Friday the 13th Countdown: The New Beginning

So it's come to this.

2015 is a very special year for Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th franchise.  For starters, we've had three of the actual days pop up on the calendar - and the upcoming one is always extra special, because a November Friday the 13th means a continuation of the Halloween horror season.  And another excuse for fans and, yes, non-fans to see more of these films on TV.  More importantly, the series turns 35 years old and we've got another movie coming up on the horizon.  Of course, said movie is still owned and operated by Michael Bay, the man who has made seemingly a career goal out of anally raping pretty much the entirety of my childhood.  This guy's grubby mitts have soiled Leatherface, Jason, Freddy, the Ninja Turtles...all that's left is a Michael Bay-produced version of Indiana Jones and we're all set.  But I digress.

Kids, this really is an awesome series, isn't it?  The films are textbook examples of "less is more" played out to perfection, all based around one simple moral: be a good person or else bad things will happen to you.  Add that up with one of the two or three most badass villains of modern cinema and some sympathetic victim characters and you've got the makings for a series that can last for damn near four decades.  But it's the series' quirks that truly make the movies unforgettable, and that's what I've looked at all throughout the year here on the ol' blog.  I've counted down the best expendable victim characters, the hottest camp counselors, the most eye-catching trailers, the most suspenseful locales, the most ass-kicking Final Girls, and the freakiest "Jason without a mask" looks. 

All of that has led us to the following.  I'm ranking the entire series, starting with the worst and finishing with what I consider to be the greatest slasher movie ever made.  While the last part of that sentence is true...don't think of this as any sort of authoritative, nuanced list.  Not that you would, anyway, but I'm not ranking these movies by a strict storytelling method.  If that were the case, the original movie would win this in a landslide.  These are just the movies that I have the most fun with, and that's what the F13 series is all about.

With that, let's count this bitch down.

12.  Jason X (2002)

Friday the 13th movies come in all types of shapes, sizes and themes.  In fact, that's part of what makes them so awesome - their ability to morph and change and still call themselves Friday the 13th.  But this movie...yeah, it's not so good.  It's "Jason in Space," and this reporter's opinion is that it set out to parody itself in the most obnoxious possible way.  And while the kills are pretty memorable and visceral, the characters are all totally wasted.  It's like if they took Michael Myers, sent him to a nuclear wasteland and had him do the hokey-pokey - yeah, this movie is out there. 

11.  Friday the 13th (2009)

The aforementioned Michael Bay remake certainly wasn't the out-and-out disaster that his versions of Leatherface and Freddy Krueger were.  It had some things going for it, including a decent cast, an awesome first act, and Jason's newfound ability to use traps.  But Michael Bay has one all-encompassing power that is a running theme throughout all of his movies: sucking the soul right out of everything, and this one isn't any different.  The characters are entirely forgettable as is the rest of the movie, and the result was a flick that was fun to watch in theaters but one I haven't wanted to revisit since.

10.  Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

For many years, this movie was on the bottom of my list.  Now that I've seen it a few more times on AMC FearFest, I've come to appreciate some of its more underrated charms.  For starters, I really dig the two main characters; the dude's journey to get back with his wife is actually kind of emotional.  I also really like Creighton Duke, with Steven "Mr. X" Williams bringing all of his badass charm to the role of the bounty hunter trying to put Jason Voorhees six feet under for good.  It's just a shame that those strengths are buried behind a wall of body-soul-swapping mayhem, because it has its moments.

9.  Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

What we have right here is one of the most fascinating horror movies of all time.  By this point, it had been three flicks with Jason Voorhees as the main villain.  The previous movie had effectively killed him off, and this was the producers' attempt to give the series a mini-reboot at its halfway point and give us a new killer in the former Jason slayer, Tommy Jarvis.  It was a sound enough idea on paper, but the execution is quite simply amazing.  And I mean that in both the best and worst possible ways.  This is an infamous movie within the Friday fan community, mainly due to its HUGE body count (it's 22) and its repeated "introduce characters and summarily kill them off five minutes later" style.  This flick is loads of fun to watch, but it's desired effect of making the audience want to hate Tommy Jarvis was not achieved.

8.  Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Writer/director Rob Hedden hears your complaints, and he agrees.  For a movie that bills itself as "Jason Takes Manhattan," a movie that decided to take Jason Voorhees out of his very familiar forest location and unleash him on the Big Apple, it sure doesn't spend much time there.  The final thirty minutes or so of the movie, to be precise.  But the movie DID succeed in freshening up the now more-than-familiar Friday formula as the '80s came to a close, giving us some pretty decent kills and scares aboard a cruise ship for the first two acts along with some decent characters and Kelly Hu in one of her early film roles.  And it's got a scene where Jason punches a dude's head off.  That alone accounts for something like 80 Fonzie cool points, but when you throw in the amazing "decapi-camera" that follows the head downward, it's a real winner.

