Review #395: Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
October 2026 Horror Reviews #23 - Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Just when you thought the movie series was going to leave Jason behind and move on with Tommy Jarvis as the next slasher (as the last movie all but promised), this one goes right back to the familiar well! It starts off with Tommy and a friend going to dig up Jason's (now un-cremated) corpse to destroy it and give Tommy some closure after all these years. But since we all know that in the 1980s lightning was literally magic, Jason's decomposed corpse gets hit by a bolt of magic from the sky and what do you know, he's back and stronger than ever. Tommy tries to get help from the police, the sheriff's daughter gets really hot for him instead, and Jason kills a bunch of people before Tommy finds a way to trap him under the lake. And then the movie ends.
I don't think this is a bad movie exactly, but it really doesn't stand out much in my mind (which is crazy because this is the movie that turns Jason explicitly magical, so I really think it should be pretty darn memorable). I'm supremely disappointed that the series went in this direction rather than continuing with what the previous two films were clearly trying to set up, and also the fact that now zombies are a thing and nobody acts like it's a big deal. Like, the Halloween series keeps trying to convince us that Michael Myers isn't purely human, but we never actually see him do anything supernatural, right? I know Halloween 3 has stonehenge magic and a couple of the Halloween movies involved some weird cult that I guess was supposed to explain Michael Myers' extraordinary resilience, but those all got retconned away so it would be extremely weird if the last couple Halloweens were like "Yeah, Michael can re-attach limbs and breathe underwater. It's no big deal." But here we are, in a series that so far has been as grounded as slasher movies get, and suddenly the villain literally gets brought back from the dead as an immortal zombie and will remain that way for the next five movies. (And as you'll see in tomorrow's review, that's not even the end of the supernatural powers this series has to offer!)
The actual movie is fine. I don't really care for the (third) actor playing Tommy, and most of the characters are pretty lackluster (including Tommy himself, whose entire personality seems to have been replaced with simply "I need to stop Jason"), but the action picks up VERY fast (unlike all of the other entries so far, where the first half of the film is getting to know the characters and seeing them goof around and canoodle and whatnot before Jason eventually starts killing, Jason gets reanimated in the first five minutes and never really goes away). This is good because it keeps everything moving at a nice clip, but it's also bad because, well, I really like getting to know the characters and seeing them goof around and canoodle! It's also worth mentioning that of the entire series, this is the ONLY entry in all of Friday the 13th that actually shows summer camp in session. In the first two movies we see only people getting ready for camp, and 3, 4, and 5 didn't even take place at summer camp (and I'm sorry to say, the next five don't take place at camp either, though I think the remake at least nominally takes place in or around Camp Crystal Lake). So this movie is fine, no real highs or lows to speak of, everything kind of balances out.
One thing I do want to touch on before I close out, though, is the way that Tommy defeats Jason at the end. (Spoilers, I guess, but I don't think this is really enhanced by keeping it secret.) He reads in a book that the only way to stop Jason is to return him to his "original resting place", referring to the place where Jason drowned in 1957 (which directly contradicts Part 2, which established that he never actually drowned, but whatever) so Tommy's plan is to go out on the lake with a big heavy rock, lure Jason out there, and chain Jason to the rock, so he can dump the rock into the lake and Jason will be stuck at the bottom. This actually sounds like a pretty clever plan, until you think about literally any of the logistics involved. Let's look at how many bizarre assumptions this plan includes:
1. It assumes (and the movie later shows) that Jason is naturally buoyant and unable to sink, which makes no sense. A corpse that's as decomposed as Jason's wouldn't float, would it? Even if he's capable of floating (either by inflating his... lungs? or by moving his arms to swim) he should easily be able to sink to the bottom, even if he has to do it intentionally. This whole plan would go out the window if Jason was able to just swim downward once he's in the water, but the movie simply assumes he floats uncontrollably. Jason has never had any issue being underwater in any of the previous movies, I'm not sure why being dead would change that.
2. It assumes Jason can't break a chain. I'm not sure anyone would have batted an eye if living Jason broke a chain with his bare hands, but this movie shows that zombie Jason is even stronger (he punches straight through a guy's chest like it was nothing, he routinely smashes through doors without even trying, Tommy even comments on how much stronger he is) so a single loose chain around the neck should not stop Jason Voorhees at this point.
3. It assumes Jason is just going to float there, unmoving, forever. Even if he is naturally buoyant and can't break a chain, if he's going to be down there, conscious, forever, wouldn't he at least try out some things? He could grab the chain, and use it to pull himself downward (due to his buoyancy, think of it like if an immortal person was hanged from a gallows, they could probably eventually try to just reach up and climb the rope, at least until it was slack enough to remove from around their neck). The chain around Jason's neck is the only thing holding him in place, and it's not even on tight. It would have been way better if Tommy handcuffed or manacled Jason to the rock (again, assuming he can't break them for some reason), but nope, all we get is a loose chain.
4. It assumes Tommy was able to lift a rock massive enough to hold Jason down. Jason is naturally buoyant enough to keep him trapped suspended in the water, but skinny teen Tommy Jarvis was able to lift and carry a rock so big and so heavy that even zombie Jason Voorhees was unable to fight against its immense mass.
5. It assumes that nobody will ever go swimming in that lake ever again. Tommy started all of this by bringing a dead killer back to life just to ease his own trauma, so for most of the film it seems like Tommy is committed to stopping Jason so nobody else gets killed by him again. And yet, once he's carried out his plan, he just walks off into the sunset whistling a tune and never returns to check on Jason ever again (because, spoilers, Tommy never shows up again in any further movies) despite the fact that Jason is like thirty feet from the shore of a summer camp and easily within reach if anyone swims past him. Now I'm pretty sure the next movie establishes that Jason goes, like... "dormant" or something after a while of being trapped down in the lake, but THIS movie establishes in its last few seconds that Jason is still down there, still alive (or... undead). Anyone who goes out for a swim is likely to get got. But I guess Tommy doesn't care and isn't going to take responsibility for that.
(Also, this isn't a problem with his plan, but just a question: what was the point of lighting the surface of the lake on fire? Don't get me wrong, it looked badass, I just don't see what purpose it served beyond that.)
Anyway, like I said this is a fine film, but not great. Maybe the next one will be a bit more memorable.
Overall Rating: 6/10 Gun-toting Camp Counselors
Trivia or Goof: One item in the IMDB trivia section simply reads, "There are as many microphone boom sightings as there are murders."
Next Up: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)!
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