The Cabin in the Woods

I’m fascinated with fresh takes on horror movie conventions.  If done well, these movies can give you something new to think about while watching horror movies, and can also stand on their own as a great movie.  Scream helped to redefine the slasher movie in 1996.  In one masterful stroke, Wes Craven pointed out slasher movie conventions dating back to the beginning of the genre, while simultaneously reviving it at a time most had given it up for dead.  He also gave us a great new movie monster in “Ghost Face”.

A more recent example would be 2006’s Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.  We got to see a slasher movie through the eyes of the slasher.  Again, it successfully deconstructed the slasher genre while standing alone on its own merit, and introducing a new monster…something else to scare you when things go bump in the night.

Colin didn’t deconstruct the zombie genre, but it did allow us to see a zombie movie from the zombie’s perspective.  It was a touching story of a reluctant zombie that still clung to pieces of his past life.  For the first time in my life, I saw the crowd of zombie hunters and felt bad for the zombies.  It allowed me to watch zombie movies in an entirely different light.

Basically, these types of movies can almost be seen as a class in the genre.  How many people learned about “the rules of a slasher movie” from Scream?

All three of those movies rank among my favorite modern horror movies.  I was hoping The Cabin in the Woods would be able to join that list.  For the first hour, I thought I was right.

From the outside, the premise is simple: a group of five college kids (the jock, the intellectual, the comic relief/stoner, the slut and the virgin) head out to a cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation.  They hear noises, and they are all terrorized (and most of them killed) by some random terror.

All of this borrows heavily from the “cabin in the woods” genre, most notably Evil Dead 2 (right down to the look of the cabin).

Sadly, Ash was nowhere to be found

But, of course, there is more going on in this movie than the plot suggests.

Without giving too much away, I feel I can say this: there is a group of people who have set this entire scenario up.  They don’t control everything that happens, but they definitely have influence over the kids in the cabin.  Or, as one of the characters says, “We rig the game as much as we have to, but in the end, if they don’t transgress, they can’t be punished.”  

Still, it gives little glimpses into what causes these slasher movie stereotypes to act the way they do.  Why does the girl drop the knife after stabbing her attacker?  Why does the alpha male decide it’s a good idea for everyone to split up? 

 The Cabin in the Woods takes this horror subgenre and pulls back the curtain a bit, revealing a vast conspiracy behind the seemingly mindless slaughter.  They add a healthy dose of humor to the process, but they don’t skimp on the gore and jumps that the genre is famous for.  It’s a pitch-perfect deconstruction of the genre.

Until the final half hour.

[I don’t want to give anything away from this portion, so I’ll try to keep it vague.  I’m toying with the notion of starting up another blog to link to with nothing but spoilers – which would make for a better discussion area for those who have seen the movie – but, since I’m not sure anyone is actually reading this blog in the first place, I doubt I’ll do that.]

 During the first hour, I felt they did a great job of deconstructing the genre, while still revealing the vast conspiracy behind it.  There was still a little bit of mystery surrounding it, but that’s okay: not everything needed to be fully explained.  I picked up enough of what was going on to know why they were doing what they were doing…I didn’t need to know everything.  I didn’t need to see everything.  But that’s exactly what the last half hour of this movie was.  Instead of pulling back the curtain a little and inviting us in for a peek, they threw the curtain open and screamed, “Hey!  Look at this!”

It wasn’t terrible, but it just felt like a completely different movie.  The subtlety and humor from the first hour was thrown out the window in favor of a huge spectacle.  I know there were some people who enjoyed this portion of it, but it just wasn’t for me.  Give me the brilliant and entertaining deconstruction of the genre from the first hour. 

Perhaps it was a way to please all viewers.  I watch a lot of horror movies, so it was pretty much a given that I would enjoy the first hour of the movie more than the last half hour.  But what of the person who doesn’t watch many horror movies?  Perhaps they are more inclined to enjoy the last half hour.

My main problem with the movie was this: I feel like it could have been amazing.  And for the first hour, it was.  If they had kept that momentum going, this easily could have become one of my new favorite horror movies.  As it is, I still really liked it, but not to the extent that I could have.  

This movie was very close to perfect: I guess settling for pretty good isn’t the end of the world.  (Or is it?)

Rating: 4/5

I'll mention this once more, just in case I haven't said it enough: this movie was really funny.  Whether they were needling horror movie conventions, or just sitting around talking, there were plenty of extremely funny moments.

