Friday the 13th, Part VI - Jason Lives (1986)
d. Tom McLoughlin, 86 minutes

Film Plot Summary

This "reboot" film was set about 3 years after the events of Friday the 13th, The Final Chapter (1984) (or Part 4).

In the film's pre-credits prologue, traumatized 16 year-old Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews) (vowing: "This is between me and Jason") had convinced institutional friend Allen Hawes (Ron Patillo) to escape from incarceration and join him, and drive out to the Eternal Peace Cemetery in Forest Green County. Supposedly, it would be therapeutic and stop Tommy's hallucinations if he verified that the killer Jason was actually dead and buried ("Jason belongs in Hell and I'm gonna see he gets there").

Carrying shovels and a gasoline can through the cemetery during a thunder/lightning storm - a purposely-Gothic atmosphere, Tommy's aim was to disinter the remains and then destroy the corpse once and for all ("I gotta be sure"). The coffin lid was opened with a crowbar, and they viewed Jason's rotting body covered with worms and cobwebs. As Tommy looked at the decomposed corpse, he hauntingly thought back to when he was age 12 (Friday 13th, The Final Chapter (1984)), when he cried: "Die" and repeatedly stabbed Jason.

In a fit of rage, Tommy grabbed one of the long spiked posts from the cemetery's wrought-iron steel fence and angrily stabbed Jason's rotting body. He repeatedly impaled the body, while crying: "Die, bastard," and left the post embedded in Jason's body. He threw Jason’s old hockey mask onto the corpse, adding: "Yeah, f--k you, Jason," and began opening the gas can (to set the body on fire and cremate it), when a flashing bolt of lightning struck the fence post, acting like a lightning rod (Frankenstein-style).

Tommy had inadvertently resurrected or reanimated Jason (C. J. Graham) from his grave (signaled by a close-up of his opened eye), causing him to now be a supernatural undead zombie. After Tommy pulled out the stake, he was grabbed by Jason, now brought back to life, but Tommy wriggled away. He sprinkled gasoline on Jason's body, but his wet matches wouldn't light. He then witnessed the brutal killing of his friend Allen when Jason punched his chest with his fist, and held his torn-out heart (# 1 death). Allen's body fell into Jason's coffin and its cover closed over him. Tommy fled to his pickup truck and drove off, as Jason donned his trademark hockey mask, grabbed the fence post, and stalked into the woods.

[The opening credits paid spoof-homage to the traditional James Bond series' openers - a close-up of Jason’s eye revealed a super-imposed smaller Jason, walking like agent 007 to the left, then turning suddenly towards the camera and slashing his bloody machete at it.]

Tommy drove to the Forest Green County Sheriff's Department [the name had been changed to Forest Green to disassociate itself from its murderous Crystal Lake history - "People want to forget this was Crystal Lake"], and reported the incident to skeptical Sheriff Mike Garris (David Gagen):

"Jason's alive. He killed my friend. Now he's coming for me...Look, Jason is alive. We dug up his body. I was gonna cremate it...We gotta do something. He's even more powerful now."

The Sheriff was becoming exasperated: "Don’t piss me off, Junior. Or I will re-paint this office with your brains." Tommy's troubled reputation preceded him, and the Sheriff was doubtful of his sanity, since the teen's family members had been murdered and he had subsequently been placed in a psychiatric clinic. He called Tommy's story and claims only a "prank" - and then jailed him, as Tommy desperately screamed back: "I tried to destroy him, but I f--ked up...You're gonna be sorry you didn't listen to me."

Meanwhile, two head camp counselors were driving back to the recently-reopened Camp Forest Green (formerly Camp Crystal Lake) in a VW bug, but they were lost in the dark on a muddy road:

• Darren (Tony Goldwyn)
• Lizabeth (Nancy McLoughlin, the director's wife)

Suddenly, they came upon Jason standing in their path and blocking their way. Lizabeth cautioned that they should turn around: "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." Darren foolishly suggested: "We're gonna scare him...That's right, just drive towards him. He'll move. Nobody wants to die." When she drove up to him and stopped, Jason remained immoveable, as she sarcastically quipped: "Yeah. That really scared the s--t out of him."

The masked figure speared their left front tire through the fender with the broken metal fence post. Darren grabbed a gun from the glove-compartment, surprising Lizabeth (she cried out: "You ain't Dirty Harry") and Darren threatened Jason with it: "All right scumbag, get outta the road!" But Darren was stabbed in the stomach and impaled on a spear, and then tossed over Jason's shoulder (# 2 death), as his blood splattered onto the windshield. Jason speared and broke the windshield, as Lizabeth crawled out of the car into the mud. He stood atop her as she begged for her life (offering him money and her American Express credit card from her wallet). Writhing in the mud, she was impaled through the mouth/face with the same spear (# 3 death) (partially off-screen).

