Humor in a Friday the 13th movie is a very delicate thing. It may be present, but it may not be overt. You must search for it; it may not hit you over the head. In Tom McLoughlin's contribution to the Friday the 13th series, Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives, McLoughlin has a title sequence featuring an iris shot following Jason. Jason turns around and slashes it, making it turn red. It's an obvious parody of the James Bond intros, but for some reason I had decided to let it slide. When Jason attacks some paintball players who, after being tagged with a paintball, are forced to wear bandanas saying that they are "Dead,” I did not let it slide. That sort of obviousness is really inexcusable. Then there is the case of a redneck gravedigger looking at the dug up grave of Jason and saying, "Some people have a funny idea of entertainment.” This attempt to implicate the audience is symptomatic of McLoughlin's superiority towards Friday the 13th films and the audience for Friday the 13th films.

He has one character say, " I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly.” McLoughlin is attacking his audience in that the girl thinks that she is in a Jason movie, as her repeated viewings of them has distanced her from the reality of violence. The line of course does not suggest that they have informed her about weirdoes wearing masks, as much as they have taught her to write them off as the weirdoes wearing masks that she sees in the movies. It also, I think, puts a blow against the often accused derivative nature of these films that has been assigned by snoozing critics of the Friday the 13th series. Essentially all of these horror movies have an unfriendly weirdo in a mask. Roger Ebert has even given a derisive name to their genre. McLoughlin is not arguing with these critics, he is conceding to them.

Friday the 13th: Part VI has however been very well received for its sense of humor by the very people who you think would be insulted by it, Friday the 13th fans! Many feel that it is one of the best films of the series. Because I think that a lot of the people who are reading this like Friday the 13th films and like Part VI in particular, and so I don't offend them, I'll assume that they all have their sanity intact and we'll politely agree to disagree. But man, this movie made me upset. Tom McLoughlin's smarminess is an insult. Friday the 13th: Part 3 and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning had a goofy sense of humor too, but they made you work for it a little and they never thought they were really better than the material. "Wakka wakka" disco music is great. What McLoughlin does in this movie is not.

The film does make an attempt to get back to the roots of the original Friday the 13th film. An early draft included scenes with Jason's father. This is the first film in the series to include camp counselors since Friday the 13th: Part 2. McLoughlin even has a sort of recap of the theory of Jason as a misunderstood child forwarded in Friday the 13th: Part 2. Unfortunately, the actress in the film telling the story looks like she can barely contain her laughter. In Part 2 it was straightly melodramatic. The right tone. These connections are largely superficial. Even though this is the return of Jason from The Final Chapter, as he was not present in A New Beginning, I feel that A New Beginning did a far better job at connecting to the roots of the Friday the 13th films. McLoughlin creates these connections, I fear, to make fun of them.

There are some thematic elements of the Friday the 13th series that McLoughlin has touched on, but there are major portions that he is unable to grasp. He has a little girl falling asleep while reading Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit.” In a sense, it's essentially just a visual gag, unnecessarily pointing out the inescapable fate of her mortality. There is "no exit.” She is doomed. I know that it's funnier to have a child reading it, but since she doesn't die the joke doesn't have much power. Simply as a visual joke, I may have liked it a little more if the film wasn't constantly trying to call attention to its own sense of self-awareness. If we begin to consider "No Exit" as a play and how it applies to Friday the 13th we realize that this girl may be one of Jason's creators. The characters in the Friday the 13th films are essentially living the sort of Hell in “No Exit.” They, of course, die for the simple reason that they do not have lives that are worth living. That is inarguably how and why they have been constructed. Life in a Friday the 13th film is basically waiting. Jason and his friends, the freaks, geeks and Tommy Jarvises, are in tune with this concept and have learned to loathe the characters in a Friday the 13th film. The thought that "Hell is other people" is a remarkably on-target assessment in the philosophy of slasher cinema. Although I really do wish that he would have done it with a little more subtlety, like when Crispin Glover's identity was summed up as being a "dead fuck" in The Final Friday, McLoughlin is accurate in labeling his victims with bandannas that say "dead". They are dead, they haven't any other purpose but to die.

