Update and scripts

Hi, everyone! A quick update for you today. You may have noticed that there are more politics videos and less politics-in-media videos this year. The events of January 6th in Washington DC lead to a necessary video on that subject, which lead to a necessary video on the impeachment. Then Ted Cruz made a fool of himself and inspired me to make a video on him. With everything "settled down" now, I can get into some lighter topics. I've been planning a video about trauma in horror films for a while now, and it looks like there are some openings in my schedule. I'm also strongly considering a video about the new Marvel series about Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

With that out of the way, here are some scripts of episodes from late last year.

THE REAL RULES OF HORROR

AUDIO 1

Scream does not tell the audience the rules of horror. In the 1996 film, a series of murders plague the town of Woodsboro. To escape the carnage for the night and ease tensions, the high school students throw a party wherein they watch horror movies. Randy, a self-professed expert on horror, halts the festivities when he realizes that the other party-goers don't know the “rules to surviving a horror movie.” The first two rules are key. Randy says that only virgins will survive and that only those who abstain from getting drunk or high will survive. What Randy is describing is a pattern that filmmakers – consciously or unconsciously – tend to follow when crafting a movie like Scream. A movie is influenced by the society that creates it and crafted for the society that will watch it, not in terms of effectively mirroring our circumstances but in displaying what society values and what society de-values. Virginity, chastity, modesty. These Puritan, conservative values are praised by the society that made movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th. In the former, not only is a woman slain immediately after being intimate with her boyfriend, but it happens in the very bed where she did it. In the latter, the entire rampage takes place due to counselors sneaking off to be with each other while Jason Voorhees drowned. These movies are undoubtedly influenced by the real world false dichotomy of categorizing women into two boxes:

Either the pure madonna or the insatiable tramp who is both sought after and frowned upon by the same men. This pattern reoccurs in these movies with such frequency that scores of books and academic papers have been written about it. Randy is correct in understanding that life or death within horror movies is often a value judgment and related to sin, but he is incorrect in the specifics. Because what he tells the party guests are not the rules of horror but the rules of slasher movies, a subgenre of horror. Different subgenres have different values, different sins that they highlight. A slasher movie generally features a lone killer, young, mostly women victims who are taken out one by one, and a survivor – almost always a woman who did not indulge herself and who guarded her virginity. Slasher movies can deviate from this pattern a little and still be slasher movies. Scream, for example, features a pair of killers instead of one, older men are killed with about as much frequency as young women, and there are multiple survivors living in various degrees of “sin.” Randy survives Scream despite drinking alcohol. Sidney survives despite losing her virginity to Billy. Slasher movies that purposefully deviate from established patterns often do so in recognition of those patterns nonetheless, subverting the expectations of the audience. Scream and other slashers that deviate from established patterns are still recognizably slasher movies. Few slasher movies deviate as much as Scream, but that is only because Scream is meant as a send-up of the subgenre. Although inaccurate, it makes sense that the dialogue in this scene conflates horror movies with the slasher subgenre.

AUDIO 2

In the 1980's and early 90's, slashers were the dominant and most lucrative subgenre of horror. So much, in fact, that when the words “horror movie” were uttered during that period, popular slasher franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street would come to mind more often than, say, The Fog or Videodrome. Slasher movies were inexpensive to produce and yielded big returns at the box office. Low risk, high reward. Also, if Randy's famous speech would have been awkward if he had said “There are certain rules you must abide by in order to survive a horror movie, specifically the slasher subgenre, as horror has a diversity of patterns and influences, hey, where are you going?” Nevertheless, the inaccuracy begs for correction and examination. Subgenres of horror have their own patterns, and each entry into the subgenre reveals what the society that created it values and de-values. It is not a coincidence that various horror subgenres made in the western world utilize “sin” as its values barometer, even if the patterns of different. Gothic horror is defined by its romanticism, forbidden sensuality, and by its setting, taking place before the 20th century and in castles, remote hamlets, or decaying, haunted mansions. Gothic horror movies often place sin center stage, sometimes due to being adaptations of novels prior to what we might consider the modern world and sometimes due to the ubiquity of purity and sin being what the western world values and de-values.

