Harefooted Halloween: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

What I Liked: Ok, Jason looks fucking incredible.  Best design we’ve seen yet.  He’s been under Crystal Lake for a while so he’s been decaying quite a bit.  His clothes are all torn, you can see pieces of his skeleton sticking out like his spinal chord and his bony hands, the chain around his neck leftover from the previous film adds a ghostly element like one of the spirits from A Christmas Carol or something, his hockey mask is falling apart in some areas and you can see his torn up jaw and teeth and it’s prefect.  This is how I want Jason to look every time.

To piggyback off of the previous paragraph, the makeup effects work on Jason when he loses the mask and we see his face for the final portion is fantastic.  I thought he looked nasty in Part 4 The Final Chapter but this tops that.  His face has become so gnarly with mangled teeth, decaying skin and almost no nose.  And this would certainly be an acceptable creature design for any horror franchise.  I mean the hockey mask is iconic, you can’t ditch that, but in a parallel universe if this were the design of Jason from the beginning I’d be on board.

Jason uses a wider variety of weapons than usual like a sickle and a party horn.  This one also has probably the most infamous kill in the series which is when Jason picks up a woman in a sleeping bag and whacks her against a tree.  Honestly I don’t exactly get why that one is so beloved.  It’s unique and has a definite degree of silliness but it’s not the craziest thing I’ve seen these movies dish out.  For my money the one that stands out the most and seems genuinely frightening (which is another well known kill) is when Jason wields some sort of portable gas powered buzzsaw with a long handle.  Can you picture encountering that fuckin’ bullshit in the isolated woods at night?!  Jeez is that an image.

What I Didn’t Like: While the filmmakers tried to craft a story about a girl with telekinetic powers (Lar Park-Lincoln (Knots Landing)) who killed her father at Crystal Lake many years ago it’s not something I’m terribly interested in.  It’s a slightly unusual direction for the series to introduce other characters with supernatural abilities.  It also doesn’t help that Halloween 4 used a similar gimmick the same damn year.  They wanted a character who could go toe to toe with Jason and basically they came up with Carrie.  Freddy is a better matchup in my opinion.

Besides the story about a lady with mind powers and her doctor (Terry Kiser the year before Weekend at Bernie’s) who’s trying to exploit her in some way (his full intentions remain very unclear) this is another sequel that’s simply about killing the partying teens in the house next door.  A definite step backwards from Part 6 Jason Lives.

Overall Impressions: It’s no wonder the makeup effects are so spectacular in this installment because the director, John Carl Buechler, is actually an effects guy who worked on a bunch of stuff including Re-Animator, From Beyond and Prison before getting this gig.  Afterward he worked on tons of other stuff like Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Halloween 4 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  So yea, he’s legit.

Other than that it’s not very interesting.  I would say it’s better than Part 5 A New Beginning though.