Notable actors: Chris Hemsworth, Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Amy Acker, Fran Kranz

The Silent House (La Casa Muda)

When the American version came out a few months ago, I looked up to see what the movie was about.  It was then that I discovered that it was a remake of a Uruguayan movie that came out a couple years prior.  So I thought I would check it out

The plot: Laura and her father (Wilson) go to fix up an old house owned by Nestor (in the American version, I believe the Nestor character is Laura’s uncle, but I don’t think there was any such connection between the two here).  The house is out in the middle of the woods, and, since no one has lived there in a while, it is broken down and the lawn is overgrown.  Laura and Wilson are supposed to fix up the house to get it ready to sell.  They get in a little late, so they decide to sleep in the house and get started the following day. 

Before too long, Laura begins to hear noises, and it’s clear there is someone else in the house.  She sends Wilson upstairs to check out a noise.  She hears a thump, and he ends up at the bottom of the steps: his head bloodied, his hands tied, and his body lifeless.  So Laura finds herself needing to fend for herself in the house.  Throughout the movie, she begins to discover an even bigger mystery about the house.

 This movie was shot in entirely one take; or, at the very least, shot in such a way to resemble one take.  As far as getting me interested in the movie, it worked really well.  I was on edge from the minute the movie opened.  Since there weren’t any tight shots, I was always looking to see if there was any movement going on in the background.  It made for an incredibly stressful movie watching experience.  For the first half or so, anyway.

There were some pretty obnoxious parts in this movie.  There were a number of times where I screamed at the TV, “Look behind you!”  With the knowledge that there was someone else in the house (someone who had already beaten her father to death), she spent a ton of time investigating rooms in the house.  There were a couple of scenes where she went into a room and spent two minutes looking at objects in the room, with her back to the door the entire time.  It got a little old after a while, but there were still enough tense moments throughout the movie that kept me interested the entire time.

 Also, there were a lot of parts that ended up not making any sense when the ending was revealed.  I can’t say much else without giving the ending away, so I’ll venture into some spoiler territory here.

[SPOILER]  As it turns out, it was Laura the entire time.  Basically, Nestor got her pregnant (while her father watched), and he killed the baby.  So the killings inside the house were her revenge.  But the camera basically followed Laura the entire movie.  We didn’t see the murders at all.  When her father was killed upstairs, the camera was on Laura downstairs.  So did she have an accomplice?  Was the camera only showing us what she thought was true in her original personality, not showing what her other – more sinister – personality was doing?  If the entire movie is based around using the one-shot approach, it has to make sense.  And there were many times where this movie failed to make sense.  Since I didn’t know who the killer was while I was watching the movie, it didn’t seem strange to me.  But, when I was thinking about it after I finished watching, I started wondering about these things.  [END SPOILER] 

Overall, I liked it.  I didn’t love it, mainly because of the glaring inconsistencies and the ridiculous room-searching of Laura.  But it was still a well-done movie.  It kept me interested for the majority of the movie, and the one-shot style definitely drove that.  It could have been better.  As it stands, it’s still pretty good.

I hope to watch the American version at some point in the not-too-distant future, and then I’ll be able to compare the two.

Rating: 4/5

Trollhunter

With the theme of “found footage” movies, I give you Trollhunter.

The plot is relatively simple.  We follow three college students (Thomas, Johanna & Kalle) as they make a documentary about an alleged bear poacher.  By asking around, they’re able to find out who is responsible: a man named Hans, who seems to be acting alone.  They try to interview him, but he keeps brushing them off. 

One night, they follow him into the woods.  Off in the distance they see flashing lights and hear a loud growl.  Hans comes running towards them screaming, “Troll!”  Thomas is bit, and they all end up getting into Hans’ jeep and taking off.

He sits down with them and tells them that he hunts trolls for a government agency (TSS: Troll Security Service).  He tells them that trolls can sense the blood of Christians.  He tells them that UV light kills trolls: sometimes they turn to stone, and sometimes they just explode.

He allows the students to follow him around, on the grounds that he hates his job, and that the public deserves to know the truth.

They ride around with Hans and observe him dealing with trolls.  Throughout these trips, he tells them how he got into the business, and when it all started to go south for him.  They also run into Finn, who also works at TSS, and is none too thrilled that Hans is allowing these students in on their secret.  Finn threatens the students, telling them that he will never allow them to keep the footage.  With each encounter he grows increasingly more hostile.

