Midnight Movie of the Week #76 - Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (Guest Post by Enbrethliel of Shredded Cheddar)

(Note from The Mike: When I realized that I was going to have to leave FMWL alone for my vacation, I couldn't think of many people who would be as qualified to keep the midnight spirit alive as Enbrethliel of Shredded Cheddar.  E has long been one of the site's most dedicated readers - even though her specialty is books - and I'm stoked that she's joined us to offer up this week's Midnight Movie of the Week.  Read on to find out why she fits FMWL perfectly (HINT: THE BLOB!), and don't forget to head over to her site and check it out!)

You know that scene in The Blob (1958) when Steve McQueen’s character is trying to convince the police that a monster that has already killed one person is on the loose—and the police can’t take him seriously because when they ask him to describe it, he says it’s a “kind of like a mass that keeps getting bigger and bigger”? He already has a few pranks on his record and this story hardly sounds plausible, so they hesitate to believe him. The trouble is that he’s telling the truth.

Few other characters in horror can relate to that scenario as well as Tommy Jarvis can. When he goes running to the police at the beginning of this sixth Friday the 13th installment, to warn them that Jason Voorhees has risen from his grave and has just begun another killing spree, they not only refuse to believe him but also lock him in a cell until they can escort him out of town. They know of his personal history with Jason and the fact that he has been in institutions or halfway houses ever since; and it’s just reasonable to dismiss his crazy tale of a midnight resurrection. Like Steve before him, Tommy has no choice but to take matters into his own hands.

Thom Mathews is the third actor in a row to portray Tommy Jarvis, and he actually gives the original Tommy, a young Corey Feldman, a run for his money. Feldman was perfect as the weird little brother in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter whose unexpected insight into Jason’s psyche helps him save his sister but nearly lose his own mind. John Shepherd took over in A New Beginning, in which Tommy is supposed to be spiraling into full-blown psychosis, but never matched Feldman’s original intensity. (In all fairness, it was a very high bar.) What Mathews inherits here is a character with a back story nearly as complex as that of Jason Voorhees—and he wastes no time making the role his own. His Tommy Jarvis is a man of action: he doesn’t wait for catharsis to come to him; he drives all night to where it is buried and digs it up.

How it plays out involves equal parts courage, carnage and comedy of errors.

The tragicomic fact is that Jason would have rotted in peace for the rest of eternity if Tommy hadn’t gone to that graveyard in the middle of a storm, and then, deviating from his own plan to burn the corpse, given in to a mad impulse to stab it repeatedly with an iron fence post. That lightning happens to strike that one post out of all the others in the graveyard may be considered a freak accident, and that the electric shock completely revives a man who has been dead for years may be considered some supernaturally bad luck . . . but Tommy remains the main agent of Jason’s resurrection. The irony is that if he had got the police to believe his story, they would have been even more justified in locking him up for the part he has played!

Luckily for Tommy, however, there is someone who thinks he’s too cute to be crazy. Every teenage boy trying to save a skeptical town should be so lucky. That she is also the sheriff’s daughter is a nod to another old trope: the second parallel to The Blob, in which prankster Steve wins the trust of the high school principal’s daughter, and a cute twist that turns Jason Lives into a decent date movie. Jennifer Cooke plays the perky and exasperating Megan Garris and has great chemistry with Mathews.

Clearly, this Friday the 13th movie has a completely different dynamic from all those that have gone before. Yes, we still get our thrills and our kills: the body count is impressive without seeming excessive, and the new, supernaturally strong Jason makes the perfect dressing for this serving of Slasher salad. What we no longer have is passive waiting while the bodies pile up and the remaining survivors figure out what is going on. This time around, we get a hero as well as villain—someone else with a sense of purpose beyond self-preservation . . . someone who gives new meaning to getting the Final Girl in the end.