Inglourious Basterds

November 25, 2018 / andrewmisk / 1 Comment

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

Written by: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz

Despite him being my favorite filmmaker when I was in high school, and despite the fact that engaging with Tarantino’s cinema was one of the most important and influential developments in my early introduction to the movies, I really fell off of Quentin Tarantino almost immediately after high school. The Kill Bill movies were released at the beginning and the end of my senior year of high school, and I remember spending much of the ensuing summer under the thrall of their pastiche of cinematic influences, continuing my love affair with Hong Kong action cinema and getting more seriously interested in Sergio Leone. When I came to Pittsburgh for college, however, I found myself with access to a wealth of movies to explore, and I was eager to explore the texts that had informed the post-modern cinema of my favorite director. Somewhere along the way, revisiting Tarantino’s actual films seemed less and less important. Death Proof, released the summer before my senior year of college, didn’t move the needle for me, and I don’t think I saw Inglourious Basterds until as much as a year after its initial release. Missing it on the big screen is a big regret of mine, since I’ve seen every other Tarantino since Kill Bill: Vol 1 in the theater, and because after nearly a decade of returning to Inglourious Basterds, I’ve found it to be my favorite 21^st century Tarantino movie. It might be the quintessential Tarantino film, perhaps more so than even Pulp Fiction, and the more I watch it, the closer, and more comfortable, I get to declaring it my favorite Tarantino movie ever.

Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s revisionist history of World War II, framed through the lens of Italian B- action movies, American Westerns, both classic and revisionist, and the European New Wave cinemas of the 1960s. It finds Tarantino at his most appropriative, and at his most original, weaving a tapestry of these disparate styles to create a pattern that’s distinctively unique, while fabricating from whole cloth a compelling narrative worthy of a 1940s dime store pulp serial. Set in and around occupied Paris, Inglourious Basterds introduces the audience to a cast of misfits – American soldiers, defected former-Nazis, English spies, and one vengeful French Jewish cinema owner – who are brought together by their fervor for killing Nazis. The titular Basterds are a renegade squad made up primarily of American Jews and led by Lieutenant Aldo Raines (Pitt), feared throughout Europe for their penchant for ambushing and murdering entire Nazi units. Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent), is a French Jew hiding out in Paris and posing as a cinema owner, whose whole family was killed by an infamous Nazi interrogator, Hans Landa, nicknamed The Jew Hunter (Waltz), who also happens to be on the trail of the Basterds. Through a chance meeting with an over-eager Nazi war hero, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), Shoshanna’s cinema is chosen to host the propaganda film that Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) has made about Zoller’s military exploits. This screening is to be attended by much of the high brass of the Third Reich, including Hitler (Martin Wuttke) himself, which prompts Shoshanna to launch a plan to burn down the theater with the Nazis inside. All of the involved parties are put on a collision course culminating in the film’s literally explosive climax during the film’s premiere.

I’ll be writing about two of the movies that Tarantino directed in between Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds within the next couple of months, so I won’t delve into either Jackie Brown or Kill Bill, but after watching Inglourious Basterds for the sixth or seventh time, I feel more assured than I ever have that this is Tarantino’s best work post-Pulp Fiction. It’s tough for me to take any of the credit away from the latter film, as it has rightly gained a classic status for its role in shaping post-modernism in cinema, its announcement of Tarantino as a major influencer and voice in independent film, and its radical reinvention of visual and narrative cinematic language. That being said, I am really starting to think that Inglourious Basterds does everything that Tarantino’s earlier film does while also improving upon some of Pulp Fiction’s rougher edges. Simply put, Inglourious Basterds is the work of a more mature filmmaker. By 2009, Tarantino had already fully established his signature style of cinematic collage, wearing his wide set of influences on his sleeve, and often straddling the line between homage and plagiarism, but Inglourious Basterds is the movie that sees him mastering his style and seamlessly meshing his own visual aesthetic with the visual and storytelling styles of his influences in service of a tight narrative, creating a sharp film in which form and content are perfectly complementary. It’s a blend of the artistic modernism embodied by the French New Wave and the exciting, slapdash postmodernism of the New Wave of American independent film that established itself in the 1990s.

