Okay, I’m now into the third week of my total rundown of all the Jason and Freddy movies as part of The Series Project, I have seen eight Jasons and four Freddys, and I’m officially baffled at the pop culture rivalry that had grown between the Friday the 13th movies and the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies during the 1980s and 1990s. The two respective series are just so different. To be sure, I grew up during the height of the slasher craze, so my elementary school play yards were dominated by endless conversations of Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees facing off in imaginary smackdowns of epic proportions. Indeed, friends of mine and I would actually play as the killers of the various horror franchises around at the time (thanks mostly to Matt Knedelender, who was allowed to watch horror movies), and imagine who would win in a fight. Please don’t ask how 10- and 11-year-olds knew intimate details about the ins and outs of two R-rated horror movie franchises. I’ll just quote Joe Dante in this regard: Cable TV has a lot to answer for.
But Freddy Krueger was a supernatural demon who lived in dreams, and killed the offspring of the people who murdered him years before. Jason, by contrast, was essentially a retarded oaf who killed because… well, he was a little nutty and saw all people as horny camp counselors who let him drown and who killed his mom. Indeed, if there was to be a horror rivalry during the 1980s, I’m surprised it wasn’t between Jason and Michael Myers from the Halloween movies. They have a lot more in common. They’re both crazy thugs. They’re both mute. They both wear creepy masks. They both prefer choking and stabbing, usually with improvised weapons. They both seem capable of being repeatedly stabbed, shot, punched, and electrocuted without feeling any pain. Jason became increasingly rotten over the course of his films, and Michael seemed to retain his boyish complexion, but otherwise, they fulfill a near-identical dramatic function. Freddy, in contrast, could speak, had a definite agenda, and killed through creative and surreal means borne from the dreams of his victims.
I guess timing had everything to do with the ultimate fighters in our playful pop culture cage matches. Halloween came first in 1978, but its first two sequels were lackluster at best. Halloween didn’t bother becoming a proper ‘80s slasher until 1988, when the Friday and Nightmare films had both been chugging along at a powerful and profitable pace for years. Even though John Carpenter’s famed horror flick is easily the best of all slasher films, it’s still oddly considered second-tier when compared to Jason and Freddy movies, who constantly vie for the top spot.
Yes, we’ll eventually have a movie called Freddy vs. Jason, where the two will indeed do battle. But, like Alien vs. Predator or, to a different extent, The Avengers, the film will only serve as a way to visualize all the schoolyard conversations as to who would win in a fight more than it will be a definitive or even necessarily interesting look at the pop culture mashup.
This week, I’ll be looking at the Jason and Freddy films from the late 1980s, and, it could be argued, the films that essentially defined each of the series as they are thought of today. When we think of Jason, our minds don’t typically go to the original Friday the 13th (which Jason wasn’t really in anyway, the gooey finale notwithstanding). I would argue that our minds go to either Part VI or Part VIII. When we think of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, we think of an awesome film, but when we think of Freddy, our minds go to…
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Director: Chuck Russell
Release Date: 27th February, 1987
Body Count: 6
Best Kill: I guess the girl who was given a forceful heroin overdose from Freddy’s finger-syringes.
Number of Breasts: 2
I hesitate to call Dream Warriors the best in the Nightmare series (parts one and seven easily have it beat), but I think it’s certainly the best-loved, and has some of the most striking and disturbing nightmare sequences in the entire series. The most disturbing will be seen in part 4, but I’ll get to that one in a sec. But whenever I talk to fans of the franchise, they typically hold this one the dearest to their hearts. By the time it was released in 1987, special effects technology and budgets had advance to a rather spectacular place, and Dream Warriors is loaded with awesome visuals, and some really disturbing deaths. The nightmares don’t really feel like real nightmares (as in the first film), but they’re still awesome to watch.
