On "Friday The 13th Part Five"

One of the digital sub-channels was showing Friday The 13th movies to mark the date yesterday. You may remember my string of posts about Part Four. I don't how whether I'm liable to duplicate that here, but I will say that most of the movies in the series are ripe for it. One of the ones they showed yesterday was Part Five, which is about as bad as any in the bunch. Somehow, it was always on television in my adolescence.

It ought to be no spoiler when I say that it's reviled partly for the decision to have the villain be some guy we've never seen before pose as Jason. The movie plays out as a half-assed mystery, with the killer concealed from sight more than any film since the original, when it was Jason's mother and there was no expectation that it wouldn't be. In a way, it's not a terrible thing that they went that way. It might as well have been a bad movie because they tried something different.

The movie is located at a small mental institution for young people. The man and woman running it look like they came from some Billy Jack movie. They are not doing too good a job, considering some of their charges are rampantly have sex on private property, others are not getting any better, still others seem to have no reason to be there, and then there's the one who kills one of the other kids without relation to any of the other mayhem.

Things play out from there in a fairly predictable fashion. Watching the movie on free TV felt fairly familiar, with the pacing wrecked by commercials and most scenes marred by the ham-fisted excising of either sex or violence. It makes you wonder why they would even bother putting it on television in the first place. I guess it still gives you the urge to seek out the proper versions, just as Part Five ought to give you the urge to seek out better horror movies.