Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986) Starring C.J. Graham, Tommy Jarvis & Jennifer Cooke Directed by Tom McLoughlin Written by Tom McLoughlin & Victor Miller

But not Friday the 13th. Not in my humble opinion, anyway. Friday the 13th is one of those rare cases when it was only through sequelization that a true personality was found. After all, let's not delude ourselves here – the original Friday the 13th was not a particularly special or unique movie in the first place, basically just a cash-in on Halloween with some liberal lifts from Bava's Bay of Blood (aka Twitch of the Death Nerve). With most of the cast slaughtered by the end, including the murderous matriarch Mrs Vorhees, there isn't much about Sean Cunningham's film that screams 'franchise.' And yet, it got that stalk 'n' slash structure down so well, introduced a whole new level of graphic gore to the subgenre, and boasted a wonderfully evocative setting in Camp Crystal Lake. Constant revision film by film made Friday the 13th the pillar of 80's horror that we now remember it as. Like JT in Planet Terror, they were constantly tweaking the recipe, knowing they had something tasty but certain they could get it just right with a few simple amendments; a feral man here in place of old Mama, a hockey mask there in place of a potato sack.

And, to my mind, it was with Part VI: Jason Lives that they got that barbecue damn near perfect.

Now this might seem an odd thing to say, considering how sparingly Jason Lives uses two of the most vital ingredients of any slasher, two elements so obvious I doubt they even need mentioning... but what the hell, I'll spell it out for you anyway: SEX and VIOLENCE. It's the least bloody entry in the series by far; despite a fist through the chest and a three-for-the-price-of-one decapitation, the kills are by and large pretty clean and splatter-free. And as for the other (nudge-nudge, wink-wink - you know, 'the other' - sorry, maybe you have to be English to appreciate that one): beyond one comedic, clothed sex scene and a couple of extreme close-ups of a denim clad crotch, Jason Lives is astonishingly chaste. It doesn't even have - gasp - a single tit shot! Not one! It doesn’t even cut loose a split-second nipple slip or so much as a slither of sideboob, nothing! That makes it unique among the eleven Friday films to date, including Freddy Vs Jason, and I understand the new reboot won’t be skimping on the boobage either. Crazy.

This tameness was almost certainly a direct reaction to the fairly extreme Part V: A New Beginning. But for all that curious series anomaly had going for it in terms of slaughter and skin (and golly, did that girl who got sheared through the eyes have a nice pair or what), it lacked that great big hunk of meat around which the recipe now seemed to gravitate: Jason Vorhees. I can see why getting rid of Jason might not have seemed that big a deal at the time; after all, he wasn't the original killer, and had only lead the carnage for three movies. Replacing him with a copycat certainly wasn't as drastic a direction change as that of Halloween 3. Unlike that breakaway sequel, A New Beginning was still set in the same universe, with a returning character in Tommy Jarvis of The Final Chapter, albeit an older version no longer played by Corey Feldman. And A New Beginning hinted strongly that the boy who had been Corey was about to take over from Jason as the new Friday the 13th psycho. (Again, I can't say this with any authority, but I gather much the same thing is going on with Jigsaw...? Shit, maybe I'll actually have to watch those Saw sequels at some point after all.)

But Jason Lives dispenses with all that. No more imitations - it was time for the real Jason to make his comeback, Elvis '68 style. And considering that there was no way to pretend the wounds he sustained at the end of The Final Chapter could not have been fatal (once your head slides down a machete, you don’t tend to get back up), there was only one course of action: to take the franchise headfirst into comic book supernatural fantasia, and bring the fucker back from the dead.

From the first frames, there’s no mistaking the shift in tone that Jason Lives takes from the earlier films. Strings shriek as we watch the white mist rolling over a midnight Crystal Lake, in a shot that could have come from the frames of Tales From The Crypt. Next we see Tommy Jarvis, now in the shape of Return of the Living Dead’s Thom Matthews, driving out to the graveyard with a fellow mental inmate. Far from the probable paranoid schizophrenic of A New Beginning, this is a sharp, focussed, comparatively well-adjusted Tommy, a Tommy on a mission: to find and destroy what little remains of Jason Vorhees, and thus close the book on that chapter in his life. Progressive therapy in action, I suppose. Soon enough he’s digging up a grave in a Scooby-Doo cemetery as a storm crashes down upon them, and venting his rage on Jason’s maggot ridden remains with an iron fencepost. But just before he gets to set the corpse on fire – which he has conveniently provided with a hockey mask – a bolt of lightning hits, and awakens Jason from the sleep of death. One dead buddy and one fleeing Tommy later, Jason slips the mask back on, snaps around to menacingly face the camera, lightning flashes and thunder rumbles, and the camera cuts rapidly into Jason’s evil eye – across which the image of Jason walks, machete in hand, and slashes outward, filling the screen with blood. That’s right – he’s back, and he’s the slasher James Bond. (And the way things are looking, he might wind up with as many films to his name.)

In the documentary The Many Lives of Jason Vorhees, Jason X writer Todd Farmer remarks that there is debate about this film marking the birth of ‘zombie’ Jason: “up to that point, he’s just a guy who was hard to kill.” It’s certainly true that the first five films only hinted at the supernatural. It was never explained how Jason was meant to have survived drowning as a child, or why he hadn’t made his presence known before Part 2, as though logic and chronology were ever the filmmakers’ concern. Really, Jason Lives isn’t so much sending the series in a new direction as it is simply making explicit that which was already apparent. Jason isn’t just some particularly resilient human being; he’s a bona fide indestructible killing machine. Why? How? Who fucking cares. He just is. And he will always return from the grave, even if you blow him up, put his head in a blender and mail the rest of the pieces to Norway.

It’s by finally severing ties with reality, injecting a hefty dose of ghost train theatrics and slipping the tongue just that little bit into the cheek that Jason Lives becomes perhaps the most entertaining, rewatchable entry in the whole Friday the 13th series to date. Any attempts that the earlier films may have made at being edgy are largely discarded. Put simply, Jason Lives is just plain fun. It’s so much fun that, believe it or not, the titties and gore aren’t really missed. Yes, I said it. And in concentrating first and foremost on being fun, Jason Lives epitomises what the Friday the 13th series is really all about. It set the tone for the Kane Hodder films that followed, for better or worse (Jason Takes Manhattan being the absolute worst). And, of course, it had the masterstroke of getting Alice Cooper on the soundtrack. As a marriage of movie and musician, it’s considerably more appropriate and successful than, say, Prince and Batman.

It’s only a few more months before we see if Platinum Dunes can breathe new life into Friday the 13th, and for once it’s a remake//re-imagining/regurgitation that I’m actually optimistic about. As I said before, Friday the 13th never was about innovation; each film was essentially little more than a remake of the one that went before it. Bay’s boys are promising a return to the days when slashers were fun, and judging by the trailer they might just deliver. But whether or not their new twist on the old tried-and-tested recipe proves appetising, we’ve still got Jason Lives, as near a bull’s-eye as the series has got just yet.

Now all we need is a Special Edition that inserts lots of arterial spray and full frontal nudity, then Jason Lives would be a perfect ten for sure.