We also find out that the troll that bit Thomas had rabies, and that the majority of the trolls in the area have been infected by a rabid Jotnar: a 200 foot tall mountain troll.  So Hans and the students go to take down the Jotnar.

It was a well-done movie.  A little slow at times, but that’s pretty common in a found footage movie.  It was pretty funny at times, too.  A dark, dry sense of humor, but it was there all the same. 

The special effects were surprisingly good, considering this movie was not made on a huge budget ($3 million, from what I’ve seen).  The trolls looked pretty good.  Their movements were a bit choppy at times, but it never distracted from the movie.

It was a highly enjoyable movie, start to finish.

Rating: 4/5

Apollo 18

When I originally saw the previews for this movie, I was kind of excited.  A found footage movie of a lost Apollo mission that went horribly awry.  From the looks of the preview, it looked like there was a monster loose on the moon.  I had a hope that it was some sort of Moon-Yeti.

I was sorely mistaken.  Both in my excitement and in my hopes of seeing a Moon-Yeti of any sort.

 We follow three American astronauts on a top secret mission to the moon.  The goal was to place sensors that would alert the United States of any missile attacks from Russia.  Their trip is disguised as a satellite launch.  Once there, they start seeing odd things, and they realize that they are not alone.

The movie starts out amazingly slow.  But so did Quarantine.  And, since they’re the same style of movie (and Quarantine is amazing), I gave it the benefit of the doubt.  Fifteen minutes in, I was still on board.  “They’re setting something up.  We’re getting to know the characters.  It’ll pick up soon, and we’ll be invested in the characters.”  By the time the 30 minute mark rolled around with little in the way of anything interesting happening, I began to lose hope.  Then 45 minutes with nothing.  Once an hour hit, I had given up all hope and fast-forwarded to the end of the movie, just to see if anything interesting happened.

It didn’t.

There were moments where it appeared as though something interesting was going to happen.  The discovery of a dead Russian cosmonaut and his abandoned ship.  Their own equipment getting destroyed.  A crab-like creature that appears to be crawling inside a helmet.  But every time something even borderline interesting started to happen, it almost immediately subsided.  The movie would start building towards something, then nothing would happen for the next 5 minutes.  Build build build…nothing.  It kept on like that for the majority of the movie.

It was a good idea.  What’s more claustrophobic than the vast expanse of space?  A found footage movie only amps up that feeling of claustrophobia and panic.  This could have been a great movie.  Perhaps my expectations were a bit too high, but I think I would have hated it even if my expectations were low.  It was just a boring, slow-moving movie with no pay-off. 

 

This could have been good.  It really, really wasn’t.  Seeing as how I had just watched a terrific found footage movie not that long before this one (Trollhunter…which will be my next post), I knew how good a movie like this could be.  Which only highlighted just how bad this movie was.    

Rating: 1/5

Chillerama

I’ll be doing a number of single movie reviews for a little while, to get caught up with all the stuff I have watched but didn’t write about.  But, once I get caught up, I think I’m going to try to start another series like I did with Friday the 13^th.  There has been a call for Nightmare on Elm Street, so I may go that route.  I was thinking of possibly doing something a bit more recent (the Cold Prey series has come to mind), but I’m not sure I want to do something that recent.  I don’t feel bad for throwing around spoilers for 80s movies, but I would probably feel a little bad about throwing around spoilers for a more recent series.  I’m undecided.  I would appreciate any thoughts in the comments.

And now…to Chillerama!

This is a movie-within-a-movie (within-a-movie?) horror-comedy anthology. 

The set-up: there is an old drive-in theater that is getting ready to close.  On the final night of operation, the owner (Cecil B. Kaufman, played by Richard Riehle) shows four old, extremely hard-to-find horror movies: Wadzilla, I Was a Teenage Werebear, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, and Deathication.  Of course, we are also watching the movie of the teens watching the movies (which is titled Zom B Movie), who are caught up in some problems of their own: mainly, an employee has been turned into a zombie, and dripped some of his zombie goo in the popcorn butter.  So, between the movies, we see the patrons of the theater slowly turning into zombies.

It should be noted that we see very little of Deathication, which is good news, because it’s just a lot of images of poop.

I’ll give a brief review of each of the movies.

Wadzilla is a spoof of 50s monster movies.  Basically, a guy with a low sperm count wants to raise that count, so he takes an experimental drug.  But, instead of raising his sperm count, it just makes him produce a very large sperm.  With teeth.  It terrorizes the city, eating animals and people.  Eventually it grows to be larger than a building and the army is called in.