Inglourious Basterds also features the single best performance in a Tarantino film in Waltz’s truly terrifying turn as The Jew Hunter. The film’s masterfully suspenseful opening scene is the perfect introduction to Waltz’s truly villainous SS Col. Hans Landa. He plays the Nazi interrogator with equal parts sophisticated charm, savage brutality, and ruthless cunning, creating a layered villain who is as fearsome for his silver tongue as he is for his abject viciousness. In the scene, Landa is interrogating a French farmer, M. LaPadite (Denis Ménochet), who is suspected of hiding a Jewish family in his home. The Jew Hunter begins his investigation by complementing and cajoling with the farmer, but of course this is a pretense, as both parties are well aware of the deadly consequences that will befall LaPadite and his family should his wards be discovered, or if he resists the line of questioning in any way. The two actors circle around one another verbally as Tarantino allows the scene to play out languorously, tension building by the second. There’s no doubt as to the outcome of the scene, but this doesn’t make the moment when Landa calls in his goons to machine gun the poor family hiding beneath the floor boards any less shocking or viscerally horrible. The violence isn’t what makes the scene so particularly horrifying, but rather the fact that Landa has been building to this particular climax with a smile pasted to his face, relishing the discomfort he is causing in LaPadite. The character’s erudition and charm are insufficient to mask his inner monstrosity, and Waltz is perfectly cast as an actor who at once can embody the exterior of societal niceties, as well as the flinty interior of a cold-hearted, remorseless killer.

Inglourious Basterds also finds Tarantino drawing from a broader set of influences than in many of his earlier films. While Jackie Brown drew its inspiration solely from the world of Blacksploitation films and Kill Bill operates in a Western milieu, with dashes of Hong Kong action and Wuxia thrown in for good measure, Inglorious Basterds is a beautiful pastiche, borrowing liberally from the works of John Ford, Sergio Leone, Leni Riefenstahl, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Howard Hawks, as well as featuring homages to famous films such as The Wizard of Oz, The Dirty Dozen, and Unforgiven, among others. The film is a love letter to classic cinema, and it’s the Tarantino film which most explicitly highlights his cinephilia, placing films and their exhibition at the core of its narrative. I’ve heard a criticism of Tarantino and of post-modernist filmmaking in general that it offers up great style with little substance, essentially functioning as a checklist of “in” references to be discovered by fellow movie nerds, but I’ve always felt that that criticism is hollow and really doesn’t stand up to the actual experience of watching a Tarantino film. The director might bear his influences proudly and obviously, but his frequent liberal borrowing from film texts always serves as a complement to original and engaging narratives, and this is truer than ever in Inglourious Basterds. Certainly Tarantino has lifted some settings and motifs from earlier films, but they serve as the window dressing for a revisionist history fable that is thoroughly modern and original and that, at the same time, couldn’t exist without being informed and influenced by its predecessors. In this way Inglourious Basterds forms a feedback loop, or an Ouroboros, a B-movie that achieves actual prestige, propped up by a host of earlier texts while also informing those texts and imbuing them with new meaning and life. It’s the perfect Quentin Tarantino movie.

I reserve the right to reevaluate this judgment when I soon write about Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, but I don’t expect that I will. While those are both movies that I love and that I relish the opportunity to engage with in a more critical manner, I think that I am familiar enough with them all that at this point my mind is made up. Inglourious Basterds achieves levels of meaning and critical engagement with its influences that those movies fail to, and it’s a better movie for that reason. It lacks the shock factor that must have accompanied Pulp Fiction’s initial release in 1994, but only because it takes a similar, and already accepted, template and perfects it. Tarantino followed up Inglourious Basterds with two films that I enjoyed, but that I felt were more style than substance and which I haven’t had a lot of interest in going back to in the way that I have with all of his other films. As a fan for life, I’ll turn up with interest for any new Tarantino project, but it will difficult to top the high water mark that Inglourious Basterds holds in my mind.

High Plains Drifter

October 28, 2018October 22, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by: Ernest Tidyman

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Billy Curtis, Geoffrey Lewis

I was introduced to High Plains Drifter when it was described to me by a professor in film school as “the movie in which Clint Eastwood paints a town red and calls it Hell.” While this curt description leaves out some of the nuance of the plot, it is, at its essence, what the film is about. Though we didn’t screen High Plains Drifter in the Film Westerns class during which it was first mentioned to me, the attitude of that particular professor did a great deal to help form my own viewpoints on movies, and watching this particular film always reminds me of him. Prof. Best was as likely to recommend a Kaiju movie as he was Kurosawa, and was more interested in comics than he was in literary classics. His open-minded approach to movies and to art helped to open up my own thinking on what could or should be considered valid as a subject of academic study. If Prof. Best could champion Star Trek, Godzilla, and anime, then why shouldn’t I seek to explore the artistry in whatever text I might see fit. Breaking out of the ivory tower mentality of academia was freeing, but it was also a development that likely pushed me away from continuing to pursue my education beyond my undergraduate studies. When I entered into a graduate program at Pitt, I found that the canonization and attention to classical theory completely turned me off, and I longed for the freedom that I had found studying under Prof. Best. I’m always reminded of him when I watch High Plains Drifter, not just because he was the person who first introduced me to it, but also because it is typical of the type of B-movie that he would have found artistically valid and criminally under-considered.

