A young man's mind shattered by the tragedies that had befallen him. A halfway house for disturbed teens laid waste by the blade of a madman's axe. In one world, he went on to finally confront his demon and send it back into the waters from whence it had come.
On another world, something very different happened.
But how would that story continue? Where would the story go from there, knowing what we know now?
As a certain Watcher once said, I invite you readers of mine, to pull up a chair and watch as we ponder the question...What If?
We begin where the link above ended. After the events at Pinehurst, paramedic Roy Burns is dead after his confrontation with the young Tommy Jarvis. Tommy, believed dead from his injuries, had been taken to the morgue at the hospital while the other survivors recovered. Unfortunately for a morgue attendant, he was very much alive and very much still in the full throes of his psychotic break.
As Violet found the body, terrified to her core, Tommy found Pam. Pam screamed...and Tommy's hand is about to descend upon her when the door slams open. A cop, having heard the scream, has charged in and has his gun drawn. Alas, he is half a second too late. Pam is killed by a knife to the chest and the cop opens fire on Tommy, hitting him twice. Tommy dodges two more shots as he leaps out of a window and into the night.
At the end, a repairman from the phone company comes along, having been mentioned early on and being needed to repair a telephone line to house. He finds the massacre, but is soon added to the bodies as Tommy gets a brand new, well-worn jumpsuit.
However, Tommy Jarvis isn't the only returning individual to Crystal Lake. As we established in my MadCap Fixes Movies segment, Violet Moraine went from social outcast with some interesting musical tastes to being the Final Girl of the film. Having survived Roy's rampage at Pinehurst and Tommy's breakout from the hospital, she has come to Crystal Lake intending to either reach Tommy and try to pull him back from his own darkness or - as the handgun in the glove box of Pam's pick up truck shows - to put an end to this once and for all.
The police come up to the old Jarvis House to find the massacre, but no sign of Tommy anywhere. When one cop brings up that Jason Voorhees must be back, Sheriff Mike Garris is quick to tell him to stow it. They changed the name of the town from Crystal Lake to Forest Green for good reason, and Wessex County doesn't want to remember those terrible murders back in '84, to say nothing of the rest of the town's storied past. Clearly this is a copycat looking to cause trouble. They need to be stopped.
Tommy, meanwhile, has found his way to the actual Crystal Lake itself and witnesses the arrival of some teenagers to the grounds. Megan, Sissy, Cort, and Paula have all shown up at the Lake with the intention of starting up Camp Forest Green at the behest of Darren Robinson and Lizabeth Mott who, due to Jason not having been resurrected in this timeline, are still alive and have arrived at the Camp unscathed. After seeing a hallucination of Jason, Tommy begins to stalk and kill off the counselors, starting with Paula (with an axe to the chest).
While this is going on, Violet tries to read up on the history of the town, but her inquiries at the local library get the librarian calling the sheriff, who comes around. Unlike Tommy's interaction with Garris in the original Jason Lives, Violet's is a bit more amicable as she explains the situation. Garris puts out an APB for Tommy, but tells Violet that the Forest Green Sheriff's Department will take it from here. Violet, though, reads through the articles about Jason's massacre on microfiche and we see an idea beginning to form.
At Camp Forest Green, Tommy kills Darren (head impaled on a fence) and Lizabeth (broken neck). Megan, more than a little worried about Darren, Lizabeth, and Paula having all disappeared, decides to go out and look for them, leaving Cort and Sissy to tend to things at the camp proper. Cort soon leaves to have his camper sex scene with Nikki. Sissy begins to read the book 30 Years Among the Dead and Megan has an encounter with Tommy that leaves her with a gash across her arm. However, she does manage to escape him after hitting him across the face with a machete, damaging the mask.
When Tommy does finally rise up again, he picks up the iconic weapon and decides to put it to use. He attacks the camper where Cort and Nikki are having their only ten more minutes. Nikki is unfortunately murdered much as she is in the original film. Cort manages to escape with the help of Violet, who rolls up in the truck and gets a shot off into Tommy's arm at the shoulder, knocking him down and allowing the two to escape. Violet gets Cort up to speed about what's going on and they get back to Camp Forest Green to find Sissy helping Megan out with her arm wound. As a storm kicks up, Violet tells Sissy and Megan about the events of the previous film and they put everything together. Sissy suggests that the only thing that could stop Tommy at this point is Jason, though it's clear that this isn't a good idea.
The Sheriff follows the trail of Tommy, finding the camper with Nikki's body having been wrenched apart and finding Cort's footprints heading away from the scene as well as the treads of the truck Violet was driving as she and Cort made their escape.
