To bring us into Halloween I thought I would do a daring deed and take on Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger in a no holds bared face off (literally) where I have watched the entire back catalogue of their films to determine once and for all who is champion slasher
The three killers have haunted us through our childhoods with each horror legend bringing us movies which have completely terrified and equally bemused us with poor sequels and terrible plots
Beware pictures of blood, gore, slight nudity and terrible acting to follow.
I begin with Part one of the Halloween Special and start with Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees, one of the most iconic horror villains of all time sporting the classic hockey mask and machete, Jason Voorhees has become a vastly popular member of the horror circle and would be up there with Dracula, Frankstein’s monster Wolfman and Fred West in a poll of people you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a dark house with
With his name first brought to the screen in 1980 and Jason murdering his way through 12 films in total with a 13th on the way, he has amassed around 155 kills and has been shot, stabbed, electrocuted, blown up, drowned, dissolved in sewage, hung, dismembered, anchored to the lake floor and dragged into to the lake by a revengeful dead father of a terrified child! I kid you not.
Jason’s first appearance was in Friday the 13th in 1980 but he was not the killer of the teenagers his vengeful mother was. After the death of her disfigured son Jason where he drowned whilst the Crystal Lake Camp leaders were busy getting horny, Pamela Voorhees decided to seek revenge by killing anyone at the camp and finally getting her comeuppance by having her head cut off by a huge machete by the last remaining survivor of the film, Alice.
That survivor then climbs into a boat and awakes in the morning happy as Larry, then from nowhere a young disfigured Jason jumps from the water and drags her into the lake, A classic ending but she then awakes in hospital and asks about Jason, He’s still out there.
Best Kill:- The leaping from the lake when all seemed calm is Jason’s only kill but in the film the best kill was a young Kevin Bacon lying on a bed and having an arrow come through his neck from below the bed.
Friday 13th Part 2 released in 1981 follows on two months after the first one where a mysterious man tracks down Alice, the survivor from part 1, and kills her. Then five years later another bunch of counsellors come to Camp Crystal Lake and one by one they are killed by an unknown killer who is revealed towards the end when Jason is is shown wearing a sack with eye holes, a far more creepy look that the iconic hockey mask.
Jason gives chase to one of the remaining survivors, a girl, to an abandoned cabin where she finds an alter with Pamela Voorhees severed head and sweater which she wears to deceive Jason but not for long, she is saved by her friend Paul with a machete through Jason’s shoulder and they escape back to their cabin only for Jason to appear unmasked smashing through a window.
Best Kill:- A poor counselor in a wheelchair gets a machete in the head and then rolls down a flight of stairs still with a stunned look.
Friday 13th Part 3 was released in 1982 was not only in 3D but was the film that finally introduced us to the hockey mask but not till near the end of the film.
It’s the next day after part 2 and another group of kids head to the area of Crystal Lake and are picked off one by one by Jason, including a rag tag mean bunch of motor bikers who have a conflict with the kids. Jason dispatches a majority in 3D protruding implements and picks up the hockey mask from one of the kids and completes the legend.
And so all that remains is a girl survivor Chris, who manages to hang Jason from the barn rafters, which doesn’t kill him and when he gets free a surviving biker dude tries to fight Jason who is killed easily, Chris seases opportunity and plunges an axe into Jason’s head and escapes in a canoe and falls asleep”¦.sound familiar? Well she awakes seeing an unmasked Jason from the canoe and this time a decomposing Pamela Voorhees rises from the lake to drag her down below only to awake again being taken away by the police clearly disturbed with Jason lying “dead” with his new axe hat.
Best Kill:- As it’s a 3D movie this kill was truly hilarious and must have been terrifying with an eyeball flying at you from the screen after Jason squeezes our victims head until it goes pop. Classic.
Friday 13th Part 4 The Final Chapter (yeah right)
Released in 1984 it’s the day after part 3 and Jason is whisked to the morgue (don’t paramedics check for pulses?) Inevitably he rises and kills the morgue staff and returns to Crystal Lake.
Here another group of teenagers are gathering to spend time at cabin and a mother, her son Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) and daughter Trish live near by.
Jason proceeds to kill everyone off in a variety of ways including a young George Mcfly, Crispin Glover getting a meat cleaver to the face and all that’s left is Tommy and his sister, 
Tommy is into horror and makeup and so cuts his hair short and applies makeup to make him look like a disfigured young Jason which distracts Jason long enough for Trish to attack with the machete but she misses and removes his mask, she drops the machete which Tommy picks up and stabs in his head but Jason moves so Tommy hacks the hell out of Jason with an evil look in his eyes. The End”¦..
