Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is often regarded as the moment when the long-running slasher series learned to laugh a little at itself, but according to filmmaker Tom McLoughlin, things could’ve gotten even sillier in the 1986 fan favorite.
The writer-director of the sixth, and some would say best, Friday the 13th film went on the Midnight’s Edge podcast last week, where he explained a pretty wild idea for a more efficient way that Jason Voorhees could hunt down his victims.
“I turned [the Jason Lives treatment] in, and it’s pretty much verbatim exactly what the movie is, in terms of the characters, the scenes,” McLoughlin told the show. “The only thing that is different that I wrote and then realized, ‘No, this is not a good idea’, was when Jason kills the paintballer that has all the weapons and stuff that he takes, you know with the utility belt and the machete and all that stuff. Originally these were not paintballers, they were hunters out there, and this guy was Mr. Macho with all that stuff and he had an Uzi.
“So when Jason ripped his arm off and gets the machete, the next time we see him, in front of the motorhome, he’s got an Uzi strapped to him. And I thought from a visual standpoint, it’s like ‘Holy shit, Jason Rambo!’ And so when he goes into the motorhome and he bursts out of that bathroom on the girl, he just opens fire and shoots the crap out of her and shoots the crap out of Cort behind the wheel and then the motorhome crashes.”
While this would’ve been quite the sight, McLoughlin soon decided that the hockey-masked killer works better when he does all his killing at close range.
“But I went, ‘You know what? Anybody can do that.’ If I’m bringing Jason back from the grave with this superhuman strength… he can turn a head and rip it off and punch a heart out and decapitate three people with one swoop… this is just not right, and it’s also an imitable act, and I did not want that.”
Since the release of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, the franchise has almost certainly ventured into even more outlandish territory (the outer-space adventure Jason X being the obvious example), but due to the current legal messiness around the property, it unfortunately may be a long time before we can see anything new from the star of the series, Uzi or no Uzi.