Where I feel that McLoughlin has failed severely though is in his use of the Tommy Jarvis character. Jarvis was our connection to Jason. In The Final Friday and A New Beginning, the film had implied that he would "turn into" Jason. Jarvis was a character with demons and who was holding some heavy things. He was complex, at least relative to the characters in a Friday the 13th movie. The case is that he is sort of like the Dennis Quaid character in Far From Heaven. He is surrounded by all of this plasticity where everyone seems to be at peace, but he is unable to join them. He feels sort of jealous and angry with this. In McLoughlin's film he becomes a hero. While he resurrects Jason in his attempt to actually cremate him, he is also responsible for helping to take Jason down. The local sheriff has a beef with Jarvis. He thinks that he is crazy, and when the Jason murders happen, suspects that he has committed them. The only person who believes Jarvis' side is the sheriff's daughter! This is rather inexcusable. In giving Jarvis a love interest, he becomes associated with the victim and not the killer. When we begin to fear for Tommy Jarvis; the connection of him with the killer is destroyed. This is an essential aspect of the Friday the 13th experience.

It is important to note the teenagers in these movies are not killed after sex because sex is immoral. Nor is it exactly because sex is a sign of emotional maturity that is being rejected by the childlike Jason or the virgin who has summoned him out of his/her subconscious. I'm taking the position of your father now, but using sex as evidence of maturity is the very definition of an immature view towards sex. Indeed, teenagers and certain divorced sexually promiscuous older women I know have forwarded this philosophy with great gusto. And there you go. While I generally squirm at the notion of masculinity (and adulthood) being defined through sexual experience, this idea still gets a good portion of what is going on in the slasher film.

The real reason that Jason kills people who have sex, and commits those "rapes by steel" that I have talked about in previous reviews, is because as a manifestation from the subconscious of the virgin, he represents a frustration with the comparative lack of guilt of his victims. They haven't really any hang-ups about sex, and their freedom from sexual guilt is what is so frustrating. That is what enrages the Jason character to kill. It is useless and meaningless to oppress morality onto an immoral person. Morality is essentially a very private and personal thing, and essentially we really shouldn't care about the choices that others make. It is not logical to incarcerate a murderer because what he did was immoral, as much as because with him in prison it is safer for us to live our lives. And so the real problem is in seeing these people doing what they wilt. You see this and ask yourself, "Why am I cursed with inhibition, shame and fear?" The only thing you have is a fear for the consequences.

I suppose that it is not necessarily about sex. Just a handful of the characters in the Friday the 13th films are worried about being killed by Jason himself, whereas everyone else in the films are not, until of course it is far too late. Fear and shame are more or less interchangeable in this sense. What is ideal for Jason and the character that creates him is to become disaffected from everything that makes them so miserable. The universe in the Friday the 13th films is essentially atheist. There is no promise or suggestion of spiritual rapture. There is a sort of hollow loneliness; it's stylistically minimalist. The ephemeral pleasures of all that life or existence has to offer. The denial of this fact through Jason's jealousy is what gives the series such a great poignancy.

McLoughlin understands that these characters are, what we would say in the perspective of an emotionally haunted character, shallow. I have read that they are more complexly written than previous entries, but no. They are thankfully as nonwritten as they ever were. McLoughlin lets his characters have sex, party and laugh. They don't smoke pot as I think they should, as the weed is symbolic for a relaxed pleasure-seeking existence and casual immaturity. But that is excusable. In portraying the victims, McLoughlin is pretty respectful of Friday the 13th tradition. But the problem is that there is nobody in the film that feels that guilt or frustration. Tommy Jarvis' demons have evaporated away. He warns people about Jason, but unlike previous protagonists in the Friday the 13th films, he easily relates to his love interest. Jason does not have any real motivation for killing people now. He seems to exist independent of anyone's subconscious.

I suppose you could argue that the film is about how Tommy battles Jason as he no longer has any use for him now. It is about Tommy's battle of industry over inferiority as we learned from Erik Erikson. The problem with that is two-fold. The first is that McLoughlin makes Tommy into as shallow a character as the rest of the characters. Tommy doesn't have the chops for that kind of psychological complexity. The second is I think that healthy may be bad. Part of us really doesn't want us to see Tommy conquer his demons because his demons are what sets him apart from the victims. This is the last film in the series to use Tommy Jarvis, I believe. Friday the 13th: Part VII: The New Blood seems to have forgotten all about him. I guess that Jason moved on. It's a pity though that he couldn't have followed that next logical step and executed Tommy.

