Amazing! Splendiferous! Outstanding! Stupendous! Totally Awesome! Rad! Gnarly, dude! Like, fer sure, fer sure! This movie was better than all the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the
The first and one of the biggest tragedies to receive this
cold shoulder would be Kane Hodder, the leading man in the role of Jason
Vorhees. Mr. Hodder’s ability to portray
such a tortured soul, eternally tormented by his inner demons, without the
benefit of even a single line in the entire script, puts him in a class all by
himself. The fact that multi-talented
Mr. Hodder pulled double-duty as the stunt coordinator was virtually ignored by
the Academy.
Next we have Lar Park Lincoln, as the troubled yet
psychokinetic femme fatale, duped into what was to be a fun-loving weekend to
Crystal Lake, the scene of more murders than New York City sees in a total of
ten years (somehow this easily overlooked fact has been forgotten and left off
of the travel brochure). The role of
Tina Shepard was undoubtedly ‘stepping out of the box’ since very few previous
movies have tackled such a prickly issue as teenage girls with lethal telekinesis. One notable actress to portray such a
character is Sissy Spacek in the 1976 thriller “Carrie” for which Miss Spacek
was nominated for a Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar and won the
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress in 1977. It was this same Academy that snubbed Lar
Park Lincoln for virtually the saem cutting edge role, even though Lincoln
Also being rudely shut out is Susan Blu, in the supporting
role as Tina’s mother, Amanda. Ms. Blu
took her character in another direction than Piper Laurie’s Margaret White in
“Carrie”. Amanda Shepard was a caring
and protective parent, in fear for her daughter’s well-being. This more affectionate and touching role was
far more Oscar-worthy than the screeching, violent Margaret White, yet it
earned Ms. Laurie an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for Best
Supporting Actress. But the damage to
Ms. Blu’s career has been more extensive than Lincoln
Despite these outstanding performances, the only nomination
was Jennifer Banko, for the Young Artist Award for Best Young Actress in a
Horror or Mystery Motion Picture in 1989.
Not a bad job for someone who is on the screen for less than 3
minutes. It was a coincidence and accidental
that Ms. Banko appeared exactly as Heather O’Rourke’s Carole Ann Freeling in
“Poltergeist” who was nominated for the very
same award in 1983! “Poltergeist”
garnered 3 Academy Award nominations and won Academy of Science Fiction
The reason that Friday the 13th, Part VII: New
Blood didn’t win any acting awards in 1989 cannot be because of the actors and
actress, since their performances were stellar.
In brief, there was Terry Kiser as the seemingly caring but actually devious
Dr. Crews, who’s darker side matches that of Jason’s, and his bedside manner as
well; Susan Jennifer Sullivan (no, not THAT Susan Sullivan) was Melissa, the
poor little rich girl, trying to find love with the beautiful Nick, but the
last thing that goes through her mind, before Jason’s axe does, is that money
can’t buy happiness; Jeff Bennett as budding screen-fiction writer, but
cancelled going head-to-head (literally thanks to a machete and Tina’s
psychokinesis) with the villain; and Diana Barrow’s Maddy, the ugly duckling
turned beautiful swan turned worm food by Vorhees.
Besides the impeccable acting, there were technical gems
that contributed to this jewel in the crown of thorns of the Friday the 13th
series.
Costume designer Jacqueline Johnson captured the
quintessential style of the late 1980’s with enough shoulder pads and sweaters
(no parachute pants?) to outfit the cast of Ben-Hur, a multiple Oscar winner
including Elizabeth Hoffenden for Best Costume Design. But Johnson’s unique ability to depict the
style of that era so completely there is no doubt when you see the movie that
it IS the 1980’s. Her costume designs
are to 1988 what James Acheson’s are to 1760’s France
The Make-Up Artist and Hair Stylist Jerrie Werkman also
worked (no pun intended) up cosmetic miracles.
With so much big hair on the screen (and enough hairspray to set the
Montreal Protocol back 10 years), what can one say but “Ah, those were the
‘80’s! Still Ms. Werkmen magic on Hodder
gave Jason a more horrifying face than any Alien we’ve seen on Star Wars (and
Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean ,
Harry Potter, Star Trek, etc.) Her only
gaff was for John Otrin’s appearance in the climatic scene at the pier. He looked damn good for being fish fodder for
the past decade and a half.
Probably the only area where an Oscar sweep could have been
jeopardized is the original score. Henry
Mancini…oops!...Harry Manfredini (obvious mistake, anyone could have made it)
composed the music for previous Friday the 13th movies, so in the
“If-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” vein, Fred Mollin’s score is “recycled music”
[source: IMDb.com] with some original music composed by Mollin. The good ol’ (tired) “Jason’s Theme” has been
updated and remixed but the Academy apparently was not impressed.
Breaking away from the “We’ve-seen-THAT-before” mold are
writers Daryl Haney (canned by uncredited executive producer Frank Mancuso,
Jr.) and ghost writer Manuel Fidello.