7.  Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

a.k.a. Friday the 13th Part It's Comin' Right at Ya, since this was the one that was originally filmed and released in glorious 3D.  The fact that a goddamn Friday the 13th movie was the highest-grossing of the early '80s 3D revival pictures fills my heart with gladness.  While this movie has its flaws, it is nonetheless a pretty iconic movie within the series' framework, as it gave us the introduction of the familiar hockey mask and a Final Girl sequence that, while it wasn't QUITE as strong as the one that preceded it, ranks respectably as one of the series' best.  It also has Dana Kimmell playing a very interesting mentally unhinged heroine, an interesting counterpart to the trope of the time.  But it just treads too much into dopey territory due to the 3D gimmick far too often for me to rank it higher.  Yo-yos, anyone?

6.  Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

This movie has tons of nostalgic and emotional value for yours truly.  It was the first movie in the series that I saw way back in 1991 thanks to my older brother, and all these years later, I still remember that experience watching it in my parents' basement.  Director John Carl Buechler knew that he had a tall task when initial negotiations to do a movie where Jason took on Freddy Krueger fell through.  What we got was Jason vs. Carrie, but when it comes to that concept, the writers and Buechler really did a smash-up job.  This was Kane Hodder's first of four go-rounds under the hockey mask, and his presence and emotion when portraying a silent film villain was really something to behold.  I also love Jason's LOOK here, as the makeup crew took every bit of battle damage that had been done to him up to this point and made it stand out.

5.  Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

After more than a decade in development hell, horror fans were simply dying to see these two stalwarts of the slasher genre meet up on the big screen.  Director Ronny Yu didn't disappoint, as this was just a damn fun time in theaters - and it even stands up to home viewings pretty damn well, combining the mythologies of the two characters and blending them together seamlessly.  Picky viewers might point out that this is more of a Nightmare on Elm Street movie than an F13 flick, but it should be pointed out that Jason racks up a huge body count in this one and does the dirty work of spreading the word about Freddy Krueger, thus bringing him back to life.  The final showdown itself was also everything that myself and horror fans everywhere had asked for.  The ONLY thing it was missing was Kane Hodder, as everything else was spot-on.

4.  Friday the 13th (1980)

The one that started it all.  At the time that Sean Cunningham took an ad out in Variety promising the most terrifying movie ever made, no one thought that a film shot for half a million dollars and shot at a New Jersey summer camp would do anything but fly in and out of theaters.  Frank Mancuso thought different, releasing this primal, violent horror piece as a big-time summer movie.  And it exploded right out of the gate.  For good reason, because this is still a very effective piece of horror cinema.  Each one of the characters is a recognizable archetype that the teens watching in theaters could readily identify with, one of several things that screnwriter Victor Miller turned on its head as the increasingly violent body count piles up.  By my tally, one of the two or three most influential horror movies ever made.

3.  Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

After the misfire that was A New Beginning, the powers-that-be behind the franchise knew that they had to bring the big guy back with a vengeance.  Jason Lives did just that and more, as this is just one of the most fun motion pictures of all time.  It starts off with an absolute bang, as Tommy Jarvis (retconned out of going all villainous batshit crazy in the finale of the last one) inadvertently brings the dead body of Jason back to life.  From here ensues one of the earliest meta-humor laden horror movies out there, as writer-director Tom McLoughlin pokes fun at the conventions of the series without ever veering into the snobby or mean-spirited.  All the while, this is also a very cool, effective horror movie with a great many classic scenes, the best of which being Darcy DeMoss and her clueless boyfriend biting it.  Ouch.

2.  Friday the 13th Part II (1981)

The first movie to feature Jason Voorhees is still an absolute classic of '80s horror that has more than stood the test of time.  Kicking off with a creepy opening bit ("The itsy bitsy spider...") and never looking back, everything about this movie fires on all cylinders.  It's darker and more intense than the first movie, creating an even more foreboding sense of total isolation than that one did as this group of counselors seem WAY off the beaten path.  Amy Steele as Ginny Field is simply one of the best Final Girls that the horror genre has ever seen - she's a girl next door, but she's also got an intelligence and inner toughness that makes her very endearing.  As for Jason himself, yeah, he looks a LOT different in this one, but that one eye darting around underneath the sack mask in the finale is some truly unnerving stuff.

Drumroll...

1.  Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

You know, the real fascinating thing to me about The Final Chapter is how seemingly NO ONE showed it on basic cable back in the day.  As such, this was one of the last movies in the original 8 that I saw.  It lived up to the hype that it had built up on the internet, as this is a movie where the combination of quirky characters, brutal kills and a stunning final showdown adds up to just kickass awesome stuff.  Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, Judie Aronson, the dancing scene, the gory murder set pieces...folks, if this really had been the way that Jason Voorhees went out, they couldn't have asked for a better sendoff.  As it is, this WAS the end of the first (read: Human) version of Jason Voorhees, with Feldman's child makeup prodigy making an unlikely but fascinating foil for the machete-wielding maniac.  A must-see, and an A+ horror epic.

It's over?  It's really, truly over?  Thus concludes the 2015 Friday the 13th countdown of countdowns, but as the years tick by and that unlucky day rolls up on the calendar, just ignore that familiar "Ki ki ki ma ma ma" reverberating throughout the background.  It's probably just your soundbar, anyway.