Watch Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Boring

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

This movie would've gotten 8 or 9 stars from me if it hadn't been for that dumb actor who played Tommy. Worst terrible actor I've ever seen. He totally sucks and he shouldn't be in movies at all.

Directed by Tom McLoughlin, a veteran of plenty of made for TV movies and Sometimes They Come Back, as well as playing the robot S.T.A.R. in The Black Hole and Katahdin in Prophecy, this is the film where Jason became fully supernatural and it's also one of the few films in the series to get good reviews, probably due to the amount of humor throughout.The original plan was for Tommy Jarvis to become Jason, but audiences were pretty unhappy with that hint at the end of the last film. So this one begins with Tommy (Thom Matthews, Return of the Living Dead) heading to Jason's grave to destroy his body so that he can never come back. But of course, as soon as he stabs the murderer with a metal fence post, lighting strikes him and he's back from the dead - and kills Tommy's friend Alan (Ron Palillo, Horshack from TV's Welcome Back, Kotter) right away.Tommy freaks out and heads to Sheriff Garris' office and the lawman locks him up, thinking that this is all in his head. The truth is that Jason is back and he is on a rampage, killing camp counselors Darren (Tony Goldwyn, Carl from Ghost) and Lizabeth. A whole new crew of kids go looking for them and despite Tommy's warnings, they think of Jason as only an urban legend.This time, Jason is stopped by being chained underwater, but even at the end, his eyes are wide open and he's obviously ready for more.Again, this movie was a major big deal in my teenage years, particularly because it had a music video for it! "He's Back (the Man Behind the Mask)" by Alice Cooper announced that Jason had survived the final chapter.The working title for this installment was Aladdin Sane. I really enjoyed this installment, which even has a nod to James Bond in the beginning. In our movie hallway, we have several versions of the poster for this one. It's nearly a comedy in parts, but still has a great plot.

Tommy Jarvis (Thom "Return of the Living Dead" Mathews) brings Horshack to the graveyard where Jason is buried to destroy his body once and for all. Through an improbably series of events involving an iron fence post and a thunder storm, Jason is resurrected and Horshack bites it. Frankenjason spends the whole movie wandering around and killing folks while Tommy tries to convince a hostile sheriff that Jason is back. This is one lousy film. It's packed with completely inappropriate terrible humour and mostly bloodless kills. I guess some guy shoots Jason with a paintball gun, so there's that.

The weakest edition to the series since Part II. Friday the 13th has always been campy, and the previous installment, A New Beginning, introduced overt comedy to the films. Jason Lives tries to continue with the humor aspect while re-introducing the original killer and Camp Crystal Lake setting, but it just doesn't seem to work this time around. Friday the 13th is fun because it's already humorous, it knows it, but it doesn't bring it to the forefront, more often opting for a nod and a smile as it plays straight into the horror trope. Jason Lives revs the humor from Part V up a notch- into the realm of self referential and meta-humor, anticipating the wave of films that would follow Wes Craven's Scream almost exactly a decade later. But the effort is too weak, never really giving us a strong delivery in that field, always wavering on the edge of the Modern and Post- modern. And it gives us this half-hearted effort in lieu of the traditional elements of the Friday the 13th series- namely a strong atmosphere and baroque set and visual storytelling style. If you're not a completist I doubt you'll have made it this far, and so I doubt you'll be willing to skip, but this is just my two cents- that Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is the weakest entry in the series up to this point and if you can bear it, go from Part V to Part VII- both great examples of movies with great atmosphere.