Capsule Review – Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives

After killing off Jason Voorhees in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART IV: THE FINAL CHAPTER and then having someone else don the hockey mask for PART V: A NEW BEGINNING, writer-director Tom McLoughlin opted to more or less ignore the events of the preceding film and take the franchise is a new direction. PART V: JASON LIVES turns the masked murderer into a more traditional movie monster by resurrecting him from his grave with a lightening bolt. Thus, the sixth installment seems deliberately designed to be the first one to make classic horror movie fans sit up and take notice. If you prefer the living dead to masked slashers, if you taste runs toward Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man rather than Michael Myers, Leatherface, and the old Jason Voorhees, this film is for you. No longer a mere maniac in a hockey mask, Jason is reinvented as a walking corpse, and McLoughlin strives to bend the familiar FRIDAY formula into a throwback to an earlier era of horror monsters. The results are mixed – neither fish nor fowl (or, rather, neither bat nor snake) – but you have to give McLoughlin credit for trying. At the very least PART VI is fun, and it also features songs by Alice Cooper. Read a more complete review at Cinefantasitque Online.