After a HELL of a consistent run in stories between 1980 and 1989, I find it somewhat disheartening that the first studio outside of Paramount to touch the ‘Friday the 13th’ franchise, not only managed to completely misunderstand the brief, but veer so wildly against what the franchise is actually about that its actually kind of impressive that it managed to fail *quite* so spectacularly for me.

The 9th entry in the ‘Friday the 13th’ series, ‘Jason goes to hell is detached from the rest of the series. Is seemingly set in 1993 (despite the last entry having taken place in 1994) and is effectively an attempt at kinda sorta half heartedly rebooting the franchise.

The…frankly bizarre plot is thus, it’s 1993, the legend of Jason Vorhees has plagued the residents of the nearby town surrounding Crystal lake for over 10 years at this point. So…in order to put this thing to bed once and for all, the FBI organise a mass SWAT intervention at Crystal lake, they send a woman up there to get naked (thats…literally all she does) which instantly summons Jason (who here looks like a badly packed sausage…for some reason…) The woman lures him out into an open field, where it’s revealed its all a trap and swarms of FBI agents open fire on Jason, LITERALLY blowing him up into tiny pieces.

They all celebrate a job well done, but obviously this movie isnt 10 minutes long (god I wish it was) and so instead, Jasons remains are scooped up and bagged…including his heart, which is still weirdly beating, and continues to do so all the way to the morgue. Once at the morgue the resident patholgist documents Jasons body, but Jasons still beating heart somehow mezmorises and hypnotises the pathologist who, without warning, picks the heart up and eats it…thus becoming possessed by the spirit of Jason Vorhees.

We then cut to the town outside of Crystal lake where a bounty hunter by the name of Duke is on the hunt for Jason, convinced he isnt dead and looking to finish the job. At the same time a local by the name of Steve freeman is driving the highways outside of crystal lake when he picks up some partying teens who are planning to head to the lake to do LOTS of naughty things now that Jason cant get them.

While dropping them off at the lake however, the possessed pathologist turns up, butchers them and starts heading back into town. Steven and Duke wind up in jail accused of the teens murders where its revealed that Duke knows whats going on, and informs Steve that Jason has living relatives, and that those relatives are the only ones who can put an end to him once and for all.

Theres certain things I come to a ‘Friday the 13th’ movie for, and I should clarify at this point that im not a stickler for ‘sticking to the formula’ dont get me wrong, im HAPPY for some new ideas to be injected into franchises as I feel it gives them new lifeblood.

But the choices made in ‘The Final Friday’ to me at least, show a fundamental misunderstanding of Jason as a character. In essence the films 1 part ‘Childs Play’ to 1 part ‘Evil Dead’ to 1 part ‘Halloween 2’ with a smidge of the old ‘Demon possession’ genre sprinkled in for good mix.

We dramatically shift from a series that has THE most simple plot point in horror movie history (invincible killer takes vengence on improper teens because as a child, teens behaving badly led to his death.) to a total abandonment of that, and embracing of the supernatural and very little else. This is literally just 90 minutes of people pretending to be Jason, with some bollocks about ‘half sisters’ and ‘previously unknown babies’ thrown into the mix. NON of this has EVER even BEGUN to be hinted at in the previous 8 installments. and the fact that the film ITSELF doesnt seem to know exactly what it’s main characters history is, nor does it solidly want to commit to anything, is concerning.

The thing reeks of ‘TV Movie’ vibes, with large gulfs of nothingness being punctuated by totally meaningless gore (apparently theres an extended cut that doesnt nothing else but put MORE meaningless gore in…yay…) the plot is just silly by this point. It seems they only put the ‘teens partying at crystal lake’ angle in because all they knew was they had to have teens attacked at crystal lake or the fandom might complain.

The pacing is a turtles crawl, the tone is all OVER the place and equally confusing. Theres no clean act structures here everything is just seemingly happening all at once with no rhyme or reason. the characters are all unlikable mostly and feel undercooked.

Honestly? if I were to speculate. This feels like a rejected ‘Halloween’ script (Michael gets killed, ressurects in random bodies and Laurie has to protect her daughter and grandchild from him) that, once it got rejected was reworked into a ‘Jason vs Tommy Jarvis’ script…which also got rejected before finally being settled in as a retooled version that crams ‘Childs Play’, ‘Evil Dead’ and ‘hellraiser’ easter eggs in to try and keep the audience on side. I mean…this is the entry that tries to insinuate that Jason is some kind of ‘Deadite’…if you need any more evidence for how little the scriptwriters understood the source material…there you go.

the direction and cine are of studio standard. but poor, it’s heavily styalized, but everything so darkly lit and shot its hard to figure out exactly whats going on on screen. the sequence building is messy and unconventional, it feels like entire scenes of explanation have been left on the cutting room floor, ‘Exploded sausage’ Jason is EASILY the worst design the series has ever had. he looks like someone put a slab of spam in a boiler suit.

Everything just has this overhanging ‘made for tv’ vibe to it, and I cant shake it, the quality has downgraded SO MUCH in 4 years. It really feels like this was just shot on a backlot somewhere using whatever tools the director could get his hands on.

The cine is poorly composed, badly edited together with an overeliance on cutaway footage to try and make this nonsensical shoot make sense. Theres little in the way of iconography, though the film does introduce Jasons fathers name into the franchise…though…it doesnt do anything with that information sooo….

Outside of Duke (whos basically just a sociopath) I couldnt tell you a single thing about the performances here, SO unmemorable they are that as soon as the credits rolled, i’d already forgotten half the character names. They’re stiff, with awkwardly delivered dialogue, they dont animate facially and it’s really hard to even begin to care for them. Performances in the ‘Friday the 13th’ films have always struggled to really deliver on character…but this is WELL beyond poor, even when compared to the poorer offerings in previous entries.

Even the soundtrack takes a hit, with cheap and nasty synthy sounding 90’s-ified takes on that lovely 80’s orchestral style that the original films had. its awful.

I always try to praise a film that tries something thats different from whats been established before it. But at the same time, certain acknowledgements DO have to be made when dealing with a franchise, and here? It feels like the producers just had a load of scripts and pitch ideas floating about, got he F13 license and decided to rush something out ASAP by blending all their pitches into a slurry of a story.

Surprisingly I actually tolerated this film better this time around than the first time I saw it, the first time I saw it my DVD copy of the movie made a direct beeline out of my dvd player and into my bin in one smooth glided motion before the credits had even begun to run.

Easily the worst ‘Friday the 13th’ movie i’ve seen to date, ‘Jason goes to hell’ deserves to be dropped in your nearest well…preferrably as soon as possible.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/jason-goes-to-hell-the-final-friday/