The last three installments of the "Friday the 13" saga that Paramount Pictures released in the late 1980’s each drift into their own peculiar degrees of God-awful badness. Being created by freelance low-budget producers that had zero involvement in the first five movies will do that to a series, but I digress. In 1986’s "Part VI: Jason Lives," which assumes most viewers had a lobotomy to forget "Part V" and ignores everything that took place in it, the character of Tommy Jarvis (played by yet another actor, Thom Matthews) wants to make sure that Jason Voorhees is dead. So he recruits a fellow patient at the mental institution where he’s staying and drives to the renamed town of Forest Green, AKA Crystal Lake. Jason’s tomb exhumed and the decomposed remains of the murdered psychopath don’t convince Tommy. He’s preparing a gasoline container to burn Jason’s remains when lightning strikes the dead man’s corpse (Ch.2) and resurrects it. Gosh, don’t you hate it when good things happen to bad people?

Armed with an improvised spear and donning a brand-new hockey mask, Jason promptly perforates the chest of Tommy’s friend with his fist and sets out to do what he hasn’t been able to since 1984. You know: spear to death some counselors stuck on their way to the new Forest Green Camp (one of which is played by Tony Goldwyn, the voice of the lead character in "Disney’s Tarzan" and the bad guy "Ghost"), wipes out an entire regimen of businessmen pretending to be soldiers at a military retreat (including one that’s a dead ringer for Woody Allen), perforates with a broken bottle the throat of the drunk graveyard digger that covered back his grave to hide his incompetence, etc. Tommy’s impassioned pleas for authorities to help him stop Jason’s killing spree fall on the deaf ears of Forest Green’s sheriff Garris (David Kagen) and his men. Garris seems like a reasonable guy (I’d trust him over Tommy’s crazy rants), but the movie’s need for an antagonist to Tommy’s ‘crying wolf’ routine forces the producers to make a stubborn asshole out of the best actor in the cast.

Garris’ daughter Megan (Jennifer Cooke), on the other hand, believes and helps Tommy because she and her friends Paula (Kerry Noonan), Sissy (Renee Jones) and Cort (Tom Fridley) are counselors to a large group of boys and girls staying at Camp Forest Green. Would any sane person send his/her kid to the same geographic area where more than 60 people were slaughtered (assuming one takes into account "Part V’s" forgotten victims) by the Voorhees clan? Probably not, but by making Jason a member of the living dead cache of movie characters the series has taken a steeper dive into the illogic, which can’t be really held against it given how messed-up "Part V" left the chronology. Tommy went from being a perpetually-troubled man with personality problems (didn’t he kill Pam at the end of "Part V"?) to a cocky and self-assured son of a bitch, one that wants to be friends with Megan as much as stop Jason. Where’s the believability in any of these? It doesn’t matter since most people in the movie are busy being idiots that go outside and into the woods to be mistreated by one of America’s favorite cinematic anti-heroes.

Under the helms of writer/director Tom McLoughlin though (co-creator of the forgotten syndicated TV series "She-Wolf of London"), gore has been toned down dramatically and the emphasis refocused to make the death scenes less gory and more ‘wink at the audience’ clever. You know you’re not watching the grim psychological woes of "Part 2" or the nasty attitude of "The Final Chapter" when the opening credits of "Part VI" open with an homage (rip-off?) to the opening sequence in every James Bond movie ever made. Acting is neither too horrible or genuinely good, but it feels as if a made-for-TV crew were working on a feature film punctuated by a few graphic moments of intense violence (like Jason’s first simultaneous triple homicide when he decapitates a woman and two man at once). The budget for the film stock and production seems to have increased a little bit, but "Part VI" clearly denotes a shift of emphasis by Paramount intent on making the series more appealing to teens than horror genre fans.

We don’t even get a decent sex scene or an exposed breast to look forward to, and have to settle for a couple of twenty-something actors pretending to be teens having sex with their clothes (and Walkman) on. Only little Temi Epstein scores believability points as a little girl that sees Jason but thinks she can make him go away by closing her eyes and saying a prayer to make him go away. Gosh, if only we could be so lucky!

BODY COUNT: 17 (12 men & five women, one of them off-camera). MOST GRUESOME DEATH: sheriff Garris (David Kagen) may have been an asshole throughout the entire movie by giving Tommy Jarvis a hard time, but he certainly did NOT deserve to get bent and broken in half by Jason. Not after doing whatever he could to save the children at Forest Green camp and his daughter. But hey, life ain’t fair!

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