Back at the Camp, the group finds that someone has slashed all four of Violet's tires. The other vehicles, likewise, have suffered damages to the tires and the phone lines have been cut. Night is falling and they'll have to get back to the town on foot. The Sheriff is unable to get a hold of Megan at the Camp and first tells a deputy to head out there to check it out. At the last second, though, he changes his mind and resolves to go out and do it himself, just in case.
After grabbing and reading one of Sissy's other books The Manual of the Occult, Megan presents the idea that they could stop Tommy by returning him to the place where he "died". In this case, the Jarvis House. When Violet brings up that Tommy isn't dead, he was just presumed to be dead, Megan points out that it is a spot of massive psychological trauma that could put Tommy off-balance so they could have a chance at stopping him. With no other ideas, they begin to set their plan into motion...though, first, they have to get back to town.
Sheriff Garris makes it to the camp and comes face to face with Tommy. Deputy Rick pulls the "wherever the red dot goes, ya bang" line, but gets cut off as Tommy cuts off his hand with the machete and crushes his throat. Garris takes three shots at Tommy, but likewise suffers a death by impalement via machete. The teenagers get to the squad car, Megan having a slight mental breakdown at witnessing her father pinned to a tree, before they manage to make their getaway. Tommy lumbers after them on foot, his mind clearly set on murder.
The group gets to the old Jarvis House and for once, we see things from the perspective of the killer. Tommy keeps having flashbacks to The Final Chapter, in particular his final climatic fight with Jason...which is echoed as he follow Sissy, who is seemingly all alone, into a trap that gets him in the same position that Jason was in back during Part 4. Violet attempts to reach him and seems to be succeeding...and then Cort hits him with a machete in the shoulder.
Tommy is, if anything, more enraged than before and kills Cort. The three girls flee for their lives, Megan not able to make it and her screams echo in the distance as Violet and Sissy drive away. With their previous plan up in smoke, Violet reasons that they need to prove to Tommy once and for all that Jason Voorhees is actually dead...and there's only one place to do that, Jason's grave.
The two get a pair of shovels from a police storage shed and head out to the spot where Jason was buried. Some hours pass and they soon dig six feet down...and find an empty coffin. Jason's body is nowhere to be found, and a storm is brewing over their heads.
Tommy arrives. In the rain, he, Violet, and Sissy fight. During the struggle, Sissy's neck gets snapped and she gets tossed into the empty grave. Violet, now alone, struggles seemingly in vain against Tommy. Tommy's mind recounts the final battle against Jason, and his screams of "Die! Die! Die!" get echoed by Violet, who has given up trying to reach him and is desperate for survival. In the end, however, Violet emerges victorious, impaling Tommy with the broken end of her shovel. As Tommy falls back, a bolt of lightning strikes the handle of the shovel and fries him, knocking Violet back as well.
She falls unconscious, the rain pounding down upon her.
Hours later, an ambulance has arrived. Seventeen are being counted among the dead in Tommy's massacre. While the body of Sissy is pulled out of the empty grave of Jason Voorhees, Tommy's is nowhere to be found. Violet attempts to warn the people of Forest Green, telling the EMTs and the police there that Tommy is still out there and will kill again, ranting hysterically before she is sedated and taken away in an ambulance. The last vision to meet her eyes is of a scarred, burnt figure of a man wearing a hockey mask watching her from the distance within the line of trees, who vanishes just before she closes her eyes and is carted away.
We're not quite done yet, though. A mid-credits sequence shows us the refilling of the grave of Jason, despite there being no body to fill it. We see a lone car driving away from the scene, it eventually stopping at a house and parking to reveal Chris Higgins - the survivor from Friday the 13th Part 3. She enters into the basement, where we see she has claimed the body of Jason from his grave. With the addition of a human heart in a jar that she pulls out of a bag, she begins to cackle a bit in a frenzied, maniacal way. She walks over to a nearby bookshelf and picks up a book that should be very familiar to anyone who is a fan of the Evil Dead franchise - the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis.
She declares that the time has finally come and she opens the tome, preparing to read from it just as we cut back to the credits.
And that's where this What If ends. Violet's quest to stop Tommy ended in failure and may potentially have opened a door to something far, far worse. Why would Chris Higgins, a former survivor of Jason, be trying to resurrect him? They are questions for another time. Next time, we'll be looking at a very different question. Even though it's still some time off as I want to review both the Friday the 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street series to that point, I want to go ahead and try to answer a question that's been bugging me for a while.
What if Freddy Krueger had never resurrected Jason Voorhees?
Be there!
No comments:
Post a Comment