It’s…unnerving.  I know that it’s supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t.  At all.  I don’t remember laughing once.

Notable actors: Ray Wise, Eric Roberts

I Was a Teenage Werebear is a musical.  It follows Ricky, a boy with a nice girlfriend, but who is remarkably gay.  He gets caught up with a leather-clad gang, who are all gay.  They are also werebears.  They turn Ricky into a werebear, but he fights against it.

There are a number of terrible songs scattered throughout this movie.  It got to be a bit long and boring, so I ended up fast-forwarding to the end.  I should have just fast-forwarded through the rest of this movie.

I did like Ricky’s girlfriend, Peggy Lou.  Early on, she gets hit by a van, and spends the rest of the movie with a massive head wound, saying random bits of nonsense.  She made me laugh.  But that’s the absolute best thing I can say about this movie: the girl with the head wound who blabbered on about nothing was the best part of the movie. 

Notable actors: Ron Jeremy

The Diary of Anne Frankenstein is also a musical.  But this one follows Hitler.  He finds Anne Frank and her family at the beginning of the movie and kills her.  She has a notebook that he takes, which has instructions on how to build a Frankenstein-type monster.  So, in an attempt to build “the perfect killing machine to win the war”, he makes the monster.  But the monster ends up being Jewish. 

To top things off, Eva Braun is a massive whore.

I actually kind of enjoyed this one.  Not the entire thing, but there were enough funny moments to keep me interested in it throughout.  It was worth watching to see Joel David Moore’s portrayal of Hitler.  He was fantastic.

Directed by Adam Green (Hatchet)

Notable actors: Kane Hodder, Joel David Moore, Kristina Klebe

As I mentioned earlier, we don’t see much of Deathication.

 Zom B Movie is the movie that is going on while the rest of the movies are being watched.  We follow a handful of main characters as they go to the closing night of the local drive-in.  Between the movies, we see the spread of the zombie virus throughout the people watching the movies, to the point that Deathication is (mercifully) interrupted by the zombies.  We spend the rest of Chillerama watching the chaos at the drive-in.  There is lots of running and screaming and shooting.  There’s a scene where two parents eat their baby.  There’s a scene where the owner dispatches zombies with a wide assortment of weapons and says random movie quotes between each kill.  “Say hello to my little friend.”  BLAM!  “I’m getting to old for this s***.”  BANG!  “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  BIFF!  “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  And so on.

It’s not great, and all the references get a bit old after a while (more on that in a bit), but it had some funny moments.  Not many, but a couple, which makes it better than Wadzilla and I Was a Teenage Werebear.

Notable actors: Richard Riehle

I knew going in that Chillerama would have a terrible script and would be terribly acted.  That’s what they were going for.  Still, I was hoping for a much funnier movie.  If you’re going to make a horror-comedy, you have to make sure that it’s actually funny.  This wasn’t.  It was also pretty long, clocking in at just under 2 hours.  That’s way too long.  I was ready for this movie to be over much sooner than it actually was.

Also, I feel like they were trying to make Zom B Movie a little “smarter” than the rest.  There were lots of movie references that I felt like were forced…like they were saying them just so the audience would nod their head and say, “I know that quote.”  It failed.  Yes, I knew a lot of the quotes, but that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it.  They were just beating us over the head with them, and it was a bit much.  There’s a difference between “smart” and “beating the audience over the head with tons of movie references”. 

One last complaint.  Bad horror movies can be funny in how bad they are.  It’s extremely hard to make a good horror movie that feels like a bad horror movie.  Chillerama tried to pull that off, but failed miserably.

 In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t really like this movie.  Aside from the girlfriend in I Was a Teenage Werebear and parts of The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, I didn’t really like this at all.  So, while I can’t say that I hate it, I can say that I disliked it immensely.

Rating: 1/5

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

So here we are, at the end of our little journey.  I know this isn’t the end of the series, but, as I mentioned at the start of this, most of the movies after this don’t really interest me (except Jason X, which is amazing).

It should be noted that it is in this movie that the nudity really ramps up.  Pretty much every character (other than the Jarvis’) get naked.  Most of them early and often.

For the opening sequence in the movie, we see Paul (from Part 2) talking about Jason around the campfire, along with a montage of a bunch of the deaths from the previous 3 movies.  It’s a great opening.  Even without the name of The Final Chapter, the opening gives you the feeling that this would be the last movie.  But money always wins out in the end, and the series continued after this movie.

