Trick or Trailers: Wishmaster (1997)

I believe that only a certain type of person could ever be hyped for Wishmaster. That isn't a knock on it at all, just a statement of fact. 

No matter how this movie was marketed, it was only going to speak to a certain segment of movie goers. While there's definitely a non-genre audience that can get excited for the likes of, say, Misery or Bram Stoker's Dracula or whatever, Wishmaster is another matter. 

Released in 1997, Wishmaster had '90s direct to video written all over it and yet was given a wide theatrical release. Anyone catching this trailer knew immediately whether it was for them or not.  

 

Every second of that trailer is pitched squarely to FANGORIA subscribers, not to the kind of wider audience that was fueling the then-resurgence of theatrical horror, kicked off by Scream in '96. 

Right from the Live Entertainment logo to the "Wes Craven Presents" label to the appearance of genre faves like Tony Todd and the corny vibe of the Wishmaster himself (played to hammy perfection by Andrew Divoff), this was not the stuff of mainstream blockbusters. 

No, this was something that you'd grab off the shelf of your local video store, alongside Leprechaun 4: In Space. But that's what I love about Wishmaster. It's a movie for hardcore horror nerds that somehow got an unlikely break and played on the big screen. 

The month after Wishmaster's release, both Devil's Advocate and I Know What You Did Last Summer were released to theaters, just in time for Halloween. Both of those films had the kind of mainstream appeal that Wishmaster didn't. In the case of Devil's Advocate, you've got big stars like Keanu Reeves and a big budget and in the case of I Know What You Did, you had stars on the rise like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt and a screenplay penned by Scream's Kevin Williamson. With Wishmaster, on the other hand, you had a screenplay by the guy who wrote some of the Hellraiser sequels and cameoes by Ted Raimi, Kane Hodder, Robert Englund and Tony Todd - with a voice over appearance by Phantasm's Angus Scrimm to boot!  

And yet, Wishmaster did well enough to spawn three direct to video sequels! So many efforts to deliberately create a new horror icon tank that you have to give Wishmaster credit for actually successfully launching a franchise. True, Wishmaster may not be a household name like Freddy or Jason but, hey, he's got four movies to his name and that's the kind of success that the people behind Dr. Giggles or the Trickster would have made their own wish to the Djinn for! 

Trick or Trailers: Jason X (2002)

Man, it feels like these October days are just burning away faster and faster. Honestly, how is it possible that we're little over a week away from Halloween? I'm telling you, there's just no keeping up! But anyhow, as much as this Halloween season (along with the rest of 2020) is feeling like a dismal wash, one bright spot this month has been the arrival of Scream Factory's glorious Friday the 13th box set. 

The fact that I own all of these movies many times over in various formats doesn't diminish any of my geeky excitement over having them all together for the first time in one beautifully designed package. The box, the casings, the discs themselves, it all looks wonderful - such a difference from the "who cares?" attitude that Paramount always seemed to bring to the original eight films. 

Warners/New Line was always a little better in packaging their entries but having all twelve films together in a set that shows real care across the board is awesome. The only reason any fan will ever need to upgrade now is if the legal obstacles to a new film are ever cleared and we finally get Friday the 13th Part 13. I have to imagine it will happen at some point. I mean, come on, how could it not? 

In the meantime, though, having this set is compelling me to revisit the entire series (which is only making it seem even less like October - I associate Friday with the spring and summer, not the fall!) and, of course, all the trailers. 

One of the best of the bunch, in my opinion, remains Jason X. 

 

What a splendidly cheesy trailer this is! While there's an automatic eye roll effect that happens as soon as fans hear a slasher series is heading to space, I love that this trailer doesn't care about that. It leans into the premise and sells it hard, like it's the coolest thing that ever happened.  

Sure, one could say that it gives away too much. It could be argued, I suppose, that it would have been better to keep Uber Jason under wraps as a surprise to be delivered by the movie itself but I say to hell with that. Far better to just put it out there. It's the movie's big selling point so why hide it? You can't have your tagline be "Evil Gets An Upgrade" without showing what that upgrade's gonna look like.  

Of course, all the coolness of the Uber Jason design aside (how much of a bummer is it, by the way, that we never got a Jason X 2? I would have loved to have seen Kane Hodder come back and rock that look at least one more time), it's really the Drowning Pool song that makes this trailer. It was a stroke of genius on whoever it was in the New Line marketing department who thought to slap "Bodies" on this. 

Call that song corny if you will but as soon as it kicks in, it's like "Oh yeeeeaah!" And from the vantage point of 2020, hearing it now brings on a such warm rush of early '00 vibes. 

Back then, those years did not feel like such a great era but, you know, we got through 'em and so now that time has its own kind of nostalgic glow. Let's hope we'll be able to say the same about this time we're living through now one of these days. No matter what, as Jason X shows us, we've always got to keep our eyes on the future. 

Chances are, some cool shit is likely to go down there.   

Summer Shocks 1989: Jason Takes Manhattan

When it comes to horror franchises, I'm all about Friday the 13th. Halloween was a classic, no doubt, but as a series it was a weak player. Friday the 13th, though, they knew how to roll those movies out and the first movie hit when I was exactly the right age to be affected by it. Awed by it, really, because of the fact that I was too young to see it immediately - the same with its first two sequels (The Final Chapter was the first Friday I saw in the theaters, thanks to my mom generously consenting to take me and my best friend). But having those films be off-limits to me for a few years only made them become larger than life in my imagination. Had I been able to see the Fridays in the theaters from the start, they wouldn't have had the same mystique for me.

