Every Friday the 13th Movie Ranked
Arguably, no franchise encapsulates the spirit of the trashy 80’s slasher quite like Friday the 13th. Decades after Reagan left office, the Berlin wall fell, and people (tragically) lost interest in hair metal, Jason Voorhees lives on as a cinematic icon.
This is all in spite of the fact that just about none of the movies in which he appears are what you would call “good”.
That’s a statement that might rile some, but that only speaks to the degree to which the goalie masked slasher and his goofy adventures are beloved by horror fans the world over. But also, let’s be real; most major horror franchises have at least one unimpeachably good movie, and it’s almost always the first one. That’s largely the case with Friday’s competition; your Halloweens and Nightmare on Elm Streets and such usually have a good starting point and maybe a surprisingly solid sequel or two to justify their long-lasting appeal. Friday…well, we’ll get there.
To celebrate a year with two instances of the day, I decided to watch the whole series. Going in with no knowledge besides what I’d absorbed through pop-culture, I found myself surprised at which movies I wound up liking, and which I didn’t. If you’re confused about this goofy series, and which ones to see and which ones to skip, read ahead.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
To the surprise of no one, the apparent death of Jason in Part IV was not the end of the franchise. A year later, A New Beginning hit theaters. Tommy Jarvis, Jason’s killer, is now a teenager, but he’s suffering from some intense trauma over what happened in his youth. Plenty of teenagers have met Jason, but no one else can claim to have killed him when they were just a kid. As a result, Tommy is constantly on edge, and his antisocial tendencies have landed him at a juvenile detention facility that conveniently doubles as a summer camp, kind of like what I imagine is where Dr. Phil sends all the kids on his show. Immediately, the camp’s surly teens begin to get picked off by someone dressed like a hockey player, and almost as homicidal. We know it’s not Jason, the movies aren’t silly enough to resurrect him yet, and besides, it’s the wrong mask.
This leads into a somewhat intriguing whodunnit. A good murder mystery, however, requires us to have some interest in the characters, and the ones that pop up in this movie are so ludicrous they venture into parody. I know some people appreciate the movie as a classic “so-stupid-its-funny” type of slasher, but it was a bit too obnoxious for my money, and the final reveal as to who the killer is is a joke. He seems like he’s been watching more Halloween movies than Fridays. I guess he never got the memo that Jason’s allowed to run.
Worth Watching? Nah
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
I don’t know if Jason Takes Manhattan is the worst film in the series, the fifth one is definitely more boring, but what I do know is that it is the stupidest. It’s potentially one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of amazing actually.
The plot involves Jason climbing aboard a cruise ship carrying a graduating high school class out to a party on the high seas. I don’t think the boat is actually supposed to be in Crystal Lake, that would be a pretty enormous retcon, but what do I know? After the students (including a young Kelly Hu) spend the trip screwing each other, they predictably get offed by Jason, until a few survivors jump ship and row to shore, which is conveniently Lower Manhattan. Jason follows them of course; apparently the guy whose whole deal is his predilection for drowning is a world class swimmer now. That, or he just teleports.
New York feels like a character in and of itself, but I don’t mean that in a whimsical way, like its Annie Hall or whatever. Friday part 8, in typical 80s reactionary fashion, depicts the city as one giant nightmare where rapists and drug dealers are around every corner and the city’s sewers fill with corrosive waste every night. Jason should be the meanest thing around but, spoilers, he can’t even survive a single night in Brooklyn.
There’s just way too much to fit into one review. How about a scene where one of the teenagers punches Jason over and over again for like two minutes? Or the racial stereotype hooligans who want to kidnap the lead female and force her to take heroin (something, it bears mentioning, most criminals would never part with for free, much less force on someone). Or the ending, in which Jason’s mask falls off, revealing what looks like a melted Ninja Turtle face, whimpering in a child’s voice about how scared he is in between violently retching. It’s unforgettable.
Worth Watching? Yes, it’s amazing.
Friday the 13th Part 3
The sequel with the 3D gimmick oddly has a couple things going for it, even if its constant need to have various objects point directly at the screen gets tiresome really quickly. Everything is quicker, more manic, and gorier, which is good because those are the movie’s strong suits. Too much suspense and atmosphere just makes us realize how little we care about the characters. Only a few teens, like a portly young man (whose discovery of a nondescript hockey mask will find its way into horror history) and the girl he’s got a crush on, make enough of an impression that you feel sorry when they’re inevitably gutted.