Best Kill:- A swimming teenager is stabbed with harpoon gun in the groin by Jason, then lifted into the air and then Jason fires the gun, Ouch!
Friday 13th Part 5 A New Beginning is a bit of a con but a brave idea to get things going in a different direction in 1985. Young Tommy Jarvis who butchered Jason in part 4 is now a teenager and has been moving from various mental institutions and settles in at a place called Pinehurst run by Pam. A murder occurs on his first day and a disgruntled ambulance man by the name of Roy Burns seems a bit annoyed when picking up the body, Hmmmm plot point maybe.
From then on a series of killings occur by an unknown assailant which lead to Tommy becoming more unstable with his feeling that it’s Jason and by the end of the film a killer emerges dressed as Jason Voorhees but of course it’s not Jason, he’s dead and it’s a Scooby doo ending revealing under the mask it’s old Roy Burns the ambulance driver who’s son was killed at the start, and he would of got away with it if it wasn’t for falling onto some spikes.
Tommy recuperates in hospital and is visited by Pam who is attacked by Tommy, but it’s all a dream”¦or is it.
Tommy opens his hospital bedside cabinet and takes out the hockey mask, you hear a smash and Pam runs in thinking that Tommy has done a runner but as the door closes behind her Tommy is wearing the mask “Look out Pam” it’s too late your dead.
Best Kill:- Another Non-Jason death. Our victim is strapped to a tree by a belt around his eyes and the killer proceeds to twist the belt making it tighter squashing his eyeballs into his head, brutal stuff.
Friday 13th Part 6 Jason Lives. And so he does in 1986, at last supernatural Jason takes centre stage in a brilliant plot device that ignores the last film almost completely.
Tommy Jarvis is back, he’s not an insane killer he’s just stupid.
Jason is buried in a cemetery (with mask still attached of course) and is actually dead with his own tombstone and Tommy and his pal decide to dig Jason up and destroy the body once and for all as Tommy is haunted by Jason in his dreams and so in a fit of rage and some unbelievable odds Tommy impales Jason with a piece of iron fence that is struck by lightening reviving Jason into an all powerful killing machine, Opps.
Tommy retreats after his friend has his heart ripped out and flees to Crystal Lake (now Forest Green as the old name seemed to effect the tourist trade) knowing that’s where Jason will return. With Tommy’s mental past the police find it hard to believe him and so blame him for the recent spat of murders that are occurring.
With the help of the Sheriff’s daughter Megan, Tommy hatches a plan to send Jason to the bottom of Crystal Lake, Jason by now has killed all the new counsellors at Camp Body Count and is lured into the lake where Tommy and Megan wait and eventually send him to the bottom of the lake with some chains and a rock, and so we see Jason is finally dead”¦.. No wait he opened his eye and clenched his fist, Grrrrrrr.
Best Kill:- A teenage girl gets dragged into the bathroom in their RV whilst her boyfriend drives, Jason then smashes her head into the mirror and continues pushing so a perfect imprint of her head comes through the wall on the other side.
Friday 13th Part 7 The New Blood is a venture into the ridiculous for the Voorhees franchise in 1988, not that being electrocuted back to life or being hacked to pieces and still living isn’t ridiculous, but Jason is put against his greatest match, a girl called Tina with telekinetic powers.
The film starts showing the girl at seven years old killing her father, after he abused her mother, by collapsing the jetty he was standing on into Crystal Lake.
Ten years later Tina is still struggling to cope with guilt of killing her father so her mother, the most loving mother in the world, sends her back to their family home where she killed her father (if that doesn’t work nothing will) to be studied by an exploitive psychiatrist with a hidden agenda, now what could that be.
His skills as a psychiatrist are basically shouting verbal abuse at her to increase her mental powers which leads to her accidentally breaking the chains round Jason’s neck that Tommy used to sink Voorhees in Part 6, Oh no!
Jason is obviously quite annoyed at being left on the ocean floor for years and kills everyone near by, including some more kids partying in a cabin down the road and after he has made up for lost time it’s time for the final battle between Tinakinetic powers and Jason, She spins him round, sends him up and down, makes his mask tighten and break revealing his decaying face and finally exploding the family cabin.
Jason is pretty hard though and keeps coming and just when he is about to kill Tina on the Jetty her dead father (presumably brought back to life through her powers) explodes through the jetty, grabs Jason and brings him back to the bottom of the lake, now that’s redemption for abusing her mother isn’t it.
Best Kill:- And probably the best kill of the series, A terrified teenager decides the safest place to hide would be in her tent in her sleeping bag, alas Jason is not an idiot and drags the sleeping bag outside where he smashes it into a tree killing her instantly, it’s hilarious and quite brilliant, so much so in Jason X it’s copied with two girls and two sleeping bags hit against a tree multiple times. Fantastic.
