Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

“In a Voorhees was he born. Through a Voorhees may he be reborn. And only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die.” – Creighton Duke

Jason surely DID go to hell in this film, that’s no lie – but not in the way you’d expect. Perhaps a better title would’ve been Jason Goes to Hell in a Handbasket. Paramount was done with the character, and New Line were eager to get their hands on a horror franchise, having run their own into the ground, particularly with Freddy’s dead: The Final Nightmare eight years earlier. Unfortunately, the company didn’t seem to know what to do with Jason, so they reinvented him in a way, and added in some new rules to the mythology they decided to create, and they brought in the old cliched trope of Jason having blood relative we had never heard of before – as well as a character who seemed to have some backstory with Jason, which was new to the audiences. It all became messy and unsatisfying. But – and here’s the thing, it’s not a bad horror movie overall. Very reminiscent (to the point of being a rip-off) of an earlier sci-fi horror from New Line called The Hidden, but an acceptable movie to while away an hour and a half. Having said that – it’s an absolutely lousy Jason movie, cheating us, effectively, of the main reason we watch these films – Jason Voorhees, while bewildering Jason fans with a slew of back new backstory and mythology while ignoring most of the previous films.

When New Line bought the rights, they bought the rights to Jason Voorhees only. (Which when you think about it is remarkably short sighted and immediately threw up some problems.) Paramount retained the title “Friday the 13th” meaning New Line couldn’t even use THAT on their movie, hence “Final Friday”. Jason’s drowning in the lake was mentioned, but no flashback scenes, no returning characters – which REALLY hurt the film, as we’ll see.

The highlights of the film, from the perspective of a Friday the 13th fan – or this particular one, at least, are the beginning, and the end. The film starts with a lone young woman driving to a cabin at Crystal Lake, one evening. She arrived just as it’s getting dark. Entering the cabin, she switches on the light, and the bulb blows. Having warily gone to an outbuilding in the dark to find a replacement, she decides to take a shower – as the cabin is again plunged into darkness and the menacing music builds up the tension even further. This opening sequence plays every trope of these movies perfectly. We even jump when Jason makes his expected appearance. And to give credit where it’s due, his appearance this time is nastier than ever – his hockey mask seems to have sunk into his face, with the skin growing around it. Kane Hodder, now appearing for the third time seems larger and more menacing than ever as the girl, now clad in only a wrapped around towel (naturally) runs into night, with Jason in pursuit.

Here, the cliches end.

Luring him into a clearing, the girl dives for cover and Jason finds himself ambushed by the FBI and a SWAT team who shower him with bullets before delivering the coup-de-grace with a rocket launcher that literally blows him to bits.

So, the takeaway from this is that after, according to what we’re told in the film, over eighty victims over the past nineteen years, the FBI finally decided to do something about the most prolific serial killer in American, if not world history. Come on, guys – it’s not as if Jason’s hard to find. He operates in a very limited area. Also, I’ve never understood exactly how the Feds managed to set up this ambush without Jason noticing. He seemed to know instantly when there was a new lone potential victim in the area – how did he fail to spot a virtual army of armed marksmen? More than that – how did he make his way back from the Manhattan sewer? (But of course, it was decided to completely ignore the events of the past movies.)

Okay, so Jason’s gathered up and taken for an examination in a morgue. I don’t think this is a post mortem as such because he’s literally in bits, so the cause of death is pretty damn obvious – decapitation and dismemberment by bazooka. (The poor guy wasn’t even read his rights).

Guarding the morgue are two SWAT officers, one of whom is played by Kane Hodder, out from behind the mask. But inside – the coroner (Richard Gant) makes a startling discovery. Although blown clean out of his body, Jason’s black heart is still beating. And when I say black, it literally is black and nasty looking. The coroner is influenced into eating the heart, which means he now contains the essence of Jason. (Yeah… I know). And although he appears as the coroner to people who see him, if they see his reflection, they see Jason (Hodder) as he was before the FBI ambushed him.

Enter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams) – a bounty hunter who’s tangled with Jason before and has been hired by the host of a TV true crime show to kill Jason once and for all, because Duke knows that Jason’s not really dead. Jason has to be killed by a blood relative. He must be stabbed in the heart by a blood relative, to be specific. Similarly, he can be reborn through a blood relative. If the parasite now inside the coroner can be passed to a blood relative, then he’ll be reborn as his big old familiar self. Any body he inhabits in the meantime, he’ll just burn out – and he’s already burnt the coroner out and is inhabiting the body of a deputy. (The depth of Duke’s knowledge makes more sense when you understand that originally, Duke was supposed to be Tommy Jarvis from F13 Pts 4, 5 & 6 – until copyright reared its head.)

So, who are these relatives Jason has suddenly acquired?

Well, there’s a half-sister Diana (Erin Grey), her daughter Jessica (Kerry Keegan) and baby granddaughter. Any of those will do as a host for his rebirth. Sadly, Diana isn’t around for long and is killed by accident by the guy who’s trying to save her from the possessed deputy, which opens a sub plot as he’s the estranged father of her granddaughter and gets himself arrested. Daughter Jessica is being set up by her new suitor, the crime show presenter who has hired Duke and wants to spice up his ratings no matter who gets killed.

Okay, so it’s getting messy – right? In a nutshell, Jason hops from body to body, recognisable only by his reflection until they’re all in the Voorhees home and he uses Diana’s corpse to be reborn in his familiar Hodderesque guise for the final reel. In the Voorhees house, we see some familiar props, including the crate that contained the Tasmanian Devil in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982) in the cellar. But of more interest and maybe controversy is the discovery of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, the Book of the Dead from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead (1982) along with the Kandarian dagger from the same film. There was an idea at an early stage of the script to tie Jason in with the Evil Dead, and that Pamela Voorhees had used the incantations from Book of the Dead to resurrect her son after drowning, which would, it was supposed, explain how he was so difficult to kill. But again, copyright. New Line didn’t own The Evil Dead. But curiously, they still had Jessica use the Kandarian dagger to stab Jason.

So, the souls of those who Jason had killed over the past two decades are released from his body (this never having been part of the mythos, this is clearly Freddy territory) as demon hands burst out of the soil and drag Jason presumably to hell.

The following morning, a dog wanders to the site of Jason’s demise and sniffs at Jason’s discarded mask. The dog wanders away again, just before Freddy’s knife clad hand emerges out of the soil and drags it down.

Here’s a stunning piece of trivia from Kane himself about that closing scene, taken from my 2007 GoreZone interview with him;

“I played Freddy’s gloved hand at the end of “Jason Goes to Hell” and in “Leatherface” the third of the original “Chainsaw” movies, I actually was Leatherface for half the picture. I’d like to have played Michael Myers for Rob Zombie to round off my horror icon resume.”

Sadly, to date, Hodder hasn’t been a part of the Halloween series, but he has added Victor Crowley in the Hatchet series to his resume of returning characters. And despite this being The Final Friday, he wasn’t quite done with Jason yet – but it’d be a new century when he reappeared.

To be continued.