High Plains Drifter opens with a lone stranger (Eastwood) riding into the mining town of Lago. Upon his arrival, The Stranger is warned by the town’s saloon keeper that range types such as himself don’t often stop in Lago, finding the town to move too quickly for them. He insinuates that The Stranger ought to keep moving, and a trio of rough types in the saloon follow him across the street to the town barber shop, where they menace The Stranger. He takes the three by surprise, spinning out of the barber’s chair with his pistol drawn, and quickly dispatches of the trio. After having witnessed his lethal capacity, the town’s sheriff offers The Stranger the job previously held by the three roughriders that he killed, defending Lago from Stacy Bridges (Lewis) and his gang of outlaws who previously menaced the town and who are soon set to be released from prison. The Stranger learns that the town’s previous marshal was whipped to death in the street by the Bridges gang, and he is plagued by dreams of the marshal’s torture. The Stranger reluctantly accepts the job of defending the town, with the caveat that if he protects the town that the townsfolk must give him anything he wants. He takes full advantage, buying rounds for the whole bar at the saloon, loading up on supplies at the town store, and appointing Mordecai (Curtis), a dwarf, to the position of sheriff and mayor of Lago. The Stranger begins to devise a plan and instruct the townsfolk on how to defend themselves from Bridges’s gang. The Stranger’s plan involves painting the town red and staging a welcoming party for the gang, during which the townsfolk will ambush them. However, when Bridges and his outlaws are about to arrive in Lago, The Stranger rides off, leaving the townsfolk to fend for themselves, and the gang overruns the town and begins to burn it down. The Stranger returns to the town, emerging from the flames, to stalk and murder the Bridges gang. The next day, The Stranger rides out of town as Mordecai is engraving the previously unmarked grave of the murdered marshal.

That plot summary of High Plains Drifter is a bit more involved than the one-sentence summary that had first piqued my curiosity about the movie, but its essence can really be boiled down into the fact that it is a movie in which Clint Eastwood paints a town red and calls it “Hell.” When I eventually got around to seeing the movie sometime in my early 20s, I found the pervasive strangeness and otherworldly tone of that abstract but powerfully evocative summary informed the film completely. High Plains Drifter seems equally influenced by Eastwood’s directorial mentors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, and by Italian horror masters Dario Argento and Mario Bava. The film initially seems to hew close to the blueprint that Leone and Eastwood had established in the “Dollars” trilogy, but it quickly adopts a rather unsettling tone and it contains supernatural elements that are rare in the Western genre. It contains a level of violence, gore, and nihilism that would have been thought unseemly for the All-American film genre just five years prior. This is a revisionist Western, through and through, and it establishes Eastwood as a director who would continue to be interested in exploring and shifting the boundaries of the Western genre. Though it’s a bit of an uneven effort, High Plains Drifter is only Eastwood’s second feature in the director’s chair, and it deserves special commendation as a wholly unique vision of the West and of the Western film.

High Plains Drifter isn’t a great movie; in fact, I think many people would say that it isn’t even a very good movie. It doesn’t really feature any standout performances, as Eastwood is essentially reprising his Man With No Name role, and the rest of the cast suffers from sorely lacking character development. These are stock Western characters, meant more to stand in for types than to differentiate themselves from one another. The movie’s production value is also fairly low, although its sets are decently impressive, featuring full buildings rather than false fronts, which gives the town of Lago some sense of depth. Rewatching High Plains Drifter, I was struck by the sense that some of the scenes weren’t finished, featuring abrupt endings, seeming extraneous to the plot, or just not quite matching up with the tone of the rest of the film. However, I still find this to be an incredibly enjoyable viewing experience. While it isn’t perfect, High Plains Drifter nails the right balance of pulp, action, and horror, even peppering in moments of levity. It’s schlocky and campy, but I’ve always found something intriguing about Eastwood’s injection of the supernatural into a Western revenge story. It’s a fresh take on the Western and one that I’m pretty happy to explore whenever the mood strikes me. For a movie that was introduced to me in such an inauspicious way, it’s one that has become a go-to Western, despite its obvious flaws.

I don’t know if High Plains Drifter is underseen, or if I just don’t know that many people who like Westerns, generally, but I think that it’s a really fun movie that deserves a little more attention. It isn’t as iconic or groundbreaking as Eastwood’s work with Leone in the 1960s, or as paradigm shifting as something like The Wild Bunch, but it continues the revisionist ideas of the West that those films started to explore. It’s a refutation of the idyllic vision of American society in the Old West, and despite its supernatural overtones, it’s a position that rings true to me as a viewer. Watching this movie and High Noon in succession for this project, I was struck by the honesty that the townsfolk of Lago who would stand by and watch their Marshal whipped to death in the street are a natural extension of the cowardly townsfolk of Hadleyville who abandoned Marshal Kane, leaving him to face his fate alone. The major difference is that in a classic Western such as High Noon, the basic decency and virtue of the hero is assumed, whereas in Eastwood’s savage vision of the West, decency has been stripped away in favor of vengeance. I think it’s also interesting that both of these films drew the ire of none other than John Wayne, who posited that they both misrepresented the good, honest people of the Old West. I don’t bring that up to paint Eastwood as some sort of progressive in contrast to the virulent, reactionary Wayne. I think that Eastwood is presenting the same sort of paranoid, cut-throat world view that was on display in Dirty Harry, but something about the transposition to the Western setting makes it easier for me to stomach as a viewer in 2018. There are a couple of other Eastwood films that I’ll be writing about for this project, and I’m sure that my relationship and consideration of him as an actor, star persona, and director won’t get any less complicated, but I think that High Plains Drifter is a movie of his that I can pretty wholeheartedly endorse. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a really fun Western that inverts many conventions and traditions of the genre, and it offers enough stylistic variance to please fans of other genres, as well.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

