Capeworld Comics

The FORBIDDEN Prediction Blog Episode 6

 

Original Fight 4

 

Michael Myers vs Jason Voorhees (Parts II-IV)

 

Well, let’s get something out of the way real quick. Nearly every version of Jason wipes the floor with Mikey. Jason can rip a man’s arm off by tugging on it. Mikey lost a fight to Busta Rhymes. Jason walked out of an exploding house. Mikey was put into a coma by an exploding room. Pick your Jason–film Jason, NES Jason, Wildstorm comics Jason, Uber-Jason from Jason X, hell-lord Tom Savini Jason from the recent video game, they all feed Mikey his Shatner mask.

 

But what if we made things a little more fair? What if we pitted Mikey against the weakest incarnation of Jason (no, not Roy the paramedic from Part V, an actual Jason)? I’m talking about the “human” Jason from parts II–IV. This Jason wasn’t punching people’s heads off or fighting telekinetic girls. This Jason was human in the same way Mikey was “human.” They were both capable of superhuman acts of durability–but only to a degree.

 

You know how Marvel’s Kingpin is ostensibly human and yet he pulls off stuff like opening vault doors with one hand and beating up Spider-Man and Captain America? Pre-Part VI Jason and Mikey sort of have the same deal.

 

For this fight, the usual strength/skill/speed/durability categories are changed to stalking/slashing/surviving because I like theming. Surviving is durability and slashing is strength, but speed and skill are lumped together for stalking. Stalking is a measure of finesse, wits, and speed. It determines who is more likely to sneak up on the other and get the first hit in.

 

Two slashers. The Shape vs The Man Behind the Mask.

 

Who will survive, and what will be left of them?

 

Jason Voorhees

 

“I don’t want to scare anyone, but I’m going to give it to you straight about Jason. His body was never recovered from the lake after he drowned. Now if you listen to the old timers in town they’ll tell you he’s still out there. Some folks claim they’ve even seen him. Right in this area. The girl who survived that night at Camp Blood, that Friday the 13th, she said she saw him. Legend has it that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night, and he took his revenge–a revenge that he will continue to seek if anyone enters his wilderness again.”

 

Jason’s story goes like this: when Rita Repulsa was freed from her space dumpster prison by astronauts, Zordon recruited five teenagers with attitude to…

 

Okay, I’ll stop now.

 

A lot of people seem to have trouble reconciling Part I and II. If Jason didn’t drown, how come he’s still alive? 

 

I never had any problem. Jason was always a ghost. The idea that ghosts can’t be anything but intangible spirits is fairly modern. In mythologies and folktales around the world you have stories about ghosts that have physical bodies. You have stories from ancient India about men marrying ghosts and fathering children with them. You have stories from ancient Greece where heroes beat up troublesome ghosts. A personal favorite ghost story of mine comes from medieval Europe. There’s a medieval genre of literature where a ghost comes out of hell to warn their friend to repent of his ways lest he suffer the same fate. A Christmas Carol has a long precedent. In one such story from this genre, the friend tells the ghost that he’s not going to listen to him because he’s a ghost and ghosts can’t do anything to people. The ghost replies by squirting boiling puss on him.

 

While we’re on the subject of literature, I highly recommend Ogden’s Magic Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds. It’s a great way to learn about mythology, folklore, the occult, philosophy, and all kinds of cool stuff. 

 

Okay, enough high-brow crap. Back to the slashers!

 

Jason is a ghost. He drowned and haunted the nearby forests and lake. When Pamela Voorhees racked up a kill count in the first movie, he saw her get decapitated. This added to his anguish and thus his power. He was then able to manifest a physical form, if he didn’t have one already, to track down her killer and then murder anyone that trespassed on Camp Crystal Lake. This form grows stronger as it faces more and more anguish. It’s why Part II Jason was a little sackboy while Part III and IV Jason was bulkier. The anguish of not getting Jennie made him stronger.