As he rested in jail, Tommy watched the next morning as various friends (all camp counselors) arrived:

• Sheriff Garris' blonde daughter Megan (Jennifer Cooke)
• black girlfriend Sissy Baker (Renee Jones)
• Lizabeth's sister Paula (Kerry Noonan)
• torn jeans-wearing Cort (Tom Fridley)

Megan asked that her father go looking for the two missing head counselors (Darren and Lizabeth), as she suspected they had car trouble. The two had planned to organize the new campgrounds for the day's arrival of young campers. Overhearing their problem, Tommy blurted out that the serial killer might be responsible:

"I've got a bad feeling what might have happened to them. Hopefully, they're fine, but with Jason out there...he's looking for me. He's probably headed back to the camp."

Although the Sheriff warned that Tommy was "dangerous" and "not well," Megan believed his story about the legendary Jason, thinking he was "cute." Sissy clarified the identity of the notorious Jason: "You mean the Jason of Camp Blood?" The Sheriff was very upset with Tommy, and planned to personally escort him out of the county (to the edge of his jurisdiction) for ever: "I don't want you around here any longer poisoning my daughter or anyone else with your warped sense of humor." However, Tommy believed that Jason would return to the camp, something "familiar" to him ("It's still Camp Crystal Lake to him").

The drunk and grizzled old cemetery caretaker Martin (Bob Larkin) complained about the conditions he found at Jason's gravesite. He then reburied everything by filling in the hole with dirt ("Why'd they have to go and dig up Jason? Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment").

The four camp counselors arrived at Camp Forest Green with supplies, where they reviewed their encounter with the weird "jailbird." Megan insisted: "Maybe he was telling the truth...What if he did come back here, looking for the camp counselor that caused him to drown as a boy, searching for the one that decapitated his vengeful mother." She reminded her friends of the day's date -- Friday the 13th. When the campers arrived on a large yellow school bus, Sissy joked: "I think I'd rather deal with old Jason."

In the woods, Jason stumbled upon a fivesome of corporate sales executives (four males and one female) wearing protective eye-goggles and camouflage uniforms, and playing paint-ball wargames:

• Katie (Ann Ryerson)
• machete-wielding, female-hating sexist Burt (Wallace Merck), wearing a black DEAD headband
• Stan (Matthew Faison)
• Larry (Alan Blumenfeld)
• geeky Roy (Whitney Rydbeck)

The only female in the group, Katie was eliminating most of the other males in the group, infuriating Burt. Jason confronted Burt, ripped off his arm, and threw him into a tree trunk (where his body was impaled on a thick tree branch and his face was bashed in, leaving a bloody circle on a carved smiley face) (# 4 death). As the threesome of Stan, Katie, and Larry stood together, Jason dropped down in front of them, and with one swipe of his machete decapitated all of them in a triple murder (# 5-7 deaths), as geeky Roy watched in horror. To defend himself, Roy vainly shot his paint-ball gun at Jason -- and then ran for his life, wildly screaming for help. [Although Roy was killed here, chronologically, his dismembered body parts weren't discovered in the woods until later - # 8 death, off-screen.]

On his way out of town, escorted from behind by Sheriff Garris' and Deputy Rick Cologne's (Vincent Guastaferro) police car, Tommy took an unauthorized detour in his pickup truck to Eternal Peace Cemetery. The pursuit led to a car chase and foot-race through the grounds, where Tommy was wrestled and hand-cuffed, after which he insisted on showing them Jason's grave. At the burial site, they saw that the casket had been reburied by Martin the caretaker, as Tommy shouted out that his friend Allen Hawes had been put in the grave: "Jason's not in his grave. Hawes is! Dig it up!" Martin replied as he swigged some whiskey: "Dig him up? Does he think I'm a farthead?" At the county line, Sheriff Garris again threatened Tommy:

"With all the grief you've given me, you should be leaving wearing your balls as earrings! And if I ever see you around here again, you can guarantee it."

In the woods near the cemetery that night, Martin was drinking from his whiskey bottle and wandering aimlessly - he spoke to his empty container: "Darling, you're gonna be the death of me. Yeah, but what a way to go, huh?", and tossed it over his head, but he didn't hear glass break. Jason had caught the discarded bottle, then crushed it, and used the broken-edged glass to stab Martin in the throat (# 9 death) (off-screen).

