It’s been nearly five years since my last posting about my encounters with some of the so-called ‘Final Girls‘ of the Friday the 13th franchise. At the time I reported on meeting three of them, but since there were a total of twelve films (with a thirteenth project just recently scuttled), obviously there was room to grow in this area of mad killer Jason’s final combatants. Although I’m still not quite half way through this quest (with admittedly the later films being less than exciting), here are two more scream queens I’ve added to this grouping.
Moving chronologically by film rather than meeting, the first up is Melanie Kinnaman who starred as the leading lady Pam in the somewhat-faux film in the franchise Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. Although she wasn’t facing off against the actual Jason Voorhees in the film, she provided a worthy adversary to the real killer, and lived to tell the tale…perhaps. With an ambiguous ending, she was originally signed on to do the follow-up film, but producers ended up taking the series in a different, if less believable direction.
And with that her film career mostly came to a halt. With the exception of a few TV appearances including one in Cheers, she all but disappeared from the public eye. This kind of made it all the more cool to get the chance to meet her when she made an appearance at the Flashback Weekend on August 6, 2016.
She was very nice and her $25 price for the autograph and photo op was pretty reasonable, but I was rather taken aback to see how almost unrecognizable she was. I had always considered her to be very pretty, so I’m sure any facial alteration she may have had was largely unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong. She still looked good… just different.
Sadly our next final girl wasn’t looking so good at all. In fact she looked as tired and disheveled as anyone I’ve ever met. I mean no ill will at all toward Monica Keena, who played the final girl Lori Campbell in Freddy vs. Jason, and was perhaps the most attractive of all of the final girls, but she looked so tired when I met her at the Indianapolis HorrorHound show on September 8, 2013, I thought she might just fall over.
I’m hoping she just was having an off day, as she is still doing a lot of acting work, and has a good number of notable shows to her credit: Dawson’s Creek, Undeclared, Entourage, Grey’s Anatomy, The Closer, and she was currently working on a film as recently as 2016. However it seems that she was in the news quite a lot around that time for her tempestuous relationship with Edward Furlong.
In any case, I had no qualms about paying $20 for an autographed photo that came with a free photo op, and was certainly glad to meet her and hope that she’s gotten some serious rest in the meantime.
Hopefully this isn’t the final chapter in meeting the ‘final girls’ as I know of at least two more who have appeared at shows in the past.
Celebrities of the 2013 Indianapolis HorrorHound will continue…
Celebrities of the 2016 Flashback Weekend will continue…
Leave a Reply