Rating:

The Friday the 13th series has a long history spanning a whole bunch of movies, and in any situation like that you’re going to have a vast range in terms of quality. Jason Goes to Hell was by and large pretty nifty whereas Jason X was a complete piece of shit. The original film was a great one, to be sure, but when it came time for each passing sequel, you never quite knew what you were in for. My feeling is that, of all the sequels, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is by far the best. In fact, I’m even inclined to say it outshines the original picture, and that’s pretty impressive for any series that’s four movies deep. This chapter of the story has a whole heck of a lot of things about it that I love, some of them quirky oddities and some of them genuine horror moments, that help it to stand a cut above the rest. Let’s take a look at some of those things.

The GoreThe gushy bits are the real star of any Friday the 13th movie. Thankfully, this one was made a time when the prevailing trend in horror was to splash all the blood and guts over the screen in their full glory rather than to cut away and force the audience to use its imagination. BORING! There are a few dynamite examples of the kind of killing that makes me want to build a medium-sized shrine to horror films in the center of my home and bow down before it daily. There are your standard Friday the 13th stabbings through the back of the neck of course, but we’ve come to expect–nay, demand–that sort of thing by this point. But there are some far more noteworthy moments of unapologetic violence to be found in this one. A guy gets stabbed in the groin with a spear, for example, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. One particularly wonderful moment is when Jimbo (Crispin Glover, of all people) is in a darkened kitchen searching for a corkscrew? “Where the hell’s the corkscrew,” he asks, and boy does he find out. Jason jams it into his hand before finishing him off with a meat cleaver to the face. (If only that happened to Crispin in all his movies, am I right? “Hey you, get your damn hands off her!” WHACK!) This movie also contains what is perhaps my single favorite moment of gore in the entire Friday the 13th series. At the film’s climax, the final showdown between Jason and his terrorized vitims, poor Jason gets sliced in the side of the head with his own machete. That’s awesome enough, but consider also that the machete gets stuk in his head. That, too, is awesome enough. But now consider that the force of the blow causes Jason to fall down and on his way to the floor the hilt of the machete lands on the coffee table. As a result, the blade is slowly pushed further and further through his head until his eye bulges out, which is pretty goddamn righteous if you should ask me (and you should).

Two Examples of Total Spazzes

Among all the naked people and murdering, we also get a chance to see two actors acting like total nutcases. First is Corey Feldman as young Tommy Jarvis (if the Friday the 13th series can be said to have any recurring hero character, he’s it). Early in the picture he is peeking out his window into the house next door and sees a couple of teenagers getting ready to go at it. This excites him, to say the least. He starts hopping around like a rabbit on methamphetamines, bouncing here and there while cackling like mad. But his gaze always returns to the nudie show going on across the way, the sicko. But the bizarre maneuvers of Corey Feldman are not the weirdest phsycials movements in this film, not by a long shot. For the truly unusual we must turn, as always, to Crispin Glover. When he and the rest of his teen comrades are having a party, preparing to engage in all the behaviors that are guaranteed to get you killed in a movie like this, Glover turns on some music and starts “dancing.” I put quotations around the word because what he appears to be doing is having a grand mal seizure. His spastic gyrations have nothing to do with the rhythm of the music or anything else in this universe. Words truly fail me. No mere sentence can do justice to the absolutely batshit things he’s doing with his body. As a special bonus, the director of the film alleges that this wasn’t any bit Crispin was doing, no sir. This was apparently the actual dance he was doing when he went out to clubs with his friends. Yes, Crispin Glover had friends, even after he danced like that. Amazing, isn’t it?

Awesome Dialogue
One of the greatest things about the slasher films of the eighties was the dialogue, which ranged from the poor to the awesomely poor to the downright nutty. This movie is no exception. One prime example is when a nurse refers to the man who lusts after her as “the Super Bowl of self abuse.” How one person can be like the Super Bowl I don’t really know. This same nurse has another great line a few minutes later. When she’s leaving the room and asked where she’s going, her reply is: “I’ll tell you where I’m going! I’m going crazy!” That’s the kind of writing that most of us can only dream of. Another awesome combination of words comes when one of the minor characters is surprised by Jason. He leaps up and lets out the following string of random profanity: “Jesus Christmas! Holy Jesus goddamn! Holy Jesus jumping Christmas shit!” I don’t know about you, but I frankly can’t wait until after Thanksgiving when everyone has big sales on all their jumping Christmas shit. Taking the cake, though, is an ongoing discussion throughout the movie about Crispin Glover (who else?) being a “dead fuck.” The characters go on and on about it, much to Crispin’s chagrin. The phrase “dead fuck” originated when a particularly irritating character named Teddy ran information about Crispin through an imaginary computer and maintained that was the result it spewed out. So I guess what I’m saying is, all the dialogue in this movie is pure gold.So yeah, I totally recommend this movie if you’re into the whole slasher thing. Jason didn’t get his hockey mask until midway through the third picture, so this is the first one where it’s fully the Jason we’ve come to know and love. The balance between goofiness and spookiness is struck just about perfectly, and the ambiguous and downright creepy ending makes this a somewhat more thought provoking entry in the series than any of the others. If you’re only going to see one movie in the series, I’d recommend this one. That may be blasphemy from people who would swear you should see the original, but hey. Those fuckers can get their own website.If you don’t like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, then you will also totally hate: Freddy Vs. Jason

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Freddy Vs. Jason
• Saw Series in a Nutshell
• Creepshow
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
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