Watching Jason continue his rampage from the last movie is where the fun’s at. Sadly, the gore effects are laughably terrible. I understand that digital airbrushing was less feasible than it is today, but the amount of times something that’s supposed to launch at the camera is very clearly being pulled by a visible wire is just ridiculous. The lone point in its favor is that all of this cheap stupidity does become genuinely funny at a few bits.
Friday the 13th Part 2
Famously the first movie to actually feature Jason as the main villain. In the previous film, he’s a ghost story, a child who drowned in the lake as a kid. Well, it turns out he survived the experience and has been hiding out in the woods ever since. I guess he never reconnected with his mom, who thought he was dead for decades, but he saw her die nonetheless, and now he’s on a rampage to avenge her. His targets are a new group of teenagers who have stupidly set up a camp counselor seminar adjacent to Camp Crystal Lake.
Jason manages to differentiate himself from his serial killer competition in a few scenes. He’s much more lively, even vocal, than his immediate comparison, Michael (he’s also clearly borrowing some of Norman Bates’ oedipal issues). The movie much more clearly wants us to see him as a mentally ill, traumatized child. But whereas Michael’s evil is made all the more fascinating by its mystery, Jason’s carries an uncomfortably ableist air to it, made all the more disquieting by his disfigured appearance. The series still feels a ways off from hitting its high points.
Worth Watching? Not really.
Friday the 13th (The Remake)
Well, you can’t say they didn’t understand the assignment.
The late aughts, Michael Bay-produced remake fits pretty firmly in line with series tradition. It’s a retread of the plot from the first four movies–Jason growing from a misshapen kid, to a confused mountain man with a bag on his head and an altar to his dead mom, to a maniac in a goalie mask. We even get Jared Padalecki as a guy trying to track down his missing sister, a la a similar character from the fourth movie.
Like other slasher reboots from this time, the movie definitely modernizes itself from a technical perspective. The updated budget is obvious and Jason looks better than he has in decades, running and jumping out at our unfortunate heroes. At least one death genuinely elicits surprise. For the first time since the 80s he’s not a zombie, and fittingly, he feels more alive than he has since then. But, for better or for worse, the movie never loses sight of the fact that it’s a Friday the 13th movie. That means the teenagers still talk like complete idiots and insist on taking off their shirts every few minutes. It might seem silly to rag on the movie on that basis, but something about a movie from 2009 leveling itself to the same nonsensical tropes that were well past the point of being lampooned feels somehow more lazy. By this point, Jason had been to hell, gone to space, and fought Freddy. Just going back to Crystal Lake feels like a step back.
Worth Watching? Nah
Jason X
Jason X is the one where Jason goes to space.
It begins ten years in the future, where the machete-wielding maniac is being held in a research facility so David Cronenberg (yes that David Cronenberg) can study his regenerative capabilities. Anyway, Jason escapes (without explanation, of course), only to wind up trapped in cryogenic storage alongside one of his would-be victims, a hot young scientist named Rowan. They are both thawed out 500 years in the future by a troupe of scientists (all horny, attractive grad students of course, because even in the future, teenagers are still dumb) from “Earth Two”, “Earth One” having long-since crumbled to climate catastrophe, because the real slasher villain is greenhouse gas. Anyway, Jason wakes up on the spaceship and starts killing everyone.
Jason X’s one small step isn’t quite as novel as it seems; even ignoring the slasher-adjacent Alien movies, both Pinhead and the Leprechaun had made the jump to the stars long before this movie came out, and slasher movies were played out enough in 2001 that audiences largely rejected the movie. Still it makes for a pretty fun thing to have on at a party, which is more than can be said for plenty of its competition. Dare I say it, scenes involving Jason fighting an android and getting trapped on a holodeck might be series highlights.
Worth Watching? If you’ve got friends over.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
Not to be outdone by the Nightmare movie titled “Freddy’s Dead”, the Friday producers hilariously titled their “last” outing “Jason Goes to Hell”. And boy does he. In what might be the best opening for any movie in the series, Jason just shows up spontaneously outside a shack at Crystal Lake where a young lady is undressing and chases her into the woods. The predictability of this is the point: she’s an FBI agent, and after Jason follows her into a clearing, the military pops out of the trees and kills him harder than any slasher villain has ever been killed. Less than five minutes into the movie, Jason Voorhees gets blown to bits.
