Friday Week: In a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn, and only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die

JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY

1993

Directed by Adam Marcus and Sean Cunningham

Written by Dean Lorey, Jay Huguely, and Adam Marcus

Spoilers: high

The best thing about Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday is its title, which is evocative, and metal, and, of course, a lie.  Jason does go to hell, presumably, in a somewhat neat sequence involving giant puppeted hands (looks cooler than it sounds, so "very slightly cool").  But hell is not exactly a major shooting location; there is none of the imaginative vistas that this movie's title, or its boss poster, might have conjured in your teen brain back when you walked through the horror section of your local video store.  The chrome mask isn't even in the movie.  On the other hand, the demon worm thing, while not an accurate portrayal...

As for its "finality," everything I said about Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is equally applicable to The Final Friday; that part's a lie, then, less because it wasn't the last Friday the 13th, than because it isn't a Friday the 13th.  Or at least I don't know why it is.  Check out this extremely characteristic, Friday the 13th-style scene:

Jason lives!

The production history explains little, but we have it anyway, and it had come to pass in the early 90s that Paramount was dumping the franchise.  (They were restrained, legally, from selling the title, which is why it's a "Final Friday," because you can say "Friday" but not "Friday the 13th," even if that still seems like an obvious infringement of the mark if the mark was the problem.)  The folks who acquired those Friday rights—Voorhees rights and Crystal Lake, NJ, rights, anyway—were New Line Cinema, their ultimate purpose being to pit Jason against New Line's own iconic villain, Freddy Krueger.  This had to have been pretty galling to Frank Mancuso Jr., considering that's what he asked Robert Shaye to do back in 1987, only to be laughed out of the building; but in the interim the whole horror genre, and slashers especially, had precipitously declined, so maybe such a corny move made more sense for them now than it did then.  Or, maybe, it was just that that Sean Cunningham, the director of the original Friday the 13th, had thrown his hat into the ring.  He thought Freddy vs. Jason sounded rad.  Now persuaded, New Line thought there should be a new Jason movie to revive interest after the Paramount octology's ignominious conclusion in 1989's Jason Takes Manhattan, and Cunningham agreed.  So Cunningham produced The Final Friday, and he set his editor wife's former intern, now first-time director Adam Marcus to his task, though some of it and quite possibly as much as half of it was directed by Cunningham himself, and I'm being only slightly facetious when I say that the post-release history of the film has been the two men fighting to give the other the credit for it.

You would too, because The Final Friday is extraordinarily bad, and, indeed, it was recognized as such even by Friday the 13th fans—and I'd say we're a rather open-hearted and forgiving lot—and while its very last shot finds a certain clawed glove reaching out of the dirt ("from hell," I guess) to clutch at Jason's very ordinary mask, the immensely negative reception to the film meant that the crossover didn't happen till yet another decade had turned over.  For all I know, "The Final Friday" was never contemplated as a subtitle by either Cunningham or Marcus, and it was something New Line added themselves, in acknowledgment of how thoroughly they'd shit this franchise's bed.

To be fair (even if, for various reasons, I'm skeptical Marcus deserves any consideration), the movie wasn't exactly what any of its principals first intended—which seems counter-intuitive, since it's hard to imagine The Final Friday coming into existence by any means whatsoever besides deliberate iconoclasm.  But I suppose this was what happened when the early pitches were too stale, so that a desire to do something completely different took hold, and as deadlines loomed and whole screenplays had to be thrown away, Marcus and Cunningham became stuck pursuing their most drunkenly radical ideas right into the maw of chaos.  Still, Marcus got exactly what he wanted for the first scene.

So let us return to Crystal Lake, some years having gone by—the next time Jason takes Manhattan, he's going to find the Statue of Liberty buried chest-deep in the surf—where arrives a lone young woman (Julie Michaels) who's rented a ramshackle old cabin.  After a little light household maintenance and suspense, she does what a nubile does, disrobing for a shower.  Now comes Jason (Kane Hodder, whose "best Jason" reputation continues to perplex me because how could you possibly tell), and the woman, with only a towel, makes her run.  Perhaps we notice that, despite her undress, she's maybe a little more confident in her movement than the usual slasher victim; perhaps we don't, since she still falls down.  But that does foreshadow what she actually is: Special Agent Marcus (oh), bait to lure Jason into an ambush set up by her comrades in the F.B.I., who blast away at the revenant, ultimately deploying a mortar and literally disintegrating him.

