Power Filmmaking

Yesterday, I perseverated on who owned the boat in the first real scene of "Friday The Thirteenth Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan".  There are these two horny teenagers who horse around and have sex. Unfortunately, the anchor damages a power line (and one might well wonder whether it's necessary to lay power lines across a lake, but I don't pretend to know), and what should happen to be there but the corpse of Jason Voorhees.

Naturally the power line electrocutes Jason's lifeless body, bringing it back to life. By this time, Jason had long since abandoned any notion of being a human being of any kind. It's a soggy, badly deteriorated stiff of a man (writing that word feels wrong) who climbs aboard the boat like a walking breathing (?) wet shoe. I thought at first that there's no good reason for him to board the boat when he could go straight to land, but he has traditionally hung around that lake. What's odd is that he moves on after.

If I could go back to the electrocution, let me say that there may never have been a more cartoonish, spectacular, animated-looking electrical phenomenon than we see in that scene. It looks like the monster in "Forbidden Planet" hitting the security fence. After an absurdly lengthy sequence in which we see balls of electrical energy, tendrils of electricity writhing around and more, finally Jason is brought to life, but what if we never had a killer except for that electricity?

Something like that has been done- in "Shocker" for sure- but for all of the been there, done that killing that Jason does in this film, I can't help but think that if you're going to blow up the traditional formula to the extent of having Jason abandon his traditional turf and go someplace he doesn't belong like New York City, you might as well go even further so that you're really and truly making a bold choice to break with the past. As it is, it's kind of half-assing it. Still, the electrical reviving of Jason is pretty memorable.