Back in the ever-less-accurately-named Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a twelve year old Tommy Jarvis finally slew the mass-murderer Jason Vorhees "for good". But despite the seeming finality of that event, Tommy has never been able to shake the conviction that Jason would be back. Which is why, now aged roughly twenty, he decides to break into the cemetery where Jason is buried, exhume the body, and sent it up in flames.
Given his pyrotechnic plans, Tommy probably should have chosen a less storm-wracked night, particularly because with one errant bolt of lightning into a maggot-inspected corpse, Jason Vorhees is not just back, he's back and undead. His nigh-supernatural resistance to injury now escalated to actual supernatural levels, Jason narrowly misses out on killing Tommy in this first encounter, but is soon merrily hacking his way through anyone else he happens across. Meanwhile Tommy desperately tries to persuade the authorities that they've got a zombie killer on their hands, which goes about as well as you might expect, though the local sheriff's attractive daughter seems rather more willing to believe him than does her dad ...
Fans of the Friday franchise were apparently less-than-enthused by the fifth film's attempts to set up a new killer in place of Jason Vorhees (and to be fair, the film wasn't very good). So with this one the studio apparently decided to give them what they wanted. Jason's resurrection kicks off this movie and is by far the best scene in it, particularly for slasher fans, since it is one of the very few moments where the movie actually gets gory.
Because for some reason - probably the mid-1980s moralist pushback on gory, sexualised films - this movie seeks to give answer the question "what would a Friday the 13th film with no boobs or blood be like?". Which I can assure you is not a question any fan of the series was asking.
The answer, at least as it turned out in this case, is "not very good". The film-makers attempt to recompense the lack of prurient content with ham-handed attempts at comedy. Oh, the guy slammed his face into the tree and it make a bloody smiley face! Oh, the kids at summer camp are making droll comments about their chances of survival! The laughs, they barely start. An effort to actually inject some tension and menace would have been a much more effective tactic; but also probably much harder to pull off, and "making an effort" has never really been the franchise's strong-point.
For Vorhees-completists only.
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