In various adaptations of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein plays God, resurrecting the dead, unnaturally reanimating what was naturally taken. The novel leaves the method vague, but in the most famous adaptation, Frankenstein harnesses a storm, which has its own Biblical connections, to give life to his creation. [In the name of God. Now I know what it feels like to be God.] For this indiscretion, this affront to God, both he and others around him are punished. His hubris in transcending his human restrictions and meddling in God's domain costs him greatly. Adaptations of Dracula, particularly the 1992 adaptation, show Dracula's descent into inhumanity correlated with the rejection of God, specifically God as depicted within Christianity. The dichotomy of the pure woman and the promiscuous woman often comes into play within gothic horror as much as slashers, but rather than this dichotomy portrayed as only implicitly having to do with Christian morality, gothic horror set during more “modest” eras can more explicitly reference this. Lucy, who is portrayed as promiscuous, is transformed into a monster that needs to be slain through the power of the cross. Mina, who is chaste until her marriage to Jonathan, survives Dracula despite her temptations.

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Gothic horror antagonists are often those that Christian morality posits as being in direct competition with God or an affront to God, such as witches and the Devil himself. So, how does one survive a gothic horror movie, Randy? Surviving a gothic horror movie is connected with abstinence and a devotion to God. Not always, as there are variations within the subgenre, but often. Mina survives. Lucy does not. “Sin” as the moral barometer and arbiter of survival exists in gothic horror movies as much as slashers, but in the former, belief in both God and Christian morality are also components. Faith cannot stop Michael Meyers, but it can and will stop Dracula. This overlaps with the broader supernatural horror subgenre. Supernatural horror is often defined by the antagonist: spirits, demons, devils. Supernatural entities that haunt the protagonist. If the supernatural horror movie is made in the western world, due to Christianity being the most common religion, the supernatural elements are often explained through Christianity or defeated through Christianity.

Often, the haunting visited upon our characters is related to sin or not showing proper respect to God. In Poltergeist, when the father learns that the cemetery had been moved, he calls it “sacrilegious.” He later discovers that the headstones were moved, but the bodies remained under his house. The antagonist is explained through religion, through sin. In The Exorcist, the demon possessing Reagan is defeated through religion, through the expulsion of sin. Once again, horror movies show what the society that creates them values and de-values. It values faith, and it de-values a lack of faith. [The power of Christ compels you.] Father Karras' greatest obstacle in The Exorcist is not Pazuzu but his own lost faith, which he struggles to overcome throughout the film. In the end, he believes again and sacrifices himself to save Reagan. At a glance, Karras dying despite his faith conflicts with who survives, but this is a different kind of survival. A spiritual survival. What greater value is there for a Catholic than martyrdom? Surviving a supernatural horror film is best achieved by trusting Christians. What about more secular horror subgenres? What are the secular values they espouse? Completely over-saturated in the past twenty years, zombie horror generally takes a detour from “sin” as the cause of the problem and sin as something to overcome to solve the problem. Zombie horror, despite being supernatural at a glance, takes a more secular route. Often the cause of the zombie apocalypse is either completely unexplained or is caused by humankind making a simple mistake. Dawn of the Dead has a line about “no room left in Hell” that touches on a spiritual explanation for what is happening, but nothing ever comes of it, and it exists largely in isolation in the subgenre.

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The solution to the zombies is more humanist than in other horror subgenres. Because the solution is cooperation. The zombies are many, but the humans can use weapons, can strategize, and can think. It is in their cooperation, their humanity that allows them to live. When cooperation fails, that is when the humans are most vulnerable to the zombies. When cooperation succeeds, that is when the humans are strongest against the zombies. Surviving a zombie movie is unlike some other horror subgenres because all that is necessary is humanity. Sci-fi horror often values human knowledge over human ignorance. It also values the aforementioned human cooperation. In Alien, Ripley states that the xenomorph must not be brought on board because it will almost certainly endanger the entire crew. They ignore her warning, and the crew is lost – except for Ripley – the only crew member who recognized the danger. In The Thing, paranoia and lack of cooperation eventually leads the shape-changing alien to run amok. Surviving sci-fi horror is a matter of intelligence and cooperation. In a sense, both Alien and The Thing operate much like slasher movies. An unstoppable foe who picks everyone off one by one until there is only a sole survivor. We don't find out who will be the sole survivor in The Thing, but the pattern is still there. Remember, a slasher movie can deviate from the pattern a little and still be recognizable as a slasher movie.

