It’s always interesting to hear about things that *could* have happened in our favorite movies, and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives writer/director Tom McLoughlin just shared a pretty fun “what if?” in an interview chat with Midnight’s Edge.
You’ve maybe already heard this one, but one of McLoughlin’s original ideas for Jason Lives was that Jason was going to arm himself with an uzi and go on a rampage… Rambo style!
“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.”
McLoughlin continued, “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. 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.”
The closest Jason ever came to firing a gun was of course in Friday the 13th Part III, wherein he shoots Vera through the eye with a spear gun. Similar but also very different!