10 Great Horror Movies That Fell Victim To Franchise Fatigue
2. Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
By 1986, the Friday the 13th franchise was a well-worn cinema entity, and the franchise found itself in disarray following 1985's A New Beginning.
That fifth movie in the series mislead audiences with its reveal of a copycat killer in Jason's mould and an ending that promised now-legacy character Tommy Jarvis would be the new Jason. The concept didn't sit well with audiences, with A New Beginning grossing $11 million less that its 1984 predecessor, The Final Chapter. Paramount Pictures responded to the diminishing returns by bringing Jason back and making sure the audience knew it.
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives opens by picking things up with the aforementioned Tommy. In his endeavour to make sure that Jason is dead, Tommy accidentally ends up reanimating Jason's corpse via a convenient lightning strike. From there, Jason heads into the woods, intent on picking off campers, while Tommy struggles to warn a disbelieving community of the resurrected threat that now looms large.
Friday VI opened to surprisingly positive reviews, but unfortunately topped out with $19.4 million at the box office, becoming the lowest grossing film in the series so far. Why should you see Jason Lives, then?
For a start, the humour. This is a film that knows it is the sixth entry in a horror series and makes no bones about it. It fully exploits the ridiculousness of Jason Voorhees and his inability to stay dead, and this leads to some hilarious and wonderfully executed sequences of Jason sustaining ridiculous injuries and never batting an eyelid. It is fair to say Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was ahead of its time, being meta before the concept even existed.
Director Tom McLoughlin knew the Friday the 13th franchise was dwindling and so he does his best here to reinvent the material. If that's not enough to intrigue you, how about a custom made soundtrack from Alice Cooper? Yes, this was the Friday the 13th movie that tied into MTV and provided us with fantastic '80s rock banger like Teenager Frankenstein and He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask).