Friday Week: Then I'm a dead fuck

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER

1984

Directed by Joseph Zito

Written by Bruce Hidemi Sakow and Barney Cohen

Spoilers: high

The year-to-year history of film can easily get flattened the further you get away from it; consider the case of the film musical, which exploded after the advent of sound, then died, and then came back so quickly that it's hard to remember it even happened.  So it may be worth a reminder, then, because looking at the 1980s from the 2020s, it sure doesn't seem like the slasher flick was ever in trouble; but by 1984 the genre had, as all film movements eventually must, arrived at a place of impending crisis.  The dead teenager film market had been glutted; slashers were starting to become less popular in response; if you wished to make the argument, the form had hit an artistic wall; and, as importantly as anything else, it had genuine and powerful enemies in the MPAA and its constituency of concerned puritans.  Making slasher films had become a source of controversy and friction that now—potentially—outweighed their declining market value.  By the end of 1984, the commercial and indeed the artistic crisis had been averted; we'll go down that fork in the road soon enough.

For now, this was the state of play when Paramount commissioned its fourth Friday the 13th film in five years, the first sequel to skip a calendar year and betray Paramount head Frank Mancuso Sr.'s quaint idea of an annual scare.  Yet, apparently, the biggest reason that this fourth film and third sequel bore that unambiguously-conclusive title, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, is because its producer, Frank Mancuso Jr., had gotten resentful that he was accorded no respect for his work on this franchise.  Perhaps he pulled at his tie; history does not record this.  So he was tired of it, wanted to move on, and, burned not only the bridge behind him but, theoretically, the whole damn town.  Some of the principals behind the previous entry, Part III, had already described that film, sotto voce, as the conclusion of "a trilogy"; but as nothing about that movie indicated this—you'd obviously have to be told it to even be aware of it at all, and you still wouldn't believe it—The Final Chapter would do it deliberately, and make sure you knew that what you were watching was the end of Jason Voorhees.  The best-laid plans of mice and men, huh?

Even so, this part works.  The Final Chapter, featuring no returning character but its villain, strains to have satisfying finality, but it gets there in the end.  And, frankly, that's the only reason comprehensible to me that, besides the rightly-judged series peak of Part 2, this is probably the best-loved film of its whole franchise.  I find that honestly perplexing: the thing people always say they hate about Friday the 13th films has never been, and might never be again, more fully and persistently on display than in this one, not even in the (wrongly) despised Part III.  I mean, you say you don't like slasher movie dialogue?  How about a slasher movie where the single most well-represented common noun in the screenplay—possibly without any hyperbole—is the neologistic insult "deadfuck," never even delivered in anything remotely like a funny way except maybe the one single time, when someone says it, "dead fuck," as two words, so you can pretend (other elements here suggest that maybe you're not entirely making it up) that it's a blunt bit of commentary re: the slasher film's symbolic connection between sex and death.  I realize it's not important to anybody but me, but for the titles of these reviews I've endeavored to use quotations of these films' most serious (or cod-serious) lines, such as still possess some measure of out-of-context heft as prose—that is, the lines that indicate that on the part of those films' makers, there was some level of sincerity about what they were doing.  I listened intently to every last word in The Final Chapter, and I don't think it has a single one.  So I went with the best of the "deadfucks" instead.

On the other hand, The Final Chapter does earn an objective boost from two things, besides what I've alluded to as a good ending: the first, most famously, is that it brought back into the fold special makeup effects artist Tom Savini, lost to the franchise these past two films, presently tasked with destroying what he had once created in Jason (the nightmare coda of the original Friday the 13th, the thin reed upon which Parts 2 and 3 hang, had been his idea).  His participation is sometimes larded with legend about how he also wished an end to the series, though I assume his relationship with Steve Miner's replacement, veteran exploitation director Joseph Zito, was more determinative here; I respect Savini too much to conceive that if he worked on The Prowler he could somehow maintain a condescending attitude towards Friday the 13th.  Yet less important—only perhaps!—than Savini himself is the ethos behind bringing his top-flight macabre illusions back.  It feels like Mancuso's intention to end the series emboldened him to attempt flipping the MPAA the bird (he partially succeeded), and the (relative) self-restraint of the previous two sequels is relaxed, making this the goriest Friday since the first.

The other thing is only meaningful or even particularly noticeable if you value slasher cinema as cinema in the first place, but, of the first four, The Final Chapter is the best-mounted as a production (it shared a dollar figure, $2.2 million, with Part III, which felt like less there because its 3-D was dominating the shooting schedule and soaking up its budget).  Accordingly, it boasts some genuinely professional scary movie lighting, its cool moonlight and sundries coming from DP João Fernandes (also a collaborator of Zito's on The Prowler, but let's not hold that against him, for while The Final Chapter somehow looks more like a 1980 movie than Friday the 13th looks like a 1980 movie, the blown-out highlights that are an egregious feature of The Prowler are tamed and made aesthetically congenial here).  So if Part 2 has better cinematography overall because of its muscularity, and I will go to the wall for Part 2 and even Part III having much better direction, between Savini and Fernandes, Shelton H. Bishop III's production design, Joe Hoffman's art direction, and John Lytle et al's location management, there's a more robust "real movie" feel to The Final Chapter than we're used to.