July 29, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning (1985)

Dir. Danny Steinmann

Written by: Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann

Starring: John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman, Shavar Ross, Tom Morga

I’ve reached the end of my month of watching and writing about Friday the 13^th, and this month is wrapping up with the sequel that’s probably the reason why I didn’t continue collecting more of this franchise. Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is a follow up to the inaccurately named The Final Chapter, and it attempts to move the franchise in new directions hinted at in that film by continuing the story of Tommy Jarvis. Unfortunately, where that film was able to make subtle innovations to a tired formula, A New Beginning chooses to attempt to change things too drastically, while retaining some of the worst aspects of the earlier sequels. It’s a confusing mess of a film, and one that feels wholly unnecessary with regards to the rest of the series. It’s the middle film in an ill-advised trilogy that used Tommy Jarvis as its central character, but it fails to develop his role in the series, or even in one individual film, in any meaningful way. Featuring one of the series’ highest body counts, this entry might please viewers only looking for some gory fun, but for anyone with any higher expectations, A New Beginning totally fails to deliver.

The film opens with young Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) sneaking through the woods near his home to find Jason Vorhees’s fresh grave. As he spies on the grave, a couple of grave robbers arrive on the scene hoping to get a view of the legendary monster, Jason (Morga). When they unearth the coffin and remove its lid, Jason quickly and miraculously comes back to life, stabbing both of the grave robbers with his trademark machete. Jason rises from the grave, shaking off dirt and worms, and turns his attention to Tommy, who is still cowering behind a bush. He slowly strides over to the boy who killed him, and raises his machete high over his head, preparing to deliver a killing blow. As the blade descends, adult Tommy Jarvis (Shepherd) awakens, startled, in the back seat of a transport van from the mental institution where he has spent all of his teens. Tommy is being transported to a rural halfway house, in an attempt to ease his transition back into society. At the halfway house, Tommy first meets Pam (Kinnaman), the director of the facility, and Reggie (Ross), a young boy whose grandfather is the cook. He also meets the other patients, including Joey (Dominick Brascia) and Victor (Mark Venturini), two patients who have a dispute shortly after Tommy’s arrival that leads to Victor brutally murdering Joey with an axe in front of the rest of the residents. Joey’s is just the first in a string of murders, as several of the residents and townsfolk in the surrounding area go missing, and Tommy is left wondering if Jason Vorhees could truly be back.

It’s understandable that the series’ creators and the filmmakers behind A New Beginning would want to shift the focus of the series moving forward. Despite the successes of The Final Chapter, no one could deny that most of the life had been wrung out of the existing formula, and using Tommy Jarvis as the character to bridge the gap between the first few movies and the next batch of sequels makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the execution of those changes is terribly botched in A New Beginning, with new director Danny Steinmann trying to change too much, too soon, and ending up creating a confusing mess of a movie. Though it stands firmly in the slasher genre, Steinmann attempts to integrate elements of mystery, and even psychological thriller, into the mix, and it just doesn’t work. The film wants to tease throughout that Tommy may in fact be behind the murders, but its narrative is too flimsily constructed to carry this conceit through. Instead, what is presented is a series of kill scenes, many of which feature characters who are introduced into the film for the sole purpose of being murdered later in their first scene, strung together by the sketches of a mystery that also feels largely irrelevant to the film’s outcome. The film features a couple of twists in its third act, with the killer being revealed to be Joey’s estranged father, who works as a paramedic, and who snapped after seeing his bastard son’s mutilated corpse, and with a final shot which features Tommy putting on Jason’s hockey mask and stalking up behind final girl, Pam, with a knife. These sorts of twists revealing the killer’s identity, or hinting at the inevitable sequel, should be familiar to fans of the series by now, but in A New Beginning, neither of the surprises feel narratively warranted or satisfying.