Nearby, two lovers, Steven (Roger Rose) and Annette (Cynthia Kania), who were making out on a blanket, heard the death screams. They fled after Steven caught a glimpse of Jason standing over Martin's dead body - and as the two were climbing onto his motorcycle, Jason stabbed both of them together with his machete (# 10-11 deaths), a two-for-one kill.

At Camp Forest Green, the campers were all asleep in their bunkhouse on their first night. Camp counselor Sissy described her new card game (dubbed Camp Blood) to Paula. She said that the Jack of Spades represented Jason, and the other face cards were the counselors - the object of the game was to determine from the piles of cards "which cabin Jason is in." A scream brought them to the bedside of young camper Nancy (Courtney Vickery), who prophetically claimed: "There was this monster and he was after me, and he wanted to kill me." She claimed it wasn't just a bad dream: "It was real, just like on TV."

Away from camp, counselor Cort was having sex with partially-clothed, slutty girlfriend Nikki (Darcy DeMoss) in her stepfather's borrowed RV motorhome, to the rhythmic tune of "Animal" (sung by Felony). On top of him, she demanded, "You got to keep it up till the end of this song...It's only 10 more minutes." Outside, Jason appeared, unplugged their power -- clueing Cort to orgasm, who then dumbly asked the sexually-frustrated Nikki: "Wasn't that the end of the song?" Cort found the frayed end of the power cord, while Jason snuck into the camper and hid in the bathroom. Fearing Jason might be "out there," they decided to leave and get on the highway - with Alice Cooper music blasting on their stereo ("Teenage Frankenstein" - "These ain't my hands And these legs ain't mine...I ain't one of the crowd I ain't one of the guys They just avoid me They run and they hide...").

Jason grabbed Nikki, silenced her by covering her mouth, dragged her into the bathroom, and crushed her face against the RV wall's mirror (conforming it to her face and pressing through to the outside) (# 12 death). He then stabbed a large serrated Bowie hunting knife into the side of Cort's head while he was driving (# 13 death) - and the camper flipped onto its side and caught fire. Unhurt, Jason emerged from the side door, and stood triumphantly on top of the wrecked vehicle.

Away from her camp's duties, smart-mouthed, brassy Megan was arguing with her single parent Sheriff father at his office. Deputy Rick Cologne phoned in with the news of the discovery of the bodies of head counselors Darren and Lizabeth ("Looks like someone did 'em in using Jason's old M.O."). Sheriff Garris suspected the murderer to be Tommy Jarvis: "Seems your boyfriend wants people to believe Jason has returned...Tommy wants to prove the legend is true." When her father left for the murder scene, Tommy called - and Megan warned him that her father was out looking for him, and was blaming him for all the problems with Jason. She proposed picking him up in her car at Karloff's General [homage to horror great Boris Karloff].

As Tommy had feared and predicted, Jason arrived at the front entrance to Camp Forest Green.

An all-points alert was sent by Sheriff Garris regarding Tommy -- dubbed the "wacko kid" (Tommy was suspected of being a copy-cat killer who was blaming the murders on Jason). Roadblocks were set up. In addition to the two corpses of the counselors, Deputy Cologne also discovered dismembered body parts of paint-ball gamer Roy strewn about the woods. (See # 8 death above) This confirmed Garris' contentions about Tommy: "Our boy sure wants us to believe his story." Cologne added: "Happy Friday the 13th."

Jason cut the phone line at the camp, and then stalked Sissy from outside. He reached in through an open window, picked her up by her shoulders, and pulled her outside (leaving her bunny slippers inside!), and there he twisted her head around and ripped it off (# 14 death). [Later, her decapitated head was found in the Sheriff's vehicle.] Young camper Nancy sat up in bed, startled when she saw Jason carrying the decapitated body of Sissy past her window. Shortly later, the last remaining counselor on the camp grounds - Paula, had just suggested to Nancy that she say a little prayer to make the scariness go away. In her own cabin, she was viciously hacked with a machete (# 15 death) (off-screen) as blood splattered everywhere (seen later), and her body was thrown through a glass window.

Megan picked up Tommy, and insisted on joining him - and she also proposed to help him get supplies. They came upon a roadblock, and to hide Tommy, Megan pushed him down. He found his face buried in her crotch. They were pursued and eventually cornered at another roadblock, where her father confronted her. Tommy was arrested and suspected of murder by Sheriff Garris (after receiving a call about the discovery of the bodies of Cort and "some girl") - he was absolutely sure now: "Tommy Jarvis is a psychopathic killer," although Megan was convinced that he was innocent.

