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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

The creators of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter marketed their film by suggesting that this would be the last opportunity to experience ultimate terror at the hands of Jason Voorhees, everybody’s favorite hockey mask-wearing, forest-dwelling, deformed face-having, mass murdering loner. They lied. But, I will keep my promise. This is the last Friday the 13th Fest entry. I can no longer justify wasting any of my time watching these predictable crapfests.

The Final Chapter is nothing more than a collection of inconsistencies, implausibilities, and nonsensical plot twists so ridiculous that even M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t make them worse. Some evidence:

• The film starts out with the now expected recap of events from the previous film. Unfortunately, this recap wasn’t like that of Karate Kid II, which offered highlights from the All Valley Karate Tournament ta the end of The Karate Kid. That recap actually helped us revisit the emotions we felt as Daniel beat Johnny at the film’s conclusion. For The Final Chapter, they literally Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V’d the entire end of Friday the 13th: Part III as if nobody would notice.

• After starting The Final Chapter with another viewing of Jason’s “death” from Friday the 13th: Part III, we follow his body to the hospital–wait, why are they taking his dead body to the hospital!? Are they going to unkill him?

• A necrophiliac doctor refers to a female corpse as still being attractive and then solicits sex from a nurse by asking her to meet him in the “cold room”. What demographic is this kind of humor targeting?

• A bunch of kids drive by a headstone on the side of the road. It reads “Pamela Voorhees” (Jason’s mother). Who on earth would bury this mass murderer in a clearly visible headstone on the side of the road?

• In the one-sheet above, where does the blood come from if the mask isn’t on a face when someone stabbed it through the eye hole?

• The Final Chapter stars a young Crispin Glover, who inadvertently managed to be just as creepy as he was in his later films, and Corey Feldman, the most famous of the half dozen famous Coreys of the 1980’s, and it was still the worst entry in the series (so far).

• There is a sequence about halfway through the movie when Crispin Glover does a strange, robotic dance routine. It was the only scary part of the movie. It gave me nightmares for a week. I still can’t figure out if his dancing was absolutely horrible or if it was really good in 1980’s dance terms.

• Everyone seems to be wearing La Coste polo shirts. When did these shirts become so expensive?

• Of course, there are two more skinny dipping scenes full of 80s boobs and butts.

• Toward the end, Corey Feldman’s character is told to run away from the house while his sister tries to kill Jason. Instead of running, he inexplicably goes to the bathroom, trims and then shaves off his hair to varying levels of success, and transforms himself into something that ultimately inspired Peter Jackson’s version of Gollum. There is absolutely no explanation for why he does this, and must frustrating of all, this strategy somehow distracts Jason long enough for Feldman’s sister to kill Jason.

That’s all I have to say. I will leave you with this final image of Gollum 1.0 and 2.0. The Final Chapter was my final attempt to develop some kind of appreciation for the Friday the 13th series, but it’s just not going to happen. There are many, much better movies to watch, including but not limited to: Bebe’s Kids, Shakes the Clown, Sweet Home Alabama, any of the Air Bud movies, and the entire Land Before Time series. I’d even throw in The Dark Knight (aka Badman II) but only for posterity.

Friday the 13th: Part III

The creators of Friday the 13th: Part III believed so strongly in their heaping pile of suckiness that they even added a third dimension of suckiness: depth. Woooo. Yes, Friday the 13th: Part III was released to audiences in glorious early 1980’s 3-D. “You too can be stabbed in the gut by a forest-dwelling lunatic named Jason!” was their tagline. How could a moviegoer possibly turn down that opportunity?

Unfortunately, the filmmakers forgot to add the most important dimension of all: a point. Yes, the movie had the familiar group of sex crazed, 1980’s-looking 1980’s youths causing mischief in the forest. Yes, it had three local “gangsters” who must have filmed their roles after walking right off the set of the Beat It music video. Yes, it had the same maniacal, deformed killer roaming the woods in silence, stabbing or crushing to death anything that moved. Yes, it featured a death scene in which Jason embeds a machete in the face a wheelchair-bound youth and sends him crashing down a flight of stairs. But why?

Why is Jason killing everyone? He never had a relationship with his mother, who, in Friday the 13th Part I, killed everyone “in Jason’s honor” because she thought he drowned as a child. But he didn’t drown. If he and his mother had been in contact throughout his life, one might infer that Jason’s bloodlust is an expression of grief after his mother’s death. However, he and his mother didn’t know about each other until somewhere between Friday the 13th I and II. I can understand him being upset to have his mother die shortly after being reunited. However, the reality is that his mother was also a barbarian, and she deserved to have her head lopped off by a machete.

Why are his face and head so deformed? He nearly drowned but didn’t. Somehow, he survived by himself in the woods through adolescence and into adulthood. That may account for his warped views of the world, but it doesn’t explain why he can’t speak or why he looks like a cross between the soldier who opened the Arc of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Arc, Sloth from The Goonies, and Fire Marshall Bill from In Living Color.

