Breaking It Down, Breaking Down

As I write this, I am contemplating a day every bit as busy and interesting as the one that preceded it, which was a day I promised would spawn multiple posts. Those posts may well be coming, but first I can only share a story from today (by which I mean Friday). About the last thing that happened Friday was a screening of "Friday the 13th Part Four" on sixteen millimeter film. It was pretty cool, but in a way it was a mixed experience.

I enjoyed as always watching a basically fun movie with good friends, but I found myself unable to excuse the weak script from which the film was made. I will do my best to summarize it concisely. Though seemingly dead, Jason Voorhees is alive and at it again. He kills people at the hospital morgue and escapes, making his way back to Crystal Lake. There, he finds a group of six teenagers partying at a cabin. Next door to the cabin is the Jarvis family residence. Also in the mix are a pair of beautiful twin women whose presence is not explained and a hitchhiker out to avenge a sister killed in the preceding film.

Most of those people are killed, with the survivors seemingly dispatching Jason and reaching the safety of a hospital (presumably the same one Jason escaped from earlier). Hopefully it's evident that there are a lot of moving parts in this film. There too many, if you ask me. The film, hardly more than 90 minutes long, harbors some seventeen meaningful characters who appear in between the first scene (which wraps up the carnage of the previous film) and the last scene (which does so for this film).

Those characters, who either have dialogue and are killed, have dialogue and aren't killed, or have no dialogue but are killed, exist in five separate worlds by my counting. Two are worlds of just one character. There is the male hitchhiker and there is a separate female hitchhiker. There is the party contingent, there is the Jarvis family, and there is the group of characters at the hospital. These worlds overlap very little.

This is terribly inefficient. The exorbitantly large cast serves well to provide many opportunities for Jason to kill, but in practice it is about the same as stuffing people in a phone booth. They start struggling to breath or avoid stepping on each other. Jason kills fifteen people, I think, but few of them, if any of them, are developed enough that I care. By contrast, Michael Myers (in the first Halloween) kills significantly fewer people, but the cast is composed of fewer people and they all have more time to distinguish themselves before getting offed.

I'll briefly outline my plan for fixing "Friday the 13th Part Four", academic though it is. The film can't handle these five separate categories of characters. There's not enough screen time to go around, and even if there was, the characters don't follow a similar enough trajectory. First you have to scratch the hospital people, the twins and the female hitchhiker. The male one I keep because he's the most conventionally handsome male actor in the cast and he also is one of the few characters with a backstory or a motivation.

The Jarvis family is a real problem because the lynchpin of the group is Tommy, one of the most implausible child characters in film history. The mother is superfluous. The elder daughter is not bad, and is the only female character who matches up decently with the male hitchhiker. I would scratch the Jarvis family but salvage the daughter, folding her into the party group. That takes the film down from seventeen characters to ten and from five groups to two.

You have a party of seven people, three of whom are men and four of whom are women. The odd woman out matches with the male hitchhiker, who happens upon them while hunting Jason. Jason comes in, killing six characters, and finally faces off with the two strongest characters, the elder sister and the male hitchhiker. At that point you probably kill off the guy and leave the girl as the only one standing when Jason is done in.

Call me crazy, but simplifying things to that point would help the film immensely in my mind. There are a lot of other things that would make it better, but that's the one thing that would help the most if there was only one thing you could change. Of course, I was unable to convince anyone of that following the screening, but you may recall that I'm quite used to being the lone person to take a particular point of view.