Point to Silence of the Lambs if you like, but this might be the moment that "1990s horror" was truly born, and I fucking hate it.  It embraces the literalist impulse that, sure, we're all guilty of—"uh, I'm pretty sure that if 83 people* got chopped up by a corpse in a hockey mask, the government would look into it"—but embraced here in a way that amounts to a rejection of stories as stories.  It's likewise self-impressed to a downright poisonous degree, and an unearned one, considering how idiotic the next scene is in context with the first, regarding a perfectly normal movie autopsy rather than the Area 51 stuff that an X-Files investigation into a magical murder corpse would dictate.  It's stupidly and mechanically meta, to boot, asking you to give it a high five for its clever deconstruction.  (It bears mentioning that the other "final" Friday already did auto-critique better, still without doing it particularly well.)  But does Jason not fly towards the naked female as the moth towards a flame?  I mean, not really.  Yet this is a new age, and "the new" means striking a pose of superiority and lazily pointing at a trope, that might not even be a trope, and discontinuing the analysis there because the purpose of the gesture (being seen as "intelligent" and "funny") has already been achieved.  We're still living in that age, but I should stop before I call it the most important moment in film history.  I was also going to say it feels like this single-joke scene takes twice as long to play out as it actually does (it's not actually good at its suspense or thrills, but as a parody where the only content is "look at how lame this movie you bought a ticket to see is," would it be?).  But, since it actually does take eight minutes, or about a tenth of this movie, I admit that it only feels as long as it is.

(And let's just take one second to despise Jason's resdesign for this movie, too.  Reminding one of overcooked later Godzillas, the makeup artists went really overboard, with cranial deformities that make him look like an alien, necessitating a proportionally diminutive mask that looks blatantly bad in its fit.)

The thing is, I could approve of the whole movie that did this (the Friday the 13th where the Crystal Lake "teens" are active Jason-trappers sounds decent**), but what it comes off like instead, when it's just a prologue to something completely different, is a statement of purpose: the slasher is over, the slasher is done, so we, the vanguard, look ahead to what's next for horror.  Unfortunately, what's next for horror is a rip-off of 1986's The Night of the Creeps, 1987's The Hidden, and that 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Conspiracy," all of which are variations on the venerable concept of gross mind-controlling brain parasites, a concept that wasn't new in 1958's The Brain Eaters, and if it might have been new in "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" in 1932, I still doubt it.  So that's what this—I should double-check—Friday the 13th film is about: Jason as a mind-controlling bug creature (the distinction is that it's mystical rather than sci-fi, which causes its own problems, insofar as it acts like a sci-fi alien, rather than a hellspawned demon).  Which means that, yes, we should belay any phrase like "statement of purpose" when discussing Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.  However, if you're wondering if the snotty tone is retained beyond that opening scene, oddly enough, it substantially subsides, and I guess I'm thankful (I also know many people love that first scene, and I bear you no ill will).  But it's slightly disorienting that afterwards, what we get is just a different subgenre of 80s horror played entirely straight.

Regardless, this is where we land once Jason's parts get sent to the coroner (Richard Gant); to his shock, Jason, the Jason inside, is not dead, his essence surviving through the demon parasite that, I think, it'll eventually be implied was conjured by Pamela Voorhees, the sorceress, as a means of, I guess, resurrecting her drowned son prior to her sharp-implement-based slaying of all those counselors in 1979.  It goes unreported whether she made this demonic pact while wearing a cable-knit sweater.

That parasite enters the coroner, establishing the central idea of the film—that Jason can be anybody—and he shall go on to commit the single act of "proper" Friday violence here when he slays some campers, perhaps as Marcus's way of saying "I can, in fact, do this correctly," though in the process he arguably demonstrates the fullness of his misunderstanding, by the small but telling way the full-on softcore pornography he gets up to with the featured extras is entwined directly and intimately with the bloodletting.  (Much more typically, the fornicators in other Fridays are killed before or after, because in those it's about exploitation, sure, but it's also about pathos; fundamentally, maybe it's about some marginal level of tastefulness, too, in that they don't actually want you to have an erection while you watch a woman die.)  On the plus side, it does prove that a 90s Friday can have solid gore effects again (in the unrated cut, anyhow).  However, before this, we've also gotten a long segment from a satirical 90s true crime show about the legend of Jason Voorhees, so it's not like the snotty attitude has been completely banished, though I bring it up mainly because it's important to mention that this movie, whatever the hell it is, cannot bring itself to start for a good twenty minutes.

When it does start, we meet a few figures who've descended upon Crystal Lake, who either already know about Pseudo-Jason's rampage, or will shortly find out.  There's the bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams, taking the part on the condition he'd be allowed to dress and talk like a cowboy), who's after Jason and is presently being demented and (sigh) sexually demeaning at his waitress at the local diner, Diana Kimble (Erin Gray).  For her part, Diana has some dark secret related to the Voorheeses that you only won't guess because it's been explicitly ruled out by earlier movies, though that hadn't stopped Freddy's Dead.  Also present is Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay), former paramour of Diana's daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan), whom (we may eventually piece together) abandoned Jessica after he knocked her up, and while Steven's come back, she's upped sticks to the city with their child to pursue a relationship with the host of that satirical A Current Affairish show we saw, Robert Campbell (Steven Culp).  If this sounds kind of breathless, one thing that I originally thought was a manifestation of that snotty attitude, though I even sort of liked it, was how haughty the movie was about refusing to hold your hand through its character relationships (there are numerous others I'm not even bothering recapping).  I perceived it as a flex on the makers' part to differentiate this Friday's writing from the usual baldly-stereotyped presentation of teen meat, though it turns out it's at least as much a result of editing being taken away from Marcus and the expository/interstitial material cut to ribbons.  But the effect is the same, and it does a reasonably good job of creating somewhat vital characters embedded into a community (the caricatured Appalachians-of-New-Jersey diner workers are right at the limit, but still fun), thanks especially to a cast that's remarkably game, considering that it's a movie about Jason Voorhees being a demonic bug who gets puked from one victim's mouth to another.

