JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY (aka FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 9, THE DARK HEART OF JASON VOORHEES, THE ANNIVERSARY OF JASON, 1993)
Directed by Adam Marcus.
Written by Jay Huguely, Dean Lorey, Adam Marcus.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/PrIShIfjHeM

Let me start out by saying that I am not a fan of JASON GOES TO HELL. In fact, I really loathe this movie. I know this film’s got it’s fans. But if you’re looking for adoration for the flick, you’re not going to find it here. The film was the first of the New Line FRIDAY THE 13TH films and it is indicative of how the company really didn’t respect the franchise or want these films to succeed. If I were a conspiracy theory enthusiast (and you all know, I am), I would think that the folks at New Line simply bought the franchise to bury it since it really was the only competition at the Box Office for their main man Freddy Krueger. Now, I think they wanted the money (especially when it came to a possible team up of the two of them), but in terms of respect for this much loved movie series, it really didn’t seem like anyone tried to make a good movie here.

JASON GOES TO HELL simply is a film made by folks who most likely didn’t see the series, weren’t fans of the series, and knew nothing about what fans wanted from a new installment. It’s a great example of producers thinking very little of the fans and delivering stupid clichés, cardboard characters and most importantly ineffective scares because they think that’s either what they are looking for or that they are too stupid to know the difference.

As my coverage of the FRIDAY THE 13TH films would indicate, I am a fan of the series. Even the worst of the series, and this one most definitely is, has some merits and I’ll struggle to find a few later. But I remember hearing about this FINAL FRIDAY and scoffing right from the get go. We were given THE FINAL CHAPTER five movies prior and that didn’t stop them from proceeding with more. So when the tagline came out, I remember being excited for a new F13 film, but knowing that this we will always have another chapter of the Crystal Lake Killer’s endless rampage against anyone who crosses his path.

I also remember going to see this one in the theaters despite the fact that PART 8 was a disappointment. Still, the ad campaign was bigger, as was the budget, so I was hoping for a better installment and went with a group of friends to see the film. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but have you ever gone to a movie and felt embarrassed for the movie you are watching? This was the experience I had with JASON GOES TO HELL. My friends knew I was a F13 fan and sitting next to them in the theater, I could almost feel them judging me for liking the series as the shitty movie played out in front of me. Not only were my hopes dashed, but now my friends thought I had horrible taste in movies too.

Things start out promising enough in this installment. A plucky young gal in a baseball hat (there seems to be a lot of women in baseball hats in this one for some reason) arrives at Crystal Lake and of course, after a bulb burns out and she replaces it, she immediately strips and takes a shower. As fast as you can say “nip slip”, Jason appears and starts swiping away at the gal with his machete. She runs out of the house, leading Jason into the open as a military team pops out and unleashes hot-lead hell upon Mr. Voorhees. The whole ballistic battle ends with someone tossing a grenade at Jason and blowing him to bits.

Now, this opening was actually pretty decent. We get some nudity and a typical final girl chase. And I kind of like flipping the script and having all of this being a trap for Jason as very rarely do we have the tide turned against Jason with him not being the one in control (especially not in the opening moments). Sure, I would have liked Jason to take on some of these military types and maybe dismember a few before the grenade was thrown, but that is but one of many missed opportunities for cool here from first time director Adam Marcus (who went on to write the screenplay for TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D). And while I think Marcus was way out of his element here with this production, I did really like Marcus’ Christmas horror comedy SECRET SANTA. I’ll most likely be covering that one this December for Ho-Ho-Horrors!

Back to Jason. Remember the iconic “Jason on the mobile home” shot from PART 6 or the epic battle between Jason and Tina in PART 7 or even the fun Jason in Times Square scenes from PART 8. All of these films are not perfect, but they provided some moments of coolness that showed him doing something fun and new. None of that is in this film. Jason gets no cool kills in this one and this opening scene against the military unit could have been that scene appeasing fans looking for another reason to love the character. One of the cardinal rules of the FRIDAY films is that you simply don’t make fun of Jason. Make fun of the stupid kids. Make fun of the scary situation. But nothing kills the bite of a villain than having someone make fun of the killer (see Busta Rhymes showdown with Michael Myers for a prime example of that). In JASON GOES TO HELL, not only does he get no cool scenes, but everyone is making fun of him. The mortician talks about shitting on his chest. They make hamburgers shaped like hockey masks. Hell, even Kane Hodder gets in on the action and as a security guard, he calls him a pussy. This does nothing to make Jason scarier. It makes us laugh at him, thus making him less ominous and less frightening.

