It takes a certain breed of
woman to face off against Jason Voorhees - delicate and sensitive, slightly on
the prim side but resourceful when it comes to a life-or-death battle.
The actresses behind these
screen personages, though, vary from conservative near-puritans to enthusiastic
genre fans. There have been seven of them so far, and only one - Adrienne King -
has returned for a sequel engagement, which makes some sense; any heroine who
survives Camp Crystal Lake should be put into psychiatric care if she even
thinks about going near the woods again.
This conclusion of our survey
shows the contrasts between those who loved it and those who regret it, those
who feel it opened doors and those who claim it hindered their careers. It all
proves one thing; A bad experience is in the mind of the beholder. (Easy for us
to say, huh? We didn’t have to go rolling around in any freezing muddy lakes.)
Kimberly Loves Jason
Kimberly Beck has just come
back from a visit to the doctor’s office. It was the first time she met this
particular sawbones, but the medico knew her.
“He looked at me for a
second and said, ‘You were in one of those Friday The
13th Movies,’” recalls Beck, balancing conversation and a 6-week-old baby as she
cuts and hacks her way through her memories of Friday The 13th - The Final
Chapter. Beck, a good-natured straight shooter who, believe it or not, married a
guy named Jason, remembers that her Voorhees waltz began with her going in
blind.
“I had never seen a Friday
film, and I had no idea what they were about,” admits Beck of the
five-callback process that resulted in her landing the Final Chapter job. “It
was work, and I was basically so happy to have a job at that point that I didn’t
think about the significance of what I was doing until after I did it.”
Beck is not the superstitious
type, but she feels that landing the coveted Friday role led to some very
strange days. “A lot of weird things were going on in my life at the time,”
allows Beck, who stops short of giving up the real dirt. “All of a sudden, I
found myself in this Friday The 13th state of mind. I began to attract all kinds
of weirdness.”
This weirdness, at its most
extreme, began to take on the trappings of a real-life slasher movie. “ I
always went to this park near my house to run,” she discloses. “Right about
the time I began making the film, this strange man started showing up and
watching me from a distance. One day I finished my running and started back to
my car, and the guy followed me. He stopped a couple of feet from the car, and I
freaked and yelled at him to leave me alone. But he wouldn’t say a word. The
was sure creepy.
“So were the strange
telephone calls I would get,” she goes on. “They were just weird calls. I
would get them at all hours, and it really upset me. I have no idea if all those
things were happening because somebody knew I was doing the film or what, but
the scary scenes at the park and the phone calls stopped when I finished the
film.”
As if those real-life horrors
weren’t bad enough, Beck soon had to face the terrors of Friday filmmaking
which, as with the previous three outings, required her to be wet, cold and
passionate for night work. Her reaction to his ordeal was to bawl at the drop of
a hat.
“Yeah, I cried a lot,” Beck
chuckles. “I cried every time they put water on me, I cried when I had to fall
in the mud. I cried when I had to fight Jason. But after I stopped crying, I
went ahead and did what I had to do.”
The actress, who also appears
in Massacre at Central High, would up having to do so many of her own stunts
that she was presented with a Stuntman’s Association card. Still, one stunt
she did not do remains, to this day, a constant source of embarrassment. “It
was the scene where my character Trish gets thrown out the window,” she
details. “A stunt double did that actual stunt, and I was matched to the
scene. Unfortunately, when the stunt double landed, her underpants were showing.
I had to lay down in the mud and have my dress pulled up so that my underpants
would show as well.”
Beck’s finale, a battle royal
with Jason, proved a particular test of the young woman’s mettle. “The guy
who played Jason, Ted White, was a real nice guy,” she assesses. “During the
final scenes where we were struggling, he told me to go all out, so I did, but I
was constantly hurting this guy. It made me feel read bad.
“The scariest and hardest
part of the Jason scenes,” she continues, “were when I had the machete in my
hand. It was pretty sharp, and we had to choreograph all these moves. I had a
hard time getting the moves right. Just before the final scene was shot, I got
real upset. I thought I was going to screw up and actually kill this poor guy.”
White and Beck survived the
alleged Final Chapter, though, so the actress went about her business.
Unfortunately, business slowed to a dead stop after the release of the fourth
Friday epic. “I thought appearing in that film would lead to other work, but
it didn’t.” Beck frowns. “For a while, I was flooded with other slasher
roles that I turned down. I was even offered a role in Re-Animator, but I turned
that down, too. And no, I was not offered Friday The 13th, Part V.”