 

You know all those dream sequences that happen at the end of a few of the films? Like how at the end of Part I the final girl dreams of kid Jason jumping out of the water and getting her and at the end of Part III the final girl dreams of Jason looking at her from the window of the barn before Pamela jumps out of the lake and gets her? Those are parts of Jason’s haunting. Those are manifestations of the Jason ghost without his physical body. It’s why they show up to survivors of Jason’s attacks. Jason failed to kill them, so his incorporeal self attacks them in their dreams because that’s all he has left that he can do.

 

Kid Jason shows up at the climax of Jason Takes Manhattan when Jason gets disintegrated by New York’s sewers by a regularly scheduled toxic waste deluge (because that’s what you get when you live in a major city in a blue state) because that was meant to be his final death. Kid Jason shows up to represent that both the ghost and the body of Jason Voorhees was finally being put to rest.

 

That didn’t take, obviously, but neither did Part IV and it was titled The Final Chapter.

 

Jason Voorhees Kill Compilation:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH77OHkQsZY&t=242s

 

Part II Ending:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZQretiKT6g&t=242s

 

Part III Ending:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO1llz_pctg&t=4s

 

Stalking

 

Part II

 

–Survived in the woods since he was eight. Though Jason might seem like a big idiot, he’s actually got some practical redneck smarts. 

 

–He was somehow able to track down and kill Alice, the lone survivor of Part I who killed his mommy.

 

–Caught a victim in a snare trap.

 

Part III

 

–Had pretty good aim with a speargun. Got her right in the eye!

 

–Cut the power to Higgins’ Haven.

 

–After removing the bar from a barn door to chase his victim, he reset the bar to keep his victim from escaping while he searched for them.

 

Part IV

 

–Cut the power to the Jarvis residence.

 

–Found Rob’s campsite and broke his guns.

 

–Okay, get this, during Part IV a bunch of characters are chilling out in a two-story cabin. Naturally, Jason does to them what he does to everyone in cabins. But here’s how he did it: he killed one of them in the first floor kitchen, ran outside, climbed up the house, pulled a girl out of a window killing her, climbed down the house, went back into the kitchen to grab a knife, and then killed another guy on the first floor. And no one noticed. 

 

Jason is a redneck ninja.

 

Slashing

 

Part II

 

–Buried the claw of a hammer in the back of a man’s skull with a single blow 

 

–Burst through a window and grabbed a girl even with a machete stuck in his shoulder

 

–Stabbed a pitchfork through two horny teenagers and a bed 

 

–Hit a guy in a wheelchair in the face with a machete so hard he was sent rolling backwards and down a flight of stairs. He also made a death cry almost as good as Sully’s from Commando. UUUWWWWAAAAAAUUUWWWAAAAAA!

 

–Stabbed a pitchfork through a door and the roof of a car 

 

Part III

 

–Stabbed a cute biker gang chick with a pitchfork so that she was lifted off the ground and pinned to one of the support beams. He’s pretty handy with a pitchfork. I’m surprised it didn’t end up being his weapon-of-choice over the machete.

 

–Grabbed a man’s head in his hands, lifted him off the ground, and squeezed so hard his eyeball pops out (and in 3-D!). The scientific term for your eyeball popping out of your head is traumatic globe luxation. You should google it, it’s cool!

 

But Jason popped an eyeball so hard out of poor dude’s socket it wasn’t even attached by a string. It ejected out of the guy’s socket like a gore rocket. That upgrades Jason’s kill to traumatic avulsion of the globe.

 

Surprisingly, the google image search on that didn’t give many cool pictures.

 

How hard would you have to squeeze to get someone’s eyeball to fly out? You’d have to provide 2,300 newtons of force to crush someone’s skull which is more than twice what humans can produce with their hands. Jason pulled this off while lifting the victim off the ground and producing so much force so fast his eyeball flew out like he was in Looney Tunes–the good one, not the shitty remake where they took Elmer’s gun away.

 

–Knocked out a biker with a single punch. When this biker wakes up later and tries to avenge his colleagues by attacking Jason with a machete, Jason takes his hand off with one blow of his own machete. Engaging Jason in a duel with his weapon-of-choice probably wasn’t the best idea.

 

–Ambushed a woman on a cot from below and crammed his machete through her sternum.

