Trish (Kimberly Beck). Tommy is one of the few recurring characters in this series, and will be present for the next two films. He’s definitely the strongest character in this film, but in an odd way that actually causes him to fail at his intended purpose as a character.

From the beginning the intention was to make Tommy a young Jason, with the implication that he would eventually turn into a killer himself. However, while it might relate to my own autism, Tommy comes across as a mildly autistic, but well-adjusted kid. He makes masks and plays video games because they interest him, and he may somewhat relate to Jason as an outsider.

Towards the end of the film Tommy shaves his head to distract Jason by looking more like him, and then, after Jason is put temporarily down, Tommy hits him repeatedly with his own machete to make sure he doesn’t get back up. This is treated as proof that Tommy has a violent nature...as opposed to Tommy being the only one smart enough to make sure that Jason is dead. Tommy isn’t going to turn into a slasher, he’s just not going to die by one either.

I don’t have much else to say about this film, honestly. I have no idea why it was marketed as a finale, when it ends with Jason being no more definitively dead than he was at the end of the previous movie. I accept it as the end of this sub-series not because it completed a story, but because the next film picks up years later.

Would I recommend it? Honestly, not really. I wish they would bring Tommy Jarvis back for future entries, but this is among the least memorable F13 films. For a finale he truly falls short. It’s neither trashy enough to be a true exploitation film, nor does it yet treat Jason with the awe of an iconic character. If anything, I felt less awe than in the previous entry.

To end on a fun trivia note: I was mentally reviewing the F13 movies the other day, and I realized that all parodies are actually spoofing this movie. It’s the only one that has all the pop-culture traits: Jason is the killer (he isn’t in I and V), he wears his hockey mask from the beginning (he doesn’t have it in II and gains it part-way through III), and he isn’t yet overtly supernatural (VI+). Just a weird little bit of fanboying.

Friday the 13th Part III

(No, I don’t understand the sudden change to Roman Numerals either.)

I wonder why no one ever parodies the cliché of old people dying first. It doesn’t happen in every horror movie, but right off the top of my head” this film, Halloween 2, Halloween 5, and You’re Next all feature one or more old people who appear for a scene or two at the beginning, and then get axed so the killer can stalk the sexy young cast. I kind of wish someone would do a subversion, where the older couple survives and fights the killer after the sexy young people have been sliced up.

The legacy of Jason Vorhees is really the legacy of this film. I remember being in High School when this movie came up in conversation during a math class, and the teacher excitedly recounted his viewing of this film in his youth. It wasn’t considered scandalous or racy that he was talking about this movie. It was as much as part of American culture as Easy Rider.

The first reaction is to say that it’s legacy comes from the hockey mask. This is the movie where Jason finally puts it on, and assumes his iconic look. However, I’m not convinced that the mask is a cause and not an effect. Sure, I doubt any film could have made Jason’s baghead look from Part 2 timeless. However, I also feel that the hockey mask would have been forgotten as well if it was in a more forgettable movie.

Above all, my theory is that this is the film in which the lunatics were officially running the asylum. It was only two years after the first film, so there certainly wasn’t time for a generation to grow up on Jason Vorhees. However, this was a film made for young people, by young people (director Steve Miner was 31 at the time of this film’s release). I feel like the talent behind the movie recognized the zeitgeist of the era they were entering, and they weren’t prepared to short change it.

Does that mean this is a “good” move? Hell no. Rather, it’s a movie that’s good at being what it is. The actors are charismatic, sexy, and seem to be speaking up to make sure the audience can hear them spout exposition. The scares are built up for a time, we get a few false scares, and then the blood comes. The music is both relaxing and haunting in a weird mix. While the movie makes no effort to be realistic, it also never attempts to wink at itself.

The characters, for the most part, fulfill their roles. You have the nice guys, the jerks, a desperate virgin (Larry Zerner), and we get an angry gang of bikers thrown in to give Jason a few more assholes to kill.

