Over at our sister site, darkness.com, I was waxing nostalgic over the thirty year anniversary of the release of FRIDAY THE 13th PART SIX: JASON LIVES. (How can it have been THREE DECADES since this movie came out?!) This got me to thinking. Surely all self-respecting zombie freaks have seen the FRIDAY THE 13TH series, right? Actually, I’m betting not. Lotsa Millennials love THE WALKING DEAD but have never seen a Romero flick, which is disheartening as hell, so it’d be easy to believe they’ve never seen any of the FRIDAY films, either. (There might even be a few who would think that this last sentence was concerning those inane comedies starring Ice Cube!)
For the culturally impoverished, permit me to educate you. Jason was killed off in FRIDAY THE 13th PART FOUR, which was supposed to be the final entry in the series. Paramount, the company that owned the rights to the franchise at that time, was embarrassed by it. It made them gazillions of dollars, but they were ready to put it to bed, all the same. Greed overruled their squeamishness, though, and in FRIDAY THE 13th PART FIVE: A NEW BEGINNING an imposter did all the killing, with Jason having a cameo as a ghost. But with PART SIX, the original returned—as a zombie. Jason would remain a zombie through two more films and the remainder of the decade before being retconned in the early 90s. Along with the original and JASON X, which should have been called “Jason in Space,” the zombie Fridays are the best of the bunch. If you haven’t seen them, do yourself a favor. Parts six and eight are hysterical fun, and part seven is, along with X, in my opinion, the best overall Friday film(s) in the entire series.