 

–Threw a man’s body through a window..

 

Part IV

 

–Sliced a pervy mortician’s neck with a hacksaw then twisted his neck around. I don’t mean like he just snapped his neck. I mean the head turned more than 180 degrees and nearly came off.

 

–Stabbed a poor dude in the crotch with a speargun then lifted him in the air. Then he fired it. Fucking ouch. Jason did this while below the dude underwater, which goes to show that Freddy vs Jason was really, really stupid.

 

–Broke through a window, grabbed a woman, and casually threw her to her death onto a car below. God, I wish you could have thrown people onto the car in the recent Friday the 13th game. That would have been so satisfying to do when they try to escape.

 

–Embedded his machete in Crispin Glover’s face and skull with one blow after immobilizing his hand with a corkscrew. (“Hey Ted? Hey Ted, Where the hell’s the corkscrew?”) Rest in power, tiny dancer.

 

–Crushed a man’s skull by palming it. He didn’t even have a good grip and he crushed a man’s skull. He crushed a man’s skull with his fingers. Jesus Christ Jason had no chill in Part IV. I guess he was really pissed about the head wound from III!

 

–Killed a woman by throwing his axe at her through a door.

 

–Killed a woman by throwing a pitchfork at her so hard she flew back and was pinned to the wall. See? He’s really skilled with a pitchfork.

 

–Threw a body through a wall-length window.

 

–Walked through a nailed-shut door. He gently bumped into the door and it just flew apart. I think the door was afraid of him.

 

Surviving

 

Part II

 

–Was stabbed through the shoulder with a machete during the climax of Part II. He was knocked out, likely from the pain of having a hunk of metal shoved through his body, and the two survivors Ginny and Paul left him for dead on the floor of his cabin–big mistake. He 

 

What seems to be a continuity error with the beginning of Part III makes this feat even more impressive. Part II closes with Jason attacking Ginny and Paul by bursting through a window with the machete still in him, but Part III opens with Jason picking himself off the floor of his cabin and pulling out the 

 

Is this reading too much into what’s probably just a scripting error? Perhaps. But as you’ll see from his other feats, it’s not outside what Jason’s durability can accomplish.

 

Part III

 

–Was knocked out by a shovel and then dropped from the top of a barn with a rope around his neck. Such a fall should have broken his neck if not taken it clean off, but Jason survived. He hung for 1 minute and 34 seconds. Strangulation induces unconsciousness in 7-14 minutes and kills in minutes. In real life, a person might survive Jason’s 1 minute and 34 seconds of strangulation. But there is no way they would be conscious let alone strong enough to free themselves by lifting their body up by pulling on the rope with one hand.

And Jason did this while grinning at his victim like he knew he was doing something cool.

The man is a maestro! It’s the little flourishes that seperates a classic slasher from a one-movie killer.

 

–Got his head sliced opened which incapacitated him until the next film where he wakes up in the morgue.

 

Part IV

 

–Got attacked with a hammer and then had its claw buried in his neck. This just made him mad and he opened up a nailed door by walking into it.

 

–Got a television set smashed over his head. And this was the 80’s. This wasn’t one of those wimpy modern flatscreens. This was a hefty tv set. 

 

–Got his hand sliced open to the wrist. Major props to Tom Savini! That was one of the most memorable scenes of the entire series. Jason looked at his hand in a “huh. That’s weird” sort of way instead of a “Oh god my handdddddd!” sort of way. Not only did it not slow him down, he was still able to use his hand to grab people.

 

–Got sliced across the neck and chest by a machete. It did nothing to him.

 

–Was finally defeated by Corey Feldman hitting him in the head with a machete. This caused him to fall forward pushing the machete through his eye and skull skull. Even after that, he still had enough life left in him to twitch his fingers which caused Tommy to go DIE DIE DIEEEEEE on him until he was dead dead instead of just mostly dead. Then a bolt of lightning brought him back to life, but that’s another fight for another day.

 

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Tommy beat Jason. I mean, Tommy has enough ranger forms to make his own team and then there’s the whole Lord Drakon thing…

 

Michael Myers

 

“I met him, 15 years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this… six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and… the blackest eyes – the Devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… evil.”