One of the reasons for this lack of satisfaction is likely that the film doesn’t do anything to make the audience care one bit about any of the characters. Even the trio that ostensibly makes up the core of the cast – Tommy, Pam, and Reggie – are completely underdeveloped. Clearly the idea here was to include a cute kid to replicate the success of casting Feldman as the young Tommy Jarvis, but Reggie’s character is never developed beyond being an excitable, rambunctious little boy. Pam’s character is given maybe a dozen lines in the entire movie, and Tommy is equally mute, with Shepherd attempting to translate his mental scars through a brooding, vacant performance. Ancillary characters fare even worse, with the residents of the halfway house being as typically undifferentiated as the counselors of the first few installments in the series. As I mentioned, several characters are literally introduced just to be killed off, and as a result, the film feels disjointed and incomplete. The film jumps from locale to locale with little logic, and characters pop into the story abruptly, with little narrative import, and are dispatched from the story summarily, with even less. More than any other entry in the series, besides perhaps Part III, A New Beginning feels like its narrative was constructed with the sole purpose of guiding the audience from one kill to the next, with little attempt made to promote satisfying, or even coherent, storytelling. The fact that its creators clearly had a higher opinion of its quality, and had ambitions to introduce new elements into the series, makes it a bigger disappointment than Part III, because at least that movie contained its ambitions to being a campy gorefest.

I haven’t seen the films that make up the second half of the Friday the 13^th series since sometime in the 1990s, so I’d have trouble maintaining that A New Beginning is positively the worst movie in the series, but it can’t be far off. I’m sure it’s a movie that has its champions among fans of the series, but it’s hard for me to look at this movie as anything but a failure, particularly after the relative successes of The Final Chapter in reinvigorating the series. Its plot is a flimsy pretense, its acting is as laughably bad as its dialogue, and it doesn’t even have the good sense to actually feature Jason Vorhees as its masked killer. I suppose that it does feature a few good kill scenes, but if that’s all you’re looking for as a viewer, there are superior watching experiences within the Friday the 13^th series, and certainly across the slasher genre. A New Beginning tries to do too much with the franchise, and its attempts to move it forward end up being two steps back. The less said about this bad movie, the better.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

July 22, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Dir. Joseph Vito

Written by: Barney Cohen

Starring: Kimberley Beck, Corey Feldman, E. Erich Anderson, Ted White

The Friday the 13^th series bounces back admirably from its two lackluster sequels in what was initially intended to be its final installment. The Final Chapter attempts to make changes to the stale formula of its predecessors, and actually features a few performances that are worth watching, as well as upping some of the suspense factor, providing actual scares rather than the gruesome shocks of the first few films. The subtle attempts to change the patterns of the series make The Final Chapter feel somewhat fresh, and make it a highlight in the series. This might be faint praise, but it’s certainly the best of the five that I own, and from my memories of the other movies in the series that I’ve seen, it’s likely the best in the series, overall. Its higher production values give it a boost above the original, and its lack of adherence to the established Friday the 13^th formula make it unique enough to stand head and shoulders over the other, highly derivative sequels.

The Final Chapter picks up immediately after the events of Part III, with Jason’s body being taken to the morgue. Presumably, his fight with Chris put Jason (White) down for the count, but you can’t keep a good unstoppable psycho killer down, and, as such, Jason miraculously revives in the morgue. After killing the orderlies on duty there, Jason is back on the loose and headed towards Crystal Lake, where a new family has moved in. Trish (Beck) and Tommy (Feldman) Jarvis, and their mother (Joan Freeman), have moved to the country in search of a quieter life, but the group of teens who have rented the house next door might have other plans. Those teens lead Jason right back to the lake, and he quickly gets back to his old tricks, rampaging through the woods, picking off his victims one by one, in gruesome and shocking fashion. While Jason is stalking his victims, however, there is someone stalking him. Trish meets a young man named Rob (Anderson), whose sister was one of Jason’s victims in an earlier massacre, and Rob has sworn to get revenge on the masked killer. As such, he shows up at the end of the film to help protect Trish and Tommy from Jason. However, Rob proves to be no match for Jason and the two siblings are left as the last pair standing, forced to confront the monstrous Jason in a fight for their lives.

The introduction of the Jarvis family was a conscious decision on the part of the film’s creators to create protagonists who would be seen as more than just disposable fodder for Jason’s murderous rampage, and that decision pays dividends. The earlier films in the series feature a host of interchangeable murder victims, and, as such, don’t invite any sort of audience identification, but The Final Chapter actually gives us a few characters who are sympathetic and fleshed out enough to make them worth rooting for. Focusing on a family gives the film a feeling of higher stakes than previous entries in the series, and Tommy, in particular, is a notable addition to Friday the 13^th lore. More than any other character in the series, Tommy gets actual character traits and a personality that makes him endearing to the audience. Casting an up-and-comer in Corey Feldman also helps this cause. He doesn’t have to do much acting in the film besides being an excitable, cute kid, but his performance stands out as one of the best in a film franchise that doesn’t put much weight in the dramatic chops of its actors. Beck doesn’t fare quite as well, largely falling into the familiar role of the final girl, but she is still very good. She has a bigger screen presence than any of the actresses who preceded her in that role, and she brings a wholesomeness to her portrayal that was largely absent from any of the first three films. Her performance ranges from nurturing and kind to savage and fearsome during her final showdown with Jason, and she shows more depth and range than any actress in the franchise previously or since.

