The Friday the 13th franchise is an acquired taste. Despite its longevity – twelve movies over thirty years is no joke – it never really evolved. If you watch a Friday the 13th movie, you can pretty reliably expect to see a hulking hockey-mask wearing psycho killer murdering a bunch of unruly, lascivious, drug-addled teens at a camp. Either you’re on board for that, or you’re not.
Luckily, I am! Friday the 13th is my favorite slasher franchise, in part because it knows exactly what it is. There’s no pretension, no misguided pitch to the masses. There’s just Jason, bulldozing his way through expendable camp counselors and vacationing teens. Jason, of course, is the secret weapon here: There’s no attempt to invest him with pathos or to give him a backstory deeper than the confusing melange offered in Part 2 (he drowned as a kid, leading his mom to go mad, but also grew to an adult and watched her get beheaded? Huh?). Jason is pure rage, a brutish personification of conservative fears who descends on the youth every few years to avenge his boomer mom. (Okay, she’s Silent Generation, but you get the drift.) He hacks and slashes his way through the latest upstart generation, leaving only the virgin alive. You know, classic slasher shit.
Like Ash with the Xenomorph, it’s the purity I admire. Jason is uncomplicated, and so are the movies: You can throw just about any of them on and not overburden yourself with things like “plot” or “theme” or “character.” I feel the same way about these movies that some people feel about Law and Order or Criminal Minds. Sure, the content is nominally disturbing, but as long as it follows the pattern, it’s also oddly comforting. You know where you stand in slasher land.
That having been said, not all Fridays are made equal. So in honor of Friday the thirteenth, here’s my franking of the Friday the 13th series. I’ve decided to separate this list into four tiers: Dreadful, Disappointing, Guilty Pleasures, and Slashics. Without further ado, here’s the list.
(I should mention, by the way: full spoilers for all movies in the franchise.)
Dreadful
12. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Undeniably the nadir of the series. Jason is actually barely in it – instead, he’s killed in the opening minutes by a U.S. government attack squad. In the only clever touch, he’s lured outside by a scantily clad special agent before being lit up by guns and rocket launchers (someone evidently got tired of teens going missing at Camp Crystal Lake). The big twist here is that Jason isn’t actually a person, but some kind of … evil worm … who can possess others and … has a secret family because … only a Voorhees can kill a Voorhees and … yeah. It’s unbelievably dumb. The worst part is that Jason’s secret niece isn’t even the main character – it’s some guy named Steve. So what should have been a story of a young woman discovering her dark heritage is instead the story of some dude who reconnects with the woman he left and his child, whom he’s never met because reasons. The gore is good, but mostly it’s tedious, and probably the entry I’m least likely to revisit in the future.
11. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Shot by a director more comfortable with pornography than ultraviolence, this is a weirdo movie in the franchise because it’s another entry in which Jason doesn’t really appear. Instead, it’s a Jason impersonator. I can appreciate why they felt this was necessary: A New Beginning is the fifth movie in the series, and in the entry just prior they rather definitively killed Jason. There are some fun gonzo choices made here, and the tone is, if nothing else, memorably oddball. But it’s also just boring, a slasher in which almost no characters are even memorably annoying: they’re just bland, often introduced for the first time seconds before being killed. There’s no rhyme or rhythm, and John Shephard’s Tommy Jarvis is a total wet blanket of a protagonist. Really almost nothing works, and I’m pretty positive that I’ll be skipping it on future franchise re-watches. Once was enough for this turkey.
Disappointing
10. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Jason Takes Manhattan is a movie with an identity crisis. Half of it is actually more like Jason on a Boat, while the other half is less Takes Manhattan and more Wanders Around Some Vancouver Alleyways. The chief sin of this film is not committing to one or the other: I think a Jason movie set on a boat could have been a lot of fun, actually, but because the goal is to get him to Manhattan, this section of the film is poorly paced, with a bunch of no-name characters getting offed with little fanfare. When we do finally get to the Big Apple, we’re gifted one great scene of Jason stalking through Times Square and … not much else. It’s clear they didn’t have the budget to do the title justice, so they settled for half-assing virtually every aspect of the production. At the very least, there are some fun kills (“Take your best shot, motherfucker!”). And I do appreciate the suggestion that Jason actually rather fits in to weird milieu of New York. But it just doesn’t live up to the promise of that title.
09. Freddy vs Jason (2003)
Genuinely feels like two movies stuffed into one unwieldy package, with the tones of the franchises clashing wildly from moment to moment. Fun in fits and starts, and at least goes all in on the title brawl, but otherwise resolutely unremarkable. Not the best or worst for either franchise, this ends up being … a movie that exists, for some reason, more interesting for the potential inherent in the premise than for anything that actually ends up happening.
08. Friday the 13th (2009)
It’s an audacious opening gambit: In the first twenty or so minutes, the most recent Friday – a franchise reboot – essentially speed-runs the first two films in the original series, before settling into a more familiar groove. It’s only in those opening moments, when this Friday dares to zig instead of zag, that it comes to life. Otherwise it’s business as usual, with even more vapid teens than usual playing the part of Jason’s victims. There are slight innovative touches elsewhere – Jason lays traps! – but none of them can really overcome the fact that this is a franchise best left to the 80s. It’s hard to replicate the magic of those earlier entries, in part because they were such a product of their time, in part because most attempts to rework the formula have ended in disaster. You end up having to pay lip service to change while still mostly doing the same thing you’ve always done, and while that can be fun, it doesn’t have the same kitsch appeal.
07. Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
Gets points for introducing Jason to his iconic hockey mask; loses points for being so otherwise unmemorable that I’m struggling to think of anything to say about it. Does have the 3D gimmick going for it – yes, this is one of those 80s movies that hopped on the 3D train. Watching today, on my 2D screen, the effect is more hilarious than likely intended, with everything from pitchforks to eyeballs popping out at the camera in an attempt to take advantage of a technology that even today elicits eyerolls from me. (Only James Cameron is allowed to use 3D.) It gets old after a while, marring what is otherwise a solid but ultimately unremarkable entry.
Guilty Pleasures
06. Jason X (2001)
It’s Jason in Space, what do you want from me?? Admittedly, this is probably less camp than it could and should have been; if it took itself just a hair less seriously, it might even be higher on the list. But when it works, it really works. I mean, Jason is frozen in ice or whatever, wakes up on a spaceship, immediately starts murdering people, fights a cyborg, loses (!), is transformed by nanobots or whatever into Uber Jason, becomes even more of an unstoppable killing machine … There’s just a lot to love here, including one of my favorite gags in the series, as well as one of my favorite kills (it involves liquid nitrogen). It’s not a great movie, but it’s one I can see myself revisiting over and over again in the future.
05. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Jason vs Carrie! How could I not love the telekinetic swerve this series takes, with Jason facing off against a young woman with psychic powers, her evil psychiatrist, and her abusive ghost dad. It’s a lot, and it shouldn’t work – in fact, you could probably make the argument that it doesn’t work at all. But I still love it. Watching Jason fend off flying light fixtures is a source of endless enjoyment. The only real problem is that the MPAA heavily censored it – turns out there were some great, gnarly kills that were unfortunately cut and later lost (some footage remains, but it’s in bad shape). The MPAA isn’t just an evil organization because they ruined a lot of otherwise great slashers, but that’s surely the sin that feels most personal to me. What a shame.
Slashics
04. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
From here on out, I have no reservations, just love. The top four movies in the franchise are all great for one reason or another. In this case, The Final Chapter feels like the ultimate Jason movie: they pulled out all the stops to give him one hell of a finale. This one also has the benefit of some genuinely fun teen fodder, with Crispin Glover, of all people, showing up and being just as weird as you would expect him to be. This lends some actual personality to the proceedings, and also makes the deaths just slightly more impactful. By trading on the legacy of the franchise and establishing a clear end point for the original continuity, this also accomplishes the neat trick of ending a slasher franchise on a genuine high note (of course, it wasn’t actually the ending, but they sure thought it was at the time). There’s a reason this entry often tops rankings like this: It’s just that good.
03. Friday the 13th (1980)
The original, and still one of the best! Sets up a template that the series only deviates from at its own peril: horny twenty-somethings, camp, serial killer. The twist at the end is great and sets it apart from other entries, with the great Betsy Palmer giving 110% to a part that was certainly beneath her talents. She was rewarded with decades of infamy and adoration from fans, so hopefully it was worth it. Though obviously a Halloween clone in many respects, Friday understands what can make slashers fun and runs with it. If nothing else, I enjoy that this movie angered Gene Siskel so much that he put Betsy Palmer’s hometown in his review and encouraged folks to write her about their disappointment. I like to think the opposite happened and she was inundated with fan mail.
02. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Jason Lives wisely ignores A New Beginning, relocating the action back to Camp Crystal Lake where it belongs and giving us a proper Jason at his most indestructible. It also replaces John Shepherd with the instantly more charismatic and likable Thom Mathews (of Return of the Living Dead fame), who gives us a Tommy with actual agency (not to mention a fighting chance against his nemesis, Jason). We also get a welcome injection of humor. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not quite in Scream territory here, but there’s plenty of knowing winks to the audience, such as the moment a gravedigger looks straight into camera and says “Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment.” That we do, gravedigger. Perfectly paced, suspenseful, and for once lacking the otherwise requisite exploitative nudity (yes, this is the one Friday you can watch with your parents!), it’s very nearly the best of the whole franchise – and is surely the most entertaining.
01. Friday the 13th Part II (1981)
I said at the beginning of this post that I admire the purity of the Friday the 13th franchise, and no movie is more pure than Part II. It feels, in many ways, like the quintessential slasher: Not the best, mind you, but the most distilled expression of the form, a slasher with every standard ingredient done well and right. There’s no fluff, no meta awareness, no tweaks on the formula, no subversion, just pure, unfiltered slasher goodness, the kind of rain-soaked romp through the woods that exemplifies the coziest properties of the genre. This gets a nod over the first movie for introducing us to Jason – bereft of his hockey mask, he makes do with a potato sack, which somehow is actually more menacing. Unlike later entries, which will turn Jason into a hulking monstrosity, this Jason is just a dude, obviously unhinged but otherwise normal. This also has the best final girl in the whole franchise, Ginny, who is smart, resourceful, and cunning when she needs to be. In fact, the last half hour or so – as Ginny flees from Jason through camp buildings, the woods, and finally Jason’s own ramshackle house – is easily the strongest bit of sustained tension in the whole series, culminating in a genuinely clever, insightful climactic moment. As a fan of slasher movies, this is undoubtedly one of the purest, and for that reason it gets my vote for best Friday film.
criterion / watch 