 

Yeah, you knew this quote was coming. What other quote could I have used? It’s the perfect Michael Myers intro quote.

 

Odds are you know Mikey. He might not have been the first “slasher,” but Superman might not have been the first “superhero” either. Mikey is still the slasher. He’s the one that perfected the “supernaturally durable psycho with a knife menaces thirty-year-olds playing teenagers” formula that Jason and others copied.

 

Why does Michael kill? Why can he get back up after being shot? The original film gave us no answer, and that is possibly the best answer of all. He is purely and simply evil. He kills because it excites him to use power over those weaker than himself. He cannot die because evil cannot die.

 

(Don’t worry. I’ll address the Thorn cult bullshit in a bit.)

 

The Halloween multiverse is surprisingly complex, and it raises the question of which Mikey does Jason fight. For instance, we’re probably not going to use the Mikey from the old Atari game.

 

I’ll try to make this continuity rundown as painless as possible.

 

The first major division in the Halloween multiverse starts with the first movie. All but the Rob Zombie universe recognizes Halloween (1978) as canon.

 

Rob Zombie Universe:

 

Halloween (2007), Halloween II (2009)

 

Then you get to universes that do recognize the first film as canon. Halloween is sort of like Godzilla in that lots of different continuities accept the first film as canon. The split here starts with the recent Halloween series with Old Lady Laurie which recognizes the first film exclusively as canon making its Laurie unrelated to Michael Myers as that retcon was established in Halloween II. Presumably, the Mikey of the Old Lady Laurie universe is much weaker than other Mikeys because he was captured at the end of the first movie and didn’t go on a rampage at a hospital with several bullets inside him like other Mikeys.

 

Old Lady Laurie Universe:

 

Halloween (1978), Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (coming in 2020 maybe. You never can tell in these crazy days)

 

Now you get to universes that recognize Halloween I and II as canon. The Lauries of these universes are the sisters of their respective Mikeys. The split between these universes comes with whether or not they recognize Halloween IV or H20 as canon. In the Halloween IV universe, Laurie is killed in a car crash off-screen after II (how lame!) and Michael decides to go after her daughter Jaime who he shares a psychic connection with (no seriously). This universe’s Mikey is also, get this, part of a magic ritual by a druidic cult called the Cult of the Thorn. The Cult placed a demon called the Thorn into Michael when he was a child which gives him his superhuman abilities and compels him to kill his family on Halloween. The Cult wants to cultivate and harvest Mikey’s evil DNA so that they can control evil itself.

 

How I wish I was making this up:

 

https://halloweenmovie.fandom.com/wiki/Thorn#:~:text=The%20Cult%20of%20Thorn%20was,The%20Curse%20of%20Michael%20Myers.

 

Halloween IV Universe:

 

Halloween (1978), Halloween II (1981), Halloween IV (1988), Halloween V (1989), Halloween VI (1996)

 

The H20 universe keeps Laurie alive and replaces her daughter with a son. She becomes the headmistress of a boarding school and eventually beheads Mikey giving some appropriate closure to the series after the nightmares that were IV-VI.

 

H20 Universe:

 

Halloween (1978), Halloween II (1981), H20 (1998)

 

Halloween Resurrection (2002) retcons the ending of H20 so that, get this, Michael Myers tricked Laurie Strode into killing a paramedic by gagging him and sealing his mask on his face and changing places with him in an ambulance when no one was looking. 

 

You got that? 

 

Resurrection was such trash.

 

Then Mikey goes on to crash a cringey executive’s idea of livestreaming and reality tv taking place in his old house and is eventually killed by Busta Rhymes.

 

Busta Rhymes.

 

It sounds like an awful fever dream instead of a movie, but I assure you its real.

 

You know, Friday the 13th as a series never reached the heights Halloween did, but it sure didn’t hit the lows.

