Saturday, December 20, 2008

My dream: A goalie mask crushed under the wheel of a '67 Impala.

Slasher flicks are not my favorite type of movie. They regularly feature threadbare plots meant only to act as vehicles for the graphic massacre of attractive young people.* The villains are implacable and unkillable, almost a metaphor for the uncaring world that is out there waiting to chop teenagers up in a less literal sense. Maybe "villains" is too strong a term for monsters this simple. They're murder machines, the consequence phase of perverse morality tales, existing only to dispose of errant human beings in new and creative ways.

This isn't to say that I won't watch one. In fact, thanks to the tastes of friends and family, not to mention the fact that often - even in the era of hundreds of channels - there is absolutely nothing else on, I've become enough of a Friday the 13th expert to win a trivia contest centered solely around Jason Voorhees' nighttime activities.

So I'm coming to accept the inevitable that, sooner or later, I'm going to watch the next installment. Adding to that inevitability is the presence of Jared Padalecki, who in the trailer looks like he just stepped off of the set of Supernatural for an afternoon's filming.

Ah, but there's the rub, isn't there? I've always been a fan of the monster hunters more than the monsters, and seeing young Padalecki up there, I can't help but think of what might have been.

I'm not enough of a sadist to suggest that Padalecki play his Supernatural character forever, but come on. If you're a fan, you can totally picture Metallicar pulling up while Jason watches in camera-eye view from the woods. If any piece of fictional real estate screams for the attention of the Winchester brothers, it's Camp Crystal Lake.

But I guess distance from the show is kind of the point for Padalecki.** After all nothing says "see, I'm an actor, not a badass monster hunter" quite like playing a corpse-in-waiting in a horror franchise. Look what it did for Sarah Michelle Gellar. After Buffy the Vampire Slayer died its death, she was totally able to take her film experiences from Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer and parlay them into the role of Daphne in the Scooby-Doo movies, where she now hunts monsters and kicks butt with karate in a totally different way than Buffy!

Sorry. The urge to sarcasm is sometimes irresistible.

I'll admit that my whole "When Jason Met Sam and Dean" scenario springs from the same part of my fanboy brain that considers such weighty matters as: "Who would win in a fight - Ghost Rider or The Creeper?" And it's within that realm of comics that I'm most likely to have this crossover dream of mine come true. DC Comics holds the license to both Friday the 13th and Supernatural, so if the respective properties' lawyers are willing, maybe Jason will get his visit from the hunters yet.

* - For those same young people to engage in activity perfectly natural and vital to the propogation of the species on camera is an obscenity beyond all mention, of course. Meanwhile, decapitation and dismemberment only rate a hard "R" rating. But that's a rant for another day. Or me just being a dirty old man again.

** - I'm just assuming here.

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