Jason Voorhees & the Black Hearts

 

I read about them wanting to do this documentary several years ago, but didn't think it would happen. I stopped keeping tabs on the news until recently, when I was like "Oh, yeah, what happened to them doing that?" I look it up and, to my surprise, Hearts of Darkness: The Making of the Final Friday was going to be hitting Blu-ray from Synapse Films in a month! I pre-ordered that sucker and seemed to have gotten it a couple of weeks early...

It's unheard of to have a full length documentary devoted to a movie as divisive as Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. I've come to really like the movie over time, but...man, I fucking HATED it when it came out. And I wasn't that big of a fan of the franchise at that point to have been entrenched in my ways and be like "Boo, it was too different." I hadn't been allowed to watch the Friday the 13ths until that point -- only the network airings of them! But, man, did Jason Goes to Hell have a hype machine behind it -- I remember a lot of ads and tie-in comic books and coverage of it. 

Jason Goes to Hell was probably the first Friday the 13th movie I got to rent and see in its full, R-rated glory...and I didn't like it. It had nothing to do with the lack of Jason or Crystal Lake, but if I could choose a way to describe how I felt about the movie at the time, it would be "off-putting." I thought the heart-eating, body-hopping stuff was weird, I didn't like the music, I didn't like the way it was filmed. (There's something about the way a lot of '90s movies were filmed that I just don't particularly like the look of. A lot of them seem strangely TV-movie-like in their look.)

 And then, over time, I really got into the Friday the 13th franchise. I loved the Paramount entries, the earlier ones the most. And then it came time to rewatch Jason Goes to Hell, which I'd only watch bits of every now and then. My video store had the unrated version by this point, which I rented. And holy moly did that make a huge difference in how I viewed the movie.

I'm not a gorehound. I don't say that with any snobbery, it's just not something that's at the top of my list for what makes a good horror movie. I'm a big fan of the Terrifier movies, but their detailed kill scenes aren't what I find most interesting about them. John Carl Buechler was a talented make-up effects artist, whose work sometimes actually made me fill repulsed, but even if they let him keep his gore in The New Blood, that wasn't going to make that movie any less boring. 

So it's not necessarily the fact that the unrated version is gorier, but just that it completes the experience with Jason Goes to Hell. Because what's removed isn't just the gore of a kill, but entire sequences. You can easily edit Jason slashing with a machete, the victim screaming, and cut around the gore of the kill, but still imply what happened to that person. You can't edit around the disgusting, disgusting scene of Josh melting, so it was a sequence they had to lose entirely, but is so memorably fucked up and incredibly done and unique to the movie that it makes the movie lose something, it punches a hole into it.

Not just the unrated version, but listening to the commentary track by director-writer Adam Marcus and writer Dean Lorey greatly helped me appreciate the movie more -- their trying to explain what their objective was by making it so different, conveying what fans they were, and they were also a little self-deprecating when it came to how many new rules they came up with or how their reach might have exceeded their grasp in some areas. Besides being informative, they were funny and entertaining and it's one of the best commentary tracks I've heard. A lot of commentary tracks you'll forget as soon as they're over -- this one helped change my views on the movie. I went from hating the movie to being a fan of it! So a whole documentary about the movie, focused on Marcus? I knew I had to buy it.

The big thing I got out of the documentary was a bigger appreciation for KNB's creativity in how they approached bringing their effects to life. (I had no idea so much puppetry was involved.) It was good to hear from cast members who weren't part of previous bonus features or the Crystal Lake Memories documentary like Steven Williams (The Duke!), Michelle Clunie, Allison Smith and Kathryn Atwood. (Kari Keegan is, disappointingly, still a no-show.)

I think my favorite part of the doc was the featurette Never Say Dead, where documentary editor Eric Beetner interviews friend Adam Marcus and Marcus' wife Debra Sullivan and we learn more of Marcus' rise to Hollywood and see glimpses of his early works.

I would like to have been hipper and to have appreciated Jason Goes to Hell when it was new, but I at least did reach a point of liking it and being happy to see this documentary finally get made.

Music recommendation: A New Beginning by Wolfie's Just Fine

If you're a fan of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning -- and there's not many of us, since that movie's so divisive -- then you should check out this video and song by Canadian band Wolfie's Just Fine. The song, titled after the fifth Jason flick, is about that silly love a young horror fan will feel for an actress in a horror movie, and the devastating effect the inevitable killing of that actress's character has.

And if you were a male of a certain age when you saw it, chances are that Friday Part 5's Debi Sue Voorhees made an impression on you. This video nicely recreates the full death scene of her character, Tina. The kid starring in the video is also pretty good; look how horrified he is by the girl's death and the sight of Jason! I feel like this song and video even trumps The Ramones' "Chain Saw," which was Dee Dee Ramone's ode to Teri McMinn's Pam from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

A big thanks to Siskoid of Siskoid's Blog of Geekery for linking to this song and making me aware of it.

A New Dimension in Friday the 13th Heroines

The final (maybe?) piece of my Horror Heroines line! Since I really like the Friday the 13th series, I wanted a heroine to represent that franchise. For me, it was no question that I wanted a figure of Chris from Part 3.

Part 3's my favorite Jason movie -- I think it's the one that completely delivers on franchise creator Sean Cunningham's "roller coaster thrill ride" credo, with a bunch of fun characters and creative kill scenes. It's also one of the only times I think Jason even comes across as spooky. I always thought that Chris was one of the more memorable protagonists of the series -- certainly when it comes to the earlier installments.