 

Resurrection Universe:

 

Halloween (1978), Halloween II (1981), H20 (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

 

You could also consider Halloween III (1982) part of the multiverse though it takes place in a universe without Mikey. In fact, Mikey is a fictional character in that universe and appears on a television. Halloween III would thus be the Earth-Prime of the Halloween multiverse.

 

Where Dead by Daylight fits in all this continuity mess, God only knows. Pick a universe. I don’t think the Dead by Daylight Mikey model has the Thorn tattoo on his arm, so he’s not from the IV universe. But given that they gave us the godawful Freddy from the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, he’s probably Resurrection Mikey. It would explain why wooden pallets falling on his toe make him cry out in pain.

 

So that’s the Halloween continuity rundown. You may now take a candy from the Superman candy bowl.

 

So what Mikey do we use? Well, we aren’t using Rob Zombie’s Mikey. We should at least use one that has the first Halloween as part of his canon. Using Old Lady Laurie Mikey robs him of several key feats from Halloween II such as his explosion feat, so he’s out. Remember, we’re trying to be nice to Mikey in this matchup since Jason from VI and onwards slaughters him. We aren’t going to use Resurrection-timeline Mikey because that Mikey got his ass beat by Busta Rhymes.

 

No seriously. See for yourself:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpnKDOs582A

 

Oh, the shame!

 

That leaves us with the cult timeline Mikey and H20 Mikey, and though H20 was a much better film than any of the cult timeline specific films, cult Mikey was stronger. It doesn’t even have to do with the whole “secretly empowered by a demon” thing. He puts his thumb through a man’s forehead, and that’s Mikey’s best hand-to-hand combat feat by a lot. Using cult Mikey also provides another theme for this match. The fight is now a guy whose films jumped the shark when it was revealed he had a demon inside him against a guy whose films jumped the shark when it was revealed he had a demon worm-baby inside him.

 

Did I say Resurrection was such trash? Silly me, I meant Jason Goes to Hell. Jason Goes to Hell was such trash.

 

I’ll be including H2O feats in his analysis anyway since they don’t really push the needle for Mikey powerwise and I have to justify wasting my time rewatching it.

 

Stalking

 

Halloween

 

–A lot of people find it hard to believe that Michael knew how to drive a car even though he spent most of his life in an asylum. Loomis even talks about how weird that is as if Carpenter thought it was a plothole that could be somewhat ameliorated by having the characters talk about it. Personally, I never had any problems with Mikey driving. It’s a car. It’s two pedals and a steering wheel, not the cockpit of a fighter jet.

Wait a sec, was that a stick shift he was driving?

 

I take it back. This is definitely a solid intelligence feat. 

 

–Made a bedsheet ghost with Buddy Holly glasses look scary. When the hell are we getting it for Dead by Daylight?

 

–Tried to trap Laurie inside a house with a rake. It worked until she just broke the glass. 

 

Halloween II

 

–Lured a victim to the front of her house with an open door so he could stab her from behind 

 

–Lured a victim away from a hospital hot tub by turning up the temperature. 

 

Couldn’t you do something similar in Hitman? I’m pretty sure you could.

 

H2O

 

–Lured a security guard away from his post with a broken car.

 

Slashing

 

Halloween

 

–Lifted a man with one hand then pinned him to the wall with a knife. This kill was so good especially with that little head tilt at the end Mikey does that several films in the series recreate it. He can even do it in Dead by Daylight.

 

–Dug up and transported his sister’s tombstone by hand all just to set up a grisly tableau. You gotta appreciate the dedication of a guy that goes all out to decorate for Halloween.

 

–Punched through a closet door.

 

Halloween II

 

–Killed a security guard by burying the claw of a hammer in his skull. Amusingly, the kill is similar to one of Jason’s kills in Part II.

 

–Pierced a nurses’ skull with a hypodermic. Then he gave her an injection of air for an instant embolism. You don’t see many kills like that!

 

–Stabbed a nurse in the back with a scalpel and lifted her off her feet until she died. I told you they like to recreate that kill!

 

–Walked through a glass door.

 

–Tore through a wooden door. You get the feeling Mikey just doesn’t like doors much?

 

Halloween IV

 

–Stuck his thumb in a man’s forehead after banging it against a wall a few times.

