Ranking
the Friday the 13th Movies: Worst to Best.
12.
Friday
the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985): This movie totally bungles the
second movement of the Tommy Jarvis trilogy (IV, V, VI), and gives us not a
reappearance by Jason, but rather a Jason impostor. That sounds like it could be a reasonable
narrative if handled correctly, but it is never explained how the impostor
manages his Jason-like survival rate. He gets hit by a bull-dozer, and then
stands back-up to continue fighting. How
this possible for a mere mortal man? A
sub-standard, really terribly movie in the canon.
11. Friday
the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989): So, Toronto
substitutes for Manhattan here, and Jason only reaches it in the last act…for a
few minutes. Adding an insult to that injury, the movie seems to `believe that
New York City utility companies flush toxic waste through the sewers every
night. At the film’s conclusion, Jason
gets caught in the toxic flood and is reverted to the form of a child. WTF? The death scenes are ludicrous, including
one set in a disco aboard a cruise ship, where a female victim dies, literally,
because she has no attention span. If she just kept her eyes on Jason, she
might have survived. Instead, she can’t manage that feat, and he just appears
in front of her and kills her.
10.
Jason
Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993): The fun of a Friday
the 13th movie is seeing a big, hulking slasher in a hockey
mask hack people up with a machete. So
what does this movie do? It eliminates Jason’s body and turns the slasher into
a body-hopping ghoul. What is this, The
Hidden 2? And then there’s some serious
and lame retconning of the overall story. For example: the Voorhees house. Jason and his mom had a house that everybody
knew about? That still exists? That is well-furnished? That has a mail box?
Then why was Jason living in a shack in the woods in Friday the 13th Part
II?
9. Freddy
vs. Jason (2003). Jason is Freddy’s patsy for the first part of this
film, and then reveals, oddly, that his mortal fear (and Kryptonite, essentially…)
is water. This revelation occurs even
though we have seen in Jason in functioning ably in water attacking people -- without
fear -- in virtually every Friday the 13th movie
since 1980. Whatever.
8.
Friday
the 13th Part III in 3-D (1982): Folks my age have a lot of
nostalgia for this particular movie, but it doesn’t hold up well outside that
context. The stoner characters (who look like Cheech and Chong) are
cringe-inducing, and the 3-D effects (with everything flying at the screen)
look low-rent and ridiculous. All the
characters are dumb clichés, so the third time’s not the charm for the series.
Now Jason moves and acts more like Michael Myers than an original character.
7.
Friday
the 13th (2009): The reboot plays like a Friday
the 13th “Greatest Hits” mix tape, taking good ideas from
many of the individual entries and working them into one intriguing narrative.
That’s not a bad approach -- hitting all the visceral hot spots of the saga --
but the film somehow comes across as shallow and lacking in any real sense of
fun.
6.
Friday
the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984): Not a great entry in the saga, but a fun and generally quite
popular one. The film demonstrates a love for the horror genre by making young
Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) a make-up artist.
He uses that skill to good effect to decapitate Jason in the last act
(while pretending to be a young Jason). An
eminently watchable entry, although nothing fresh or exciting in terms of
storyline or effects, really.
5.
Friday
the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988): This
impossible-to-resist entry is basically Jason vs. Stephen King’s Carrie.
Accordingly, Jason falls victim to a slew of telekinetic trickery,
well-orchestrated. The first two acts
aren’t great, but the last act is a hell of a lot of fun as a monster of the physical
realm, Jason, does pitched battle with a heroine of the psychic realm. Much more entertaining than it has any right
to be. My favorite murder also occurs in
this film: the sleeping bag death.
4.
Jason
X (2002). Are you surprised that this one made it so high on the
list? Well, can you think of another Friday
the 13th movie that is so relentlessly inventive, and which
plays so wittily on the tropes of the series? Sure the movie’s premise is
ridiculous, but it knows it is ridiculous.
The scene with Jason encountering nubile hologram characters who just
“love” premarital sex is absolutely priceless and alone worth the price of
admission.
3.
Friday
the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986): This entry turns Jason
the slasher into a full-blooded supernatural monster (revived from the dead by
lightning) to good and often funny impact. The James Bond-style opener, Jason’s
encounter with survivalists, and a cameo appearance by Sartre’s No
Exit are just few of the moments worth treasuring.
2.
Friday
the 13th Part II (1981): This film pits a smart, resourceful
child psychologist, Ginny (Amy Steel) against Jason’s developmentally-arrested
“retard” (to quote the film; not my words). Lean and efficient, the film also
introduces Jason’s mom fixation
1.
Friday
the 13th (1980): Still the best of the bunch, thanks to a
smart screenplay, and some stand-out scares (including the final
sting-in-the-tail/tale). Here (as in all
Jason films), it is suggested (through the presence of a storm) that the killer
is a force of nature. Similarly, there’s
a Garden of Eden/Snake in the Garden metaphor at work at Crystal Lake.
Just posted a comment like this on another similar article/list (are you writing for Gawker also?) but even though I really do not like the "Friday the 13th" franchise (other than the tv series), I really enjoy watching "Jason X" whenever it is on. Just the fact that someone sold someone on the idea of putting Jason in space, managed to get it made, that it was close to being a good movie, just amazes me, blows my mind. (I even want to get my hands on the Jason X book series that came after it, but I am told they are pricey.)
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