Wanting to take the film in a series in a new direction, they decided to toss out everything we knew about Jason and make him into a supernatural creature that swaps bodies. As bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams) explains, “We haven’t seen the real Jason. He wears bodies like we wear suits.” Since it wasn’t a huge blockbuster of a film, the producers didn’t think anyone saw THE HIDDEN, so basically they ripped off the entire film by having Jason’s real form be that of a worm-like creature that travels from one person to another through the hosts’ mouths, eating up the life essence of that form, and then needing another soon after. So instead of Jason, the bulk of the film has us following around different normal people who walk stiffly and murder—looking like Jason only in their reflections. A Jason film without Jason in it…it worked so well before when PART 5 and HALLOWEEN 3 flopped, didn’t it? (Granted I love HALLOWEEN 3, but it was still a huge bummer not to have Michael Myers in a HALLOWEEN movie).

On top of that, out of the blue, Jason has an all-new motivation. Gone is the sense of revenge that was engrained into the character ever since PART 2 to pay back anyone to tread into Crystal Lake territory because they remind him of those who killed his dead mommy. In JASON GOES TO HELL, Jason takes a page from Michael Myers’ playbook and is in search of his relative to murder them. So a sister was cooked up in the form of Diana Kimble (BUCK ROGERS’ Erin Gray) and Jason is an uncle and a grand uncle too as Diana has a daughter Jessica who also has just had a baby, making them a target as well. The reason for this sudden urge to use Heritage.com is that the only way Jason can truly be reborn is if he possesses someone in his lineage (more made up shit, not by piecing together threads from previous films, but just to support the half-assed plot). Once again, the filmmakers behind this one had no idea what FRIDAY THE 13TH is about.

They even introduce an “Old Vorhees House” (note the misspelling straight from the film—they couldn’t even bother to spell Jason’s last name right…) which never existed before in the films and somehow still stands in Crystal Lake despite the Voorhees name being such a bane to the town (they even changed the name three films ago to Forest Green). But of course they left the vacant Voorhees home still standing and full of dusty furniture untouched for decades. The place even houses such treasures as the Necronomicon from the EVIL DEAD series and the crate from CREEPSHOW as useless winks to other far better horror films you wish you were watching instead of this one. These member berries only mess up an already convoluted story. I know there are those who now are convinced completely that Jason is a Deadite, but I loathe this idea as it degrades Jason by making him the product of another franchise. Dammit, Jason is the king of the slashers and deserves to stand on his own!

But while the body swapping route was a bad way to go, in some weird sense it kind of follows a pattern that occurs in these films leading all the way back to the original. In the original FRIDAY THE 13TH, Crazy Ralph claims that Crystal Lake has a “death currrrrse!” Now if you follow the film, Pamela is the killer in the first film until she is killed by one of the counselors. At that point, through a fuzzy dream or fevered reality, Jason makes his first appearance by springing out of the lake and pulling Final Girl Alice underwater. For the next three films, Jason goes on a killing spree until THE FINAL CHAPTER where he is murdered by Tommy. In PART 5, a Jason-less film, the hockey-masked killer is a man inspired by Tommy’s story who is set off when his own son is killed. When that guy is killed, Tommy seems to become unhinged, dons the hockey mask, and looks as if he is about to start the killing anew with his counselor Pam as the first victim. Stay with me here. So in PART 6, haunted by Jason, Tommy goes to Jason’s grave in order to destroy his body once and for all to make sure he is dead. But he accidentally reanimates Jason’s corpse and Jason goes on to kill, kill, kill all the way until the subject of this review JASON GOES TO HELL and beyond.

If you follow me here and look at this in a particular way, the evil that has been killing in Crystal Lake has been swapping bodies all along; hopping from Pamela to Jason to Tommy to Roy the killer ambulance driver back to Tommy and finally back to Jason. This has been a more nuanced metaphysical leap from body to body rather than the clumsily realized slug swap we get in JASON GOES TO HELL, but still it feels as if there may have been an incarnation of this script that could have been a little more in tune with the series at one point. That doesn’t mean the body swapping was good. It just means that it isn’t as completely out of left field as it originally seems. This “Death Curse” seems to have been hopping from one person to another all along. An interesting theory, terribly executed in JASON GOES TO HELL.

