Tommy Jarvis returns to Crystal Lake years after his encounter with Jason, determined to finally destroy the killer’s corpse. Unfortunately, a lightning strike brings Jason Voorhees back from the dead, and the killing starts all over again.
Tom McLoughlin’s Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is the series’ much-needed correction course. McLoughlin both writes and directs, bringing a fun horror atmosphere, a knowing sense of humour and enough self-awareness to breathe new life into a franchise that was beginning to run out of steam.
Thom Mathews, fresh from The Return of the Living Dead, is excellent as Tommy. Megan Garris, David Kagen, Renée Jones, Kerry Noonan, Tony Goldwyn and Tom Fridley all add to an enjoyable ensemble.
It’s also a shame they didn’t reuse Corey Feldman’s nightmare sequence from A New Beginning, as it would have provided a nice link to Tommy’s past. Instead, Mathews takes over the role played by John Shepherd, and makes it his own.
C.J. Graham’s impressive Jason is another major highlight. He establishes the hulking, almost unstoppable version of Voorhees that Kane Hodder would later step into and define. In resurrecting Jason, McLoughlin makes him an explicitly supernatural force for the first time. It distances itself from Halloween’s Michael Myers mortal archetype. This undead, more powerful version would become the standard depiction of Jason for the rest of the series.
The film even has fun with the conventions of the genre, prefiguring the self-aware horror humour that Kevin Williamson would later bring to the Scream films. The James Bond-style title walk-on is a brilliant touch, immediately announcing that this isn’t going to take itself too seriously. Yet, it has tension filled scenes, including a few with children at a camp which hadn’t been done before.
The atmosphere is excellent, the practical effects still work, the kills are inventive and Jon Kranhouse’s cinematography gives Crystal Lake a great look. Harry Manfredini’s score remains essential to the Friday the 13th sound, while Alice Cooper’s “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)” gives the film an unmistakable ’80s horror identity.
Most importantly, Jason Lives is fun. It understands exactly what audiences want from Jason while giving the series enough personality to stand apart from what came before.
Overall, while light years away from the tone of the original, McLoughlin gets Friday the 13th back on track, gory, atmospheric and unapologetically entertaining. Jason is back, and this time he really is supernatural.
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