While much of its plot does, in fact, play out like a paint-by-numbers Friday the 13^th sequel, the little differences that I’ve already mentioned in The Final Chapter’s casting and attempts to flesh out its characters do wonders to freshen up the formula. Also, new director Joseph Vito brings a new storytelling sensibility to the franchise. Jason’s assault on the house that the teens have rented feels more purposeful than any of his previous rampages, with Vito blocking the kill scenes out with efficiency and something resembling narrative continuity. The kills are still a random string of gory cut scenes, but Jason moves through the house with something resembling forethought, as if he’s actually on a mission with an achievable end goal in this film. Vito also dispenses with the silly tone taken in Part III, delivering a grimmer, more serious entry into the series. Like any good horror film, there are moments of levity to contrast the terror, but overall this is a darker movie. The stakes also feel heightened in this entry with the decision to introduce a character who already has an understanding of what Jason is capable of, and who has made it his stated mission to kill the monster. Though it doesn’t turn out to be Rob who kills Jason in the end, his foreknowledge seems to even the playing field, even if that advantage does prove to be futile. The Final Chapter takes itself seriously, which could have been disastrous, leading the audience to point out the obvious silliness of this movie and its ilk, but instead the darker tone and attempts at audience identification make for a movie that stands out in a crowded field of B-slashers.

Vito is also to be credited for creating one of the series’ most iconic final chases. Each movie in the Friday the 13^th series invariably ends with its final, usually female, protagonist desperately racing through the woods or some other locale, with Jason and his machete close on her heels. The Final Chapter delivers one of the best chases, with Trish narrowly escaping Jason time and time again as he lays waste to her home, all while she is trying to distract him and protect her brother, Tommy. This final fight scene might represent the most awesome depiction of Jason’s superhuman abilities of any sequence in the series, at least in the films that comprise the first half, with which I’m more familiar. It packs genuine suspense, from the moment that Trish and Rob arrive at the teens’ rental home to find their mangled corpses, until the very last moment that Jason is bearing down on Trish in her own home, after having chased her through the woods in between. It also packs in great jump scares, with Jason casually tossing bodies through picture windows, and crashing through doors and walls like a homicidal Kool-Aid Man. No matter where Trish hides, Jason is right behind her, bursting into frame abruptly and violently. It’s a great sequence, and it’s capped off with a memorable ending worthy of the original’s reveal of Mrs. Vorhees. Tommy arrives just in the nick of time, disguised as a young Jason, and is able to distract and confuse the killer long enough for his sister to get the drop on Jason and knock his mask off, before Tommy jumps on him, hacking away with a machete at Jason’s prone, seemingly lifeless body. It’s a thrilling ending to the series’ most exciting sequel.

I think it likely goes without saying that The Final Chapter is my favorite of the Friday the 13^th sequels. I think I probably even prefer it to the original. It can stand alone as a horror movie, without resting on the laurels of its franchise affiliation. It takes the tried and true formula of the rest of the series, and genre overall, and fleshes it out with slightly more interesting characters and a bit more depth than most of the rest of its ilk. Besides featuring Corey Feldman in a pre-fame role, the film also features a young Crispin Glover in a supporting role, and those casting choices make it obvious that there was some attempt made to make this a higher quality of movie than should probably be expected of a third sequel to a slasher rip off. It all works pretty well, however, and the end result is a totally enjoyable, mildly rewatchable horror movie. The series may have been better off truly letting this be the final chapter, but there were many, many subpar sequels to come. As a result, the Friday the 13^th brand has probably become somewhat watered down, but The Final Chapter is well worth another look for its attempts to give the series a much-needed breath of fresh air, while still remaining true to the core dynamics of the franchise. It and the original are likely the only ones that I can recommend someone who isn’t already a fan of the series taking the time to check out today.

Friday the 13th Part III

July 15, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th Part III (1982)

Dir. Steve Miner

Written by: Martin Kitrosser & Carol Watson

Starring: Dana Kimmell, Larry Zerner, Richard Brooker

The second sequel to Friday the 13^th is quite possibly the worst of the five films in the series that I own, and it is likely in the running for one of the worst entries in the franchise, in general. Friday the 13^th Part III is another tired rehash of the territory trod in the first two films, with another group of relatively anonymous young people arriving at Crystal Lake to serve as quarry for a rampaging Jason. Though director Steve Miner attempted to modernize and reinvigorate the series with his second stint as director, particularly through the use of new 3D film technology, Part III simply hasn’t aged well and it doesn’t hold up favorably to the rest of the early films in the series. It is notable for a couple of additions to the series’ canon, and for being the first ever 3D film to receive a wide theatrical release, but aside from that, it’s a largely forgettable movie.