So, is Alien a “slasher” movie if it follows the structure of a slasher movie? I would say there is not enough family resemblance and not only because of its setting and tone. It doesn't resemble a slasher movie because of what is values. The real rule of horror – the way to “survive a horror movie” – is to find out what kind of horror movie you're in. People define these horror subgenres by so many features, their setting, the monster, but these subgenres are perhaps most recognizable in what they value. What they portray as a “sin.”

WHEN WERE YOU RADICALIZED?

AUDIO 1

When did you realize that coercive, hierarchical systems that oppress and divide people are not simply broken but are actually functioning as intended? Functioning to serve the top of the hierarchy, maintained to serve those who benefit the most from them. For me, there was no single watershed moment that changed my perceptions and relationship with authority, but looking back over my adult life, there were a series of events and incidents that slowly dragged me from my previous positions. I was eighteen years old in the year 2000, which meant that mere months after entering legal voting age in the United States, I could vote in my first presidential election – as well as the first presidential election of the new millennium. I became interested in progressive politics in high school, and by the time I had graduated and begun college, the election felt momentous, that voting was going to be the most important thing I had ever done up to that point. I was registered to the Green Party at first but later switched my registration to the Democratic Party so I could vote in their primaries and potentially push the party to the left. A pragmatic decision. I watched all the debates. I saw Al Gore sigh and groan at George W. Bush's obvious and disqualifying incompetence. Then came Election Night. And then this. And then this. It was my first election, and nobody could me what was going on.

I was only 18, and I didn't understand how Gore could have won hundreds of thousands more votes across the country but somehow was not declared the winner. At the time, I didn't know enough about history to recognize that this had happened three times before, and that I was watching it happen for the fourth time. I also did not have the prescience to recognize it would happen a fifth time in 2016. It was like watching a boxing match where everyone knew who really won, but the judges scored it wrong. One guy was declared the victor, but everyone knew it was bull****. In the following 20 years, I would hear every argument in favor of the electoral college, but at the end of the day, it's a system that defies the will of the people, and that trumps any other argument. One vote in Wyoming has the relative weight of about three votes whereas one vote in Pennsylvania has the relative weight of less than one vote. That is not democracy. Worse still, that's not an error in its design. If the writers of the constitution wanted the will of the people to be absolute, then the electoral college would not exist. So, the electoral college, in occasionally defying the people, is functioning as intended. I tried to put that out of my mind and do what everyone else was doing the day after the election: focus on Florida. In the midst of the recount, the state attorney general, Katherine Harris, inexplicably declared George W. Bush the winner. Harris was also the Bush campaign co-chair. Funny, that.

AUDIO 2

The Florida state supreme court didn't have enough Republicans for the Bush campaign's liking, so they brought this matter to the United States Supreme Court, and they put a halt to any attempt at recounting. I was stunned. A series of 2001 reports showed that if all the disputed ballots had been counted, Gore probably would have narrowly won Florida and therefore the presidency. I was stunned again. Years later, I learned that in addition to all this, Bush's brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, conducted a voter suppression campaign leading up to the 2000 election which specifically targeted African-Americans. The fix was in from the beginning. … I was nineteen years old on nine eleven, and it has been nineteen years since that day. I have spent exactly half my life in the pre nine eleven world and half in the post nine eleven world. The mood of the country had changed to something that I found, for lack of a better word, suffocating. Support our troops. Support our troops. Do you support our troops? But support our troops, right? Support our troops? If you don't support our troops, then what do you support? If you were not there or were too young remember, you might see this as an exaggeration, but if you were there and were not too young to remember, then this, if anything, is an understatement. Everything in the country dove-tailed into a conversation about supporting our troops.

