Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

There’s a moment in Friday the 13^th Part 3 where the party featuring Dana Kimmel’s lead heroine pass by on a road overlooking the camp slaughtered during Friday the 13^th Part 2, tying the both films together. Director Joseph Zito starts The Final Chapter at the conclusion of Friday the 13^th Part 3, keeping a time line closely stitched together.

Zito brings an exciting opening to this film with all the patrol cars, cops, gurneys carrying off the dead, paramedics arriving, establishing yet another crime scene with a lot of victims to be identified by parents and relatives. Zito follows this round up until its close, as all the vehicles leave, the location now empty, the sounds of bugs and animals only left. It left a chilling effect to me for some reason.

I don’t know where it started, but in this sequel, Jason’s hand falls out of the sheet draped over him while on the gurney; it is a technique I have seen used multiple times, like in Halloween 4.

In this film we get a name for the county, Wessex, that has Camp Blood and other cabins and homes located on Jason’s hunting grounds. Rob Dier, who meets the film’s heroine and child hero, is an interesting character in that his sister, Sandra, was a victim of Jason’s.

While the film was supposed to be the final film in the Friday series, The Final Chapter turns out to be the start of the “Tommy Trilogy”, as the young kid, Tommy Jarvis would be a rival/adversary to Jason Voorhies, the one responsible for ultimately killing him, and later able to keep him under the water of Crystal Lake through a chain to a boulder. The New Beginning, the next Friday the 13^th film (which is basically the Halloween III of the Friday the 13^th franchise since Jason isn’t technically in the film but in two nightmare sequences), really doesn’t feature Tommy against Jason, but still has the Jarvis character as a disturbed, mute teenage male stuck at a camp for troubled/mentally handicapped young adults, in a fight with an imposter who took up the Voorhies disguise.

You have to keep in mind that the director of this particular film in the series was behind The Prowler, also working with make-up grue specialist Tom Savini, a film with a killer so savage he slowly brutalizes a showering victim with a pitchfork, buries blades deep into the bodies of the innocent, and ultimately takes a shotgun blast to the chops. So in this film, the brutality quotient of the murders committed is taken up a notch.

I think the most powerful kill isn’t even seen, where Rob cries aloud as Trish flees from the scene in horror, “He’s killing me! He’s killing me!” I think what punctuates this is the sudden silence. Trish returns to the basement, only for Jason to come at her.

Jason is a seemingly indestructible force who takes a hammer shot multiple times and a television to the head, not to mention, he’s stabbed in the neck with the two-pronged tail of the aforementioned hammer. Before escaping the morgue, Jason (while still lying still in the barn with an ax buried in his forehead), was declared dead, so how he is able to actively pursue and overpower anyone is a mystery.

Something else: lots of going through windows. The Jarvis pet dog, Gordon takes a dive through a window, as does final girl, Trish, and one of the twins is pulled through a window, falling into a crashing heap onto the top of a station wagon (exploding the windows; it’s epic!).

The Final Chapter, as a criticism or celebration depending on your viewpoint, is the quintessential kill-set piece slasher as it introduces a set of friends with sex on the mind, renting a cabin near our Jarvis family, practically all accomplishing that goal but suffering terribly afterward. While the kills are immediate and quick, not slow, methodical bloodshed but instead bursts of vicious violence that punch and run, there’s a “woah” factor that leaves its mark.

When you see a handsome young man’s face smashed in while vulnerably naked in a shower after making love to a pretty girl (who later gets an ax to the chest after admitting she had fallen in love with Doug (Peter Barton, the guy who gets the face crush)), a girl speared to the cabin, a fancy corkscrew slammed into a hand before the victim gets a hatchet to his face, a scalpel cut straight down a nurse’s torso, and a hacksaw splitting apart a mortician’s head as it is twisted completely around, it’s hard not to see that this is a film specifically built as a kill-set piece slasher.

This goes for the jugular, and director Zito pulls no punches, allowing Savini to just go to work: they seem inspired to make the most violent slasher of the Friday series. If they are to kill the kids here, then do it with a Jason so inhuman and monstrous, and have him totally annihilate them.

Nothing against Kane Hodder, as I recognize he’s a fan favorite, but my personal favorite Jason is Ted White. He’s fast and furious, comes at those he wants to kill (mainly Kimberly Beck’s Trish) with a vengeance and sense of urgency, and when he kills it is with purpose and authority. This Jason isn’t about fooling around, or idly biding his time, and is right to business from the get-go. I just consider him the scariest of the Jason’s I’ve seen in the Friday movies. He’s a force of nature and just keeps coming no matter what Trish or eventually Tommy does to him with the infamous machete.

As I mentioned in a previous review for Friday the 13^th Part 3, I find it fun to watch how each stunt man approached the character of Jason. Most of this film has Jason off screen, his arms and hands blunt force objects of destruction towards victims just minding their own business. When he finally becomes a full figure in the film it occurs as he pursues Trish. The hockey mask has its moment in the film, but this Jason is about the killer finally meeting his end, all fit and proper, his grotesque face (courtesy of Savini’s creature workshop excellence) sliding down the machete after taking it deep in the left eye. Zito and Savini truly send Jason off in style.

  ------------------------------------------------------

Like the third film in the series, Jason now no longer discriminates…he kills anybody. After the second film, the reason behind why Jason still hunted down kids or any other person, adult or otherwise, that is even close to Crystal Lake, no longer matters. The franchise developed Jason as a kill machine: the scene where the hitchhiker gets it in the throat while eating a banana and the mortician and nurse, who also get it real good, are examples of just people that are in his vicinity, nothing at all associated with Jason’s drowning or his mother’s beheading. 

While fans of the series really placed little merit in reasoning for butchering victims, I can’t fault critics who rip the Friday movies to shreds for running characters through the grinder to highlight the advance in gore effects. For us, part of the fun is seeing characters introduced, their various quirks, desires, personalities, and plans for the trip (mostly, how to get hooked up with a girl or guy) exposed prior to Jason massacring them. A lot of the time, characters like Crispin Glover’s, leave a lasting impression; his dance, in particular, and just wanting to get laid, while his wise-cracking, playfully abusive buddy (Lawrence Monoson)calls him a “dead fuck”. You get twins, Judie Aronson naked and admittedly very sexually active with her beau, Paul, and Matthew Starr himself, Peter Barton, of the soap opera Young and the Restless, getting his face rearranged. Poor Paul (Clyde Hayes) gets it the worst, with that harpoon crotch lift off the ground. 

Jason’s strength is ridiculous in this film..he literally caves in a door by just exploding through it and to lift Paul (not a small fellow, let me tell you..) up with a harpoon like that, it just defies logic. This is Friday the 13^th, so I know those who are drawn to the series could give a flip about logic or the law of physics. Seeing Jason explode through a window or door is just cool. And how he takes Tommy’s bedroom door apart with the chopping ax is also rather badass. Logic is hurled like that hammer from Jason’s hand towards Trish’s head (stuck in the wall with brute force) with an emphasis on how almighty the hockey-masked madman is.

 The Uh Oh Show

  ------------------------------------------------------------------
It was an interesting way to close the film, kind of hinting at the possibility that Tommy might take up where Jason left off, kind of open the door, so to speak, for another series of films with a brand new psychopath. Seeing Feldman in the bald head cap was funny, the way he just screams out over and over, "Die!Die!Die!" as he continues to slam that machete on an obvious cushion (a lot of squirting blood to accompany each strike would have ruled!), and his mad eyes while hugging sis. Like Part 5 attempted to do with having Tommy off the deep end it seemed, this idea fizzles out.