The movie shifts to show the barn from the end of Part 3.  The paramedics are loading Jason’s body into an ambulance.  They take him to the hospital and deliver him Axel, the horny morgue attendant.  But, as we already know, Jason can’t die, and Axel is his first victim.

Our characters:

Trish Jarvis: Our survivor girl.  I certainly like her better than Chris from Part 3.  She’s nice, and she likes to have fun, but she also loves her younger brother and would do anything to protect him.

Tommy Jarvis: Trish’s little brother (played by Corey Feldman).  He’s a geek who makes his own monster masks.

Mrs. Jarvis: Trish and Tommy’s mother.  She disapproves of their new neighbors and all the nudity.

Rob: He runs into Trish & Tommy when their car breaks down.  Seems like a nice guy.  They set him up as a love interest to Trish pretty quickly.  We find out a little later in the movie that his sister was Sandra, who was killed in Part 2.  As a reminder, this is how she died:

When they meet him, Rob says that he’s a hunter.  As it turns out, he’s hunting Jason.

Terri & Tina: Slutty twins.  And they ride bikes…just like the Doublemint Twins.

The rest of these characters all came into town together to stay at a cabin next door to the Jarvis’.

Jimmy: He’s an oddball (and extremely uncomfortable to watch), which is not surprising, considering he’s being played by Crispin Glover.  He has apparently just been dumped by a girl with the nickname of “BJ Betty”.  Sounds classy.  There’s a scene where he dances, and it’s the most spastic dance you have ever seen in your entire life.

The good stuff starts 35 seconds in.

Sam: Has a reputation of being a slut, a reputation she claims she picked up “in the sixth grade”.

Paul: Dating Sam.  He’s tall and he wears hats.  However, even though he wears a hat in 95% of his scenes, I couldn’t find a picture of him actually wearing a hat.  The internet can be a frustrating place sometimes.

Ted: A total turd.  I hate him completely.  There’s a long scene where he sits in the living room, gets high, and watches an old black and white stag film…and he laughs like an ass the entire time.  He also refers to himself as “Teddy Bear” on more than one occasion.

You can practically hear him braying in this picture.

Sara: A nice girl.  Cute, shy and virginal.  She’s good friends with Sam, who keeps trying to get her to be a little sluttier.

Doug: I honestly didn’t remember seeing this guy through the first 45 minutes of the movie.  He’s either not very memorable, or he just wasn’t in the movie much up to this point.  He’s dating Sara.  (Fun fact: he is played by Peter Barton, who played Jeff in Hell Night.)  I searched for 30 minutes and couldn’t find a picture of Peter Barton in this movie where he wasn’t in the shower.

The killer:

Jason Voorhees: As I mentioned in my last post, Part 3 really sets up Jason as the unstoppable killer that we know throughout the rest of the series.  We definitely see that Jason here.  He’s not fast, but he doesn’t stop.  If he gets knocked down, he gets right back up.  He’s a killing machine.

The deaths:

Axel, the horny morgue attendant.  He’s watching a women’s work-out video by himself.  Jason takes a hacksaw to his throat, then twists his head backwards.

Nurse Morgan had been getting frisky with Axel in the morgue.  She left, but Jason found her anyway.  She gets lifted off the ground, and gets a knife in her chest, then sliced down to her belly-button. 

A hitchhiker with no-name, but is lovingly referred to as “Banana Girl” by Final Girl.  She’s looking for a trip to Canada (and love, apparently).  When a car passes her by without picking her up, she flips them off, then sits down to eat a banana.  With a piece of banana in her mouth, Jason stabs her in the back of the throat.  She gurgles and dies while banana slobber runs down her chin.  It’s…not pleasant.

Sam gets mad at Paul for dancing with one of the twins, so she gets naked at night and gets into a little rubber boat on the lake.  As she lays there, waiting for Paul to come after her, Jason shows up and sticks a knife into her stomach and through her back.

Paul, feeling bad about dancing with another girl in front of his girlfriend, goes out to look for Sam.  He swims out to the boat, finds Sam dead, and frantically swims back to the dock.  He gets a spear in his crotch and is lifted off the ground as he screams.

While Tina hooks up with Jimmy, Terri decides to leave (apparently watching the aforementioned black and white stag movies with Ted isn’t the laugh-fest he seems to think it is).  She puts on a raincoat, walks outside to her bike, gets a spear through her back and is pinned to the house.

After having sex with Tina, Jimmy goes downstairs to get some wine.  He gets a corkscrew through the hand and a butcher knife in the face.