It doesn't mean these characters are good: Steven, who graduates to our hero, is dumb as a post (there's a point about halfway through where his mission has become to convince Jessica that Pseudo-Jason is after her, and he squanders a perfect opportunity with possessed Robert, so that we can have ten more minutes of movie); Creighton, though as much a fan favorite as this movie could generate, is solely a vehicle for two things, expositional lore and weird, stupid bullshit that Williams has openly admitted he didn't understand, which is why his performance is so ticcishly bouncy-eyed, a strategy he developed to try to embrace the senselessness.  Thus does Creighton provide possibly the most profoundly unserious scene in the whole franchise, when his expositional function merges with his weird, stupid bullshit function, and, to provide Steven the information he needs, he exacts the price of dislocating Steven's fingers for each small piece of backstory, apparently for his own amusement.  It's memorable, I guess.

But the brass tacks of it are as follows: Jessica is Pamela Voorhees's granddaughter, and, once Diana's out of the picture, only Jessica can stab Jason in the heart and send him back to hell; by the same token, Jason pursues his kin, because only a Voorhees can rebirth him (this, of course, occurs, hockey mask and all).  In the meantime, various people are killed, though mostly not slasher-style.  The back half of the movie is very much akin to the action-horror of a Terminator or the like, with Pseudo-Jasons of various descriptions chasing the reunited couple through this (heavily-armed) small town.

The strange thing is that I don't know if I've ever hated a movie this much without being able to point to it being extremely boring, or severely line-by-line annoying, or possessing deliriously bad formal deficiencies; but, despite the behind-the-scenes debacle, the movie functions fairly well.  It's not shot beautifully but it's not shot badly by photographer Bill Dill (at worst the blue nighttimes are underlit, but the right balance has been this mostly-night-set series' perennial challenge); it stumbles out of the gate and it's choppy and repetitive even after that, but it's still propulsive; and it certainly received the budget and talent to do its special effects-based horror justice.  (Honestly, there's really only the one enormous formal failure, and, sadly, it's Harry Manfredini's score, a "Casio preset" embarrassment that I would hope simply reflected his estimation that he could do nothing to help this movie, but it's so genuinely awful that it might be the single element doing it the most harm.)  But from the top to the bottom, the movie just doesn't work.  Even the gore, which I sort of praised, isn't really "good": there's a melting body effect, prompted by the deterioration of the bodies that Jason is possessing, that's incredibly well put-together, and it feels like a technical demonstration, with no emotion or sense of gruesome pain attaching to it, bizarrely near-silent as the victim deals with, inter alia, his skin falling off.

So there's all this stuff, and it's executed with some precision but rarely executed right, and the constant sensation is that all of it is wrong, from a Friday standpoint or even just a body-snatcher movie standpoint.  The energy here is so lungingly idiotic that you never forget how wrong.  "Jason the demon bug" is obviously a problem, and it's such a huge swerve it doesn't even feel like some kind of injection of wacky desperation, like (for example) The New Blood did, but always like a brain eater screenplay had the word "JASON" scrawled randomly across its pages, and then some snippets from some witchcraft screenplay were added for good measure.

Even on their merits, though, "the Jason movie" and "the body-snatcher movie" just play together so poorly: the Pseudo-Jasons are, of course, required to be "like Jason."  That means silent and stalking, and obviously the body-snatcher movie doesn't actually want that, though it's startling to discover that ultimately it can't even abide it—Creighton is constantly shrieking about trusting no one, which is complete nonsense because it's always extremely obvious, at forty paces, who's a Jason and who's not... except for that one time, when a Psuedo-Jason actually speaks, and if that was an option, then it's hard to imagine what need there was for 80% of this movie to even happen.  But even when the body-snatcher horror is trying to "do a Jason" in earnest, it's failing that, too; pitched in this register of zombie-like atavism, I don't know what Marcus or Cunningham*** thought Jason was, but he was never just a hungry animal like this.  There's nothing but carelessness regarding all of the contradictions this was always going to bring up, but I can say something kind of nice: the sheer Z-movie indifference of The Final Friday as a story, while the film itself just professionally powers through it, is honestly something of its own perverse achievement.

Score: 2/10

*According to (hedged) dialogue in this film, anyway.

**And yes, I like Scream as much as the next person.

***Who, mind you, had never made a movie about Jason.

Reviews in this series:

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)

Friday the 13th Part III (Miner, 1982)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus and Cunningham, 1993)

Jason X (Isaac, 2002)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)