Killing Jason isn’t that easy though, and before long, we find out why. Turns out, Voorhees has been a tiny little demon worm thing this whole time, I guess, and he spends the rest of the movie possessing people and going on a killing spree. As always, only one kid is aware of his return, this time a young man named Steven. His only help is his baby mama, who he discovers may be distantly related to Jason himself (because why be coy when your franchise started by ripping off Halloween), and a sly, sadistic bounty hunter named Creighton Duke. I could watch a whole tv show where Creighton Duke tries to hunt down and kill popular horror villains.
Some solid acting and a more visceral plot lead to Part 9 being not half bad for a Friday movie, but it’s still pretty dumb, and things get weirdly convoluted when Duke tries to explain the complicated rituals needed to put Jason in the ground and keep him there.
Worth a Watch? If you’re a fan, sure.
Freddy vs Jason
Probably the patron saint of dopey crossovers (narrowly beating Alien vs Predator by about a year), Freddy vs Jason must have seemed like the absolute definition of the slasher genre selling out when it was announced. In the years since, however, it’s taken on a new status as an almost cult classic of dumbass early-aughts schlock. Older fans of the franchise are totally uninterested in it, but newer fans consider it a must-see, and I can see why. Obviously whether or not any of these movies are “good” stopped being a question a decade prior, the question now is whether or not they’re “fun”, and Freddy vs Jason is in love enough with its own bullshit premise that it more than qualifies.
Aside from indulging in all the respective franchises’ unending ridiculousness, the movie reintroduced a whole generation to Freddy and Jason in a way that playfully indulges almost every aspect of both franchise’s lore. Without giving anything away, the movie knows we’ll probably end up rooting for the world’s angriest hockey goalie (and you do need someone to root for in these movies, lord knows the non-serial killer cast can’t carry it), even though this does involve some weird developments for his character (like a sudden and inexplicable fear of water). Make no mistake though, Robert Englund, in his final appearance as Freddy Krueger, steals it.
Should I Watch It? If you’re a fan of either of these characters, it’s worth a watch.
Friday the 13th
That the first Friday the 13th endures as something of a horror classic is a bit confounding. To put it mildly, it’s not very good. Almost nothing happens in the first hour, save for the standard interactions between dimwitted horny teenagers, communicated via line delivery that’s meant to sound natural but just comes off as goofy. While the movie’s tiny budget shouldn’t be held against it, one can’t shake the notion that they’re watching a somewhat trashy slasher movie whose reputation as a cultural touchstone is owed more to its financial success, as well as to the infamy of the franchise that success spawned, than to its own narrative.
Part of that is because of the ending twist; as you probably know by now, the teens in this film are menaced by Jason’s mother, Pamela. It’s a twist on the formula to be sure, nobody watching the movie in 1980 would have expected an older woman to be the killer. But nobody would have expected Jason either; he wouldn’t become a horror staple until years later. We don’t even hear our golden boy’s name uttered until Pam is giving her villain monologue. One can’t help but get the impression that the ending’s infamy as some sort of shocking revelation is largely talked up by viewers rewatching the movie in decades since and expecting Jason. I also can’t help but think the Pam twist would be more impressive if the character were introduced earlier in the movie; as it is, she shows up in the last few minutes and is basically just like “its me.”
There’s a few bright spots though. Betsy Palmer is a joy as Pamela, it’s a shame she never rose from the grave like her son did. Of course, there’s also the film’s true star: the special effects courtesy of Tom Savini. How they pulled off that arrow shot on the budget they had astounds me to this day. The movie definitely inspired, and continues to inspire, controversy and discourse (Carol J. Clover’s thoughts on the movie take up a sizeable portion of her seminal book Men, Women, and Chain Saws), but even this feels more a product of the movie’s success than its quality.
Worth Watching? Only if you’re really curious.
Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood
New Blood strives to carry on the anarchic, blithely illogical spark of its predecessor and mostly succeeds, though it does so by fully abandoning any semblance of reality and fully embracing magic, to its benefit. Our protagonist this time is Tina Shepherd, a young woman suffering from lingering grief over when she used latent telekinetic powers to kill her father when she was a girl. Anyway, the only thing that stops this from fully becoming a low-budget Carrie knockoff is what happens when she returns. First, she finds a group of teenagers have moved in next door, a whole Breakfast Club’s worth of bitchy prom queens, weird nerds, and one gorgeous hunky dude. Secondly, her powers returning in full force outside her home cause Jason to arise from his watery grave to, naturally, predate upon the aforementioned hooligans. Tina may wind up being their only hope of survival.