The Friday extravaganza sticks
out in Beck’s mind as a good experience. Nevertheless, as she hoists her baby
on her shoulder for a burp, she offers one last disappointing anecdote; “My
best scene in the entire film was cut out. It was where I find my mother and she’s
dead. The producer and director [Joe Zito] decided that the scene was too
offensive,” she laughs. “I can almost agree. She didn’t have sex, so how
could she die?”
Slasher Straight Face
Melanie Kinnaman was told that
the main requirement for appearing in a Friday The 13th movie was the ability to
act terrified. Kinnaman knew better.
“If you go back over all the
Friday movies, you notice that the people who make these films love to see
blondes running,” enlightens Kinnaman. “I knew how to run and I was blonde,
so I had an edge.”
The actress was not about to
rest on her laurels. Part V of something be damned. In preparing to play Pam,
Kinnaman did her homework. “I knew, from an acting standpoint, that it was
real easy to be bad in these things, and I certainly did not want to be bad,”
she reasons. “So I did a quick horror film study. I went back and looked at
Jamie Lee Curtis’ horror films and watched parts of three other Friday The
13th movies. I realized that leading ladies in Friday films did not have a whole
lot to do, but I was prepared to make the most of the opportunities I was given
as an actress.”
Friday The 13th, Part V: The
New Beginning, which chronicles the murder spree of a Jason imposter, began
filming about a week before Halloween. Appropriately enough, Halloween night was
when all hell broke loose. “That was the night we filmed the scene where I
attack Jason with a chainsaw,” Kinnaman relates. “I’m telling you, that
was the hardest scene to do. I just could not keep a straight face. It was just
so funny. I mean, here I was, standing there with this smoking chainsaw, going
after a 6-foot-3-inch guy with a saber in his hand. I thought, ‘He could kill
me in a second, and they’re trying to make this play like I’ve got the upper
hand!’
“Many of the things we did in
that film were so hysterically over the top that I spent most of the time just
trying to look at the cameramen without bursting out laughing. If I made eye
contact, I would lose control. And I lost it a lot of times.”
Kinnaman describes the finished
product as “a 90-minute film with 45 minutes of me running away from Jason.”
“At least two weeks of
filming was of me running,” she laughs. “There was one scene that we shot
where we were using rain machines. I had to run into camera and stop on a
certain mark. It was difficult. At one point, I hit the mark and promptly fell
down. Rather than cutting, the director [Danny Steinmann] said, ‘Keep rolling
in the mud,’ so I spent the next five minutes rolling and screaming through
this mud. When it was over, I said to myself, ‘I went to acting class for
this?’”
Despite the mud, her New
Beginning work gave Kinnaman more than a bit of recognition. She learned that
while critics invariably hate these films, being in one can give you a career
boost. “People in the industry may deny that they see these movies, but the
truth is that they do see them,” Kinnaman affirms. “I received quite a bit
of recognition and had a lot of doors open for me. People in this town truly
believe that if you can do 10 weeks in a Friday movie, you can do almost
anything.”
Except, as Kinnaman discovered,
another Friday The 13th movie. “I had originally signed to do Part VI,” she
reveals. “At one point, it was going to be a direct sequel to Part V. But the
producer changed his mind, and decided to go cheaper with it, which left me out
in the cold.”
Kinnaman claims she would do
another Friday film in a minute and has some nice things to say about the
series.
“I really feel the Friday The
13th films are among the better examples of the horror genre. I felt that even
doing Part V made me part of a classic film series.”
VI The Hard Way
The last thing Jennifer Cooke
ever wanted was to go through life having the reputation as a Friday The 13th
girl. But -
“Nothing else was pressing. I
was available. So I did it.”
Cooke, as the above
just-the-facts indicates, is not thrilled at the prospect of looking back at
Jason. Still she concedes that once she signed on for the slayathon, the
prospect of a paycheck proved fairly soothing. “It was actually a pretty fun
diversion,” admits Cooke, who ranks her horror films right down there with
taxes on the list of her favorite things. “My character, Megan, was likeable
and funny, and I got to drive a car fast.”
It also did not hurt that in
Cooke’s estimation, director Tom McLoughlin’s sixth installment of the
Friday series was essentially paint-by-numbers. “The script said to scream on
cut, and I did,” she shrugs. “I memorized my lines and showed up on time.
That’s about all you can do with a film like this. You can’t really draw on
past experiences for inspiration; I don’t know about you, but I’ve never
been chased by a monster with an ax before.”
