Today is Friday the 13th, and we’ve already selected Friday the 13th , Friday the 13th Part 2 and Jason Lives. We're far past the days where the movies were local, low budget productions that got lucky with just the right amount of stolen Italian Giallo gore set ups, a Halloween derived structure and a flipped Psycho mother/son relationship dynamic. We're right in the middle of the period when the producers were trying to break out of the series' strait-jacket of a simplistic plot and keep the audience coming year after year. They tried killing Jason off (IV); gave us a new killer (Friday the 13th V: A New Beginning); indulged in meta comedy (Lives), borrowed from other horror genres (VII's "Carrie vs. Jason); and tried a new location (Jason Takes Manhattan). The films came out nearly once a year, with 8 entries in the ten year span of 1980-1989, but declining quality and new trends in horror (not to mention the terrible ideas tried to invigorate the series and distance it had gone from its basic origins) left the series moribund in after worst-in-the-series Manhattan. The name was kept in the public's eye for a while by the odd, shot-in-Canada anthology horror series Friday the 13th: The Series that had absolutely nothing to do with the films other than the name. Paramount eventually sold the rights off to New Line Cinema, and, four years after the last wretched entry, they released today's movie.![]()
