Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

You've said "final" so many times, the word has lost all meaning

Where were we? Oh yeah – the conclusion of a deeply influential but even-more-deeply uneven run of eight slashers released by Paramount in the 1980s. Following the bizarre Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount put the series on ice. Re-enter Sean Cunningham: the man who conceived of and directed the first Friday the 13th. He had a new grand vision: a slasher cinematic universe of sorts where stabby villains battle each other for dominance (presumably once the juice of their initial series has been thoroughly squeezed and rendered into pulp and seeds, like a washed-up celebrity slumming it in pro wrestling). His first idea: Jason Voorhees, murderous monster of his own baby, the Fridays, battling Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. He wanted the film to be helmed by one of the slasher progenitors, Tobe Hooper.

Cunningham faced many roadblocks to get this film made. First was the tiny matter that he did not control either franchise. New Line Cinema, who owned the Nightmare movie rights, signed on, clearing the first hurdle. New Line tried to get the Friday the 13th rights from Paramount, who was loath to give up their old moneymaker even though they had no immediate plans to use it. In the end, the distributors reached a compromise: New Line and Cunningham could use everything except the “Friday the 13th” name in their spinoff.

The next challenge was that New Line got cold feet on a Jason vs. Freddy showdown film. They permitted Cunningham to set that film up, but his first outing would be a Jason solo number. Thus this is essentially an outsourced part 9 of Friday the 13th moreso than the launching point of a big cross-series showcase.

The third problem was recruiting talent. Hooper and Die Hard maestro John McTiernan both said no. Eventually, Cunningham brought in a lackey of his own, John Marcus, presumably with the thought that Marcus would bow to Cunningham’s whims. Marcus and Cunningham dispute many details of the film’s production, and honestly, the final product is not interesting enough to care too much about how the creative decisions were ultimately made.

The main thing to know about the resulting film is that it’s not really a Friday the 13th film. You see this in the title, of course — Cunningham and New Line get around their title-rights predicament by presuming audiences are smart enough to apply “the 13th” when they see Jason and Friday in the title. But more to the point, this really doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie, barely at all. It’s most reminiscent of the godawful Halloween entries that wrapped up the first continuity: the killer becomes the victim of a violent curse chased by a mysterious man-in-black. Jason Goes to Hell is at least better than the worst of those dregs. It pulls in bits of other horror and sci-fi textures. The overall vibe is kinda X-Filesy. The setting of a small town with dark secrets  (not to mention the cafe) evokes Twin Peaks. The creepy, gory critter in the climax made me think of Evil Dead. And whenever the audience and protagonist are unsure who the Jason curse has possessed for a scene, I naturally leapt to The Thing.

But before Jason Goes to Hell gets to all that stuff, it has its standalone opener, which is easily the best and most Friday-esque part of the film. We follow a lone, beautiful woman (Julie Michaels) as she retreats to a cabin in… Crystal Lake. (The camera lingers on the road sign. Manfredini’s score jangles. Our blood chills; whether because of fear or PTSD from crappy sequels is unclear.) Soon enough, we’re waiting for Jason Voorhees to start popping out and stabbing her. Every mirror shot and rounded corner becomes a moment of suspense. At last, after she’s stripped down for a shower, he finally appears, and he chases the towel-clad woman into the woods.

Then the twist: the woman is an FBI agent, and this is all a set-up. A SWAT team rappels from the trees and starts plying Jason with bullets like he’s Sonny Corleone at a tollbooth. They even drop a bomb on him, and his flaming head launches off his body in slow-mo. It’s a terrific and ballsy opening: this Friday the 13th reboot opens with the obliteration of Jason Voorhees. And it’s just a nice little piece of horror filmmaking, tense and surprising and well-shot with a few moments of expressionistic lighting.

