Sorry this is so long- I just really like talking about horror. ;D
Here's some extras I made for fun (sorry about the red dot, I just... don't quite know how to make that disappear):
I know ALOT of people hate on part 8, but I find it oddly fascinating! lol I really enjoy all of the first 8 films a little bit more than I should. Honestly to me though, part 7 does feel a little bit forced. It almost seems like a clone of The Final Chapter with a side of Carrie thrown in to cover for the ripoff for the following reasons. The kids in the house next door, Maddy wearing an outfit near identical to Trish, the secluded locations. The obvious tent scene from part 4 was used in part 7, and it's so funny because it's raining in part 4, and when they reused the scene in part 7 it's not raining haha, and the fact that The New Blood was a "Friday Four Production". I watched The New Blood last night actually, i really do enjoy it! It just seems a bit forced. I like JTM better. I'm an odd duck!
Well, for many years I just LOVED JTM. And I still do, but I mean- I would have worn a T-shirt and gotten a tattoo of it. That sort of thing. Now, I view it as a real "member of the family." So, I try to love the family equally. Which is the real controversial thing to do, since a very big percentage of fans just like the first 4 because they view them as logically connected and not supernatural. I personally think the series is absurd as hell but it's just classic- it's got a feeling about it that you just can't deny or put behind you (like it's some embarrassing thing you might have tried in college). I say- some people are true fans of the franchise and can see where the subtle changes facilitating each new sequel in the Paramount 8 were born (for example- some people argue that there's nothing in JTM tracable to the previous films at all; not true- Fred Mollin's music, the romance between ultra-sweet blonde heroine and "perfect guy" brunet, bitchy blonde slut). Others are fans of the slasher era who just like the first 4 movies because they're, in their eyes, an awful lot like
The Burning and
Prom Night, etc.
As for
The New Blood, I know what you mean... but god do I like that movie more than
Final Chapter! I almost never prefer this approach but it's faster and there's just no nonsense about it. You get a little sleaze here and there and then it's off to the next set-up.
Final Chapter just wastes minute after minute with things I couldn't care about if someone were
Quantum Leaping inside me. Why spend 2 freaking minutes + with the morgue guy and the nurse if all we get is her rotten acting (actually, I'm being casual there: she is literally on my list of top 10 worst actors of all time in a horror movie... ever) and a "joke" (no delivery, no finesse, no sense of timing) about necrophilia? The movie is just making the rounds of part 1, setting up a new couple like they did Claudette and Barry... and I hate these people. I don't want to watch them talk and start to makeout, I want them to die the second they open their mouths.
The other movies don't exactly play this game. And they knew how to balance better. You know? They got the music going, a lot of establishing shots of creepy camerawork and idyllic nature and atmosphere... that sort of thing. This even repeated whenever we cut to a new couple. Good example:
A New Beginning. It sounds ridiculous to use a very similar couple - Billy and Lana - as an example but they have 1 interaction (with way better dialogue) and the scene evens everything else out. You get the boobs for the people who want them, you get the implication that his doing drugs is the allegorical reason why he's being offed, and you get the space between the two characters to build up the suspense(ish) of her hearing a noise and wondering which one of them will be killed first (and how). Also, strangely enough, I didn't get the feeling that ANB was a really leering movie. It felt like the movie was almost trying to satirically poke fun at the stereotypes of the series. Whereas
Final Chapter was just mind-numbing.
I like Part VIII, but as for it being intelligent... HAHAHAHA. Ok there, someone needs to explain that to me.
Aht aht aht- don't put words in my mouth.
I didn't say "intelligent," I said "smart." Intelligent would mean: they wouldn't have bothered to make
Friday the 13th in the first place because they knew it was a rip-off of
Halloween. Smart means: they know it's a rip-off but they want to do something different and worthwhile with it. I think we can both agree they did.
Other than the fact that the movie had a good story, they cast a great actress to play the heroine, the dialogue was more mindful of the fact that since
A New Beginning- they were trying to be dramatic and this time they succeeded (in my opinion), the movie has a heart and yet it's also a lot more suspenseful and visceral this time (the deaths are a lot more hard and the victims seem more like real people, they don't just fall over and die the second a machete comes flying at them).
You know what
Dream Warriors was to
Nightmare on Elm Street? That's what
Jason Takes Manhattan was to
Friday the 13th. Well, creatively (not financially). What I really said was that it wasn't funny. People just say things like that because they couldn't take the punch beheading scene seriously. Overall, they just didn't give this movie a fair chance. Anyone who came to these movies just for sleaze and gore must not be aware of what they're actually watching since these movies were so neutered, it's not even funny. In fact... I don't know how so much gore made it through into parts 3 and 4. But to the MPAA, it was a mistake and they corrected it shortly afterward.
