Thursday, October 15, 2015

Scary Movie Month 2015 Day 15: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday 

I always thought this was the lowest point of the Friday the 13th franchise, and you know what? I was right. A lot of people give it crap because Jason is barely in it but that is the least of the problems with this entry. It's a movie that introduces mystical daggers, monster hunters and cursed families into a series that began with the simple, bloody tale of a vengeful lady killing camp counselors. This "final" entry is so convoluted and overstuffed with supernatural nonsense that it's hard to believe it's part of the same series, it features virtually none of what makes any of the others work. 

It begins promisingly enough, with a young woman in a remote cabin finding herself menaced by a weirdly bloated Jason Voorhees (after effects of toxic NYC sewer-sludge, I assume). He chases her into the woods and suddenly finds himself surrounded by a SWAT team that literally blows him to pieces. Ok, movie. You have my attention. 

What's left of Jason is brought to the coroner (Richard Gant, too good for this nonsense) who proceeds to take a big juicy bite out of Jason's enormous, slime-choked black heart. No, really. He is then possessed by Jason's spirit (keep in mind this is a thing that has never come up throughout eight previous movies) and goes off to murder a bunch of people (there is one legitimately cool moment in which he tears a girl in half with a tent spike, but you can only see it on standard DVD, the unrated cut didn't make it to blu-ray). Jason's spirit goes on a little field trip and hops from person to person, transforming each of them into murderous mongoloids in turn. 

None of it makes any sense, and it gets even sillier from there. There's very little here to appeal to fans of the series, and even less to appeal to people who like coherent movies. The previous entry in the series (the much-maligned Jason Takes Manhattan) wasn't the best, but at least it knew what people wanted from a Friday the 13th movie (hint: a low-rent remake of The Hidden ain't it).

One thing that does work is the movie's final shot. Jason is back in his own body (because...I don't fuckin' know) and, as the title promised, is literally pulled down into Hell by a bunch of underground creatures, leaving only his iconic hockey mask behind. One more hand bursts out of the ground to retrieve it, the instantly-recognizable hand of Springwood Slasher Freddy Krueger. The biggest reaction I've ever seen from a crowd in any theater ever was at this moment back in 1993. The roof practically blew off from the ecstatic audience reaction to the promise of an eventual meeting between the two titans of terror (realized a full decade later in the underwhelming Freddy vs Jason, which is still infinitely better than this pile of nonsense). Sadly, one great shot does not a decent movie make, and this proves still to be by far my least favorite in the series even after all these years. Go to Hell, Jason Goes to Hell.

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