JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY
A review by Steve Baumgarten
(sbb@panix.com)
Anyone who goes to see a FRIDAY THE 13TH film at this point is either a hopeless fan or a hopeless idiot; either way, he deserves exactly what he gets. I've enjoyed the FT13 concept--if not always the execution, so to speak--since the first installment over a decade ago (13 years ago, to be precise); so I like to consider myself a hopeless fan. But truth be told, most of the rest of the Times Square audience with which I saw JGTH last Friday night did their best to qualify for the other category. Participatory audiences are fine with me--in fact, most horror films are so lousy that they're only improved by a constant stream of catcalls, smart-aleck remarks, and general wising off until it's time for the next killing. But this audience was a little much; needless to say, I now know what 500 people thinking out loud sounds like. Listening to 90 minutes of "she's going to get killed" and "yeah, she's going to take it off" was enough to make me think that I'd reached *my* final Friday, and that I was now paying for my life of movie-going sins (like slinking off to FT13 PART V when I really should have been seeing THE COLOR PURPLE).
Making things worse was the film itself, which seems to have been assembled from a jumble of pages from the scripts of other, better horror films. It's a little beyond me: why on earth would anyone mess with success at this late date? Here we'd all just been relieved of $7.50, supposedly so that we could see Jason go to Hell--or at least kill a few scantily-clad teenagers and then retire to Miami Beach, where he could reminisce about the good old days, back in the early eighties when the horror film was king and direct-to-video hadn't yet been invented. And all we wanted to see was Jason--not an unreasonable expectation, considering that his billing is even higher than the day of the week this time around. But instead we got a very strange plot, filled with an unpleasant bounty hunter, an unpleasant tabloid TV personality, an unpleasant yuppie, an unpleasant proprietor of an unpleasant roadside diner, and an unpleasantly confused idea: that Jason isn't really beyond explanation, that in fact he's just been possessed all these years by the spirit of ALIEN. Sort of.
I'd like to say that this premise is so lame-brained that the audience was left speechless, even momentarily. But alas, they weren't, although my feeling is that for 90 minutes we were all subjected to Confuse-A-Cat therapy. And the sad part of it is that--briefly, oh so briefly--JGTH looked like it was actually going to be a rather clever finale to the FT13 series. I was especially heartened to see two very witty visuals early on--but two was apparently the limit for the filmmakers, who after about 10 minutes managed to drag the film and our expectations--if not Jason himself--straight down to Hell. So I'll give away the two visuals, just to give you a taste of what might have been. The first came very early on, when a Standard Issue Beautiful Teenage Girl appeared to be moving into an abandoned cabin in the beautiful Camp Crystal Lake area, known the world over for its relaxing atmosphere and plentiful gardening implements, ever at hand. As she enters, the light immediately burns out, and she finds she has to go to an even darker woodshed to find a replacement. She does, in fact, find one: an economy bulb in a package marked "Twice the Life." I liked that. I also liked the insignia on the shoulder of one of Crystal Lake's police officers: it indicated that they were all in Cunningham County--an insider smile for those of us who remember the name of Jason's cinematic godfather, Sean S. Cunningham, who has made a small fortune on the character he helped create in the very first FT13 and has since gone on to make one lousy exploitation film after another. Including this one, which he produced.
The very first scene, is in fact, terrific, as it sends up all the horror cliches that the FT13 series helped spawn. And yet they remained quite effective, even as the S.I.B.T.G. stripped and stepped into the shower. Unfortunately, nothing much comes of all this, as the filmmakers quickly toss aside any thoughts of making a conventional (read: intelligible, sensible, entertaining) horror film. Instead we find that Jason is finally, once and for all, killed, dismembered, cut up, and generally, well, sent to Hell. (Pay no attention to the spoilsport behind the curtain who in a loud and obnoxious voice points out that Jason dissolved at the end of the last installment in the FT13 series: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN. On the other hand, that was actually a very decent film, one of the best in the series, and by the time JGTH had ended, it had gone up another notch or two on my personal Respect-O-Meter. At least it knew what it wanted to do and did it, which is more than I can say of JGTH.)