Tina puts on a shirt and walks around upstairs.  She sees that her sister’s bike is still there.  As she’s looking out the window, Jason grabs her and throws her out of the window.  She lands on top of a car.

Ted is still watching the stag film in the living room.  He walks up to the projector screen to fondle one of the actresses.  He gets a knife in the back of the head.

Doug and Sara are in the shower together.  Sara gets out to go to the bed.  Doug stays in the shower and gets his head crushed by Jason. 

Sara, wearing only a towel, goes back to the shower and finds Doug dead.  She screams and tries to run out of the house, only to get a flying ax in the chest.  Next time, you should keep your pants on.

Rob & Trish head into the cabin next door to try to find Mrs. Jarvis.  The power goes off and Rob goes into the basement to investigate.  Trish finds Doug’s body and runs through the house screaming that Jason is in the house.  Jason appears, pins Rob against a wall, and beats him to death with a hammer. 

At this point, Trish tries to get out of the house, only to have dead bodies blocking her every turn.  She finally pushes her way past a dead body blocking a door.  She runs back to her cabin, where Tommy is still waiting.  They nail the door shut, but they don’t bother with boarding up the windows (there really wouldn’t be much time for that, anyway).  Rob’s body comes flying through the window, with a hammer stuck in his head.  Jason bursts in and grabs Tommy.  Trish fights Jason off with a hammer, and he drops Tommy.  Jason chases them through the house, and they barricade themselves in Trish’s room.  Jason uses an ax to chop through the door.  Trish smashes Jason’s head with a TV, and he falls to the ground.  They try to walk past him, but he gets up and chases Trish back into the cabin next door.  She escapes by running upstairs and jumping through a window, landing on her back (it doesn’t look all that dissimilar to the way Michael Myers lands at the end of Halloween). 

She gets up and runs back to her cabin, but Jason isn’t far behind, and she fights him off with a machete.  She even manages to slice his hand down the middle.

Meanwhile, Tommy shaves his head, changes his clothes and puts make-up on his face to make himself look more like Jason at the end of Part 1 (the version that pulled Alice into the water). 

He comes downstairs as Jason is about to kill Trish.  He tries to get inside Jason’s head by repeating, “Remember, Jason.  Remember.”  Trish is able to knock off his mask while he’s distracted by Tommy, and his face looks worse than ever.  As Jason looks at Trish, Tommy takes the machete and embeds it in Jason’s face.  He falls to the floor, and the machete slides further into his face, taking part of it off.  Tommy picks up the machete, and hugs Trish.  As he looks down, he sees that Jason’s hand is moving, so he brutally hacks at Jason’s body and repeatedly screams, “Die”.  It’s in slow motion, and it’s terrific. 

The movie ends with Trish in the hospital (she messed up her shoulder in the fall).  Tommy comes in to see her.  They hug.  As the camera focuses on Tommy’s face, his eyes open and we see a crazy look in his eye. 

 

We never actually see Mrs. Jarvis die (nor do we ever see her body), but she is assumed to be dead.  At one point we see her go outside, look up at something and scream.  The camera cuts somewhere else, and we never see her again.  So I guess she died, but I’m not sure how, exactly.

Following the survivor girl:

Not much to report, really.  There was a lot of nudity/sex/drug use in this movie, but it was all taking place at the cabin next door.  We do see her play the role of the protective big sister a number of times, even if that “protection” is only to shield Tommy from the nudity of the teens next door.

Overall, I liked this movie.  Where Part 3 set up Jason for the rest of the series, I feel like this movie set up the victims for the rest of the series.  For the most part, this was an anonymous set of victims.  A couple of them had personality, but I didn’t really care about any of them.  I wanted Trish and Tommy to live, but I had no connection to the other ones.  That’s quite a difference from the previous three movies, where there were at least a handful of characters I was sad to see die.

And that brings us to the end of this run.  We were able to see the evolution of Jason…from a young child in a lake, to a sack-headed murderer, to the hockey mask-wearing killing machine that we know in future movies: we were able to see all of that throughout the course of these four movies.  I hope you all had as much fun reading these as I did writing about them.  If you haven’t watched these movies yet, I hope this inspired you to do so.

I found a couple of sites dedicated to this series that I’d urge you to check out.  They can be a lot of fun.

A list of all Friday the 13^th deaths.

Friday the 13^th wiki page.  This has characters, a timeline of events in the series, etc.

As always, we’ll end with Final Girl’s take on the deaths.