Country music was ruined, celebrities were booed for criticizing the president or encouraging peace, the beginning of every football game had been militarized, French fries were called “freedom” fries, and anti-drug PSA's claimed that recreational drug users were responsible for terror attacks. [] This was the whole country for years. It's like we had all joined a cult but nobody could remember signing up. I was in college when we went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq. I was against it, of course, but my understanding of war was limited. When I was younger, and I would see people get into fights at school or on the sidewalk, it was always for some trivial reason. Someone looked at someone else the wrong way or said the wrong thing, or there some misunderstanding that could easily be resolved with words and a handshake that nobody wanted to do because it would mean looking “weak” and having to be the one to back down. Meaningless bravado. When I was a teenager, I mistakenly extrapolated that to my concept of war. That it was all ego and saber rattling, and that cooler heads would prevail if we simply gave peace a chance. It was a naive, individualist perspective rather than a perspective based on complex systems. I was young, I didn't grow up with the internet, and my education was limited to whatever they told me in Catholic school and later public school. Generally speaking, this individualist or “great man” perspective is not why wars happen, at least in terms of interventions and invasions.

AUDIO 3

Most wars occur due to the “interests” of the nation – in the United States' case, usually to protect their massive economic interests. These interests have long kept the United States involved in the Middle East. The region has vast oil reserves. Even Middle Eastern nations without vast oil reserves have relationships with those that do, which means the US and its allies desire control of the region. The US never got most of its oil from Middle Eastern sources, but its political and economic allies did. 9/11 provided a pretext to finally implement long-standing plans to have greater access to Iraq's oil reserves. The United States wants to sit atop a hierarchy of nations – world hegemony – and you cant do that without control over the resources that everyone wants. Between 1948 to 1991, the United States engaged in forty-six military interventions. Between the much shorter time period of 1992 and 2017, that number increased fourfold to 188. Wars were escalating as the United States became more desperate to hold on to its control. The invasion of Iraq was not a mistake. It was longstanding United States foreign policy functioning as intended. The popular misconception that the pretext for the Iraq invasion was merely an “intelligence failure” has long been debunked and revealed as an intelligence fabrication. That means that the intelligence community was also functioning as intended to support the “interests” of the United States.

When I was 22 years old, I was so enthusiastic leading up to the 2004 election. I listened to The Majority Report with Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder on Air America. I followed the primaries. I no longer trusted our institutions, but I still believed they could simply be reformed. We just need the right president. Bush was deeply unpopular. Anyone could beat him. I initially backed Howard Dean, but that did not go well. Even with that setback, I thought John Kerry would wipe the floor with Bush. I remember going to bed on election night not knowing who would be president but assuming it would go Kerry's way. Bush's re-election was called the next day. I still recall learning about the results on my car radio on the way to a doctor's appointment. That was a miserable day. Not long after, I became a teacher. Life entered a kind of normalcy. No matter what I thought about the United States and about George W. Bush, the former was still my home, and the latter would be gone at the end of his second term. As that end approached, there was a new hope emerging – in the nation and in myself. When I was 26 years old, Barack Obama was elected president. All the waiting was over. The waiting through my adult life. Which is why his presidency was so very, very disappointing. The wars not only persisted but were escalated and expanded into new territories. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize, and I was deeply confused. Obama was still better than McCain would have been.

AUDIO 4

I did not regret voting for Obama. I was just, you know, still naive enough to have expected more. Skipping around here a bit, but the next eight years, I learned about the incredible toll these conflicts had on civilians. I knew a little during the Bush administration, but the news didn't pay much attention to Iraqi families. They always focused on our losses. The troops. I had to do my own digging. Brown University's Costs of War Project calculated total death toll from American wars in three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. At least 480,000 people have been directly killed by violence over the course of these conflicts, and more than 244,000 of them were civilians. This means that contrary to the popular misconception that civilian casualties are limited in war, civilian casualties in the War on Terror outnumber military casualties. In addition, the number of indirect deaths – those resulting from disease, displacement and loss of critical infrastructure – is believed to be several times higher, running well into the millions. In fact, it's even worse than that all-around because the report does not take into account other conflicts and interventions such Libya and Syria.