What’s more, it was around here that the Nightmare series went from a horror franchise, and skewed more into an inverted action movie franchise. As the title implies, this film is more about being a warrior than it is about being victimized by an unstoppable monster. The notion of outthinking a monster and running away from the iniquities of the previous generation are eschewed in favor gathering in a team, and doing direct battle with a single bad guy. The only difference between these movies and a typical badass action movie is that we’re more focused on the fate and personality of the villain, and the hero (usually a random innocent teenager) is only there to fulfill a plot function of being a hero. Sure, the actresses involved can be quite good, but we don’t want to see the hero. We want to see Freddy.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it certainly makes for a good-looking, energetic, and fun movie. I actually like Dream Warriors a lot. But this new action film dynamic (which will continue through the sixth film) sadly dampens a lot of the scares. These films are bloody and gross, but are only intermittently scary, and rarely leave you feeling disturbed. In a way, by seeing the monster kill many people, and then be defeated, only to be inexplicably resurrected for the next film, we’re allowed to have our cake and eat it to. We can see all the mayhem we want, experience the catharsis of seeing good triumph over evil, but then allow the evil to come back. In terms of plot logic, there is little. In terms of thrills, there are many.
Dream Warriors is good-looking and thrilling and pretty dang good. The setup is as follows: The events of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge have been largely ignored. The only conceit that will remain will be Freddy’s predilection for Nancy’s old house, where he tends to dwell while in the dream world. But his MO remains: he is stalking and killing the children of the people who set him on fire and killed him in the waking world. The children, now in their late teens and early 20s, have been gathered together in a local insane asylum, where they butt heads with uncompassionate shrinks who think their dreams are mere Freudian symbols. Some recognizable actors here. The lead teen, Kristen, is played by Patricia Arquette. One of the orderlies is played by Laurence “Larry” Fishburne. And, most comfortingly, Nancy and her dad are both back in this film, still played by Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon. Robert Englund is still playing the monster with glee.
My guess is that the Nightmare series producers took a look at the cheesiness of the Friday series, as well as other slashers that were coming out at the time, and decided to class up their own franchise in retaliation. As such, the film banks on its visuals more than its kills. Indeed, it starts with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe. So when we see an early kill of Freddy appearing in a sleepwalker’s dream, and yanks out his veins to use his victim as a twisted marionette, we know we’re not in usual slasher territory. There is also a scene wherein a giant slimy Freddy head on a stalk tries to swallow Patricia Arquette alive, and a scene where Freddy’s head and arms burst from the sides and top of a TV set, so they may grab a young lady and force her face into the TV screen. Some pretty spooky and awesome visuals here. There’s even some stop-motion animation, which looks a bit dream-like.
In the first Nightmare, it was essentially Nancy doing most of the investigating, and Nancy who ultimately tried to do active battle with Freddy Krueger. There was a slight feeling of kids vs. adults throughout that film. In Dream Warriors, that dynamic is still in place, but it’s a much less an independence vibe, and much more a punk-rock-rebel vibe. The kids gather to defy adults, but only so they can sink into dreams together in order to do battle and rescue friends, and essentially do comic book stuff. Oh yes, they can meet up in dreams. It turns out Kristen has a talent of bringing others who are sleeping into her dreams, so that they may all share the same dream. Ultimately, she’ll be pulling several people into her dream at once so that they may all face Freddy together. I guess Freddy can’t appear in more than one dream at a time.
This is a mechanical dynamic, but mechanics make for better action, and this film has plenty of good action. There’s even a double climax wherein several of the kids have to do battle with Freddy in the dream world, while John Saxon and Craig Wasson (as a benevolent doctor) have to track down Freddy’s long-dead corpse in the waking world. It turns out when the Elm Street adults killed Freddy, they stored his body in the trunk of a car in a junkyard. Why there? That’s not explained. I guess so people wouldn’t think to find it. It turns out that one of the reasons Freddy was able to survive in dreams was that his body wasn’t ever properly buried.
We also learn a lot about Freddy’s birth in this movie. It turns out his mother was a young nun who was accidentally locked into an insane asylum for an extended period, where she was repeatedly raped (hundreds of times!) by the insane inmates. “The bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” Call me crazy, but I always feel a little crestfallen when an origin is explained to me. I like Freddy better when he was just a child killer in the neighborhood, and wasn’t the result of generations of insanity. If we’re going to show anything of Mr. Krueger’s previous incarnation, I would prefer that we see his process for killing children.
Anyway, the Elm Street kids find they have superpowers in the dream world, and use their magic and super strength to do battle with Freddy. Sadly, during the climax, only Kristen and two other youths survive. Even Nancy and John Saxon die. A pity, as I like Heather Langenkamp, even if she was sporting a now-dated 1980s perm.
