Yes, Jason, we see you there. Now just go away.
I've been thinking about this idea...musing...ruminating if you will. We can all agree, I think, that the series should've ended a long time ago- most logically after Part IV: The Final Chapter when l'il Tommy Jarvis got Jason to slide his face down a machete, then proceeded to flip out and hack up the psycho into little pieces. I mean, "The Final Chapter", y'all- you feel me? Since then, at the bequest of film companies reaching for the movie-watching public's almighty dollar, Jason has been killed and resurrected and drowned in toxic sewage and sent to hell and sent to space and fought ol' crusty-faced Freddy Krueger. He certainly knows how to Carpe Diem, but he knows not when to let go gracefully.
Wait, where was I? Ah yes- ruminating. I'm wondering- would it be possible, at this point, to make a decent 12th Friday the 13th movie? It's wholly unnecessary, of course, but is it possible? Let's pretend we care. I suppose the most logical path to take would be to tell the origin of Jason- what else can you do with the property at this point? Still, the movie is completely superfluous, but we're ruminating here, people.
If the task somehow fell to me to write this movie, I'd most likely continue the idea presented in Part II, or as I like to call it, "The Ginny Theory". The Ginny Theory proposes that Jason never died, never drowned in the lake all those years ago. He got out of the water and spent his days in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake, decorating his lean-to, foraging for nuts and berries, and eventually watching his mom's head get lopped off by counselor Alice. He became crazy backwoods man, running around in a series of mask-and-coverall ensembles until Tommy Jarvis shaved himself bald and went to town with the machete. The new movie would focus on Jason's early years, falling somewhere between getting out of the lake and the happenings in Part II. We'd see Jason building his lean-to, foraging for nuts and berries, and becoming a man- finding hair where there was no hair before. Maybe he'd meet a crazy, backwoods lady...it'd be just like some twisted version of The Blue Lagoon! Yeah, that'd be awesome! It'd be all- no, wait. That would be terrible.
OK, here's an alternative plan. Rather than focusing on Jason, why not focus on his mother, Pamela? Who's Jason's father? Where did he end up? What did Pamela do in the years after Jason drowned, as she thought he did? She killed the counselors directly responsible for the accident, then killed a whole bunch more when Steve Christy tried to re-open Camp Crystal Lake- but what about all the years in-between? What if there were 2 stories happening concurrently, following both Jason and his mother in that lost time? Sounds a bit interesting to me. But that would never fly- it would be too different. Audiences just want to be little baby birds, opening their mouths wide to be fed the same old worms time and time again. Give us oozy, corpse-y Jason in a hockey mask, killing faceless, obnoxious teens! Yay! We'll complain about it later, because, well, it has to suck, doesn't it? It's simply a tired idea. So we'll complain about it, but it's what we want. Anything really fresh or really different, so long as it had a "Friday the 13th" slapped on it, would be treated with as much scorn as the old re-treads precisely because it wouldn't be the same old re-treads. 'Tis a conundrum.
My prediction is they'll tie Origins in with Part IX somehow- you know, even though we all thought that Jason was basically a normal person underneath it all (at least at one point), it turns out that if you eat Jason's heart, you kinda turn into Jason, and Jason is really like some demon spirit that looks like an alien-penis-thing. Now that's the way to go, right? Sigh. Oh well. The fact that we've heard precious little about this proposed movie but they're shooting for an October release date speaks volumes about what we're going to get on-screen.
You know what, New Line? Make a movie about Jason Voorhees that's something like this and I'll be the first in line:
Fuck Freddy Krueger. I want Jason vs. little Italian stereotype plumber vs. hedgehog. Until that comes along, I ain't holding my breath!
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