The next sequence is pretty fun too, though it spirals rapidly downward from there. We meet with the coroner doing an autopsy on Jason’s mutilated corpse. We wonder how, exactly, will Jason come back from this? Surely he will. (I expect that Cunningham, Lucas, and co. are having some fun with the film’s title, letting the audience ponder when, exactly, Jason has fully descended to hell.) The answer comes not from the corpse itself resurrecting but from the coroner (Richard Gant, imposing and looking halfway between Samuel L. Jackson and Ving Rhames), who is abruptly enchanted by the charred remains. He grabs the heart, and starts devouring it.

Thus, he becomes Jason, and the essence of Jason Voorhees is now a curse that hops from body to body; but also, like an actual fleshy mass? It’s not clear; or if it is clear, it’s not interesting enough to really matter. We meet some other morgue workers we know are doomed to eminent demise, but rather than show us their deaths, the film smash cuts to news coverage of their bloody deaths (another clever bit of expectation reversal). Thus the hunt for Jason (Or is he Jason? Yes, he is.) is back on.

Now the film proper and the disappointment proper can begin. We meet a couple of protagonists: Diana (Erin Gray), Jason’s half-sister (Halloween II much, ya hacks?); Diana’s daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan); Jessica’s boyfriend and baby-daddy Steven (John D. LeMay); and bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams). For one non-compelling reason or another, Jason is intent on hunting down his bloodline, so the chase is on for his three living relatives: Diana, Jessica, and Steven and Jessica’s infant daughter Stephanie (a wee Brooke Scher).

What unfolds is simultaneously rushed and tedious, a catastrophe of pacing. The film clocks in at under 90 minutes, but that includes the rather extended intro and coda, meaning the actual story gets about 70 minutes; and yet there’s still not enough to do. The scenes within are padded and repetitive, and the film hits its action climax very abruptly, like screenwriters Jay Huguely and Dean Lorey hit their target page count and just stopped writing.

The more memorable sequences are the bizarre ones, like when the sentient guts of Jason go skittering across the shadowy floor or Duke Creighton inexplicably breaks Steven’s fingers as “payment” for helping him hunt Jason. But much more of it is bland, replacement-level horror filmmaking. A few stalking shots are nice, but the bread and brother is run-of-the-mill pop out-then-grapple sequences. It’s not aggressively bad so much as aggressively forgettable. In true Friday the 13th spirit, every character is an empty nothing, with the lone exception of the wacky, cowboy hat-clad Duke.

Finally, there’s the coda, which is a sequel hook for the crossover with Nightmare on Elm Street that was the very impetus for this project in the first place. If you were a horror-head in the pre-IP-conglomeratization, it must have been a shocking thrill to see a Jason and Freddy clash teased. Some Friday fans I’ve encountered say witnessing this final shot was the most memorable moment of watching the entire series for them (though it hardly would have been a surprise if you knew the production history). Now it barely registers an eye roll, but you can see why people would have left the theater buzzing.

The end result is a movie that inspires basically no reaction whatsoever in me. It’s too segregated from the original Friday template to even draw real comparisons; change the “Crystal Lake” signs, take Jason’s hockey mask away, and the bulk of it would be unrecognizable as a product of the franchise. It’s not bad in a goofy, baffling sort of way like Jason Takes Manhattan. It’s not a curious high concept or cash-in like Part 3 or The New Blood, nor an outright clusterfuck like A New Beginning. It doesn’t take the Friday template at face value like Parts 2 and 4, nor try to remix it like Jason Lives. It’s just a bland void of a horror film batting below the Mendoza line with no character of its own.

All that’s left in the Friday series after this are odds and ends. Freddy vs. Jason would be stuck in development hell for a decade. A futuristic sci-fi take on the series limped to theaters in 2002. And a full-on reboot sharing a name with the original hit theaters in the late 2000s, which was the style at the time. In some ways, this film’s terrific opening is poetic: a brief resurrection then careless mutilation of Jason Voorhees as a horror icon.

Is It Good?

Not Very Good (3/8)

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