In short: Edge of Honor (1991)

A troop of boy scouts (our main scouts are played by Corey Feldman, Scott Reeves and Alex “Sasha” Walkup) is on an outing in the Pacific Northwest. While farting around, our protagonist scouts break into a shack where they find a hidden cache of SAMs. They eventually decide to contact the authorities about their find, but before they can do much about it, the smugglers of said illegal weaponry come calling, and, as the audience well knows from the intro sequence where these guys murder a family operation of smugglers (apart from daughter Meredith Salenger who is going to help our heroes out with quite the talent for killing) in coldest blood, they aren’t above killing themselves a troop of boy scouts.

But these teenagers are more difficult to kill than you think.

Watching Michael Spence’s early 90s action movie with a very 80s action movie vibe, I couldn’t help but imagine this as an attempt to make a film a little like Red Dawn but without John Milius’s unpleasant idiot politics, keeping the teenagers under duress turning effective killers when threatened enough but dumping the red scare nonsense in favour of disgruntled weapon smugglers (Don Swayze giving the nastiest one) and the weird British main henchman (Christopher Neame) of their main customer. So there’s more space for the truly entertaining elements of action cinema, like said British guy’s tendency to randomly quote Shakespeare at you before he sticks you with a trick knife in his sleeve. Or Feldman’s typically strange line delivery that suggests a little kid imitating James Dean, badly, or a guy very consciously pretending to be a little kid that imitates Dean.

The woods are wet and claustrophobic, the action is fun and creative – with quite a few moments like the early scene where our scouts are trapped under enemy fire with little ability to do anything about it but cower that suggest a bit of realistic weight to the violence – a bit like a teen version of Rambo (again, without politics silly or not so silly), and the villains are perfectly hateable. It’s fun for the whole family (if your whole family watches R-rated movies).

In short: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

It seems as if this Halloween season, I’m going to slog through the less popular sequels of some of everyone’s favourite slasher franchises, just in case other blogs’ ways of keeping Halloween classy by concerning themselves with good horror movies is getting too much for you. Don’t be afraid, gentle reader, things will get better around here again once the great day has come and gone. Or before, depending on time, sanity, and the quality of slasher sequels.

Jason (this time embodied by one Ted White), wakes up in the morgue, kills a couple of people, and returns to his wood home to start a new cycle of slashing teenagers. You’d think the police would start to get how this thing works by now, particularly since Jason’s last two killing sprees were just a day or so past, but of course they’ll only appear to mop up the bodies.

Anyway, the fourth and not so very final Friday the 13th film is pretty much the same as the last ones, only where the first film codified a lot of elements of the slasher Halloween actually didn’t codify (and which Halloween 2 would later ape with little success), where the second one was really rather good and, and where the third one was entertainingly stupid, this one’s just boring. Sure, it’s less aggressively dumb than number three, but replaces that film’s high level stupidity with nothing remarkable at all, resulting in too many scenes of nothing happening until Jason finally kills someone.

However, the kills look and feel curiously perfunctory, with little on screen that seems actually transgressive, the oh-so-shocking on-screen violence feeling boring and not a little tepid, robbed of any context surrounding them as they are. Not one of the stalking scenes is actually suspenseful, and the film’s final girl sequence is lacking in imagination and punch, which has a lot to do with the fact that the film spent by far not enough time with our final girl of the night, Trish (Kimberly Beck), leaving her as the film’s final girl just because she’s the last one standing.

You might imagine that adding her special effects make-up loving kid brother Tommy (young Corey Feldman) to the mix would change things up a little, but Barney Cohen’s script only uses him for a – limp – rehash of an iconic scene from the second part.

The script is generally quite adept at wasting opportunities – there’s also a guy sneaking around hunting Jason, which again amounts to little of interest in the end. Really, the only opportunity the film doesn’t waste is showing us Crispin Glover’s dance moves.

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