Too Many Victims

For the past couple of days, I've been writing about "Friday The 13th Part 5". They had got to the point where each sequel had to be peppered with more and more murders of a more inventive nature. I'm not especially against violence in movies. I'm more against its use as a substitute for a real story. The best slasher movies are the ones that bothered to make any death mean something, and the only way to do that is good, old-fashioned character development.

Part 5 does that a little bit. Tommy Jarvis is a badly damaged young man as a resulted of his previous clash with Jason. He retains only vestiges of his former self, such as his enduring interest in scary masks. Reggie, the grandson of the cook at the halfway facility (or whatever it is you call the place) is not so bad. He gets a few scenes with his grandfather and his brother. Neither Tommy nor Reggie is really that interesting to me in spite of those character details. After that you mainly have broad types who are just grist for the mill.

There are the absurd rednecks who live next door: the domineering mother and her dimwitted, adoring son. The two of them somehow draw in an itinerant worker. There are also the two punks who happen to be driving nearby. There are the van driver and his girlfriend. There are Reggie's brother and his girlfriend. Those characters (and others), it seems to me, mostly have little to do with the main thrust of the story, and would be best served by being excised.

If I were rewriting the script, I'd say you want to focus on the denizens and staff of the halfway house. There are a couple of peripheral characters who also belong. You probably want to retain the two paramedics. I would cut loose about everyone else, including the sheriff (who probably should only appear at the end) and the mayor, whose scenes together seem to belong in some third rate Dirty Harry movie.

The barebones cast of characters we are then left with can be sketched out with more care, and given more opportunity to live before being knocked off. The movie as it stands manages to make a house full of mentally unbalanced teenagers bland and uninteresting. We could have had something more like the inmates in "Alien 3", who are a touch more colorful and some of whose demises actually meant something to me when watching that movie. What do I know, though? I seem to be the only person that has a real problem with this stuff.