We’ll see Kristen again in the next film, but Nancy is gone for the rest of the series. Dokken sings the awesome theme song. Dream Warriors will prove to be so successful, it will set the tone for the next few movies. Although they will also tend to skew a little more strange than this one. Hang tight for Nightmare 4, as it’ll be a sight to see. Before I get there, though, Jason has something to say…
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Director: John Carl Buechler
Release Date: 13th May, 1988
Body Count: 15
Best Kill: A woman is zipped into a sleeping bag and swung bodily into a tree. I also liked the woman who got killed by a party horn, stabbed into her eye.
Number of Breasts: 4, plus one butt, and one full-frontal scene, the series’ second.
So the last time we left Jason, he was chained around the neck, and left to drown at the bottom of Crystal Lake. You may also recall that, in Part VI, Jason was resurrected by a bolt of lightning, making him essentially unstoppable. He was all rotten in the last film, and has now spent a year soaking in a lake, making him all soggy and mossy and slimy. His skin is puffy and waterlogged. He seems to only have one instinct, and that’s to kill people, although I wondered how he would keep killing if his spine eventually fell out. We see it sticking out of his back in this film. His knee is also broken. I accept that he’s an unstoppable killer Frankenstein zombie in a mask, but I worry that he’ll lose a limb or two in the process, and be left a shambling torso. Well, in later films Jason will also become possessed by a demon, as well as blessed by a Wolverine-like healing superpower.
You know what? This series is way, way shabby. Jason’s motives are never properly explained, his mechanics don’t make much sense, and the people he kills have little or no personality. Indeed, in the bulk of the film, the well-known archetypes will be missing. Sure, we’ll have our characters named Paul (I explained last week that many slasher films have characters named Paul), and we’ll have nerds and sluts and other teens who are just askin’ for it, but the Friday movies offer little more than murder set pieces. I feel like I can only grade these films on their mayhem.
How is Jason back? Well, it turns out he is essentially brought back to life by psychic powers. Yup, this film features a character named Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln) who seems to have eerie psychokinetic powers like Carrie. She accidentally killed her father with these powers as a young girl (as seen in flashback), and has now returned to the site of the death to work through her trauma and control her Carrie outbursts; yes, this film features a scene where someone shouts “No!” while something behind them explodes. We all know what that means: Swirling knickknack vortex of death later on. It also turns out that her shrink (played by Terry Kiser, the title character from Weekend at Bernie’s) is not trying to reduce her stress, but hone her psychic powers. Why he wants to do this is never explained, so we’ll chalk up his motivation to the fact that he’s a dickhead.
Anyway, Tina, while looking into Crystal Lake, has a psychic fit, which undoes the chain around Jason’s neck, and, I think, brings him back to life. Well, either he wasn’t dead from the last time, or he was psychic’d back. It’s not entirely clear. Anyway, he climbs out of the lake and goes to work.
It wouldn’t be a Friday film without a huge bevvy of teen horndogs to slaughter, so Tina is given a bunch of neighbors, at the lake for the usual weekend of drug, sex, and debauchery. For a birthday party, it turns out, although it hardly matters. There are few subplots about jealous girlfriends, and sexual conquest, but they are irrelevant. One of the victims is played by scream queen Elizabeth Kaitan from Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. I guess that’s kinda neat. It also wouldn’t be a Friday film without at least one fake-out scare, that is: something to make the audience jump, but will not actually be any real danger to the on-screen characters. In this film, it’s just a cat. The actress on screen actually says “Whew! Just the cat!” Groan.
Eventually we’re down to our heroine (even mom dies, yeesh), and Jason (played by hulking stuntman Kane Hodder, who will play Jason for the next three movies), sans mask (and he looks ripe), confronts her in the very place she accidentally killed her father years before. In a weirdo twist, the dead father, also somehow psychically resurrected, is the one to drag Jason back to his watery grave.
I guess the only question I have is this: Was Jason dead at the bottom of the lake, or was he alive down there, just sort of biding his time? I think he was dead, only to be resurrected by the psychic powers. There seems to be a recurring theme through the later Friday movies of only “improving” Jason’s body when trying to kill it. Trying to kill Jason in Part VI ended up resurrecting him with lightning. I’m guessing he now has an extra supernatural shell of psychic energy keeping him upright at well. In later sequels, we’ll see other improvements as well, most notably in Jason X. But we don’t be discussing that film for another two weeks. I don’t know what this improvement means exactly; perhaps it’s a comment on how trying to destroy evil can only lead to its growth, and perhaps the Friday films are trying to promote a more pragmatic and calming Buddhist view of evil, making Jason the yang to the yin of innocent teenage girls. Okay, maybe that’s a little farfetched.
