Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) – Review

After the low box-office returns of Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount Pictures decided that enough was enough and sold the character rights of Jason Voorhees to New Line Cinema. Now, it would make the most sense to any sane person that New Line would reboot the franchise, but instead, they made a Friday the 13th movie without Jason Voorhees.

Before getting into it, just know that the last film didn’t happen. Erase it from your minds as Jason Goes to Hell opens with what looks to be a standard Friday the 13th scene, with a young woman alone in a cabin in the woods who finds herself being attacked by Jason (Kane Hodder), but when he chases her into a clearing where – surprise, surprise – it turns out that this was an elaborate sting operation and the woman was simply bait for the trap, we then see Jason literally blown away by a heavily armed SWAT team. Jason’s remains are then sent to a morgue where the resident coroner (Richard Gant) becomes entranced by the still-beating heart… and he then eats it!  And with that, we are off and running with one of the most bizarre entries in the Friday the 13th franchise.

“Alas, poor Jason, I knew him well.”

In this movie we will not have hockey mask-wearing Jason stalking a variety of idiot teenagers who had made the mistake of visiting Crystal Lake, but instead, we have a supernatural plot where we learn that Jason can “body swap” – somehow by transferring his heart from victim to victim and thus possessing them until their body is too damaged and he must find a new one – but we are also introduced to Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), a bounty hunter with a hard-on for Jason Voorhees. It’s through him that we learn more of the lore surrounding Jason, such as the fact that only a member of Jason’s bloodline can truly kill him, but on the flip side of this, we are also told that to regain his invincible nature Jason must possess a member of his family. The bizarre nature of this mythology is quickly glossed over – don’t expect flashbacks or backstory to explain any of this – but one must admit it does lead to some of the more interesting moments in the franchise’s history.

Don’t even try and understand what the hell is going on here.

What this movie has in abundance, aside from a batshit crazy plot, is a collection of actual interesting characters for us to spend time with, which is not something that can be said about most Friday the 13th movies, and the film is also more action-driven than previous installments, with scenes that owe more to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and James Cameron’s The Terminator than it does your average slasher film. When “Jason” enters a police station, shrugging off bullets and tossing officers around like they are ragdolls, we get an action sequence that many fans had expected to see in the much-hyped Jason Takes Manhattan, a film that was almost devoid of action as well as pretty much anything to do with Manhattan.

“Where is Sarah Connor?”

Stray Observations:

• The FBI trap was pretty sloppy and the fact that the undercover agent actually survives Jason’s initial attack had more to do with luck than anything else.
• The possessed coroner murders his assistant and two FBI guards, but the authorities seem unaware as to what actually happened. Wouldn’t such a well-guarded facility have CCTV cameras everywhere?
• Even if you assumed Jason Voorhees was actually dead, what is the exact appeal of going to Camp Blood to have sex? Would it be considered an Extreme Sport?
• Killing off Erin Grey, whose character on Buck Rogers ushered many of us through puberty, was an unmitigated crime.
• The passing of the “Jason Spirit” from body to body, like some kind of parasite, was a blatant rip-off of the sci-fi classic The Hidden.
• The police lock a suspect in a cell while still wearing his blood-soaked clothing. Do the cops in Crystal Lake not understand what evidence is?
• Why exactly does the Voorhees family have the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies?

Did Bruce Campbell have a yard sale?

The other big issue I have with Jason Goes to Hell is that we seem to be watching a sequel to a movie series we haven’t actually seen. Not only is the possession element completely new, but we now have the Voorhees’ extended family and a bounty hunter with some kind of history with Jason. Just before he dies in the arms of Jason, Creighton Duke asks, “Do you remember me?” but what does all this mean? Are we to assume this guy had encountered Jason in the past and, if so, how did that go down?  I certainly would have loved to have seen that. And why were there birthing stirrups in the Voorhees’ homestead? Was Pamela Voorhees a midwife? Sure, why not? Maybe in a Rosemary’s Baby kind of way. Is it possible that the unkillable Jason Voorhees was a demon from Hell all along, one who had possessed the body of a drowned boy?

Note: Writer-director Adam Marcus has since stated that Jason is a “Deadite,” just a different version of the ones seen in the Evil Dead movies, and he’s even killed by what looks like a Kandarian Dagger.

I give Adam Marcus credit for trying something fresh with the franchise, as well as doing his best with the directive from producer Sean S. Cunningham to “lose the hockey mask and forget that part eight ever happened,” but the end result was a movie that simply raised more questions than it answered. Marcus can claim all he wants that this movie exists in the world of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, but nods and a wink to fans don’t quite cut it as no matter how clever you think you are, leaving the bulk of your audience in the dark is never a good idea. It’s one thing to want to create a whole new mythology around an already established character, and I admire that, but it also has to be a film that can stand on its own two legs.

Note: The stinger ending with Freddy Krueger’s clawed hand retrieving Jason’s hockey mask was another wink to fans, something that would take a decade before finally paying off.

Jason Goes to Hell may have been too clever for its own good, with nods to Evil Dead, Halloween, Creepshow, and Nightmare on Elm Street. With all that going on, it was harder for the director to come up with a comprehensible story – I’d love to see what hit the editing room floor – but one can only grade the final product and I have to say that though this entry was a fun ride, it probably would have worked better as the third installment of a whole new fresh reboot of the franchise.