And Now The Rest

I realized yesterday that I have written four separate posts about "Friday the 13th Part Four" in the last week, all of them sharply critical of one point or another. I confess that's both more thought than most people would put into the film and more negative than most people who are not "Moral Majority" types would ever give. Believe it or not, I'm a big fan of the Friday the 13th films, even including part four, which is superior to some subsequent entries.

What do I like about the film? It's got some passable performances. I like the elder sister. The male hitch hiker is able enough. I even like both Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman, who are both bad for the film but only because of their characters and not their performances. Given a different story, I might have lauded the presence of both. One or two other characters were pretty memorable as well, and it's too bad there wasn't more room in the film for them.

Some of the "kills", as they're called, weren't too bad either. I won't go into a lot of grisly details, but some of them were inventive and affecting. I'm not as inclined as some to see the murders in a slasher film as holding up a film in the absence of a story or characters I care about, but the kills in Part Four are definitely not the problem. They were unquestionably a highlight of the movie, and I confess that if you're only going to get one thing right, that's probably the most lucrative thing to get right.

Jason himself is solid in the film, as I suppose you would, although you might not think to wonder whether Jason is better in one film than another, being something of a cypher played by a stuntman in a jumpsuit and mask. Part Four came before Jason had transitioned from something close to human to something more supernatural. He could still be hurt when struck by someone, he couldn't just teleport a mile ahead of someone if they left him behind, and he even looked more like a man than the zombie he was by Part Six.

In this film, he commits a few transgressions against the laws of space and time, and he benefits from the uncanny luck of being in exactly the right place and having his victims do exactly the right thing in order for him to kill them in a certain way, but it's not as bad as it got in later films. No, he and this film are really not so bad. If I'm harsh in my judgement, it's only because I know it was capable of better. One should never let those with potential get by squandering it.