Friday 13th Part 8 Jason Takes Manhattan in 1989, The greatest title of the series and another start that ignores the previous sequel.
Jason is stuck at the bottom of the lake but not by a dead father of Tina, he just is dead.
A randy couple of teenagers on a boat weigh anchor into Crystal Lake which hits an underwater power cable that resurrects Jason who quickly dispatches them and takes a hockey mask the boy used to scare his girlfriend, haha not funny now.
Jason then grabs an anchor of a large boat heading to Manhattan for a graduation party from Crystal Lake as he is probably sick of the sight of Crystal Lake, too many bad memories. Our heroine Rennie is onboard with other soon to be dead teenagers and she starts having visions of Jason as a child drowning and soon the kids start getting killed off and one thing leads to another the boat starts to sink after an explosion and five of the group and Rennie’s dog escape on a row boat to Manhattan.
Jason follows suit and arrives killing a few more on his hunt for Rennie, it’s here we learn that Rennie was almost drowned in crystal lake by Jason as a child, so I take it Jason wanted to finish the job which is why he targeted Rennie, heavy vendetta!
The chase continues through dark alleys and Jason finally meets his demise in the sewers of New York where for some reason toxic waste is used to flush the sewers and it melts Jason away leaving the body of a young Jason”¦.now that’s closure.
You hardly saw any of Manhattan and he certainly didn’t take it so bit disappointing overall.
Best Kill:- Has to be amateur boxer Julius who admirably takes on Jason when he is cornered giving him punch after punch pushing him closer to the edge of a building but Jason has last punch knocking his block off, with one punch decapitating Julius. What a knock out.
Friday 13th Part 9 Jason goes to Hell: The Final Friday (again) 1993 and probably the worst of the series as Jason is hardly in it.
It opens with an unexplained resurrected Jason stalking a woman who leads him into an FBI trap where they shoot him up then blow him to pieces. The remains are then taken to a morgue where the coroner gets hypnotised by Jason’s beating heart, the coroner then decides to eat it therefore leading him to be possessed by Jason’s demonic spirit. Oh dear.
The spirit then transfers from host to host through a terrible looking snake creature and many bodies lay dead. A cool character is introduced in bounty hunter Creighton Duke who seems to know all about Jason and delivers a n explanation to try explain a way to finally kill Jason “Through a Voorhees Jason was born and so through one he can be reborn, and that only by the hands of another member of the Voorhees family can Jason finally be destroyed”.
Jason then tries to locate and get reborn through a relative, so lucky then that he finds Diana who’s his half sister and her daughter Jessica. In a crazy twist of fate Diana is killed and so it’s down to Jessica to finish off Jason using a magic knife (The Bone knife from the Evil Dead films) to the heart which is given by Duke, the knife is the only thing that can kill and send Jason to Hell.
In the final fight, Jessica faces a Jason possessed body who has his head chopped off and the weird Jason Soul snake escapes and finds his Diana, his half sisters dead body and is reborn back into Jason with boiler suit and hockey mask, Right on!
Jason is stabbed through the heart which sends him to hell and all that remain is his mask, and that’s the end of Jason. BUT NO, The hockey mask is shown laying on some sand and as the camera pulls back Freddy Krueger’s clawed hand reaches out and grabs Jason’s mask and brings it to hell, Awesome!!
Best Kill:- Probably one of most goriest kills and most badly timed as two teenagers are caught doing the thing in a tent that Jason hates the most, so to show his disapproval Jason impales the girl with a spike and rips it through her upwards cutting her in two .
Friday the 13th 10, Jason X.
Released in 2002 but initially set in 2008 to avoid problems with the timeline with Freddy vs Jason being released in 2003 as that would have been ridiculous!
Jason has been captured by the U.S Government and held at the ridiculously named Crystal Lake Research Facility where they have unsuccessfully tried to execute Jason so they intend to cryogenically freeze him to neutralize the threat which surprising goes badly and he kills everyone except our heroine Rowan who lures him into the cryonic chamber where she is stabbed but along with Jason is frozen.
And to finally end any chance of adding a further sequel (so you would think) we head over 400 years into the future to the year 2455, Earth is polluted and vacant and our two popsicle roommates are found by a research ship and taken to their spaceship to go to Earth 2.
Amazingly they have a machine that can heal any wound using nanotechnology which fixes Rowan and she warns that Jason is not dead, To cut a long story short (Too late!) Jason is accidentally thawed out and starts killing, he kills more randy teenagers and a bunch of marines led by Seargent Brodski are quickly dispatched.
