Mad Man

Yesterday I mentioned how in "Friday The Thirteenth Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan", the villain Jason was revived by a rather over the top electrical jolt. He then proceeds to kill the two horny teens aboard the boat that actually was responsible for reviving him, and not in a terribly interesting way. I'll therefore move on to the next thing that struck me as being worthwhile, which is where we start meeting characters we're actually meant to grow attached to (not that it's effective).

The cruise ship that the two aforementioned killed teens were supposed to be headed for is about to shove off, and the senior class is boarding. Acting very much as if someone's pissed in his cereal is principal Charles McCulloch, who plays the same role more or less as Terry Kiser in Part 7. Everywhere McCulloch looks, he sees something that arouses his ire. A band of heavenly angels would probably draw some nonsensical rebuke from him.

That's the real weakness of his character (apart from being responsible for a rather murky and overly complicated backstory that "pays off" in the third act). He's so consistently irritated and outraged by one foot out of bounds or another that it makes no impression whatsoever when it ever happens that his anger seems justified. He's a terribly one note character whose death doesn't even inspire gladness- it's just that he's finally out of the way.

I'll give him one thing, though: out of the entire cast of characters, he is the only one who seems concerned about the disappearances of the two killed teens from earlier. His lone faculty counterpart cheerfully reasons that they probably decided to just have a bunch of sex instead of going on the cruise. The rest of the students don't say one word about them that I remember, and you'd think that a senior class of maybe a dozen or so students would be close-knit enough that a mysterious disappearance would move the needle.

It doesn't though, and McCulloch's well-founded fears that something happened to Jim and Suzy are dismissed. He moves on to other things to get bent out of shape about and the others blithely go about their trip. If you're waiting for a post where anyone apologizes to McCulloch and admits that he was right- that Jim and Suzy were probably murdered by the same guy who's currently murdering them- you can forget about that now.