Jason will hit the big city this week as well. But not before we take a stop with Freddy for his TV series. Remember that? You’re about to.
"Freddy’s Nightmares" (1988 – 1990)
The only real salient memory I have of this short-lived anthology TV series is a scene wherein Freddy (Robert Englund) popped a bowling ball like a balloon. Weird. "Freddy’s Nightmares" was a TV series that ran a surprising 44 episodes back in the late 1980s. It was hosted by Freddy Krueger as a sort of Crypt Keeper-like host who would merely introduce a series of unrelated horror stories that all took place on Elm Street in Springwood, USA, Freddy’s hometown. Freddy himself never got involved in the stories. Occasionally they were supernatural.
This was at a time when anthology horror series were riding high on cable TV, and horror on TV was actually bankable. I kind of miss that time. There are only so many times I can re-watch my "Tales from the Crypt" DVDs.
I don’t have too much experience with "Freddy’s Nightmares," although my local video store (that’d be CineFile Video in Los Angeles) does have a VHS copy, the only extant copy in existence as far as I know, of a few episodes. Even hardcore Freddy fans haven’t seen this elusive and obscure TV show. It’s the kind of thing you might find at the bootleg booth at comic book conventions. I encourage you to track it down. Let me know more about it and mail me videos. I’d love to see it. Wes Craven created the show. I’m sorry I have no other information to report.
Anyway, onto the most bizarre chapter in the Nightmare series.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Director: Renny Harlin
Release Date: 19th August 1988
Body Count: 6
Best Kill: THE ROACH. See below.
Number of Breasts: Two real ones, and two on a gooey puppet homunculus.
Yeah, this film is plenty weird, and I know exactly why: Some of the special effects were conceived by Screaming Mad George. I’ve talked about him in The Series Project before, as he conceived of the creepy killer roaches in Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4, and built He Who Walks Behind the Rows in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. In this film, he constructs a nightmare sequence that not only amounts to the film’s best kill, but also gave me real nightmares when I saw it at age 9. Freddy finds a young woman who has fallen asleep on her workout bench. She dreams of lifting weights. He grabs her barbell and pushes it into her neck. She pushes back, which casus her elbow skin to rip open, forcing giant cockroach legs to grow out. With giant roach arms, the woman flees the room, only to find herself in an adjoining room with a gooey floor and a super-creepy giant roach stuck to the floor. She falls into the goo. The sticky goo pulls her face skin off, revealing a roach head underneath. She’s a giant roach. Freddy, it is revealed, is now holding an old fashioned Roach Motel, which he squeezes with his hand, killing his victim. Excuse me while I simultaneously scream and vomit.
Aside from bizarre dream sequences like that one, though, The Dream Master is oddly constructed, and contains some creepy but seemingly random visuals. For instance, when the main characters are walking down a school hallway (in the waking world, mind you), glowing red cuts appear spontaneously in the wall behind them, without them noticing. No one seems to notice. Weird. This is in the waking world. Someone would have seen them, right? There’s also a scene wherein someone walks past a window, as it explodes in a hail of glass. Why did it explode? No reason. Also there’s a scene where a dog pees fire. Also Robert Englund appears as a female nurse in one scene. The Dream Master is pretty bonkers.
The high school exteriors for this film were shot at Venice High School in Venice, CA. My own alma mater. It’s also where Grease and American History X were shot.
So the plot of the film is thus: Kristen and the two other youths who survived the events of the last film are still trying to get over their trauma. The boys are played by the same actors from the last film (Rodney Eastman and Ken Sagoes), but Patricia Arquette has been replaced by Tuesday Knight (her real name), a pop star and founder of a vintage clothing line. Kristen has found that she’s still having Freddy nightmares, which means, essentially, that Freddy (still Robert Englund) is still around. This resurrection of Freddy means that he cannot really be killed, so long as someone has a dream of him somewhere. This notion of his survival through memory and dream will be exploited (to a rather impressive degree) in the seventh and eighth films.
Another odd detail: The teens in this movie spend most of their time at malt shops and drive-ins, and many dress like 1950s high school kids. The Dream Master does take place in the present, right?