So Zito was invited to take Miner's place, with Miner spreading his wings (only to crash and burn) with an outrageously ambitious plan to do an American Godzilla in 3-D, which, to my annoyance, is probably the real explanation for that Fangoria spread in Part III which I previously found so Goddamned significant.  Zito was hired, also, to write, but he subcontracted this out (evidently not in strict accordance with WGA rules, and one suspects at a profit) to Barney Cohen.  (Bruce Hidemi Sakow retains a story credit.)  Unfortunately, Cohen's script wound up something of a complete structural disaster.  But we kick off, pre-credits, with a nice "final chapter" gesture: a Friday stock footage montage intercut throughout the series' single most indispensable scene, the campfire tale told near the beginning of Part 2.  It decays into death highlights, but it also attempts to unify the ever-broken continuity of the Friday series, and in its very failure it's a success.  Still, with the "five years later" setting of Part 2, a grave marker seen only now for Pamela Voorhees, and the I've-never-liked-it choice to make Part 2, Part III, and The Final Chapter all occur within something like a single 96 hour span, we get the vaguely pleasant sensation that we had (for now) made our way back to the future.

Likewise, the movie itself begins well enough, with what's probably the film's moodiest shot, insofar as it seems to take stock of the horror, swooping in on a crane (demonstrating that "real movie" feel I mentioned) into the aftermath of the last film and capturing that odd historical moment where proper boxlike ambulances and those weird station wagons coexisted in uneasy alliance.  Presently, a certain corpse is carted off to the morgue.  You know where this is going; but I enjoy, anyway, the wonderful way Zito lingers on Jason's (Ted White's) body getting shoved into the fridge long enough for us to see his breath frost in the cool air.  Our host and hostess for this phase of the film are the lecherous, deviant, and potentially-necrophilic morgue attendant, Axel (Bruce Mahler), alongside his aggravated but eventually-willing paramour nurse, Morgan (Lisa Freeman).  They provide some highly-calculated abrasive relationship comedy that, at least, beats the lazy abrasive relationship comedy that opened up Part III, and their deaths—Axel's name foreshadowing what occurs to his spine—certainly have more visual and narrative merit.  We're a hair's breadth away from just remaking Halloween II, and I might've preferred it.  You'll disagree, but as gross and unlikeable as Axel and Morgan are, I think they're better at being gross and unlikeable than much of the cast we get.

So, okay, Jason's alive, and now we head back to the shores of Crystal Lake.  On one side, we have this film's big innovation, an actual family unit: mom Mrs. Jarvis (Joan Freeman), recently separated from her husband; elder daughter Trish (Kimberly Beck); and younger son, Tommy (Corey Feldman, disorientingly babyish given The Goonies is just two years out).  They live out here in the sticks, and Trish is lonely, or at least Beck tries to play her as if her structurally-dictated Final Girl has even the one personality trait, and Tommy, whom the movie focuses on substantially more, is sort of Part III's Shelly before he went down a tedious path, possessed of marked technological skills and a nearly-implausible talent at special effects, as we meet him under a customized alien mask that would easily make the grade for a reasonably well-heeled movie (Tommy is of course named after Savini, more of an in-joke at present, but meaningfully enough by our finale; there's a deleted scene with a guillotine prank I wish were still here).  Trish makes the acquaintance of an honorary member of the Jarvis faction, Rob (E. Erich Anderson), traipsing about the forest "hunting bears."  So far, so good.  The Jarvises are fine, the Jarvises are cool.

The movie is 25% Jarvises, and less if you don't count the scenes where Jason's killing them.  Most of the movie is the teens (or whatever), who've rented the house neighboring the Jarvises' property, numbering six: pre-consummation couple Sara and Doug (Barbara Howard and Peter Barton), who are actually quite charming, and hence cannot sustain this movie's interest; post-consummation couple Samantha and Paul (Judie Aronson and Alan Hayes), who are not charming, and therefore sometimes can; horny and indubitably virginal Ted, whom I shall call Teddy (Lawrence Monsoon) as the movie sometimes does, to differentiate him from Part 2's cool jokester, Ted, whose role he's unfit to fill, his primary function being to say "deadfuck" over and over; and, finally, explicitly-not-virginal-but-his-sexual-partners-still-feel-like-they-are-afterwards, our DEADFUCK in the flesh, Jimmy (Crispin Glover), possibly the film's actual protagonist by screentime, but basically just the tiresome sadsack aspects of Part III's Shelly repositioned to look like Crispin Glover.  At the lake, the group acquires Tina and Terri (Camilla and Carey More), hot twins, who (I think) didn't exist in the script till they realized Camilla, auditioning for another role, had a sister.

