If the new HALLOWEEN movie wasn’t HALLOWEEN-y enough for you, well, you probably also hated this other “final” franchise film…
Director: Adam Marcus
Stars: Kane Hodder, Steven Williams, Erin Gray
Despite already having a “Final Chapter” five movies earlier, Jason Voorhees is once again killed, allowing the residents of Crystal Lake to relax for the first time in a decade. But, of course, just because his body was destroyed, it doesn’t mean the hockey-masked murderer is done murdering.
Similar to how some are saying HALLOWEEN ENDS isn’t really a HALLOWEEEN movie and complaining about Michael Myers’ noticeable absence, one could make the same claim about JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY, which barely counts as an entry in the franchise and also features a title killer who sits out the majority of his own film. At least HALOWEEN ENDS has “Halloween” in the title—this ninth installment is so bad the filmmakers legally couldn’t even call it a “FRIDAY THE 13TH” movie.
So how in the H-E-double hockey masks do you end up with a Jason Voorhees movie that’s not officially FRIDAY THE 13TH? At least it started with good intentions: original director and longtime franchise producer Sean Cunningham came up with the idea for a Freddy vs. Jason movie and negotiated with Paramount, who owned the rights. The studio agreed to let New Line use the character in a crossover film, but they could not call use the name “Friday the 13th” anywhere. Which made sense for the original plan… until the studio got cold feet at the last minute and decided that making another straightforward solo Jason movie would be more profitable than pitting two horror icons against each other.
This put the people actually making the movie in something of a tight spot. They brought in screenwriter after screenwriter in an attempt to craft something not worse than JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (a low bar, in theory), sometimes only giving them a few days to throw together a script. Eventually, they got a green light for a story no one was really excited about. This led to tension between Cunningham and first-time director Adam Marcus and eventual reshoots to try and salvage the mess.
So it should be no surprise that the quality of the plot, writing, and acting are uniformly poor. More detrimental, however, is that JASON GOES TO HELL just has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be. Some of it is surprisingly dark, such as the lead girl’s sleazy news anchor boyfriend, who not only sleeps with her for the story but also steals her dead mom’s corpse from the morgue to show on live TV and help his ratings. And a lot of it seems to be played for laughs, like Jason’s over-the-top grunts and moans every time he gets shot, the goofy score that constantly cuts any and all tension, and the entirety of the character The Duke. It all makes for a strange tone that will not likely please fans, no matter what they’re looking for.
There are some decent kills if you’re in it just for the requisite violence and gore. There’s a girl getting sliced in half during coitus, a guy in various stages of melting, and all the bloody impalings and brutal head smashing you can shake a machete at. The late Leslie Jordan actually gets one of the more memorable offings in the movie, where he keeps trying to shoot Jason while continually yelling “OH SHIT” in slow motion before getting picked up and tossed in a deep fat fryer. Even with these few highlights, this is still not the Jason Voorhees slasher movie anyone wanted.
The film opens as you would expect: a young woman drives to Camp Crystal Lake, goes into a cabin, immediately disrobes, and, having met all of Jason Voorhees’ criteria for casual homicide, comes face to face with the hockey-masked killer. She runs into the woods and does some gymnastics…revealing this entire thing was an FBI sting to kill Jason once and for all! Commandos drop down from the trees, open fire on the killer, and, in a truly brilliant tactical decision, call in a goddamn airstrike to literally explode his body. The agents cheer and high-five as his burning head, appendages, and still-beating heart rain down from the sky.
At the autopsy, the coroner discovers that—aside from his dismembered body being “clinically dead as shit”—Jason’s heart is filled with a strange black liquid. While examining it, the heart starts beating, prompting the licensed medical professional to eat the organ like a Big Mac. This causes the doctor to become possessed by the spirit and soul of Jason Voorhees, and he immediately begins killing his coworkers.
What follows is essentially a body-swapping movie as Jason’s evil, the dead spirit, moves from person to person and goes on a killing spree. To give it some semblance of a story, the characters eventually figure out (i.e., someone tells them directly) that the only way Jason can permanently come back from the dead is by possessing the body of a family member—which in this movie includes his half-sister, his niece, and his niece’s newborn baby. Conveniently, this supernatural rule also includes a loophole that a family member is the only one who can fully kill Jason by destroying his heart (physically, not romantically). Oh, and in case you were wondering, the way Jason transfers his essence from body to body is by French kissing the new host with his giant black tongue. And yes, given the plot they set up for themselves, this does lead to a scene where a grown man tries to make out with a literal infant.
By the time the film gets all of this setup and prologue out of the way, you’re already 40 minutes into a 90-minute movie, leaving JASON GOES TO HELL rushing through the rest. It moves so fast and bounces around so much that you never get to know any of the characters. I honestly have no idea who the main protagonist is supposed to be. Is it Jason’s niece with the newborn? Is it the niece’s nerdy ex-baby daddy who somehow becomes a badass hero capable of taking on the supernatural? Or is it the bounty hunter who calls himself The Duke?
The Duke is easily the weirdest and best part of this movie. He’s just a guy obsessed with Jason Voorhees, somehow knows every detail about his supernatural abilities and weaknesses, and is also a narcissist and a sociopath. He spends the first half of the movie referring to himself in the third person, sexually harassing women in front of their loved ones, and in one of the weirder scenes in the movie, forces the hero to break his fingers one by one in exchange for information on how to kill Jason. It’s like The Duke is plucked from an entirely different, completely over-the-top movie that I would honestly much rather be watching.
In the end, one of Jason’s host bodies opens up, causing a slimy little creature to crawl out of his neck hole and start attacking everyone. Is this supposed to be Jason’s real form—an 18-inch mini-demon that looks like a skinless cat? The tiny monster finds the dead corpse of the girl’s mom and enters her from, uh, the back way.
And this is how legendary killer Jason Voorhees is finally brought into his final movie—by traveling up the backside of his dead sister and supernaturally achieving his ultimate form. Exactly what fans were hoping for!
Oh, and to keep the audience from suing them for fraud, the filmmakers shoehorn the whole “going to hell” part into the last 30 seconds of the movie when Jason gets stabbed in the heart, and a bunch of hands drags him down. Followed by Freddy Krueger’s glove grabbing Jason’s mask and pulling it below the dirt—giving us an admittedly incredible tease for a movie that wouldn’t happen for another decade.
Even if you give the filmmakers credit for making the best of what they had and trying something different (which I appreciate about HALLOWEEN ENDS), JASON GOES TO HELL still feels like a huge letdown. My grade school was next to a movie theater, and I remember seeing the poster for this movie every day for months, with Jason’s excellent new chrome mask burning in hellfire with a demon snaked through the eye holes. And of course, no part of that was in the final film.
It’s hard to believe it’s been almost thirty years since this movie, and we’ve only gotten two and a half FRIDAY THE 13TH movies since then. As a fellow Jason, I demand my namesake be returned to theaters, preferably in a much better movie.
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