Like everyone else, as the '80s went on I thought the series became pretty pathetic but in looking back, nostalgia wins out. If I had to choose my least favorite of the Paramount Fridays, it'd have to be The New Blood. A lot of people love that one but while I'll give it up for the amazing look that Jason had in that film (John Carl Buechler really rocked the make-up on that - it doesn't get much better than seeing Jason's exposed spine), the ending is so atrocious that I just can't enjoy the movie. Jason Takes Manhattan has a dumb ending, too, it's just not quite as dumb as New Blood's. That's an arguable point, I know, but I'm sticking with it. Admittedly, I thought Jason Takes Manhattan was garbage back in '89 but over time, I've forgiven it for sucking.

In light of how turgid and joyless so much modern genre fare is, I give Jason Takes Manhattan points for being fun and not the least bit full of itself. It's the kind of film that could have only come from the pre-internet age. Thanks to the threat of online backlash, studios and filmmakers are way too hip now about the danger of going too far off from what the fans of a franchise expect. This doesn't stop them from making shitty movies, of course, it's just that they make them shitty within a more focused parameter. They toe the line a little more but that usually just makes for more cautious crap, not better films.

Jason Takes Manhattan comes from a time before studios thought catering to the fan base would be in their best interest and I kind of like that. Today, geeks are seen as a force to be reckoned with (Comic-Con begins tomorrow, in fact!) but the masochist in me is weirdly fond of the days when we weren't made to feel so entitled. And Jason Takes Manhattan remains the poster boy for those times.

For my full Summer Shocks review of Jason Takes Manhattan, click here.

The New Jason

At the start of 1986's Jason Lives, the sixth entry in the Friday the 13th series, Jason was depicted mimicking the famous opening to the James Bond series. The moment rated as a nice tip of the hat to Jason's status as a pop icon but unlike the many actors that have famously carried on the mantle of England's premiere super-spy through the years, when it comes to Jason Voorhees, the man behind the mask has always been an anonymous figure to all but the most hardcore geek set. But whether or not it's news outside of the FANGORIA crowd, the new Jason for the upcoming Friday the 13th remake has just been revealed to the world. The lucky candidate to don the hockey mask this time around is Derek Mears (see photo above).

For some, the news of a new Jason will be greeted with a shoulder shrug - after all, couldn't any big dude fit the bill? For instance, I felt that Rob Zombie was just blowing a lot of smoke in trying to say that he cast Tyler Mane as Michael Myers in his Halloween remake because he really needed someone who could ACT as opposed to going with a stuntman. Well, having seen that film I strongly disagree. Mane did fine, sure, but I didn't see much in his performance that previous Shapes like Dick Warlock or Brad Loree didn't pull off just as well. If you're playing Michael Myers, you can only get so far from Nick Castle's original portrayal before it doesn't seem like Michael Myers anymore. With Jason, however, there's a little more leeway for the personality of the actor to show through.

To that, some might say "Jeff, do you ever get tired of being stupid?" but bear with me. To the untrained eye, to the casual observer, there may not be much difference between the loping, lumbering hillbilly hustle of Steve Dash's Jason in Friday the 13th Part 2 and CJ Graham's lightening-charged, zombie superhero in Jason Lives (with that film, Jason was no longer just a creepy mongoloid skulking through the woods, he was elevated to a more mythical status) but I stand here today to tell you that there is.

In Friday's 2, 3, and 4, in particular, Jason seemed really scary to me (sure, my young age probably had something to do with that, but still...). Despite the character's uncanny resilience to injury, Jason didn't come across as a supernatural entity in these films, he was just a tough bastard to keep down. He wasn't yet the stoic, Terminator-esque figure that he became in the hands of actors like Graham and Hodder.

I especially liked Richard Brooker's Jason from Part 3. Even if he hadn't been the first Jason to wear the hockey mask, and even if he hadn't been the only Jason to date to kill his victims in 3-D, I'd still be a big fan. For instance, I love the way he loses his shit and tears up a horse stable when it looks like a potential victim that he'd cornerned in a barn may have given him the slip. Seeing Jason get pissed is great! Brooker's Jason also added a patented Jason move to the playbook, being the first to hurl a victim's body through a window with enough velocity as though it had been launched by a missile.

Part 3 also features the best Jason unmasking of the entire series. When Jason is literally at the end of his rope towards the climax, hung to apparently fatal effect from a noose by Final Girl Dana Kimmell, Kimmell pushes open a set of barn doors to look at her handiwork. As Jason's body swings in front of her, twisting and turning with the wind, he suddenly reaches his arms over his head and moves to free himself. As the noose slides over his head, it dislodges his hockey mask, briefly revealing the gruesome visage underneath. It's a great moment, and Brooker's performance really sells it.

And it should also be mentioned that with Part 3 for the first time we had a Jason who possessed the tremendous upper body strength needed to crush a dude's head hard enough to make the crushee's eye fly out. After that history-making kill, all future Jasons were required to go the extra mile at the gym.

Kane Hodder remains the most famous Jason with four Friday's to his credit (he wore the hockey mask from Part VII through Jason X, cruelly being let go by New Line just before Freddy vs. Jason became a reality) but while Hodder's tenacious efforts on behalf of the series always made him an ingratiating presence on the convention circuit, I never loved his portrayal of the character. This isn't Hodder's fault as his tenure in the role was marked by a series of ill-advised alterations to Jason's iconic character (turning Jason into a zombie was questionable to begin with but turning Jason into a hell-spawned, body-hopping slug as well as into a half-man/half-machine cyborg was just too much change for the character to withstand). I much preferred the early versions of Jason when the character was just a crazy mama's boy running around the woods, playin' the fool.

That's the Jason I like and if the plan is for Mears' portrayal to bring that back, I'm all for it.