Back to 2009, when I was 27, I left the United States. Recruiting agencies that work with schools in east Asia, the Middle East, eastern Europe and Central America are always looking for native English speakers to teach “conversational” English. This was my opportunity to leave the US – and maybe never come back. I lived in South Korea and taught in Korean middle schools for about a year. I took no pictures while I was there, this is just stock footage. Not mine. I started making online content when I was there, but it was nothing like what I do now. Then, when I was 28, I taught in Montenegro. I lived in the capital, Podgorica. I actually did take a few photos while I was there. This was the church right outside my tiny apartment. This was the burger place where I would eat almost every day. This was the town square. This video, however, is not mine. It's a tourism video I found when I was making this, and it brought back some memories. Before Montenegro, I had never lived in what is called a “developing” nation. The United States and South Korea are incredibly wealthy and have these big, bustling metropolises. Montenegro's capital looks and feels like a small town. Elsewhere in the nation, poverty is much worse, particularly in the north. Knowing the local language was actually not one of the qualifications for these foreign teaching positions. That meant that getting those jobs was easy, but it also made my time abroad...isolating.

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I learned only a little Korean while I was there and practically nothing of the three mutually intelligible languages in Montenegro: Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin. I felt alone, and the quality of life in Montenegro was too much for me. I was too spoiled. I couldn't handle living there. When the school was done with me, I returned to the United States. The experience gave me a greater perspective on global poverty. I wanted to know more. Much in the way that economic disparity exists within a nation of rich people and poor people, economic disparity on a global scale exists between rich nations and poor nations. Rich people need a lot of poor people to work for their industries, and rich nations need poor nations to give them inexpensive goods. Capitalist apologists always claim that the system lifts people out of poverty, but they neglect to mention that capitalism requires poverty to function. It requires poverty for people to be willing to sell their labor for very little to an entity that will take most of the product of that labor. Rich nations do provide some aid, but that's because rich nations want poor nations to have enough resources to continue making rich nations money but not so much as to ever be competitors with the rich nations. Capitalism is not broken, it is functioning as intended. The World Bank, in concert with rich nations, uses debt to control poor nations, and then uses statistical manipulation wherein they move the standard of what is considered “poverty” over time to make it appear that their efforts are solving global poverty.

Statistical sleight-of-hand to paint a rosy picture of the future. For example, the World Bank has instituted a $1.90 per day International Poverty Line even though national poverty lines are much different. By these standards, if you are homeless, without healthcare, and without a support network, but you earn $1.91 a day, you are not living in “true” poverty. They use those misleading statistics to show their own worth and move those goal posts whenever convenient. I fell for this lie for a long time.

Since 1960, the income gap between what is called the global north – meaning wealthier countries – and the global south – meaning developing nations and what we once called the third world – has tripled in size. 4.3 billion people, which is about 60% of the world’s population, live on less than $5 per day. About 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. When you bring this up to people, they're like “Oh, really? I'll have you know that global poverty and centuries of subjugating half the world is why you can drink a Coca-Cola right now.” and it's like **** off. “Oh, really? You hate capitalism, yet you make money.” as if this is some own, but another way of saying this is “Oh, really? You hate capitalism, yet you are forced – without consent – to live under capitalism.” The price of a rich nation is a poor nation. That is how global capitalism works. That is what the world really is.

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When I was 31, I learned that despite Obama taking over from Bush, our intelligence agencies were still spying on us. But that's what they have always done and what they have always existed for. They just have better technology now. The state exists to monopolize control and violence. It is functioning as intended. I always considered myself an environmentalist, but in my early 30's, I began to learn more about climate change. The energy corporations, well, they always knew. They always knew what they were doing to the world, but capitalism does not incentivize saving the world. Exxon, for example, projected climate change pretty accurately since at least 1982, the year I was born. So, they just kept doing what they were doing, hid the data, and enacted a campaign of misinformation. All of this was a lot to take. I can understand not wanting to face any of this. Not wanting to accept how bad things are for most of the world and how bad things are going to get for the rest of the world, too. It's so...much. I was raised Catholic. Church on Sundays, Catholic school, taught by nuns. I was an altar server. One thing that attaches itself to a lot of Catholics, even if their faith lapses, is guilt. Maybe I avoided learning the worst things about the world in my youth because my brain knew that my heart couldn't take it.

I don't have a lot of money, but I have enough money, and I have enough money because of where I live, and the nation where I live intentionally keeps the global south poor and subservient through debt, controls other countries for their wealth, and turns a blind eye to energy corporations literally destroying the world. It's understandable to not want to think about this. Compartmentalization as self-care. I feel awful about this every time I think about it, and there is little that an individual can do to change it. All of this is happening on purpose. All of this is functioning as it was intended. The world set itself up from the top down and gave so much to the top of the hierarchy that the top can suffer no consequences for what it does within these systems. When confronted with this, a lot of people are like “Well, capitalism and the military and energy corporations and all those are things can simply be REFORMED.” How do you reform something that is fiercely resistant to reform by design? You can't look at much of the world ravaged by wars of choice, most of the world suffering, and all of the world in imminent danger, and think that this can all be resolved by smoothing over the rough edges. It's a position of incredible privilege to look around us and see supermarkets and department stores, pretend we don't know where this wealth comes from, and make believe that this is how the rest of the world lives. Incremental reform is no longer an option, if it ever was. A liberated society must overcome coercive, hierarchical systems, including capitalism and the state, that exist to privilege the top and subjugate the bottom. If something is functioning as intended, then there is nothing to fix – only something to dismantle completely. I'm 38, and the days of being naive about this are over. Anyway, I'm an anarchist now.

FRIDAY THE 13TH V IS GOOD, ACTUALLY

AUDIO 1

I have been emotionally exhausted every day of this year, not only witnessing the everything of it all but writing about the everything of it all. With that in mind, I hope you will all forgive me, because this week, to purge the unbelievable heaviness from my body, I deliver to you what is certain to be my least important, least political, and most inconsequential hot take ever: Friday the 13thPart V is not that bad. The stakes have never been lower. Among slasher fans and Friday the 13th fans specifically, Part V: A New Beginning is often considered a failure. This is in no small part because mass murderer and hockey enthusiastic Jason Voorhees is not the killer. Jason died in Part IV, the increasingly inaccurate Final Chapter. The killer turns out to be a paramedic named Roy whose mind was warped when he saw the mangled body of his son but not so warped that he couldn't come up with the most convoluted way to try to get away with his killing spree: dressing up like a serial killer who everyone knows is already dead. This is not a good plan. This is a bad plan. In the end, he is pushed on to some spikes – you know, common yard spikes? – and it's like “Joinks, Scoob. It was old Mr. Wilkins this whole time.” [sighs] What makes a “good” Friday the 13th movie anyway? Arguably, none of them are great movies, except maybe Part VI, but there is a kind of low-budget, cheesy charm that makes the series perfect for movie night with friends.

So, judging by Friday the 13th's baseline quality and not overall movie quality, is Part V any good? What do people want when they see a Friday the 13th movie? Well, historically, fans of the series wanted to see kills. There is a lot of admittedly anecdotal evidence from people who were in the theaters in the 80's that suggests people were counting the kills and cheering for Jason, not his victims. This has lasted to this day with “kill count” YouTube videos that focus on these scenes more than any others. Some of the most famous Jason kills across the franchise are bending his victim's body, slamming his victim against a tree, the 3D eye pop, the Mortal Kombat style uppercut and a few others. Part V suffers from the censorship of the time. There was a lot of pressure to make the Friday the 13thmovies less graphic. The director was sent notes about what they had to cut in order for it to make an R rating. Part V was infamously cut to pieces and showed less blood. You can barely see any blood in the dream sequence introduction, the two early Roy victims who are inexplicably 1950's greasers are killed in a generic, Part I kind of way, the pervert gets a bloodless axe to the dome, the peeping tom in the forest is unenthusiastically stabbed without any gore, even Roy falling on the spikes looks a little tame. In terms of kills, the thing that allegedly drove fans to the theaters, there are only a handful of “creative” death scenes.

