Cavalcade of Awesome

I was a big fan of Fangoria in the mid-to-late 80s. I still have most of my issues I bought back in the day.  So I went into the archives here at the Cavalcade HDQ and found issues of Fangoria that featured the movie maniacs I’m talking about this month.  I was able to find issues featuring all of them.  So, today, I’m looking at Fangoria #68 from 1987.  It featured a cover story about Jason Voorhees.

This is also the issue which featured the movie maniac beach party comic strip I posted on Day 1 of AWESOME-tober-fest.

The Jason cover story is an investigative interview with the actors who portrayed Jason in the first six installments of the Friday the 13th franchise.  It’s called The Six Faces of Jason and features some cool behind the scenes pics of the making of the franchise up to that point.

Here are the first 4 pages of the article.  You can click these images to see them BIGGER on Flickr.

Unfortunately, this is a two part article so they only cover the first three movies in this issue.  I assume Parts 4-6 are covered in the next issue, which I don’t have.

The actors interviewed in this particular issue are:
1. Ari Lehman who played the child Jason in the original Friday the 13th.
2. Warrington Gillette who played the unmasked Jason at the end of Part 2.  However, this article doesn’t mention that Steve Daskewisz played “bag head” Jason throughout the rest of the movie.
3. Richard Brooker who played the first Jason to get the hockey mask in Part III.

Presumably, in the second part of this article in the next issue, they would interview:
4. Ted White who played Jason in The Final Chapter.
5. Tom Morga who played Jason in a hallucination in Part 5.
6. CJ Graham who played Jason in Jason Lives.

The most famous Jason, Kane Hodder, wasn’t a part of this article because he didn’t play Jason until 1988’s Part VII: The New Blood.  The article is an interesting look back at the previous movies and gives small insight into actor experiences and casting.  One piece of trivia I learned from this article was that only one of these six men were offered the chance to play Jason a second time.  And he refused.   The article in this issue didn’t mention who specifically, so I have to assume it’s one of the last three guys.

I found another cool article in Fangoria issue #62 (I’ll feature the cover for that next week). It’s an in depth article with the special effects team from Reel EFX about some of the gory scenes that had to be cut out of Jason Lives.

The article says that director Tom McLoughlin filmed all of the kill scenes three times; as a hard PG-13, R and finally X. As you can see, from the beginning they planned to have problems with the ratings board. Much of the cut material came from the graveyard scene early in the movie. Ron Pallilo’s character actually has his heart and guts ripped out of his body and dropped on the ground by Jason. The drunk caretaker at the graveyard has a bottle stabbed into his neck and the camera shows blood pouring out of the bottle. All of this was cut cut down or completely removed for the theatrical release.  They also filmed a scene with Jason’s dad, Elias, that would have gone at the end of the movie, however the studio decided they didn’t want it at the last minute.

During the paintball scenes, Jason actually kills three of the survivalists in a spectacular triple beheading filmed all in one shot with a complicated dummy rig. Of course, this was too graphic and the kills were rearranged and cut down.

Those are the most notable cuts. There were several others involving the deaths of two of the counselors, Cort and Sissy. They were both originally much more violent but had to be cut down per orders from the ratings board. It’s a shame because all of this would be allowed as an R today considering the stuff you see in crap horror movies like Hostel or Saw.

You can get a lot more info like in these articles in the book Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th or the insanely in depth documentary His Name Was Jason.  I highly recommend both.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

This entry was posted on October 8, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under Friday the 13th, Jason Vorhees, movies, pop culture with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2012, Fangoria, Friday the 13th, Halloween, holiday, Jason Voorhees, magazine, magazines, movie posters, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.