 

–Tossed Loomis through a window 

 

–Lifted a woman with one hand and impaled her on a wall hook. There’s that kill again!

 

Halloween VI

 

–Slammed a guy through metal bars so hard he knocked them down.

 

H2O

 

–Stuck an ice skate in a teenager’s face.

 

–Stabbed a man in the back and lifted him off the ground. There’s that kill yet again!

 

Surviving

 

Halloween

 

–Stabbed in the neck with a knitting needle which knocked him out for a few seconds.

 

–Stabbed in the eye with a wire hanger which also knocked him out for a few seconds.

 

–Loomis shot him six times at the end of Halloween which knocked Mikey through a window and onto the ground. He was long gone by the time Loomis checked which led to the awesome ending where the camera moves around all the places he’s been while you hear him breathing. In the opening of Halloween II, this ending was reshot where Loomis shoots him seven, not six times even though Loomis claims to the contrary (“I shot him six times! I shot him six times! I shot him in the heart!”)

 

Halloween II

 

–Loomis shot him five more times (Halloween II). This causes Mikey to fall to the ground for a while before getting back up like the classic slasher he is.

 

–Laurie shot him twice in the mask (Halloween II). This blinded Mikey and caused blood to seep through Mikey’s eyeholes in a really cool image and also brings his bullet counter for the single night represented by Halloween I and II to fourteen.

 

–Loomis blew up a room with a lighter and some gas at the end of Halloween II (“It is time, Michael.”). In an awesome fire stunt that presaged the awesome fire stunt from The Thing, Mikey walks out of the room while on fire, but eventually falls down. This was supposed to be his and Loomis’ death, but Halloween IV (Remember, Halloween III is about HURRY UP IT’S HALLOWEEN HALLOWEEN HURRY UP IT’S HALLOWEEN SILVER SHAMROCK, not Michael Myers) reveals that both he and Loomis survived. Mikey was stuck in a coma for ten years after the explosion (on top of all the other damage he sustained). Loomis, interestingly, was only burned and scarred by the explosion and survived it without going into a decade-long coma likely because he didn’t also have fourteen bullets inside him.

 

Halloween IV

 

–Ventilated by a posse and dropped down a mineshaft. Mikey survived, but had to be nursed back to health by a hobo-pirate with a pet parrot for a whole year until he was ready to kill again (no seriously).

 

H2O

 

–Stunned by a rock to the back of the head.

 

–Knocked out by Laurie who stabbed him with a flagpole and a knife before he fell off a balcony.

 

The Best Stalker

 

Jason is surprisingly the faster and stealthier opponent. Going into this, I thought for sure Mikey would win this category. But after going over their movies I have to give the category to Jason.

 

For starters, Jason is far less likely than Mikey to mess around when on the job. Mikey has a sadistic streak that Jason lacks. Jason is a blue collar kind of slasher. He wants to kill and then move on to the next. His goal is to stack bodies like cordwood. Mikey doesn’t want to kill so much as hurt people. He plays with his food (and even has a perk by that name in Dead by Daylight). But if he tries playing with Jason it’s going to backfire horribly.

 

Jason also knows how to move around terrain quickly. Both he and Michael are known to “slasherport” and ambush their victims from out of nowhere but Jason does this to a greater degree. Michael doesn’t have an equivalent feat to Jason moving around the cabin in Part IV like a ghost. Jason is faster than Michael both on-screen and off-screen because yes, Jason knows how to run. Pre-zombification Jason wasn’t averse to some brisk jogging. Michael on the other hand has always moved at the speed of Robocop.

 

Jason is also stealthier which makes sense when you remember that he’s a woodsman that’s spent most of his life doing woodsman things while Mikey grew up in an asylum. Jason is a country boy and Mikey is a city slicker. Jason knows how to move in the woods without making a sound (you try it and see for yourself how hard it is) and how to set snares. He was able to find the camp of a dude hunting him and disable his guns. That’s a ghosting feat Mikey just can’t match.

