YA-BANG!
NEVER HIKE ALONE 2
2023/73m
Director/Writer: Vincente DiSanti / Cast: Thom Mathews, Vincent Guastaferro, Andrew Leighty, Anna Campbell, Vincent DiSanti, Lauren Wickel, Ben Kascandi, Bryan Forrest, Tracie Savage, Larry Zerner.
Body Count: 12
Never Hike Alone was the best surprise in 2017 – a Jason-centric half-length film that wasn’t amateur night; a stripped back, cut down, recollection of Friday feels. It worked. It worked better than some of the official instalments!
Three years later, a shorter prequel, Never Hike in the Snow debuted to rope in a couple of other Crystal Lake alumni for its world building and, another three years on, the closer-to-feature-length sequel rolls in.
Beginning before the events that ice off the first, poor Tommy Jarvis (Mathews, my favourite actor for the role) is still tormented by dreams that Jason Voorhees lives on. Working as a paramedic at Wessex County Medical Center (where Axel and Nurse Morgan met their grisly ends 40 years earlier), he sympathises with a doctor colleague, whose son is missing (the kid who hiked in the snow).
When Tommy and two younger medics are called to help a delirious hiker rescued from the forest, we get to see Jason lay his workmates to waste all over again and then stalk after Tommy and Kyle as they head back to the clinic.
Local Sheriff Rick Cologne still sneers at the legends until he and his deputies come face to face with ye masked one when he shows up in the ER and takes most of the remaining cast out, leaving Tommy, Dr Hill, and Kyle to lure him back to Camp Crystal Lake to stop him for good. Again. But this fosters the long awaited re-utterance of “wherever the red light goes… ya-bang!” from Cologne against Jason… who’s bound to be receptive to that threat, right?
In terms of production polish, it’s remarkably on par with its brethren – drones really have transformed indie filmmaking! – and can boast an aesthetic that would fool Joe Public into being ‘just the next Friday the 13th with comparable ease’, although a series of bizarre on screen typos seems to plague it (see the news scroll that says ‘missing deputy believed to be among missing’!) Pernickety grammar fascism aside, we get cameos from Tracie Savage and Larry Zerner (from Part III) alongside actors from other Hike films and even other Jason fan movies. It’s like a little family is growing, hopefully to the point where whomever owns the rights this week takes their ideas onboard, as they’re doing a damn sight more with Jay.
Blurbs-of-interest: Thom Mathews was also in Final Summer; Anna Campbell was in Jason Rising.