What happens here is very disheartening. Jason's dismembered corpse is taken to a hospital morgue and placed on a table so that we can look at it for a while. It's in pretty bad shape, all right, but we have confidence that he'll be able to pull himself together and get on with it. You know: JASON TAKES ON AN HMO--something that would really get the audience into it. Wonder of wonders, his heart starts beating, and just as we're all set for the fireworks, the unexpected happens. The unwanted, in fact, but what happens is very central to film's incredibly lame plot. What happens is that the coroner takes a big bite out of Jason's heart. Yum! And, naturally, becomes Jason in some undefined way. In fact, in one of the very few cool scenes in the film, he passes in front of a full-length mirror, and lo and behold, there's Jason, in all his hockey-masked glory. But in real life, all we have is a wimpy-looking coroner on the rampage. Hoo ha.
This was a big mistake. However, there's nothing anyone can do about it FOR THE NEXT 75 GOSH-DARN MINUTES! Instead of Jason, what we get is a succession of wimpy-looking characters, each of whom seems to be on the wrong end of a game of tag that requires the poor soul who's "it" to transfer a slimy-looking thing that looks like it came straight off the set of PARASITE (which, by the way, is an excellent rip-off of ALIEN, made in 1982 in audience-pleasing 3-D, and one of many films that Demi Moore is none too proud of) into someone else's mouth. That part seems to have been stolen from LIFEFORCE, an even worse film, but one which at least had the saving grace of featuring incredibly goofy dialogue and Naked Female Space Vampires.
The dialogue in JGTH is just as lame as the plot, which gets more and more convoluted as we rush headlong toward the promised Final Friday. (Actually, I have no idea what day all this was happening on--shows you just how sloppy the filmmakers were--but to be honest the whole thing felt like Monday morning.) And there are no Naked Female Space Vampires--just coroners, policemen, and tabloid television journalists on various murderous rampages. And this ALIEN-like thing, which really doesn't make any sense, but it's in there anyway. Especially as we reach the tail end of the film, when all is revealed whether we want it to be or not. By this time we've heard from the bounty hunter (who doesn't really get to hunt anything, though he does get to break the yuppie's fingers in a puzzlingly cruel and rather sour scene) and discovered that Jason wants to be reborn, but that this can only happen if he manages to transfer the slimy ALIEN-like thing to his sister or her daughter. And the sister--who, to be honest, I wasn't aware of until this installment and who here seems to be a refugee from Plot Convenience Playhouse--used to be the wife of the yuppie. And her daughter doesn't do anything at all in this film, though in one scene she looks very cute and the whole audience goes "Awwww!"
Have I left anything out? Mind you, this film is exactly 88 minutes long, and if it seems that there's already enough plot for three lousy horror films--or, more to the point, three much better horror films that have already been made--you may be shocked to learn that there is still quite a bit more plot that I haven't even bothered to mention. Late in the game we get a smattering of EVIL DEAD ("Wrong movie!" came the cry from the by now quite actively involved audience) and a magic letter opener which is the only thing able to permanently kill Jason once and for all. Permanently, like. Forever, this time. Not ever to return again. Honest.
Just to ease your minds and relieve the unbearable tension this review has no doubt created, Jason does, in fact, get sent to Hell; at least he gets buried in the backyard by a lot of hands that spring up, CARRIE-style, though in fact we never do get to see the low-budget Hell to which he's been consigned. So you can't sue anyone for false advertising: after all, this is JGTH, not "Someone Finally Makes A Great Jason Movie Instead Of Completely Wasting One Of The Best Horror Movie Characters Of All Time Yet Again." Whether he'll remain there is another question, one that I certainly hope no one bothers to answer. But the signs are bleak: stick around for the surprise finale to see just how low New Line can sink now that they aren't making mega-bucks off the Turtles anymore. Clever horror fans might guess, if they remember what other properties New Line owns; as for the audience Friday night, well, they were pleased as punch and looking forward to the next installment of, well, something. Anything, really. We're not a choosy bunch. As apparently Mr. Cunningham and New Line have realized.
: Steve Baumgarten : sbb@panix.com
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