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One in which Roy crushes a teenager's head by twisting a strap the wrong way, and another in which Demon is trapped in an outhouse and dies in his own stink. The best action in the movie is when Tommy Jarvis hits the death valley driver through a table. The only thing remarkable about this film's kills is that the count is pretty high compared to previous Fridays. There are 22 kills in this movie whereas Part I only had 10, Part II only had 9, Part III had 12, and Part IV had 14. The problem with such a high kill count is that the kills don't have much impact. There is a kill approximately every four minutes in the movie. It's not only overkill, but since so many characters are introduced almost immediately before being killed, their deaths have no resonance. Thus, if you're not the kind of horror fan who is only there is watch elaborate kills and instead want some slow, creeping dread, you're going to come away disappointed. It's an unsatisfying horror movie whether you're there for the gore or there for the atmosphere. Going outside the slasher fan community, just as an admirer of cinema, it's also a hard movie to defend because it had to be edited in a blender, and much of it comes across so disjointed, with scenes so detached from the main thread of the plot, victims invented to up the kill count who have nothing to do with...anything. So, why do I kinda like this movie?

I can't defend it as a piece of well-structured cinema because it's not, and I can't even defend it as cohesive because it's really not, and even by slasher standards, it's incredibly sleazy – almost uncomfortably so. Friday the 13thPart V doesn't work that well as a movie, but it works as a series of unrelated vignettes. Skits with goofy characters. While Part VI is best known for being a comedic meta-commentary on slasher movies, Part V really starts the comedy trend in Friday the 13th. With the possible exception of Tommy, none of the characters are particularly well-developed, but so many characters are just incredibly silly and memorable anyway, and their brief existences in the movie, barely having any impact of the overall plot, give their introductions and rapid conclusions this vignette feel. Example. The aforementioned Demon is Reggie's older brother. Reggie's grandfather doesn't want him hanging around Demon, but he never comes across as dangerous or irresponsible. Maybe it's just the charismatic portrayal by Miguel Nunez, maybe it's his genuine affection for his younger brother, or maybe it's because he's always offering people free food. Whatever it is, he comes across as this bad boy with a heart of gold. He and his girlfriend Anita sing lovingly to each other while he's in the outhouse, and then Fake Jason has to come around and ruin it by killing them both. Demon is referenced briefly in one prior scene but has nothing to do with the overall plot of the movie. Roy kills both Demon and Anita without any motivation.

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Neither of them were related to Roy's son's death in any way. They didn't even live in the halfway house where it happened. This is also true of the greaser scene. They have even less to do with the death of Roy's son. They are two random 1950's enthusiasts, presumably ready for a Grease theme party at a 50's diner, who run afoul of Roy for the crime of car trouble. “And now we take you live to two nameless greasers, already in progress.” Then there's Ethel and her son Junior who are clearly the same age. Roy mows them down too for no particular reason. Watching the actors' performances, Friday the 13thPart V feels like a movie where everyone knew what kind of movie they were making and just hammed it up. Why is Violet doing the robot? Is that even the robot? Why is she dancing like this? And why is it oddly compelling? Like, the entire movie is just a bunch of people practically winking at the camera. This isn't mere speculation either. Interviews with the actors have revealed that a lot of the memorable, funny stuff from the movie was improvised. Ethel's dialogue was ad-libbed. The song from the dance, the “It's showtime” random nudity, and bunch of other stuff was cooked up by the actors on the set. Everyone from Joey... [clip] ...to Vic... [clip] to the creepy paramedic [clip]. It's such a bizarre collection of purposefully goofy performances – all of which feel inexplicable and disjointed and unrelated to each other.

Friday the 13thPart V doesn't work as a movie, but it does work as a series of scenes to watch individually on YouTube. Maybe this is still not a convincing argument if the absence of Jason leaves too big of a void in this movie. I understand that some Friday fans will dismiss this entry into the franchise because it doesn't have Jason, but that's where they're wrong. It has a Fake Jason, a Ghost Jason, and by the end, a New Jason. That's three Jasons. That's two more Jasons than usual. If anything, there is too much Jason in this movie, not too little. There. That settles that. Very important video this week, right? Is anyone else tired? Just...very tired right now?