With Tommy's help, Megan broke him out of jail (by kissing him, and masquerading it as an attack), and they locked Deputy Cologne in the cell. Tommy thought they were already too late as they sped to Camp Forest Green. He explained his objective:

"The only way now to stop Jason is to return him to his original resting place where he drowned in 1957...Crystal Lake, where this nightmare began."

With a group of police cars, Sheriff Garris converged on Camp Forest Green, where he planned to warn the other counselors about the three recent murders (Darren, Lizabeth, and Cort). Garris found the bloodied counselor quarters, as his officers searched the grounds. Officer Thornton (Michael Nomad) was killed with a dart in his forehead (#16 death), and he fell off the pier into a canoe. Nancy was again out of her bed, running in the dark and warning of a "scary man." Declaring "what scary man?", Officer Pappes (Michael Swan) turned and was confronted by Jason - he shot his gun five times in the torso of zombified Jason, with no effect, and his head was crushed in Jason's bare hands (# 17 death).

Sheriff Garris tried to protect the children, now awakened by gunfire, and led them to a different cabin, where he instructed them to lie under the beds. The Sheriff then came face-to-face with the hockey-masked killer himself, and fired on him with both his shotgun (3x) and pistol (4x). He then fled into the woods - where Jason followed. In the camper's cabin, two young males uneasily joked: "I think we're dead meat...Real dead meat. So, what were you gonna be when you grew up?"

Megan's screams of "Daddy, please come help us" distracted Jason from finishing off the Sheriff, and he turned to pursue her. Protective of his daughter, the Sheriff jumped on Jason's back and wrestled him to the ground. He beat up on Jason (with a stick, rock, etc.) but his spinal cord was soon broken when he was folded backwards in half (# 18 death) by Jason's super-strength.

Tommy's plan was to defeat Jason by killing him (using the original means of his death -- drowning). He took a small motorboat from the dock, loaded with a gasoline can, and a length of chain padlocked to a large boulder (its other end was formed into a noose), and then took the boat out into the middle of Crystal Lake - the location of Jason's drowning in 1957, to lure the killer there by baiting him ("Come and get me. It's me you want, remember?...Come on, maggot head!" Come on, chicken shit...come on, you pussy!").

Jason waded into the lake after Tommy, who had also spread gasoline around his boat and set it on fire. Although Jason attacked the boat and tried to strangle him, Tommy was able to put the noose end of the chain around Jason's neck, and send the rock to the bottom of the lake - effectively sinking Jason there, as the boat broke in two and partially sank. The boulder hit the bottom of the lake, landing near the original Camp Crystal Lake sign (with "Crystal Lake" replaced by the word "Blood", in red paint). Tommy was pulled under and strangled some more during an underwater struggle, until he showed no more signs of life. When Tommy stopped moving, Jason let him go and his limp body floated up to the surface.

Megan swam out to Tommy to try to save and rescue him. She was grabbed by the leg and pulled under by Jason, who was miraculously still alive. To prevent being drowned herself, she reached for the motorboat's engine and started it up - she turned the engine in the water and moved the propeller into Jason's neck and main carotid artery, where the spinning blades shredded Jason's face and broke his neck (# 19 death-?) (temporary).

She brought an almost-drowned Tommy to the shore and administered CPR to revive him. He calmly looked out toward the water: "It's over, it's finally over. Jason's home."

The next morning, the camera tracked to the location on the surface and then underwater, where the maniacal psychopath was suspended at the bottom of Crystal Lake to die - but only temporarily. His right hand fist slightly clenched, and his eye opened (in close-up) to signify that he was not finally "home."

The credits played, to the tune of "He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)" by Alice Cooper.

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

With a production budget of approximately $3 million, and box-office gross revenues of $19.4 million (domestic).

With the taglines: "Nothing this evil ever dies," and "Kill or be Killed!"

Unlike many of the other installments, there was no nudity in this one. This was the first film with a reanimated, zombified Jason, after the previous two installments when he was definitely dead.

Crystal Lake was renamed Forest Green. This was the only film, to date (except for the prologue of the first film, which doesn't really count), with a fully-functioning camp filled with young campers.

The date of the major events in the film, excluding the prologue, was Friday the 13th.

Body Count: 18 (all committed by Jason). Although Jason appeared dead at the conclusion of this film, he came alive again in the next film. This was the highest body count up to this point for Jason himself, later superceded by Friday the 13th, Jason X (2001).