Determined to destroy Jason Vorhees’s body once and for all, Tommy Jarvis (Thom Matthews) digs up the killer’s corpse to burn it.
Sadly, a couple of pesky lightning bolts ruin Tommy’s plan.
Now he has to face his old enemy, now an undead monster (CJ Graham) who is seemingly more powerful than ever.
Jason returns - this time with jokes!
Written and directed by Tom O’Loughlin, Jason Lives feels completely singular in tone and style.
Gone is the hazy mythology and interchangeable victims
In their place, Jason is a zombie and the film around them feels closer to a horror comedy, with Tommy and love interest Megan Garris (Jennifer Cooke) battling to return Jason to a watery grave.
This might sound counterintuitive but there is something weirdly unsatisfying about a Jason movie with a coherent story and characters.
It would probably register if I was not watching it six movies in, but there is something so un-nutritious about Jason as a character that it feels a tad underwhelming watching Jason do his usual thing in a movie that is succeeding at elements these movies usually minimise.
This movie will probably improve on the rewatch, but perversely it solidified my enjoyment of Part 3 and The Final Chapter.
Thom Matthews is good as Tommy - he bears almost no resemblance to his predecessors and I couldn't care less. He knows the tone of the movie he is in, and he works for it.
The film is filled with gags, from obvious references (the opening James Bond parody) to smaller details (one of the kids is reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit).
While the murders come at a decent clip, the change in tone means they are built more like jokes - the easy highlight is the paintball massacre, in which Jason goes to town on some executives on a team-building exercise.
It is an approach that feels completely natural to the series, and one wishes it was a philosophy present across the series. A sense of irony has been key to the murder sequences - mostly around linking sex with death - but the films are so inherently silly that the foregrounding of humour in Jason Lives feels like a natural endpoint.
The sense of precision in the set pieces is reflective of the level of care and detail put into this film.
Watching it decades later adds a strange melancholy. One wanders where the franchise would have gone if this film had found an audience.
It has one now, and while I was not converted, it was a nice bounce back from A New Beginning.
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