By the time Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday arrived in 1993, the Friday the 13th franchise was running on empty. Unfortunately, instead of returning to basics, somebody at New Line Cinema decided that Jason Voorhees needed to be reimagined as a body-hopping supernatural parasite.
What the fuck?
The opening is quite brilliant, really. We have a young woman arriving at a cabin near Crystal Lake, settling down for the night and preparing to take a shower. The power goes out, things get creepy and before long Jason Voorhees appears and what a specimen he is.
Kane Hodder returns as Jason, but he looks even more monstrous than before. This Jason is bigger, bulkier and almost completely decomposed, with his hockey mask embedded into his swollen, disfigured face. He’s an intimidating bastard, and the opening chase through the cabin, the surrounding woods and the lake is exactly the sort of thing we expect from Friday the 13th.
The young woman arrives at a clearing, then out of the darkness arrives an elite tactical team, surrounding Jason and obliterating him with gunfire and explosives.
Jason Voorhees has been blown to smithereens.
We’re only just getting started though. His remains are taken to the morgue, where things get ridiculous. While performing an autopsy, the coroner becomes hypnotised by Jason’s heart and decides that the best course of action is to pick it up and begin eating it.
Yes, really.
Jason’s evil spirit possesses the coroner, who goes on a murderous rampage with everyone else in the morgue. Kane Hodder himself makes a fun cameo as one of the security guards who is killed before the massacre.
Unfortunately, this is where Jason Goes to Hell loses me.
For the majority of the runtime, Jason is an evil spirit jumping from body to body. Instead of watching Kane Hodder as Jason stalk unsuspecting victims in that fantastic hockey mask costume, we have to sit through random henchmen offing each other while pretending to be possessed.
That’s not what I want from a Friday the 13th movie.
The Friday the 13th franchise already leaned into the supernatural with Jason Lives, but at least there was always something familiar about Jason. He was an unstoppable force of nature in a hockey mask, wandering the woods around Crystal Lake and killing anything that got in his way.
Here, he’s barely in his own movie. 9 minutes roughly.
We’re also introduced to Creighton Duke, a bounty hunter who knows far too much about Jason Voorhees and his family tree. Steven Williams brings some personality to the role, and I think he could have been a decent addition to a different Friday the 13th movie. Unfortunately, he’s stuck explaining the ridiculous backstory involving Jason’s bloodline and why he can finally be killed. Yawn.
The Evil Dead connection is also present, with the Necronomicon featuring in the Voorhees house. It’s a fun little Easter egg, but it also serves as a reminder that this movie has nothing to do with the slasher series that began in 1980.
There are a few gross-out moments, including the violence in the diner, but none of the kills really stand out for me. Even Jason’s resurrection in his own body feels like a bit of an anti-climax. The finale has Jason dragged into Hell by demonic hands, before Freddy Krueger’s glove erupts from the ground and pulls Jason’s hockey mask beneath the dirt.
It’s a fantastic tease.
Unfortunately, it’s attached to a movie I have no interest in watching again.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is a sign that the franchise has jumped the shark. I understand that they needed to do something different after eight core movies, but adding in body possession, bloodlines and demonic resurrection wasn’t the answer. The characters are uninteresting, the story is overly convoluted and the one person I wanted to see in this movie barely appears.
Jason Voorhees.
The opening sequence suggested a legitimate slasher movie.
Everything that followed made me wish he’d stayed in the woods.
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