Part III is a direct sequel to Part 2, beginning with a wounded Jason Vorhees (Brooker) arriving at a rural convenience store in search of clothing and shelter. Jason quickly kills off the couple who owns the store and seeks refuge in a nearby abandoned house on Crystal Lake. At the same time, Chris (Kimmell) and her friends are on their way to a weekend getaway at the lake. Unbeknownst to the group of friends, however, they are in for a less than relaxing time on their vacation. Chris’s family lake house just happens to be the same one that Jason has chosen as his new home, and when the friends arrive there, he starts to his usual business of dismembering young people. Along the way, two of Chris’s friends, Shelly (Zerner) and Vera (Catherine Parks), run afoul of some bikers, who initially seem to be a bigger threat to their wellbeing than the homicidal maniac hiding in the barn, but Jason quickly proves himself to be the apex predator in this ecosystem. The movie unfolds predictably until only Chris is left to confront Jason. She manages to get the best of Jason, hanging him from a beam in the barn, before burying an ax in his forehead, but like Alice and Ginny before her, Chris is left deeply traumatized by her ordeal.

While Miner goes to great lengths in Part III to change the series’ tone and visual aesthetic, the narrative and plot structure of the film remain largely unchanged from the first two entries in the series. The embrace of 3D technology is an admirable attempt to revolutionize the style of the slasher genre, and I have to imagine that it likely made some of the film’s many kill scenes that much more intense and satisfying for audiences at the time, but while watching the movie on home video over thirty years after its initial release the 3D doesn’t have the same sort of effect. Rather than adding vitality to the horror, the effects simply look dated and cheesy. The filmmakers’ insistence on including 3D in such a prevalent role, but also introducing the effects in largely hamfisted ways, leads to an overall watering down effect, and, for modern viewers, draws attention to the effects in a negative way. The bad effects do add a camp factor to the film, however, and they pair nicely with one of its only silver linings: Miner’s decision to introduce a lighter, more humorous tone to this sequel. It seems likely that he knows that even with the addition of the 3D gimmick, audiences couldn’t take another paint-by-numbers Friday the 13^th sequel seriously so he decided to try to include elements of camp and humor to the film, to mixed effect.

One of the biggest problems with trying to add an element of silliness to the proceedings in Part III is that the cast is simply not talented enough to pull off even the most broad comedy. Zerner is ostensibly supposed to be the funny guy, but most of his jokes simply revolve around the idea that he’s ugly and a loser. He’s a practical joker, sure, but these attempts at humor make the character more annoying rather than really funny. Ditto for Chuck (David Katims) and Chili (Rachel Howard), Chris’s two stoner friends, who never rise above a C-level Cheech and Chong impression before they’re summarily dispatched by Jason. Even though the attempts at humor largely fall flat, I have to commend Miner and the screenwriters for trying to change the tone of this film from the first two in the franchise, because had they tried to play it straight and really attempt some scares, the end result would have been an even bigger disaster. One of the only things making the film watchable for me is the fact that it seems like all of the cast and crew know that they’re making a terrible movie and they decide to have a bit of fun with it.

I can’t really endorse watching Friday the 13^th Part III today, but I do wonder what it would be like to watch the movie in a movie theater in 1982. It still would have been a pretty objectively terrible movie, I’m sure, but would some of its campy charm have taken hold seeing the effects as they were meant to be seen? If so, I could probably see myself viewing this as a superior sequel to Part 2, simply because it doesn’t require the narrative gymnastics that that film requires in relation to its predecessor, and because both films feature fairly uninspired performances, predictable plots, and a plethora of gory kills. They’re essentially the same movie, but Part III aims to broaden its appeal by introducing actual attempts at humor, and seen in the proper context, I’m sure that its effects were decently impressive for their time. Plus Part III has the added bonus of being the film in which Jason receives his trademark hockey mask, a souvenir taken from a freshly killed Shelly. That moment alone gives it a bit more cred with fans of the series, but still I can only judge Part III based on the copy of it that I own and am most familiar with, and without the added benefit of being presented in its proper 3D format, the movie isn’t a success for me.

Friday the 13th Pt. 2

July 8, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th Part 2 (1981)

Dir. Steve Miner

Written by: Ron Kurz (based on characters created by Victor Miller)

Starring: Amy Steel, John Furey, Warrington Gillette/Steve Dash

The first sequel in the Friday the 13^th series marks a decision on the part of the series’ creators to eschew their original plans of making an anthology horror film series and to double down on tales of psycho killer Jason Vorhees hunting lustful teens in the remote woods of New Jersey. Predating the eventual sequels to earlier slashers Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as the entire run of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13^th Part 2 marks the first movie, that I know of, to introduce the trope of the immortal or invulnerable slasher. The ending of Halloween hints at Michael Meyers’s indestructability, but this sequel is the first that brings us a killer who was, ostensibly, killed off in the first film, in this case as a child, no less. Other than that minor innovation, the film otherwise sticks to the basic slasher template, and provides a handful of satisfying kills, but few real scares. It hews closely to the plot and pacing of the original, and though it’s the first film in the series to feature an adult Jason, it fails to really break any new ground or push the series forward in a meaningful way.

