The Most Annoying Friday the 13th Victim (Totally Deserved to Die)

The most annoying victim in the Friday the 13th franchise, Part 5‘s Joey Burns (Dominick Brascia), totally deserved to die his horrible death. Over the course of 12 films to date, Jason Voorhees (and his mother) have racked up a body count of well over 100 victims. The Voorhees family business is killing, and up until recent years, business has been good. Unfortunately, a rights dispute is keeping Friday the 13th on ice for the time being, but that doesn’t mean fans will stop re-watching Jason’s classic adventures.

While it would take a pretty sick individual to want to see someone die in real life, in the realm of movies, a death can often be cathartic. Watching a despicable villain get blown away by the hero, a selfish jerk get the business end of a sharp object, or a lying snake get tossed off a cliff can all be fun ways to get a vicarious thrill. At many points during the Friday the 13th franchise, those last two categories apply, as while Jason is by no means a good guy, he does occasionally end up offing somebody so off-putting that a cheer is more appropriate than a gasp.

It’s now time to look back at one such occurrence, in which a Friday the 13th character was so annoying that most viewers are likely to wish death upon him from the moment he’s introduced. Funnily enough though, he doesn’t meet his end via Jason’s machete.

Friday the 13th Part 5: Joey Totally Deserved to Die

Joey (Dominick Brascia) is a character in Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning that only seems to exist to be annoying. An orphan that’s been moved around between foster families and now resides at the halfway house Tommy Jarvis gets sent to early on in the film, a character like Joey should conceivably inspire sympathy and compassion. Preventing that though is how incredibly pushy, loud, obnoxious, and intrusive he is, and how much of an overall nuisance he makes of himself. Joey isn’t in Friday the 13th Part 5 long, but every moment he’s onscreen is pure torture.

The path to Joey’s death begins with him relentlessly pestering fellow residents Violet and Robin to let him help with laundry duty. Despite the fact that they clearly neither need or want his help, he persists, and ends up smearing some of his ever-present chocolate bar on their clothes. Joey then makes the biggest mistake of his life by approaching Vic, a man who looks ready to snap before Joey even speaks to him. Vic is chopping wood with an axe, yet Joey keeps bothering him relentlessly, offering him part of his half-eaten chocolate bar. When he places the candy on a piece of wood, Vic angrily chops it in half, leading Joey to get angry and start storming off, but not before admonishing Vic. That wasn’t smart.

Having reached the end of his rope, Vic swings around and proceeds to chop Joey into multiple pieces with the axe. While the other characters are rightly horrified (again, there would obviously never be a circumstance in real life where annoyance merited murder), the viewer can’t help but want to cheer and celebrate the fact that Joey won’t be in anymore scenes. As a bonus, this kill actually figures into the plot, as the killer pretending to be Jason is revealed as Roy Burns, Joey’s dad. Roy gave Joey up as a small child, and the shock of seeing his son hacked up drove him off the deep end. Thankfully, the real Jason would return for Friday the 13th Part 6. Goodbye Joey, we hardly knew ye, and didn’t really want to either.

About The Author