That wily rascal Jason Voorhees is at it again....or is he? Yes, this is the installment in the interminable "Friday the 13th" series that thought it would be a good idea to do without its only reason for existence...the hockey-masked Jason. Though you hardly notice the loss, since you don't KNOW it's not Jason until the film's final moments, and the copycat killer dresses like Jason anyway, so what's the difference? If you've seen one axe-wielding psycho in a hockey mask, you've seen them all.
Actually, I kind of like this entry. It provides the best nudity of the series....no fewer than three gratuitous boob shots, and nice boobs they are. And it's funny, sometimes intentionally so, as when the hillbilly mom calls her dufus son a dildo, sometimes unintentionally, as when the Michael Jackson look alike sings a duet with his girlfriend through an outhouse wall while he's on the crapper.
And the filmmakers outdo themselves with the body count this time around. By the end of the movie, there's no longer time to show them being killed off. Characters you've completely forgotten about just pop up as dead bodies. But what do you expect with all that plot to get through? Compared to the other films in the series, this is practically "War and Peace," what with the murder mystery story and the Tommy Jarvis plot line, which attempts to add a sense of continuity to the middle batch of movies (o.k. so Part 6 picks up Tommy's storyline in a completely different place and with a different actor, but for a series like this that's the best you can hope for in the way of consistency).
Grade: C