The sequel begins shortly after the original Friday the 13^th left off, with that film’s heroine, Alice (Adrienne King), still haunted by nightmares of her ordeal at Camp Crystal Lake and of the undead boy, Jason, who she dreamt emerged from the lake at the film’s end to drag her to her death. It turns out that her fears are warranted, as a fully-grown Jason (Gillette/Dash) has stalked her to her home and the film’s first scene culminates with him avenging his mother’s death at the hands of Alice in Friday the 13^th. From there, the film flashes forward five years and the audience is introduced to a new group of camp counselors who are attending a counselor training program led by Paul (Furey) at a camp adjacent to Camp Crystal Lake. These counselors are young, horny, and stupid, with few distinguishing character traits, much like the group of counselors in the original. As such, it isn’t particularly shocking or emotionally devastating when Jason descends upon the camp, skewering and slashing counselors right and left. Eventually, Paul’s girlfriend Ginny (Steel) emerges as a final girl, ready to do battle with Jason. She discovers a hut in the woods where Jason has apparently been hiding out for years, building a shrine to his dead mother with her severed head and articles of her clothing. Ginny uses these to imitate Mrs. Vorhees, tricking Jason into letting his guard down so that she can attack him, wounding him enough to make her escape. Ultimately, Ginny makes it out alive, but, like Alice, she is robbed of her sanity and sense of security.

Aside from the first appearance of a mature Jason as the film’s killer, Friday the 13^th Part 2 doesn’t offer much variation from the template established by the original film. This sequel exists solely as a cash-in on the popularity of the original film, and it isn’t surprising that most of the creative team behind the original opted not to participate in the series moving forward. Some of the movie’s kills stand out, and the body count is escalated, but there is little innovation or evolution in this entry in the series. In fact, Part 2’s narrative so severely retcons the original’s narrative to facilitate its own existence that it has been widely lampooned by both fans and creatives involved in the series’ initial creation. If, as this sequel posits, Jason had been alive the entire time, hiding out in a hut by Crystal Lake, why didn’t he simply reunite with his mother at some point? And, short of that, how did he survive alone in the woods for nearly three decades without being spotted by some camper, hunter, or other person? I don’t always look for strong narrative continuity in slasher films, particularly in hastily thrown together sequels, but this level of narrative implausibility is really hard to look past. Not only does it not further the Friday the 13^th canon, it severely disrupts it, opening up the rest of the series to an escalating chain of narrative disruptions and flimsy excuses to return the infamous Crystal Lake killer from the dead. The film gains points for being the first to introduce Jason, an iconic horror figure who has become larger that the franchise itself, but it’s hard for me not to wonder what the creative brain trust behind the original film could have done together if the series had moved in the originally intended direction and abandoned the Crystal Lake setting altogether in favor of a new tale of terror. As it stands, however, Part 2 moved the film in a direction that would see it largely recreating the same scenario over and over again with slight variations on the setting.

There isn’t much else to say about the film. Its cast of characters is largely indistinguishable, even more so than in the original, serving only as fodder for Jason’s homicidal rampage. Characters stand out for a few physical traits, perhaps, such as one counselor who is confined to a wheelchair, and another who is obviously cast as the camp clown, but they’re otherwise simply bowling pins set up to be knocked down in, admittedly, entertaining and clever ways by Jason and his array of sharp and pointy objects. The dialogue and performances in the film are laughable, as should be expected for a slasher of its type. Overall, this sequel has the feeling of being scraped together quickly to cash in on the success of its predecessor and to establish the long term viability of a franchise centered on the character of Jason Vorhees. In those respects, it’s a film that is successful. It pays some fealty to the original with its extra-long precredit sequence involving Jason returning to murder the heroine from the first film, and then splits off on a new, if nonsensical, parallel track from which the ensuing sequels would spring. For better or for worse, Friday the 13^th Part 2 established the now familiar paradigm in slasher franchises that the killer can be brought back from the dead for any reason or no reason at all, as long as audiences seem willing to plunk down their hard-earned cash at the cinema box office. It certainly isn’t the worst film in the franchise, but it doesn’t hold up favorably to the original for me, simply because it hews so closely to the structure and plot of that film. It gains a few points for introducing Jason, albeit without his iconic hockey mask, but it’s largely too redundant of a movie for me to want to give it much time or attention. The original packs a similar amount of scares and has an air of novelty about it, and Jason would be given better films to terrorize later in the series, so despite its importance in changing the direction of the franchise, Part 2 feels largely extraneous to me.

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