The main problem with JASON GOES TO HELL (apart from once again failing to deliver what is promised in the title as we get less of hell in this one as we got of Manhattan in PART 8) is that at this point the series really had run its course. Instead of focusing on characters like Pamela, Alice, Jason, and Tommy, PARTS 7-10 relied mainly on gimmicks in order to carry the franchise. Jason Voorhees had become a household name. Kids were dressing up as Jason for Halloween. He was appearing on the Arsenio Hall show and in videos on MTV. And the oversaturation chipped away what made him scary. It was well known that Paramount was always ashamed at the millions of bucks the franchise made for them, but they took it anyway, and when it was bought by New Line it was the equivalent of an adopted child being treated poorly while all of the spoils were going towards their favorite son Freddy. This oversaturation of Jason is exemplified pretty well in the diner scenes in JASON GOES TO HELL. Despite being cartoonish and gaudy, the marketing of Jason in these scenes with Voorhees Burgers and Jason Fries actually reflects how “out of the shadows” Jason had become to the world.

Not that being out of the shadows was a good thing in this one as the look of Jason is about as sloppy and clumsy as you can get here. The design of Jason is usually a highlight of the F13 films. Even when the story was shit, Jason looked menacing and awesome. For some reason, it was decided that Jason’s monstrous mongloid noggin would tumorously grow into his mask, making a facial reveal impossible (a mainstay in most Friday films). Kane Hodder does his best in the fifteen minutes he gets as Jason and doesn’t get to really deliver any of his subtle, yet seething moves he used in previous portrayals to animate the mute monster. Speaking of Jason’s vocal mutterings, not only does Jason roar and scream in this one numerous times, he also is able to speak through one of his possessed bodies. But hell, by that point, it was obvious the filmmakers weren’t interested in following any kind of consistency with past incarnations, so why should I give a shit.

So instead of Jason wandering around and killing, we get a whole bunch of weirdness that really doesn’t fit into a F13 film such as the wasted Creighton Duke character who Stephen Williams does a fantastic job with, yet really never gets to show us any action to backup the big and tough words he spouts to the press and to those around him not believing in Jason (though I have to say, I loved the “A little girl in a pink dress sticking a hotdog through a donut” line). Had he been the focus of the story, there could have been a truly great climax. Instead, we get John D. LeMay in the lead. LeMay was the star of the off-center but occasionally fun, FRIDAY THE 13TH TV series and makes for a weird final girl for this installment. LeMay’s Steven is nebbish, smart-assed, and downright unlikable at times, yet for some reason, convention is bucked and he survives this ordeal with Jason and even comes out as the hero. Seeing LeMay try to act tough and go fist to fist with Jason is both hilarious and pitiful as it just makes LeMay look all the more ineffectual as a hero and makes Jason look weak for actually letting this dweeb get the better of him.

Which leads to some foam muppet hands reaching out of the soil and dragging Jason to Hell (you would have thought they wouldn’t have put the spoiler for the ending in the title, but they did…). The hands are awkward foam mitts that are more comical than scary and the final scene as Freddy’s claw emerged from the soil to pull the hockey mask under only hints at a possible better movie to come rather than caps off a good one. And if you’ve never seen it, the alternative ending, which features not only giant foam hands, but actual demons dragging him down was shot, but if doesn’t make it any better.

I told you I’d get to the good parts of the film eventually, so as I wrap this review up I guess I should get to them. This is one of the bloodier installments, though none of the carnage actually comes from the hockey masked Jason. These scene where the cop melts into a puddle of goo is great if it were in another film, but like everything else, it feels out of place in a FRIDAY THE 13TH. Stephen Williams is wasted, but does have some decent lines and the finger breaking scene in the cell is hardcore. I also like it when Jason topples a jungle gym to get to his prey during the climax. It’s one of the more goofier moments that actually worked. Annnnnd that’s about it in terms of something positive I can say about this ill-conceived, remedially executed, and poorly made sequel. By far, this is my least favorite of the series and though I had to re-watch this one for this review, I hope to never have to endure it again. If you’re looking to watch a FRIDAY THE 13TH film tonight, skip this one and watch any of the other ones. Any of them.

When the next Friday the 143th graces our calendars, it’ll be time for Jason to veers off into the great void of outer space in JASON X, a film that had F13 fans split right down the middle. But that is a review for another Friday the 13th!