The Ties That Bind A Movie

In "Friday The 13th Part Five", there are a lot of superfluous characters, as I said before. That figures. If you want fifteen murders in a movie, you have to have fifteen murderable characters. Most of them won't have a good reason for being in the story. A good example of that in my mind is the pair of hillbillies who live next door to the halfway house. There is also the handyman who shows up, and since he's filthy and earthy, we can lump him in.

They're a puzzling group. I suppose they- the mother and son- are a source of some levity. I don't think there's a time where they're not silly, and I think that's mainly deliberate. I think. I'm really not entirely sure on that. The handyman is not funny. He starts out straight and finishes just creepy. The mother and son have a disturbingly familiar and insular relationship, but they do have a lighter side in a way. I don't think they help the movie any.

It's true enough that they- the mother and her son- are a source of antagonism to the halfway house. The wayward kids, failing as they do to respond to therapy, act up frequently through the film. The hillbillies are there to be bothered by that and to involve the police. I'll concede that this tense relationship could be valuable in a story. You could have the hillbillies and the halfway housers suspecting each other for the murder, maybe.

They don't do that, and the tension between them is never resolved. There are a couple of run-ins, and then it just ends when the hillbillies die. Like I've said, nobody cares but me. For everyone else, it's enough that they are there and that they die. Beyond the grimness of that message, it's lazy, ineffective storytelling. That was the essence of my post about how there were too many characters, and I repeat that about these specific characters.