Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

A complete tonal shift which transforms the series from a heightened reality to flat-out super-natural.

We have the third Tommy Jarvis movie....a character now played by three different actors in three different movies....and with zero continuity in personality or anything else from the previous one (and Thom Mathews performance is the worst of the three).

We have lots of deaths with very little gore.

We have one short sex scene and not even a nipple to be found anywhere.

We have ACTUAL children going to camp....who - by some complete miracle - all survive.

On paper....this movie should absolutely SUCK. But the amazing thing is - it doesn't...at all....in fact - this might arguably be the best of the sequels so far.

The humor works. The deaths are creative, if not overly gory. There is a larger sense of this world....which I think in no small part is due to David Kagen's excellent performance as Sheriff Garris, who is not so much a villain, but simply an adult who's been around the block a few times and doesn't live in a world where rotting corpses filled with maggots can actually escape their graves and go on killing sprees. The sheriff also gets it brutally at the end.

The real villain here isn't so much Jason who may or may not be an unthinking corpse just doing what unthinking corpse's would do (or is he?....it seems that if this scenario existed in real life, everyone of those kids would have been slaughtered...."so - what WERE you going to be when you grew up?" is one of the best one-liners of the franchise....so does Jason actually have some sort of moral code against killing children?).

But no - the real villain IS Tommy Jarvis. For all he knew about Jason - to purposefully dig him up and unleash him on the world when he didn't have to....getting his buddy killed right away (props to my buddy Ron Palillo who I completely forgot was in this film)....and a whole slew of others - including - potentially - a dozen or so children. Sure - in the end - Tommy almost drowns trying to kill him....but it's his own inability to let sleeping Jasons lie that caused the whole mess in the first place.

(The photo with Ron Palillo was taken in the early 2000s at Arlene's Grocery in New York City.  Mark Foster, the director of the Two Man Advantage documentary '69 Minutes of Fame' won the Best Director award at their annual film festival - The Groceries - and he was the guest host.  We hung out all night with him and bought him a bunch of vodka cranberries.  He was a genuinely sweet guy.)