It also doesn’t hurt that the setting is very slightly altered. Jason leaves the lake, and journeys to a farm nearby where a group of teenagers are spending some time smoking pot and doing very brief periods of work. While I saw the film in 2D, many of the scenes likely intended to highlight the 3D actually ended up being more memorable precisely because of how weird they seemed for a group of random young people on a farm. We have a guy who walks to the kitchen on his hands, a scene of juggling, and a scene in which a hippie tries to catch popping popcorn in his mouth, just to name a few. Are we suddenly in the circus? Realistic or not, though, you remember it.

Jason in this film seems to overcome his relative weakness from the previous film. This movie treats him with nothing but awe. While Jason’s face is kept mostly obscured for much of the movie, even after the reveal of his mask, Richard Brooker’s body language exudes confidence. He isn’t invincible. One scene has him jump out of the way of a van, and a few moments after that his arms are trapped in the van window, but even then he seems more inconvenienced than afraid or angry. Most of his kills are straight-forward, bloody, and effective for the audience. You could argue that this persona is too fast, smart, and confident to be the tragic Jason who lost his mother, but I’d say this is definitely a persona people remember.

I’m not entirely sure what Jason is at this point in the series. I’m somewhat glad that Part VI made him explicitly undead, although that leads to great confusion about what he was before if he didn’t die from drowning, hanging, or taking an ax to the face. He certainly doesn’t seem like a traditional human.

This is the first time we get a final girl (Dana Kimmell) who was attacked by Jason prior to the film. Chris had moved away from the area after the attack, and she returns with her boyfriend and other friends in something of a show of bravado to prove to herself that she’s no longer afraid. It’s a motivation that makes her likable and understandable. She also gets points for fighting Jason in an almost exclusively physical manner. She never needs to invoke his mother to throw him off like our previous Final Girl did. Chris is just badass.

The film ends with an inversion of the original: when Chris attempts to escape Jason on the Lake, she’s attacked by the zombified Pamela Vorhees pulling her into the lake. I honestly take this to be a hallucination, since Pamela Vorhees being a zombie isn’t a continuing part of the franchise, although I have no idea what the filmmakers intended when the movie was released. We’re shown Jason apparently still dead at the end, why the cops just left his body there after escorting Chris away I don’t know.

If you’re going to watch only a single Friday the 13^th film, I would say it should be either this one or Freddy vs Jason. The lore really starts here. It’s a fun, stupid, bloody movie. It may not be “good,” but it’s good at being bad.

Friday the 13th Part 2

(Note: I don’t feel like tackling all of this series in one go, so I decided to count the first four as a sub-series. I’ve already tackled Part 1, so here we go.)

The original Friday the 13^th has, at this point, been largely reduced to a trivia question. “Who was the killer?” Friday the 13^th Part 2 has it even worse, having been reduced to the entry in the series that just flat-out didn't happen as far as pop culture is concerned. In our collective unconscious Mrs. Vorhees (Betsy Palmer) was killed, and Jason immediately rose from Crystal Lake in his hockey mask to seek vengeance.

This movie feels a bit like a stumbling block as the series goes. It isn't really bad, but it's a bit weak and uneven. Jason (Warrington Gillette) was an icon that had to be developed bit-by-bit. This film lacks any real sense of awe in regards to Jason. As far as the filmmakers knew, Jason coming out of the lake to attack the final survivor of his mother's rampage at the end of the last film was merely intended to be a one-off jump-scare, and his use was actually mandated by executives who were turned off by the idea of an outright anthology series.

The result is a Jason who's something of a work-in-progress. While the premise that Jason kills out of anger at the death of his mother continues, to one degree or another, for the remainder of the series, this film seems to much more heavily paint Jason mentally as an angry child lashing out. He's still a killing machine, but many scenes make him out to be downright vulnerable, and even show him in physical pain.