Kristen still has her superpower of summoning people into her dreams, but she’ll find that this is a dangerous practice, as it puts people in Freddy’s path. Hence, when Kristen summons the innocent Alice (Lisa Wilcox) into her dreams, Alice is suddenly on Freddy’s radar, and he can stalk her dreams as well. Freddy’s MO changes in this film. At first, he was getting a kind of supernatural revenge on his killers by killing their kids through lethal dreams. Now, it seems he has been eating the souls of his victims, and he gets stronger the more souls he eats. Now Freddy just wants power. This, I think, makes him less interesting. Also, over the course of the last film and this one, Freddy has become less scary, transforming into a wisecracking jokester who says “funny” things before he kills you. In one scene in The Dream Master, he even dons a pair of sunglasses before committing murder. Yes, the filmmakers actually put Freddy in shades. At least he didn’t tip them first.
So, yeah, Freddy kills of the last three of the Elm Street teens, completing his revenge. Only now, he can bug Alice and her peers. Alice can also drag people into her dreams the way Kristen could, leading to the terrifying cockroach nightmare and a bizarre ninja-themed nightmare. Eventually, Alice must take up the reigns and do battle with Freddy herself. The cool thing about Freddy’s supervillain weaknesses is that they can be changed depending on what gives the lead character strength. So Freddy can be undone by a childhood mantra that Alice learned as a girl. Neat. When Freddy dies in this film, the souls he ate are released into heaven.
When Freddy dies, though, he only dies in a dream. So one can never be sure of he’s dead. I don’t recall how he comes back for The Dream Child (which I’ll get to next week), but return he shall.
One notable cameo appearance: One of the teenage boys has a sexual fantasy about a nude pinup girl who is trapped in his waterbed. The nude pinup girl is played by none other than Hope Marie Carlton, who played Taryn in several of the L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies movies!
If you’re looking to be scared, The Dream Master may not do so well on its own. But if you’re looking to give yourself actual nightmares, eating a bunch of candy and then collapsing into bed after watching it would certainly do the trick.
Hot time. Summer in the city. Next up, Jason returns, this time to go to take Manhattan. But before, why don’t we talk about a Jason-free TV series…
"Friday the 13th: The Series" (1987 – 1990)
This rather good little series has less to do with its namesake than "Freddy’s Nightmares." Jason Voorhees is nowhere to be seen, and the series focuses instead on a pair of investigators (Louise Robey and John D. LeMay) as they tracked down a series of cursed objects in order to store them in the basement of their antique store, away from people who would use their dark magic for evil.
The pattern was pretty simple on the show. A new character would find some sort of cursed bauble (a camera, a wheelchair, a magic gem, etc.), and the bauble would imbue them with special powers, or grant their greatest wishes, provided the bauble had a blood sacrifice. The main character of each episode would become increasingly greedy, and kill several people before the protagonists of the series would step in and stop them. Although sometimes the bad guys would be undone by their own greed.
While it got pretty predictable, it was a good show, and I liked the spookiness of it. It’s a neat idea that allowed for a mixture of odd horror scenarios without having to stay on the same characters all the time. Some Friday fans might complain that this show simply took the name of the film franchise and did what they wanted with it. This is true, of course. But I’d rather watch the show we got than a show about the continuing adventures of Jason Voorhees. Jason is, as I have said in the past, not a terribly complex character, so any regular TV series to involve him would not have been terribly interesting. Unless it was a show about Jason learning to talk. Or perhaps a cop who regularly consults Jason as to where other supernatural killers are hiding out or something. But look what I just did. I made up my own series again.
This series, unlike "Freddy’s Nightmares," was rather popular, and lasted for 70 episodes. Reruns sometimes show up on the Sci-Fi Channel. You can get them on DVD.
But onto the big city…
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Director: Rob Hedden
Release Date: 28th July, 1989
Body Count: 15, plus one accidental death
Best Kill: A tossup. Either the guy who had his head punched clean off, or the girl who was beaten to death by her own Flying V guitar.
Number of Breasts: Only one. How sad.