This literary duo pushed the envelope first by creating a character with
powers so controversial that they are doubted by some of the world’s top
skeptics! What guts they showed to stand
up in the face of such animosity! They
also demonstrated their ability to illustrate the 1980’s as well as the costume
designs. For example, a line of
dialogue:
“So he says ‘Let me see your I.D.’ and I’m like, ‘I left it
at home’ and he goes ‘You have to go and get it’, so I said ‘OK’ and I
left.”
Another example: “Happy f**king birthday!”
Where else can we find such riveting dialogue and insightful
scripts?
It’s the movie as a whole that we should look at. Tina and Jason, two different people from
different worlds (she from the living, he from the undead) inexplicably drawn
to each other yet forever apart, like Romeo and Juliet (it’s a stretch, I know,
but bear with me). The first evidence of
their attraction is when a grown Tina tries to raise her dead father from his
watery grave (a few minutes before, she said she couldn’t move a book of
matches, now she believes she can reanimate the dead?). Instead of focusing her efforts to the shore
where her dad went down, directly beneath her, Tina finds herself probing the
waters 50 yards away, to the middle
of the lake, where Jason waits to be reawakened.
Their attraction takes a step forward when Tina runs through
the (very well-lit) night-darkened forest after Jason, to find him waiting for
her in a clearing. After his attempts to
approach her are thwarted by her psychokinesis (apparently he was a bit too aggressive
in making the first move), he advances on her in a jealous fit after catching
her with pretty-boy Nick. We know that
Jason does not mean her harm, because he even protects her with his body from a
long fall into the basement. Tina is the
only known person that has escaped from the big man’s grasp, losing only her
sweater. Either Jason is slipping in his
old age, or he has a soft spot for her in his maggot-ridden heart. Romantic!
In the final scene, Jason proves once again his love for her
by not violently dispatching Nick (as he does everyone in every other scene),
but simply pushes him out of the way, safely into a boat so he can assert his
presence by standing between them, claiming Tina as his own. But as in Romeo and Juliet, an annoying father
interferes, to show that a man’s love and protectiveness for his daughter are
stronger than any suitor.
Special effects team used methods successfully employed by
other Oscar-winning movies, only to be passed over by the double-standard
Academy. In 1980, “Alien” won the
Academy’s award for visual effects. One
such effect that was ‘borrowed’ by the F13:VII team was the use of a cat to
induce a scary moment by jumping out of a cabinet. In “Alien” however, the cat was introduced at
the beginning of the movie and appeared intermittently throughout until the
final frame. In F13:VII, the cat only
appears in one short scene, then disappears for the rest of the film (kinda like
JoBeth Williams’s character in 1980 Oscar’s Best Picture, Kramer vs. Kramer). The kitchen scene where Jason’s victim
(whatever his name is) places a flashlight on the counter to illuminate his
refrigerator-raiding is reminiscent of Veronica Cartwright’s and Yaphet Kotto’s
death scene in “Alien.” In space no one
can hear you scream. Obviously, no one
can hear you scream at Crystal Lake
Cinematographers used creative artistic licenses by
incorporating the film crew’s shadows and equipment in many places as
background movement to add more of a sense of eeriness and suspense to the
movie. This effective and innovative
technique is rarely used in today’s modern age of editing.
Finally, we must look at the man behind the masterpiece,
director John Carl Buechler, whose unique vision by stepping out of the usual
rut of the previous six Friday the 13th movies, was so tragically
unnoticed by virtually everyone. By
electing to NOT scare his audiences (and risk boring them to death), Buechler
instead chose to build the suspense by using lighting (including intermittent oddly-timed
lightning strikes off-camera), eerie music, and hand-held camera movements and
angles (like Hitchcock) to let us know when Jason is near and ready to
strike. Much more effective than
surprising us by having Jason jump through windows, pop out of the lake, or
travel 5 miles in an instant. Buechler
eschewed precious-time-wasters like character development. For example he didn’t bore the audiences by
showing how Tina developed her powers (a mistake made by Stephen
King…twice). No, when we see Tina as a
young girl, she is fully cognizant of her power and able to use it with deadly
accuracy (accuracy which comes and goes, obviously, since she missed the mark
with her father by 50 yards, yet wielded small nails as projectiles easily).
Jason is given the Pepe LePew ability to keep up with his prey. No matter how fast they run, no matter how slow he walks, he always only ten feet behind them. Jason also has the Bugs Bunny resourcefulness, since he seems to have a plethora of garden power tools at his disposal (anywhere he goes) and can pull them out of his ass…oops!...thin air (whenever he needs them). After use, he discards the tool and grabs another one (from somewhere).
Overall, an incredible movie with only a $3.5 million
estimated budget. With all the evidence
pointing to the outstanding aspects of this pinnacle of the Friday the 13th
series, yet snubbed by the Academy
of Arts
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