One piece of good-ish news is that while in the previous Fridays, we'd have one or two people with a nudity clause in their contracts, something close to an absolute majority of The Final Chapter's cast have signed the same form contract.  But while they're not as buzzingly annoying as some slasher casts, they're trapped within some downright brutal 80s sex comedy writing.  It's like this: even if I might not claim they'd have been worthwhile movies without a murderous Voorhees, the previous Fridays always got to "painlessly watchable" on the basis of their ensembles, mostly comprised of good-hearted-if-horny kids whom you almost invariably got the impression their movies liked, even if you personally didn't.  The Final Chapter's teen phase feels like it was written with actual contempt in its heart, that the goal is to make you dislike them, whether you wanted to or not, all the better to root for their demise, rather than feel what you'd prefer to feel about all the rad super-murders that ever await all but the luckiest teens at Crystal Lake.

It's undoubtedly just a matter of laziness and a need for contrivances to put them in Place A to be eviscerated by Lawn Implement B, but were I to give it any credit, it feels like a laughless satire of teen sex comedy, and not a very well-observed one: in this house that Zito seems to be deliberately forgetting has numerous rooms that his miniature dramas could've played out in, they rut and attempt to cheat on one another, mostly in the same 8' X 10' living area—spoken-for Paul slides over to Tina or possibly Terri, abortively, Terri or possibly Tina eventually settles for Jimmy, who knows this, and the sorting of partners by value and opportunity is so mechanical and inhumane it's just ugly, not that I suppose Zito was interested in romantic farce, nor Cohen in so much as Revenge of the Nerds-level amusing dialogue.  (Deadfuuuuuuck.  Except that implies a funnier read than exists.)

But I'd have wanted to give it credit: the night ends up with the discovery of a big collection of ancient black-and-white stag reels, and this borderline-surreal backdrop of vintage pornography is terribly evocative of something, the historical connections between exploitation films and porn, or the true purpose of cinema, or, better yet, the way Fridays had heretofore been better-read as using sex (i.e., adulthood) as its metaphor for death, rather than the common interpretation, making it the other way around.  ("Real movie"-wise, there's some nicely-attentive exterior photography regarding the different lighting conditions in the shadowbox-like house, due to the flickering porn and the actual fucking upstairs.)  But it doesn't take.  (If I were giving credit, Sara and Doug almost resolve into something like a reductio ad absurdum of slasher film "rules" as might've been getting codified around 1984: Sara probably would've been the Final Girl in a movie that hadn't made that structurally impossible, but when she finally consents to sex, that's when she and her lover die.  As far as "is this the confession to moral degeneracy you asked for, you obsessed freak?" fuck-yous to a genre's critics go... well, it ain't exactly Tenebre.)  As for how the Jarvises interface with their neighbors: they practically don't.  They make their acquaintance of the Jarvises' great disappearing dog.  Tommy innocently pervs.  Trish would like to attend their party, but is late.  So it also feels like a blatant timesink even by slasher standards.

What it does have is Savini, and maybe the best Jason so far of the series, though after Part III the icon's evolution will be iterative: the main point of recommendation for this Jason is that White is the biggest to date, though I'd offer Zito also stages him as more powerful, notably in the best beat of White's stunt-heavy performance when he somehow manages to burst through a nailed-shut door yet make it look like his mass is doing the work more than his velocity, as if he's almost merely walking through the barrier.  And it's more my opinion than something made explicit here, but The Final Chapter is also where the series softly commits to "Jason is a supernatural revenant, rotting on the bottom of Crystal Lake for years till his mother's decapitation awakened his vengeance."  So, anyway, the kills and chases are for the most part very strong, and curiously (indeed, "real movie"-style) they are sometimes almost as much action as horror, especially a uniquely bad-ass kill that involves Jason throwing a stuntwoman through a second-story window.  This movie is extremely into bodies smashing through various portals.

It's a pity the lead-up is in a virtually walled-off section labeled "horny assholes" (one increasingly punctuated by some fine murders, in fairness), but things only get uniformly good in Trish's Final Girl sequence, brought on with her investigation of the party house.  It kicks off in earnest with Rob proving ineffectual and dead, but moreover with some of the best (where does he find the time?) corpse decoration you'll ever see in a slasher movie.  Bodies literally bar Trish's path, including one crucified on the doorframe.  There's a choice "corpse through the window" gag that may even improve on Part III's; the actual chase is not as adrenal as Miner's achievements, nor has a prayer of being as interestingly characterized as even Part III's (at most, Trish gets "is protective of her little brother," which of course is just automatic), but it damned well gets the job done, with Jason suffering some gleefully disgusting mutilations in his quest to finish off the Jarvis family.  The interesting part is Tommy, who, utilizing his established skills, takes a page out of Ginny's playbook with a part more suitable to a ten year-old, and if anything, given that believability was never anybody's watchword here, I only wish Tommy's makeup were actually persuasive.  It gets us to where we need to be, though, which is the upsettingly slow and rather definitive-seeming spectacle of Jason's head sliding down a machete, whereupon Tommy, in panic, makes mincemeat of the corpse.  So now I have to give The Final Chapter credit, because with its only slightly-ambiguous freeze-frame ending —"whoops, I guess slasher movies do corrupt the youth!"—means that, where it matters most, it's every bit as good a fuck-you to the genre's critics as any movie made in surly bad taste could be.  And thus, for all its flaws, is it a satisfyingly bold way to bring an end to...

Oh, I'm not even going to make the joke.

Score: 6/10