Part V is a criminally underrated blast of a movie! I love it so much. The characters are wonderful. Also, in what world could The Burning NOT be considered a slasher?
I didn't say it wasn't, I said it wasn't exactly. There is a difference. (However slight.)
Consider: the scene where the killer murders the prostitute. This is how they establish both the film's tone and the killer's pathos. By turning the film into a kind of
Frankenstein /
Phantom of the Opera thing with horny kids' shenanigans that remind me of, can I be honest here:
Little Darlings. This is just my opinion - and I hated the movie, so I didn't exactly analyze it thoroughly for every little detail that would support this argument - but I think it was an exploitation movie about how bad kids are. I'm not saying it was necessarily pushing morality but it was trying to exploit (thereby at least earning it an exploitation-horror
subgenre badge) the boys-are-horny-jerks-except-with-each-other, girls-are-either-teases-or-sluts-or-prudes stereotypes. People have a theory in "horror" movies of the last decade were doing this to make the characters unlikable on purpose so the audience would enjoy watching them killed. Not sure if that's why they did this kind of thing in the 80's but...
Sleepaway Camp definitely twisted this in a way that made it subversive and REALLY fun! In
The Burning, it was just obnoxious. Which is another reason why I would call it an exploitation film first.
The early 80s slashers are fantastic to me because they took time to develop often likable characters and weren't cardboard cut-outs of 'the jerk, the bitch, the nerd, the stoner, etc...' like the late 80s to now brought. It gets old fast. The early 80s have a creepy atmosphere about them, and don't rely on lame comedy to cover the fact of what they are. Of course, more money was used to make slashers in the early 80s as opposed to later, so that's kind of an unfair judgment, but still. The later 80s were more about 'let's show boobs and farting joke scenes' whereas the early, though attempting to ripoff Friday and Halloween, by fluke became these well spaced out murder sequences and stalk scenes with real charisma, when barely intended at first.
Wait a second, don't the
Slumber Party Massacre movies fit into your late 80's slasher criticism? I haven't seen those movies yet but I didn't like the first
Sorority House Massacre at all. And, of course, the worst offender and the movie that fits your description to a tee is
Cheerleader Camp. Which I hate profoundly. But, other than that, the late 80's slashers were characterized by supernatural elements (cases in point:
Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers,
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama). They fit the T&A accusation but, other than having some fat slob character as a "comedic" sidekick, the fart type thing wasn't as prevalent as you make out in the slasher genre. As a matter of fact, you're thinking sci-fi monster movies. Like
Street Trash or
Frankenhooker. But, anyway, nobody really paid attention to the "Babe" movie trend- they mostly got direct-to-video releases (and then just transfered into "Skin-emax" softcore sex comedies anyway) while the rest of the slasher films were sequels, ala-
Halloween 4 and
5, and both incredibly supernatural in suggestion, and
Nightmare on Elm Street and "zombie Jason," sure.
For me, I think the early 80's slasher boom was overrated. The characters were dull and annoying and the only depth the movies typically tried to show us was their sexual frustration. Not exactly interesting stuff. Which, again, is why
Sleepaway Camp is so great. It puts a mirror right up to the subgenre and makes a mockery of it. Which made me feel good after sitting through so much boring stuff like
Graduation Day and
The Initiation. Or movies like
Maniac which just plain pissed me off.
Where F13 goes wrong is with the zombie Jason, showing him in full view. It's boring. Even if I know that it's Jason, I like him to keep in the shadows a bit more.
Well, even though I saw these movies for the first time as a kid (from about age 10-12), I never questioned the logic of Jason's inability to be killed or how odd it was that suddenly he had all this rotten flesh poking out the sides of his mask. At least it was a good effect (until New Line came along). I like both incarnations of Jason equally.
Also, the Hellraisers (save for Hellworld, perhaps) aren't slasher movies. Child's Play... well, they're kind of slashers. Especially Part 2, which is my favorite of the bunch.
I know what you're saying but I'm referring to the Julia character. Remember that in the first film (which is the only one in my opinion worth acknowledging), the Cenobites don't actually kill anyone for the first 85 or so minutes of the movie. They're in the background, you see 1 second of Frank being hooked and the movie doesn't explain that, and they really play devil's advocate types. If you scrape off the fact that they torture people in their own personal hell, it's at the very least a serial killer film. But it's closer to a slasher film than that because the film isn't an exploration into Julia's psyche. What I'm saying is that
Hellraiser in the eyes of producers really was a slasher because the demographic they were targetting had no other films like it. I mean, if it's an occult film- name another one like it that was marketed to a young crowd.
Waxwork is the closest you'll get until
Warlock. Unless you count
The Kiss, which is more of a vampire / zombie hybrid.