The movie starts by tying up loose ends from it's predecessor. Jason, despite having the mentality of a child, is somehow able to track down Alice (Adrienne King), the girl who killed his mother, and kill her in her home. The scene isn't scary by any means, but it does it's job. This is a movie about dead young people, and it opens by killing off a young person. Specifically, it kills off a young person dealing with a deep trauma from the previous movie's rampage, freeing us to follow a new set of young people with no PTSD to work through. We get a death, the audience cheers, and the movie moves on.

I'm not quite sure how a man with Jason's level of deformity was supposed to have walked into the middle of a suburb without comment. We're not shown his face in this scene, so perhaps he wore a mask...which would seem just as strange. However, we do see him walking down the street unmolested, and I supposed this is far less unbelievable than his ability to track down Alice at all while completely cut-off from human civilization, and any source of information that might have aided him in the task. It's not like Jason had money to hire a Private Detective.

We then cut to five years later (I'm uncertain if this means the original film happened four years before it's production in, 1976, or if this film takes place four years after in 1985). The remainder of the film has the same basic setting as the original: a summer camp, but the kids haven't arrived yet, and the counselors are prepping. A man named Paul Holt (John Furey) set up this new Camp on the same lake as two previous massacres, just a few miles away from the original Camp.

Alice's story of being attacked by Jason in the lake has now become something of an urban legend, and Paul uses it as a ghost story around the camp fire. The urban legend status is convenient for avoiding all the logical problems that come from Jason's presence. Is he undead (a status he doesn't officially take on for four more movies)? If so, what revived him? Did he not actually drown? Then why didn't he return to his mother? And how did a small child grow up surviving in the wilderness all this time anyway?

This leads us into the section of the movie in which the characters must do two things to properly merit their deaths: be idiots and have sex. So, a boy named Jeff (Bill Randolph), in an effort to get laid, agrees to stupidly go to the site of Mrs. Vorhees massacre, with a scantily-dressed girl named Sandra (Marta Kober). Before Jason can kill them, however, a local police officer (Jack Marks) finds them and takes them back to Paul. The officer returns to the woods and is dispatched by Jason with a hammer a few scenes later.

Back at Camp, Paul decides to allow the counselors, minus the two runaways, to have a “last night on the town,” isolating the few who remain at the camp. At this point you have the basic idea. The formula of the slasher film was quick to form, apparently even quicker than Jason as a horror icon. So, we have had a series of false scares, interspersed with various sins, and eventually we get to some actual kills. For a period the film continues to follow the formula of both the first film and the opening scene, not showing us Jason.

The reveal might be called sudden, but for someone used to this series, the sight of a large man attacking people isn't really surprising. Paul and Ginny (Amy Steel) return to camp early, and find that everyone left behind is dead. They're attacked by Jason, a burlap sack covering his face, using a spear instead of his later machete.

And so, we have our main characters by process of elimination. The remainder of this film really differs from the series, to the point that anyone being shown the scenes out of context would likely assume it was a rip-off instead of an official entry in the series. Aside from the Burlap sack, Paul and Ginny are able to momentarily overpower Jason on a number of occasions.

The film ends exactly as expected: Jason seems to be dead, his sack is removed, and then a few scenes later he attacks again. Another notable difference from later movies is that Jason seems to have far more hair. It seems that half his head is bald, while the other half appears to have long hair, and even a beard. A bearded Jason is just weird to me.

The film ends more-or-less as the previous film did, with our female protagonist confused and in medical care. Ginny is knocked unconscious during Jason's final attack, and wakes up being loaded into an ambulance, with neither Jason nor Paul visible. Now, however, any ambiguity about Jason's existence has been removed.

This movie is far too often discarded as an entry. I think it's likely we would have continued to see Jason with a wide variety of looks and masks if the following film, which introduced the hockey mask, hadn't been such a break-out success with it's use of 3D. Don't get me wrong, this is a long way from my favorite entry, and Jason isn't nearly as interesting when he's this vulnerable, but this is a film that played with the formula, and eventually led us to the Jason we know and love.