Why does Jason wear the hockey mask? If he is going to kill everyone who sees him, it shouldn’t matter whether they see his face or not. In fact, his strange appearance might actually scare them more, which would help in killing them. Let’s take a step back and examine why there was even a hockey mask in the first place. It makes no sense that a character would have packed an ice hockey mask to attend a summer camp.

Why didn’t they make a spin-off series for the prankster character who originally brought the hockey mask? I thought his staged death pranks throughout the movie were actually more frightening than the death scenes involving Jason. Update: it might have been his hair and acting that frightened me most.

Why has Jason progressively grown in size and developed a set of specialized killing capabilities? If Jason was left to raise himself in the forest, how did he nourish himself to such excess that he grew to be 8 feet tall and have super-human strength? In one scene, he crushes picks up a grown man by the head and crushes his skull. In another, he stabs one of the 80s gangster characters with a pitchfork so hard that the character dies while hanging on the wall. One of my favorite scenes is when Jason shoots some kind of harpoon from 50 yards and nails his victim right in her eye. How would he be that accurate of a shooter? Why would they have a harpoon at a summer camp?

What’s the deal with the opening scene? In the opening scene, we are introduced to an entirely unlikable old couple. The situation completely deteriorates when the man decides to make a #2 run to the bathroom. As the man is doing his business, he sees something move outside, and without taking the generally accepted sanitary steps, he decides to investigate. Let me remind you at this point: this is all being filmed. It’s part of the movie. From an aerial perspective, the camera then flashes back to the toilet, which is completely empty–not even water! Why was this part of the movie????

So many questions, so few answers. That doesn’t mean I was totally unsatisfied. After all, I finally found out the origins of the hockey mask–Jason picks it up randomly and puts it on toward the end of the movie. It’s not at all important to the plot, and the hockey mask’s place in popular culture was obviously unintentional. I can’t imagine the writers saying, “Hey, we got this terrible movie–how can we ensure another 20 years of crappy but lucrative movies, games, and accessories? A hockey mask! It’s almost too easy.”

This movie was a total disaster. Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter is up next. We know it’s not really the final movie, but it stars both Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman. Quite the duo.

Friday the 13th: Part II

After enjoying the not entirely terrible original Friday the 13th, I was actually looking forward to seeing the first of 11 sequels, if only to get one step closer to finding out how the darn hockey mask is worked into the series. I was once again let down. No hockey mask. No explanations. No flashback scenes of a young Jason putting up his favorite Wayne Gretsky poster. No hockey mask-related insight whatsoever.

In fact, this movie provided virtually nothing of value at any point. A few examples:

• A few minutes into the movie, we are introduced to a stereotypical 80s-looking guy who has rigged some sort of rudimentary slingshot that he employs with such precision that from 50 feet he is able to strike a stereotypical 80s-looking girl right in butt. Maybe this was standard 1981 behavior.
• Later, this same 80s guy steals the same 80s girl’s clothes from the shore while she is inexplicably skinny dipping in the middle of the night. When she returns to find 80s guy holding her clothes, she conveniently uses her arms to cover her chest but not her naked lower anatomy. Curious. She then chases 80s guy into the woods, and ultimately, to his doom, when he is randomly captured in some kind of rope booby trap, which Jason later uses to easy slit his throat. What?
• Friday the 13th: Part II takes place five years after the original events at Camp Crystal Lake, enough time for extreme weather variations to ravage the nation. Though the aforementioned 80s-looking girl is able to most comfortably swim under the moonlight, just a day earlier she and her 80s-looking peers huddled around a campfire wearing long pants and heavy jackets.

The biggest problem with Friday the 13th Part II is that it already follows its own formulaic formula: we are introduced to a group of sex-crazed counselors heading to summer camp; we are forced to endure obscene levels of blonde-haired men; an anonymous lunatic finds creative ways to kill unsuspecting 80s-looking camp counselors; cars won’t start during chase sequences; Jason is revealed as the lunatic; Jason somehow has supernatural, demonic powers that allow him to be almost entirely invincible except for a little-known susceptibility to the classic kick to the groin area; one random girl survives by running into an attic and finding a random chainsaw that somehow doesn’t require a power supply of any kind to turn on; Jason “dies”, I guess, leaving a trail of dead 80s-looking youths behind, and the lone surviving girl suffers a lifetime of post-traumatic stress. Cue bad music.

Friday the 13th Part II only slightly advances the story of Jason Voorhies, but it was enough to keep me interested in the ending. Once I realized there wasn’t going to be a hockey mask, I had only knowledge that the ending must come to keep me going. I knew from the start that all but one person was going to survive, so there was no point investing in any of the characters. They were all idiots anyway. I spent half the movie writing this Journal entry while people were murdered in the background.

No hockey mask. No story advances. No Kevin Bacon.

Friday the 13th Part II, I award you no points. I’m still watching the next sequel, though. Buh.