Not much sticks out in Cooke’s
mind about Friday VI. “Except that horrible scene where I’m being drowned,”
the actress grimaces. “We shot the wide shots of that scene in a lake in
Georgia at 3:00 a.m., and all I was wearing was a coat and blue jeans. Then,
when we got back to Los Angeles, we filmed the close-ups in a swimming pool at
4:00 a.m. It was horrible.”
Cooke who also appeared in “V”
and comes from Long Island, NY was not greeted with a deluge of film assignments
when Jason Lives opened. “There was no flood of offers, and I didn’t expect
there to be,” she smirks. “Let’s just face it, people like Norman Lear are
not going to see a Friday The 13th film. There were a few slasher scripts and
some rumors about a possible bid in Friday VII, but I wasn’t really
interested. As an actress, I’ve got to move up in life, rather than staying
put and getting stuck.”
Lincoln Logs Friday Time
“Tina cries constantly.”
Laughs actress Lar Park Lincoln at the expense of her character in Friday The
13th VII: The New Blood. “I swear, the girl has a major migraine!”
Lar Park Lincoln seemed the
ideal choice to play Jason’s foil. For openers, she had horror experience, if
the neutered House II qualifies as horror. More importantly, she claims to be
Jason’s biggest fan. “I’ve always been a horror film buff,” Lincoln
declares, “and I’m a big fan of the Friday The 13th movies. I’m proud to
say that I’ve seen every one of them.”
Lincoln joined the audition
conga line for Friday VII late in 1988, got the requisite callbacks and when no
final decision was forthcoming, flew home to Dallas for the Christmas holidays.
“When I got to my parents’ house, a script was waiting for me,” she
recalls. “I liked the script. There was the expected stuff with Jason, but I
was really happy with the idea of Tina and her telekinetic powers. It was a
complex story that could very easily stand on its own, and it would allow me to
play something other than a drug addict or a prostitute. So I said sure.”
The dedicated Dallas-born
Lincoln also agreed to some psychic homework, the better to get a handle on Tina
and her telekinetic ways. “The script told me that the telekinetic psychic
stuff was going to stand out, so I took it upon myself to work with real
psychics and learn what it would be like to experience a vision and what a
person would go through trying to communicate the experience to other people. I
was really serious about trying to do this movie right.”
Early on, director John
Buechler stressed that he had a less gore-soaked Beauty and the Beast approach
in mind. Lincoln, however, found much to get grossed out by once she reported
for duty.
“I never realized I’d have
to be around all these dead bodies,” the actress chuckles. “One morning we
were shooting the scene where I discover the head in the flower pot. We had been
shooting all night, and we had to do a pickup early in the morning. I took one
look at the head and totally freaked.”
Highest on Lincoln’s Friday
hit list was the final fiery confrontation with Kane Hodder’s Jason. We could
fake things like the television flying over my head,” Lincoln clarifies. “But
you could not fake fire. So I ended up being real close to Kane when he was
doing those full-body burns. Of course, Kane and all the effects people knew
what they were doing, but being that close to the flames really made me nervous.”
The Friday set was a friendly
place, reports Lincoln. “Everybody worked an awful lot, but there was still
time to hang out,” she reminisces. “It was kind of funny because with a
Friday film you never knew from one day to the next if somebody you’d been
joking around with for two weeks would be slaughtered and leave the set.”
Recent guest shots on Tour of
Duty and a season’s worth of a recurring role on Knots Landing followed
Lincoln’s Friday VII stint. More terror arrived with a role on the Freddy’s
Nightmares episode “It’s a miserable Life,” an experience she jokingly
describes as “sticky.”
“I played a girl about to be
operated on who has her mouth sewn shut,” Lincoln recounts. “The makeup
people glued my mouth shut with spirit gum and put the stitches over that. I had
to breathe through my nose for an awful long time. The mouth sewn shut was a
major problem; not being able to open your mouth is an actor’s nightmare.”
A true nightmare is what is
left of the former model’s performance in House II: The Second Story. “There
was much more going on with my character than what made it to the screen,” she
laments. “I had a whole lot of interesting scenes that were rearranged or got
chopped up for just plain disappeared.”
Lincoln concludes with an
assessment on the Friday The 13th films that pretty much sums up the opinion of
every actress who has chosen to cross swords with Jason.
“I don’t think anybody
really set out to change the world with these movies,” defends the actress.
“Nobody will ever be accused of trying to make a social statement or great
art. What these films are is entertainment.”
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