I really dig how blogspot auto formats these pictures to the center. But I'm really not digging this poster as much as the others.
Much better. It actually has something to look at. Plus, it's the one I remember seeing all those years ago.
It would have probably been much better if I had reviewed this film immediately after watching it. Unfortunately, since I practically watched 2, 3, and 4 back to back, parts of them are bleeding into each other. That's not a mark against these films, that's just the way I watched them. They are practically one super slasher film divided into 3, anyway, so that doesn't matter much.
The film begins with a pretty excellent sequence set in the hospital, where we are immediately made aware that the forensic pathologist is having a fling with a member of his nursing staff. They like to get down and dirty in the dead room! The body of Jason, retrieved from Higgen's Haven, is brought in and he is presumed dead. However, don't just assume that you can kill a madman by poking him with a stick (that didn't actually happen, but no one has bothered to try and actually kill and finish off Jason.) Jason wakes up and kills the doctor and escapes the hospital to have one final killing spree. Until he is revived as a zombie in Part 6.
I think my surprise at how good Part 3 was really led me to be disappointed with this film. Don't get me wrong, it's still top notch. I repeat this in every review, but the studios knew that the F13 series would be a money maker, and they gave the films a decent budget, which means that the quality of these films is slightly higher than that of other standalone slasher films. Part 3, however, did everything right. It had a great atmosphere, it felt really REALLY eighties to me, the characters were fun and the kills were pretty awesome.
When it comes to Part 4, it is very apparent that the film makers are gaining awareness of the genre's tropes, and are playing them against the audience. For instance, there is one girl who the film makers tease to be the final girl, but she doesn't even make it to the end. This causes some dissonance, but I think it's also a fault of the increased body count. The film basically jumps between two parties--one of the horny teenagers we've come to expect out of these films who are literally partying, and a family who has a home on Crystal Lake property that lives nearby consisting of a mother, her daughter and her little son Tommy, who is the movie's hero. There's also a guy in the movie who is hunting Jason down to avenge the death of his sister, who Jason speared in Part 2.
There are way too many characters to keep up with and with few exceptions, they all kind of bleed into each other because they weren't given enough time to individually distinguish themselves to the audience's mind before being killed off. The only characters in this movie that are clearly identified to the audience are a girl who wants to have more attention from boys because she's envious of her friend (McSlut Special), Crispin Glover because he is having hangs up about a girl he dated, Tommy the boy who is really talented at making prosthetics, and the Sister Avenger. Crispin Glover's friend is also memorable, and he gets in just enough characterization before he is killed from behind a projector screen.
The film does have some pretty memorable kills, and that's because the great Tom Savini is back. Tom had done the effects in the original film, mind you. I think the best kill in the movie would once again have to go to someone getting his face crushed in by Jason.
One great thing about this movie is that we finally get a hero we can root for--Tommy Jarvis. Like Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis, like Sidney Prescott and (whoever is) Ghostface, Tommy is our guy for the next few movies. Even if he isn't given too much importance over the next few installments, he will forever go down in history as the one to kill Jason Voorhees, and he did it at such a young age. The kid is a Gladiator, I'm telling you.
This movie did give me a lot of good eighties vibes, but there wasn't too much showing off of the set location this time around unlike Part 3, so you never really got a good sense of your surroundings. However, how important shit like that is to the film is up for questioning. It's a great film, a great addition to the saga, but I'm still squeeing over Part 3.
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