New Blood is an interesting diversion, leagues ahead of its predecessors in terms of plotting and gore effects. Undead Jason really is preferable to “hick Jason”, he feels more like a genuine monster than an uncomfortable stereotype. In a scene where Jason loses the mask, Kane Hodder (making his first appearance in the role) and some gnarly makeup give the character a semblance of a personality. The best slashers are the ones where the unstoppable killer meets his match, and Jason certainly does with Tina, an intermittently engaging heroine. Unfortunately, that it’s still really dumb goes without saying. It also just takes itself way too seriously, jettisoning a lot of the fun of the last movie.
Worth Watching? If you liked Part 6 and want more.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
Out of all the franchises to write their own headstone before their time, have any (with the exception of Avengers: Endgame) been as blatantly dishonest as “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter”? They didn’t even wait a year for the next film! Nonetheless, the fourth Friday promises a showdown that will end with Jason’s demise and, for the most part, it delivers.
This time we’re introduced to Trish Jarvis, whose home near Crystal Lake becomes immensely more hazardous to live in when a group of randy teenagers move in next door for some summer fun. We all know who that attracts. Among those unlucky enough to find themselves in Jason’s path are a nebbish young man played by Crispin Glover, who, in peak incel fashion fumbles awkwardly to hit on one of two attractive twin girls he meets, less for his own satisfaction and more to assuage his male insecurities brought on by his friends. He’ll come to realize that, at Crystal Lake, success with teen girls can lead to the 80s’ second most dangerous sex-related hazard. There’s also Rob Dier, a capable and vengeful young man who’s hunting Jason to avenge his sister, who died in the second movie. Finally, there’s Tommy Jarvis, played by Corey Feldman. Trish’s younger brother who, upon hearing Rob’s tales, develops a fascination with the goalie-masked gorehound.
The characters in the fourth Friday are some of the best yet. They’re as wooden as in any 80’s slasher, but not cardboard. Watching their various subplots play out as we wait for Jason’s inevitable return is at least semi-engaging, and when the killings finally start, the movie’s actually kind of fun. It certainly follows the typical puritanical ideals we see in all slasher movies. Of course, the final girl is set aside by her allegiance to a child rather than to having fun with other teenagers, but Tommy Jarvis, as we’ll come to see later, is no ordinary child, and Feldman kills it in the role. A returning Tom Savini doesn’t hurt either.
Worth Watching? Yes actually!
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
Jason Lives is probably the point where the series jumped the shark in the best way possible. The earlier movies weren’t realistic per se, but they generally followed a relatively verisimilitudinous format. There weren’t any dream gods or druidic curses is what I mean, and the mostly unkillable killer did eventually bite it. Well, Jason Lives chucks all that out the window.
In a suspension of realism that’s so unbelievably stupid it’s shocking even for this franchise, Jason’s worm-eaten skeleton gets struck by lightning and resuscitated (now with like 200 lbs. of muscle suddenly regenerated). The guy is just too damn angry to die. The rest of the movie follows an older Tommy Jarvis as he struggles to convince the police captain of Crystal Lake (now Forest Green) that Jason has returned, only receiving help from the captain’s daughter Megan, motivated to believe the disturbed teenager’s insane proclamations solely based on the fact that he’s cute. A scene where she helps him escape from the police force in her muscle car is a series highlight.
Jason Lives is ludicrous, fast, stupid, and far more entertaining than anything else in the series. I’d be hard-pressed to call it good, but in it’s knowing, self-referential embrace of slasher trash tropes, it’s at least self-aware and is often very funny (upon finding out that he and his friends are being stalked by Jason, a child at Crystal Lake asks his friend “what did you want to be when you grew up?”). Some may grouse at the fact that it represents a full commitment to the idea of Jason as a brand; eschewing the potentially interesting direction V seemed to be taking the series with Tommy. To be honest though, the finality of Tommy’s story carries a sense of optimism that’s largely missing from other 80s slashers. Tommy is not interested in his dark destiny, and he has a chance to try and step away from it. In introducing Megan to his life, the movie also gives us one of the series’ most memorable final girls; a young woman who is in control of her sexuality and her decisions (and her car!) and is not punished for it.
The soundtrack slaps too, although considering it’s largely just songs from Alice Cooper’s Constrictor, that’s to be expected. Isn’t it weird that the characters in the movie keep diegetically listening to He’s Back though? Is it a bit too meta that a song about Jason Voorhees coming back to life is popular within the world of the movie? Whatever.
Worth Watching? Definitely.
