Well, Jason Voorhees is back, dredged from the depths of Camp Crystal Lake and let loose on a new generation of victims. I've waited 16 long years for a new Friday the 13th movie, the most recent being the 2009 reboot, which I still hold up as one of the great, underrated slashers of all time.
That's why, when I sat down to watch Sweet Revenge, the first official Jason Voorhees, uh, thing, since the resolution of the years-long legal battle between the original Friday the 13th's screenwriter Victor Miller and producer Sean S. Cunningham, I was beside myself with nervous excitement. There was no way the moment would ever live up to the expectations I'd built up over so many years, especially since I knew it was a 13-minute vignette sponsored by, of all things, Angry Orchard Hard Cider.
What I wasn't expecting was to feel so thoroughly conflicted about it. Sweet Revenge doesn't suck, not by a long shot. The kills are creative and notably gorier than any Friday the 13th movie, the score is classic, and at the end of the day, Jason is back where he should be, mutilating stupid young people played by actors who clearly aren't that young.
Better yet, Sweet Revenge seems like it meaningfully expands the Friday the 13th mythology arguably for the first time since the first movie. I won't spoil how, but stick around to the ending and you'll know what I'm talking about.
A bitter aftertaste
What's not so great is that Sweet Revenge is also an elaborate Angry Orchard commercial. Again, Horror Inc. hasn't been coy about Angry Orchard sponsoring this thing, but the way they integrated the company's branding all throughout the vignette is weird, distasteful, and a disservice to Friday the 13th's legacy.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Angry Orchard, but it's one thing to sponsor a film project, and another to turn the long-awaited revival of a beloved horror icon into a hard cider ad. Seriously, it takes about 90 seconds for a bottle of Angry Orchard to show up, and I spotted no less than two dozen shots with bottles and cases in clear view.
And then there's the apple scene. Oh god, the apple scene. For the uninitiated, it's in the slasher movie playbook to have a scene early on where the dumb kids are warned by an older local that the area is dangerous, and Sweet Revenge takes that trope and, you guessed it, makes it shotgun an Angry Orchard.
Not only is the main character, Eve, nursing a bottle of Angry Orchard, but both characters are loudly munching on apples the whole scene, even as the old guy warns Eve about "revenge, betrayal," and "murder, lots of murder."
I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I swear they even dialed up the crunching sound of the apples being eaten. At that point, I was fully expecting the ending to be Jason thwacking open a bottle of Angry Orchard with his machete and winking at the camera as he takes a sip.
Anyway, aside from alllllll that, I had a very good time watching Sweet Revenge, and I hope it's just a clumsily done teaser for a bloodier, more experimental Friday the 13th, and not a prophecy of a soulless, money-hungry "Jason Universe," a name I'm already not fond of. Jason's back, but it remains to be seen whether he's the ruthless killer we know and love or a shallow husk drunk on hard cider.