When the movie first introduces us to Chris, she's rounding up her friends for a getaway at her family's farm. She's a little nervous, a little on edge, and it's revealed that she managed to survive an attack in the forest a few years prior, which is something she's kept to herself. She's using this getaway as a way to conquer her fears and reclaim her life in addition to just trying to have fun with her friends.

The movie's not set at Crystal Lake -- it's nearby -- so it's not a case of a bunch of stupid teenagers ignoring folks and going to party at a place they knew very well is bad. Jason's on the run after Part 2 and just happens upon Chris' farm and then gets up to his usual tricks. Chris happens to be on a walk when Jason first hits the farm, and when she returns, knowing something's not right, seeing the aftermath, it opens those old wounds and she's reliving her nightmare. At first, she doesn't realize that the person causing the carnage at the farm is the thing that attacked her in the woods that time, but Jason actually unmasks himself to let her know. And that's one of the spooky things about Jason in this movie -- when he's unmasked, he's constantly grinning, obviously getting a kick out of tormenting Chris.

So while Chris is a little jittery, a little on edge, I never thought she was weak or incapable like a lot of the Friday characters are considered to be -- she gets in quite a few hits to Jason. Look at the damage she does -- she throws a bookcase on him (for that 3D effect), stabs him repeatedly with a knife, smacks him over the head with a humongous log, smacks him in the head with a shovel, hangs him... Who else has done that much? Part 2's Ginny pees herself as she hides from Jason. Part 7's Tina was telekinetic and the best she could do was drown him in a puddle of chocolate milk. Most importantly, Chris chops him in the head with an axe, giving him the infamous split in his hockey mask that the movies continued to depict for most of the following sequels. A traumatized Chris ends the movie in the throes of a breakdown, but I like to think she recovered and is ready to face Jason again if she had to, giving his hockey mask a split on the opposite side to match. Chris' journey in the movie leads it to be a little downbeat; she's trying to finally heal from her past encounter with Jason, only to encounter him all over again, and this time she's led to a breakdown. But, like I said, I like to think she recovers.

People have given actress Dana Kimmell flak for some of her acting choices, but I thought she played the role right. The scene that people like to poke fun at is Chris finally telling her ex about the night she was attacked. While I like the way director Steve Miner decided to have the scene with the attack superimposed over Dana delivering the lines, I think the mistake was having all of that dialogue done in one uninterrupted take. I still don't think it's as bad as people make it out, though -- Chris is opening up about this for the first time. She's nervous, she's traumatized at reliving it -- I think Kimmell does a good job. She, Chris -- and Part 3 in general -- are really underrated.

Ready to watch the movie!

NECA's Tater Sack Jason arrives

There are some of the old Cult Classics, Movie Maniacs and Sideshow figures that I regret not buying when they came out, because a lot of them go for high prices now. NECA's release(s) of Jason from Friday the 13th Part 2 -- the so-called "Tater Sack Jason" aka "Hillbilly Jason" -- is one of the figures I regret not buying. (Especially the box set that had Jason, Pamela and Jason's shrine for Pamela's decapitated head.) So, when I saw that NECA was releasing a retro-styled Part 2 figure, I wanted to buy it, even though I felt like I was just settling for that style of figure after missing out on the others. I'm not a big fan of the retro-styled dolls -- I can understand why people would like them, if that's the style of toys they grew up with. Me? I'm an '80s, Kenner kid, so I get a kick out of Funko's ReAction line more than the cloth dolls.

I had bought the Part 5 Jason/Roy retro-styled figure a few months ago basically because I'm one of the few fans of A New Beginning, and it was the first figure to represent that movie. It looked alright, but it didn't make me want to rush out and buy the other retro-styled horror figures NECA's done. But the newly released Part 2 figure, man...it's pretty nice. It kind of makes sense to have this look of Jason's be in the *clothed* retro style: the layered hillbilly get-up, the tater sack head... It's a nice looking figure, with neat little details like the dirtied sack. I'm very surprised by it and very pleased with the purchase. In my opinion, it definitely looks better and more screen accurate than the Sideshow version of Part 2 Jason and the molded action figure versions previously released by NECA. The look just really pops and comes across nicely in the retro style.

I'm a nerd, so I didn't want to open the packaging, so I'm curious how Jason looks under that hood. I'm assuming he has rooted hair and not molded hair, due to the way the sack is a little misshapen. Even if I opened it, I'd be afraid that I wouldn't get the sack tied on the same way and that would bug the heck out of me.

Jason's look in Part 2 is unique; his ordinary clothes, simple sack over his head and the way his make-up looks -- along with the way Steve Dash portrayed him -- made Part 2's Jason the most human seeming. The long haired Jason, the beard -- he certainly looked like someone who was presumed to have died and raised himself in a forest. (Someone also recently pointed out to me the way Part 2's Jason looks like a scarecrow. That's a neat idea, like Jason is a scarecrow scaring people away from his turf at Crystal Lake.) It's not a look that would have worked out for the entire series -- the popularity of the hockey mask proves that -- but I appreciate this different Jason look.

A neat figure, I recommend it. If you've been on the fence about these retro styled, clothed figures like I've been, I think this one will surprise you.