With a title like that, one would expect the bulk of the film to be Jason (still Kane Hodder) simply let loose in the streets of mid-town, killing people by the dozens. Sadly, the bulk of the film’s action will take place on a yacht sailing away from Crystal Lake to Manhattan. My guess, then, is that Crystal Lake is somewhere just off the Hudson River in the very northern tip of New Jersey. Although it could also be on the Raritan River, or even the Hackensack River. The river is never named. All we know is that it goes from northern NJ to NYC.
But, yeah, there are a few scenes of Jason loose in New York City, but he’s oddly obsessed on particular victims, and not the ample fleshy humanity standing around him in droves. There’s a scene of Jason on a subway, and he doesn’t think to decapitate a few strangers while pursuing his prey. So disappointing. Also, did I mention that here is one (1) breast in this film? What happened to the days of The Final Chapter, where we got 19 breasts for our efforts? Sigh. I mentioned last week also that many of these films seem to feature ancillary members of Rockapella. This film features a Scott Leonard-looking fellow named Gordon Currie, who was the male lead in Puppet Master 4 and Puppet Master 5.
So how is Jason back? Well, like at the end of Part VI, Jason is still chained up under the surface of Crystal Lake. He has now spent two years underwater, and he’s looking mighty chummy. I guess there are no fish to eat him in the lake. If a fish were to eat of Jason’s flesh, would it gain immortality as well? Hmm… Getting ideas for a killer fish franchise. Anyway, when a yacht passes by, it snags Jason’s body with its anchor, and drags him across an underwater power line, shocking him back to life. I still hold that he’s also being held together by a psychic shell. Anyway, Jason climbs on board the ship, and the rest is history.
On the ship are a graduating group of high school seniors who are sailing to Manhattan as part of a senior trip. Our leading lady is Suzi (Tiffany Paulson) who is a star student, and who is trying to avoid the evil gaze of her teacher, Mr. McCulloch. McCulloch, by the way, is played by Peter Mark Richman from "Battlestar Galactica," "Dynasty," and countless other TV shows. You’ll likely recognize him. Suzi, like Tina from the last film, seems to have some sort of psychic powers, only in this film they manifest themselves as visions of the 12-year-old Jason drowning. Jason, slimier than ever, kills pretty arbitrarily, by harpoon, axe, and his bare hands. He also goes all Pete Townsend, beating a girl to death with a guitar, which is pretty damn cool.
Letsee, eventually a few survivors (led by Suzi) do make it to Manhattan. Keep in mind, though, that this is pre-Giuliani Manhattan, so it’s still filthy and gross and crime is at a comically high level. Indeed, soon after they land, Suzi is kidnapped by a pair of muggers who shoot her up with heroin and attempt to rape her. "I ♥ New York." But, as I said, when Jason also washes up on the Manhattan shores, focused on killing our heroes. I suppose this is the first time we’ve seen Jason in a mildly urban setting (all the previous films took place in the woods), so I guess we never assumed how he felt about crowds. I always assumed he would hack and slash is way through a crowd. Turns out he has a puritan work ethic and will not deviate from the task at hand. If Suzi is next, Suzi is next. The millions of other potential victims will just have to wait. Jason does, however, scare off a group of punks by lifting his mask. That’s gotta be gruesome.
Jason is eventually done in by a sea of toxic chemicals unleashed in the filthy sewers of New York. Most of the time, when someone is doused with toxic chemicals, it gives them superpowers (see: Daredevil, Batman, et al), but it actually melts Jason. Oddly, when Jason dies in this film, he is transformed back into a real boy, appearing as his 12-year-old self. Maybe Jason was a ghost this whole time. Like I said, the Friday movies are shabby and unclear. I guess Jason looks cool and spooky, especially when covered in lake slime, but he’s a poorly defined monster.
A note: This is the first and only film in the Friday series that was not scored by Harry Manfredini. Manfredini’s Psycho-like music for the previous seven films carries a lot of the scary punch, and he is missed here. He’ll be back, but is absence is felt.
And that’s where we’ll leave it for this week, kiddos. We know our monsters will be back, but be sure to join us next week for both their final chapters. Well, sort of. In the early 1990s, both franchises decided to call it quits, and they both declared themselves officially over, each turning in some final "Final Chapters." Be sure to join me for my look at the respective deaths of these two horror icons, and ponder their inevitable returns. Freddy will have three chapters next week, and Jason will have only one. In two weeks’ time, we’ll take a look at Jason’s odd sci-fi return, the mythic crossover movie, and each franchise’s ill-advised remake.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