Jason finally comes face to face with a female android programmed to fight who kicks his ass shooting off his leg, abdomen and chest, one arm and most of his head and is dead, Yeah! but look you fools he’s fallen in the Nano repair machine, why are you walking away!!
Jason is rebuilt into Uber-Jason, making him part cyborg and quite angry but Brodski comes back and saves everyone by blowing him out into space but Jason doesn’t give up and comes back to the ship where some futuristic Holograph machine creates a version of Crystal Lake with frolicking girls to distract Jason whilst they fix the ship to escape. Hilariously Jason recreates the girl in a sleeping bag against a tree kill with two of them this time pounding them over and over (probably one of my favourite scenes in the franchise) and then gets bored and starts the hunt for the survivors.
Jason is again ejected into space but as he comes back again Brodski, the sly dog, grabs him wearing a jetpack suit and flies him into the Earth 2’s atmosphere where they burn up on entry and killing Jason once and for all, unless the image of just his mask floating to the bottom of a lake after surviving the heat of re-entry can possibly mean anything else”¦
Best Kill:- Adrienne, Jason wakes up from his hibernation and the first thing he does grab the girl by the head, sticks it in a vat of liquid Nitrogen that freezes her head than smashes it on the table shattering it to pieces, Brilliant brilliant death.
Freddy VS Jason, 2003
Finally the battle we have been waiting for since the ending of Friday 13th Part 9 ten years previous and what was made was a very well thought out story and a pretty decent horror film.
The basic story is that Freddy is trapped in hell and has been forgotten by the children of Springwood and so he finds Jason Voorhees in Hell and disguised as his mum Pamela Voorhees, instructs Jason to go to Elm Street in Springwood to kill so to get the kids thinking of Freddy again.
Jason does the business and Freddy is mentioned in the aftermath and so our heroine Lori dreams about Freddy but not giving him enough power to kill in dreams. Lori awakens and tells her friends of the dream and so they dream of Freddy giving him more power but the problem is Jason isn’t going to stop killing and step aside for Freddy to return.
The kids hatch a plan to get Jason to Camp Crystal Lake and to draw Freddy from Lori’s dreams into reality to finish it once and for all. They manage to drug Jason to sleep and get him there then Lori sleeps and finally gets Freddy into reality and the two legends face off revealing in the process that Freddy killed Lori’s mother blah blah, the two continue to fight and fight really well with machete and glove slashing and stabbing, until finally Freddy gets stabbed with his own decapitated arm and glove then gets his head decapitated by Lori as Jason’s falls into Crystal Lake due to his injuries. They are both dead.
But Noooooooooo, Jason rises from the lake holding Freddy Krueger’s decapitated head still alive and giving a wink to the camera and that’s that.
Best Kill:- Trey, Is stabbed multiple times with Jason’s Machete whilst in bed and if that wasn’t enough whilst laying face down Jason folds the bed in half so Trey’s feet are touching the back of his head.
Friday the 13th 2009.
A pointless remake adding nothing to the franchise.
Basically a reboot cash in to show Jason Voorhees to a new generation that won’t except the cheap looking versions of the early films this is the same film as the Friday the 13th parts 2-4 but with some added plot to make it modern.
The film starts off showing a young Jason witnessing his mother being beheaded by a camp counsellor then jumps 30 years later to where a group of friends are camping trying to locate some marijuana that was grown in the forest (hey, there teenagers right) they are all murdered except Whitney who he kidnaps because she resembles his mother.
Six weeks later Whitney’s brother Clay (Supernatural’s Jared Padalecki) is searching for her near Crystal Lake and Jenna and her group of young friends are also coming to town to stay in a cabin to party.
The kids all start to get killed off in pretty gruesome ways and Clay and Jenna go off to search for Whitney who find her chained up. They escape but Jenna is caught and killed and so Clay and Whitney run to safety, Whitney pretends to be Mrs. Voorhess and then stabs Jason with his own Machete and Clay dumps Jason’s body in the Lake but as They leave the dock Jason burst through the wooden dock and takes Whitney into the Lake.
It was all too similar to the originals for me and Jason did what he did best which is killing teenagers but with more realistic FX, but there was no scares that were not predictable and no added story to the great character of Jason.
Best Kill:- Teenager camper is sitting round the fire screaming like a girl because he has his foot caught in a bear trap and within seconds Jason appears and slams his machete straight into his head to shut him up.
Although mildly enjoyable it is completely unnecessary reboot and it’s already got a sequel in development that will hopefully add something more but in the hands of Michael Bay producing I doubt it.
And so from one Michael (Bay) who murdered Transformers my next part of the Halloween special will be the murdering star of the Halloween Films Michael Myers.
