Summer Camp Slasher Series: Friday the 13th Part VI Jason Lives

Kids just aren’t as scared of summer camp as they used to be. Maybe it’s because they aren’t even going away to summer camp unless forced to by the state.

Still, the nostalgia of summer camp is enough to help us begin our Summer Camp Slasher Series, a tribute to horror movies featuring campers, camp counselors, and the maniacs who murder them.

We continue this summer horror series than with Friday the 13th Part 6.

Movie: Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives (1986)

Plot: Tommy Jarvis can’t leave well enough alone, and visits the town of Crystal Lake, now known as Forest Green, in order to dig up Jason Voorhees’ body and burn it to ashes so that he knows Jason can never come back.

Unfortunately, Tommy goes a bit overboard  when he sees Jason’s decomposing body and decides to stick an iron fence post into it. Coincidentally, a storm is brewing and, two bolts of lightning later, Jason is resurrected to wreck havoc on another group of ignorant campers and backwoods adventurers.

Killer: Jason Voorhees, back from the dead for real after all these years in order to be the “it-boy” of unstoppable serial killers.

Critique: Friday the 13th Part 6 is one of those films that has so much in quantity, yet offers so little in quality. For instance, it has the highest body count so far in the Friday the 13th series at 18 but, the way people are slaughtered, the audience and director barely seems to care. It’s not due to being jaded because we’ve watched so many horror movies. Good kills are good kills, and Part 6 doesn’t have very many of them. Sure, we have the greatest back-breaker in film, and a bloody smiley face, but we don’t see as much of the actual kills as the previous films. It just seems lazy.

Then we have the total loss of what every 80s slasher needs: haphazard nudity. I didn’t see one titty throughout this movie, while I had a hard time keeping count of the amount of titties I saw in the previous two sequels.

What this film does do well is not take itself too seriously, with a splattering of inside horror jokes and an opaque campiness. It’s a necessary evil when you’re bringing the rotting body of a serial slasher back to life, and will continue to bring him back in more and more ridiculous circumstances for decades to come.

Scene of Awesomeness: Tommy, in a moment of rage, makes sure that we will have Jason for many years to come by driving a metal pole into Jason’s maggot-infested body so that it could be struck by lightning and reanimate. It’s like a really bad nod to Frankenstein.

Scene of Ridiculousness: Cort’s explanation of Indian markings. Makes sense to me, but probably not factual.

Body Count: 18

1 heart pushed through the back. Not ripped out, pushed through

1 stomach impaling by cemetery fence spike

1 face impaling by cemetery fence spike

1 death by happy-face tree branch impaling…with a ripped-off arm thrown in for good measure

3 machete decapitations… at the same time

1 broken whisky bottle through the neck in an effort to have blood pour out the neck of the bottle

2 machete stabs through the chest…at the same time

1 face pushed through the wall of an RV

1 hunting knife through the side of the head

1 dismemberment

1 manual decapitation, the twisty kind

1 gutting, followed by a smash through the window to make sure

1 weighted fishing lure to the temple

1 manual head-crush

1 back-snap (Awesomely Overkill Award)

0 breasts. None. Barely a semblance of cleavage. What has happened to this franchise?!

Actors/Actresses of Note: Thom Matthews plays the 3rd incarnation of Tommy Jarvis. He was one of the only actors to play two different people in a film series, taking on the role of Freddy in The Return of the Living Dead and Joey in Return of the Living Dead Part II.

There’s also our good friend, Tom Fridley, who we last covered in Summer Camp Nightmare.

Quote: “So, what were you gonna be when you grew up?”- Billy

Grade: B-