Jason Voorhees is the star of these movies. That is an undisputed fact as he is the only character to remain consistent throughout the series and is the only one for which the audience has any real interest. However, up until this seventh sequel, Jason had never had anything like star treatment. Here, for the first time, the viewer can catch a glimpse of how Jason goes about stalking his victims and why he chooses one course of action over another. You can see how he behaves after a murder (never shown before) and you can almost see how his addled child's mind thinks.
And that's all well and good for people who care about such things, but it makes for one crappy movie that couldn't scare a small child who is new to the series. If the viewer knows exactly where Jason is all the time and what exactly he's planning on doing, there's just no way to be frightened by what's going on here. Somewhere along the line someone, and I'm thinking it was the editor, figured this out, so during the later killing scenes Jason just appears out of nowhere constantly (created, probably, by jettisoning minutes of footage that show how he got to these new spots). This tactic doesn't work either because it simply makes the audience wonder how in the hell Jason could have climbed thirty rungs of a ladder in two seconds (even with his newly acquired superpowers) or how he could know the exact layout of a New York City sewer having never been away for Crystal Lake before.
But this is all moot. The real dilemma here is the time problem. The Girl Who Lives in this film is eighteen years old. As a small child of eight or nine, she was pushed in the lake by her uncle who was attempting to teach her to swim. While struggling to stay afloat, she met Jason who had been submerged there by his campmates. So, nine or ten years ago Jason was a little boy. That makes him about the same age as the kids in this film (never mind the whole, sunk at the bottom of the lake and still living thing). However, he is an adult when Tommy Jarvis, as a boy of about eleven, "kills" him in Part 4. Then, later, Tommy Jarvis returns to Crystal Lake as adult (in Part 6) and has another run-in with Jason, putting Jason's age at least over thirty. And if you really want to do the math, Part 2, in which the adult Jason first appears, was made in 1981 and Part 8 was made in 1989, so Jason has to be at least six or seven years older than the Girl Who Lives.
I know all this is beside the point with this sort of film but I couldn't help being distracted by it. Here you have one of the most interesting film franchises around with one of the richest subtexts and apparently monkeys are at the controls. There's not much about this film that could have been conceived by an intelligent, creative person. Too bad we'll never get to see what a person like that would have done with the franchise. Instead were stuck with a vision of New York that posits the ridiculous notion that the sewers are pumped full of toxic sludge every night (how our beloved killer meets his ignominious end). A sad way for someone so interesting to go out. Oh well, I suppose I haven't seen that Jason in space movie yet so I might have greater disappointment in my future.
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