The film does not have any nudity in it, and its only sex scene is clearly played for laughs. There is no eroticism in the film. Accordingly, the murders are not rapes by steel, defined as a murder with a piercing weapon, or with a weapon used in a piercing manner. For example, a spear through the torso, an ice pick through the skull, or a machete pushing up through the neck. McLoughlin has de-sexualized the violence, sanitizing the Friday the 13th experience as well as further destroying the thematic connection with his sexually jealous protagonist.

When Jason is resurrected through lightning, McLoughlin shows us a close-up of his eye. This is a reference to Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein,” the novel, not any of the films. The title character of Frankenstein narrates much of it, and describes seeing an eye open as being the horrifying evidence of the monster coming to life. If you think about this reference in terms of Tommy bringing Jason to life (he stabs him with an iron pole to make sure he is dead, the pole acts as a lightning rod bringing him life), it is certainly quite fascinating. McLoughlin unfortunately seems to use this image more for its satirical impact however. In another movie it would have meaning; here it is yet another joke.

McLoughlin seems to regard Jason as a force of nature reclaiming the woods from these intruders. He has one of the teens talk some nonsense about Indians and how they built traps to aid their quest for obtaining new women. Some of Jason's early victims are corporate executives playing paintball in the woods. Through his destruction of these assholes, Jason is essentially strengthening the boundaries of the supernatural world. While I think that it is appropriate to view Jason as a monster and a supernatural entity, McLoughlin's apparent reading is awfully primary; and much of this idea is encompassed in the reading of Jason as the creation from the subconscious to deal with jealousy.

I have heard a few horror fans say that this isn't just a good Friday the 13th movie, it is a good movie period. If we view it outside of the context of the Friday the 13th films, it's really a little thin. As a horror/comedy it doesn't quite match up with the slasher version of Jack Frost (which featured a rape scene using a carrot nose in a shower, but earns its stripes in a scene shortly before that where two teenagers race to strip their layers of clothes off. It’s a small, nice moment), probably from what I can remember of it Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and certainly not with Dr. Giggles, which for all its humor and goofiness was often actually scary and respected the conventions of the genre (incidentally, I saw and reviewed Dr. Giggles the day after I lost my virginity). It's the sort of nuttiness that seems to aim to distract rather than to help form its own sense of identity.

The film looks professional in the same way that Jack Frost and Dr. Giggles did. I do not feel that this is a good thing. Watching the film I found myself sincerely missing the original film’s grainy texture. It had the soul and voice of an exploitation film, a minimalism that was highly appropriate for the material. This sort of high-definition gloss was present in A New Beginning and it is confirming my fears that the latter half of the Friday the 13th decalog has lost the aesthetic that made the original so pleasurable.

The film has a soundtrack of songs by Alice Cooper. The one played over the end credits is called "The Man Behind the Mask.” It is not a very good song. There doesn't seem to be very much memorable about the tune, and the lyrics sound rambling and forced. It reminded me of the Todd Solondoz song at the end of Fear, Anxiety & Depression: "A Neat Kind of Guy." Solondoz could probably claim to be making fun of New Wave music and self-indulgent masturbation, especially when considering the content of Fear, Anxiety & Depression. I'm not sure that McLoughlin and Cooper could angle for irony, no matter how hard they want to.

All the same, part of me desperately wants to go on Kazaa and download the song to burn on a CD simply because it's a ROCK SONG ABOUT JASON! I suppose that my feelings for Friday the 13th: Part VI are honestly a little like that. It's difficult for me to really dislike a Friday the 13th film. I'm a fan and my affection goes deep. But what is going on in this film really isn't cool, and it upsets me that people are going on about how this is what a Friday the 13th film should be like. I hope that the subsequent filmmakers will not follow McLoughlin's lead and get back to the basics. My hopes really could not be higher for the next installment.

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