Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)


I understand why many fans of the Friday the 13th series hate Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  A big problem, and the one I have with it, is that it's Jason on a boat and largely taking Toronto instead of Manhattan, even though there is a good scene in Times Square.  By this time they had already gone through about every idea they had: Jason's mother is the killer, Jason is alive after all, is Tommy Jarvis the next Jason, the humorous route with zombie Jason and a fight with a psychic girl.  The rumor was that Paramount was trying to churn out 13 of these, even though Sean S. Cunningham meant the original to be one and done. 

At the end of number eight Jason is trapped in the sewers of New York during the nightly release of toxic waste.  Instead of turning into a C.H.U.D. he melts away and once again becomes a child before dying.  Most people didn't care, with word of mouth getting around about the misleading title.  Paramount decided to turn the series over to New Line but, with the series getting long in the tooth, Cunningham decided it was time to put it down and send Jason to hell.

Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) is lured into an ambush near his old stomping grounds in Crystal Lake.  After being blown up he is taken to a secure lab in Youngstown, Ohio.  Unfortunately, the coroner (Richard Grant) becomes enamored of Jason's oversized heart and decides to consume it, thus infecting him with the parasitic demon that controlled Jason since he was brought back from the dead.  

Meanwhile bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams) heads to Crystal Lake, believing that Jason is not really dead.  His sister Diana (Erin Grey) still lives there, and Duke is convinced that Jason will come for her, either to possess her or be reborn.  When Diana is killed and everyone thinks it is a local boy named Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay), who happens to also be the ex-boyfriend of Diana's daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan) and father of her grandchild.  After meeting Creighton in jail Steven escapes, determined to protect Jessica and his child, while Jason jumps from body to body in pursuit of his kin.

This was the first movie director Adam Marcus made, and from what I understand he made a mess of it.  He never looked at the dailies - much of the footage that reached the editors was unusable - and a good portion of the movie was people talking.  Sean S. Cunningham had to step in and direct some of the finale as well as reshoots to salvage the whole project and was not pleased with what came out.  Neither were audiences.  I was not, and still am not, a huge fan of the movie series, but I was of the Canadian television show, and seeing John D. LeMay from Friday the 13th: The Series and a story that owed more than a little to The Hidden was fun for me.  For fans, not so much, especially since this movie has the least amount of Jason in it since the first and the fifth. 

When Kane Hodder actually gets to play him he's great, but mostly it's the parasite inhabiting one body after another, without any real rules.  I'm still wondering how the last guy it inhabits can talk when most of the people are silent just like Jason.  However, upon leaving one body, we get a great melting scene of its former host.  Also, the unrated version is worth it to see the full death of one minor character rather than blood just splattering on her boyfriend's face. 

Despite the movie being salaged it made a little more than Jason Takes Manhattan and was the highest grossing horror movie of the year.  Many fans, due to the major departure from anything in Jason lore that came before or after, despise Jason Goes to Hell, but I like it despite all the problems it has.  There are a number of great kill scenes and some imagination behind it and, though derivative, if Marcus had decided to make a more traditional Jason film and save this for another story it might have been better received.  At least at that point he would have had the wind knocked out of some of his arrogance and had a better idea of what had gone wrong.  

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Time: 87 minutes
Starring: John D. Lemay, Kari Keegan, Erin Gray, Kane Hodder
Director: Adam Marcus

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more