 

In this fight, Ki-Ki-Ma-Ma is going to play well before the Carpenter chords. Jason is going to get the first hit in, and what’s more if things go badly for him he’s far more likely to evade Mikey than Mikey in the same situation. 

 

The Best Slasher

 

Jason took this category pretty handily. Mikey once stuck his thumb in a man’s forehead but only after banging the skull against a wall which softened it up. Jason tops that by crushing a man’s skull with his fingertips and squeezing another man’s skull so hard his eyeball flew out. 

 

Jason also seems to be better at dealing with victims that fight back. Mikey has only fought with old men and teenage girls and sometimes they get the better of him. Sure, Jason got taken down by little Tommy Jarvis and Tommy is a (mostly) normal kid, but Jason also has a good track record against grown-up men in face-to-face fights while Michael tends to always ambush men. The one big exception was in H2O with Busta Rhymes, but you know how that ended for him. 

 

 In Part II, Jason beat up camp counselor Paul twice when he was just a little sack boy. In Part III, he disarmed (and dis-handed) biker gang leader Ali in a machete duel. And in Part IV he beats Rob even though Rob was hunting down Jason for killing his sister in Part II (Oh god he’s killing me, run!). 

 

I know it’s weird to think of Jason as having combat feats outside the time he was in Mortal Kombat, but compared to Mikey…he does.

 

The Best Survivor

 

This was the hardest one to figure out since both characters are known for not just surviving but surviving and functioning after enduring ridiculous, cartoonish amounts of violence. Both can be incapacitated by similar types of blows. Mikey was knocked down by a rock to the back of the head and Jason was knocked down by a shovel to the back of the head. Theoretically, it doesn’t actually take much to kill the other so long as you remember to double-tap (and triple-tap to make absolutely sure). But let’s compare how much damage it takes to drop one of them for a substantial amount of time by which I mean a time longer than “oh thank God he’s dead I’ll turn my back now OH WAIT HE ISN’T DEAD!”

 

In the course of one night, Mikey endured a knitting needle to the throat, a coat hanger to the eye, seven bullet wounds, and five more bullet wounds without any impairment. He was so full of lead he would have pinged on airport metal detectors and he kept going like a demonic Little Engine that Could. It took two shots to the eyes to finally weaken him by blinding him and a big explosion to finally drop him.

 

Sackboy Jason took a machete to the shoulder and was able to run about and leap through windows with the machete still sticking out of him. Then he rested between movies and upgraded to Jason-the-Goalie after killing Shelley to level-up in Part III. This Jason was knocked out by a machete to the skull long enough for paramedics to arrive and move him to the morgue. Then he got up and did IV with the big gash in his head lasting even into the zombie-era. That part of his brain must have controlled Jason’s chill, because he had absolutely none during IV. IV might not have had the best individual kills in the series, but it had the best sizzle reel. Part IV Jason was done in by another machete blow to the head (Jason seems to get hurt an awful lot by machetes. Is that why he keeps one–because he respects the power of machetes?) and then Tommy going full Tommy on him when his hand starts twitching.

 

That’s some impressive abuse that Jason took, but it’s not as good as Michael attracting bullets like a magnet. I know, gunshots don’t look as impressive as getting your head chopped open. But gunshots are a lot more brutal than knife wounds. You’re far more likely to die from a gunshot thana stabbing because bullets do all kinds of nasty things when they’re inside you from hydrostatic shock to ricocheting off bones.

 

The Winner

 

Though Mikey is more durable, it’s not a durability gap that Jason can’t easily surmount with his greater strength and speed. Jason is far more likely to overpower Mikey and dismember him before Mikey does the same to him and Jason is more likely to get the first hit in as well. And in the off-chance Mikey gets the upper hand, Jason can pull a disappearing act better than Mikey and stage a comeback.

 

Poor Mikey. There just isn’t a single matchup with any version of Jason that he wins. With rivalries like King Kong vs Godzilla or Goku vs Superman you can shuffle around the versions to get fights where either character wins. It’s not so here. Hockey mask beats Shatner mask no matter how you stack the deck.

 

You can’t kill the Boogeyman? Well, you can’t. But Jason sure can.