Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter

 

And here we are with what was originally meant to be the final F13 movie. After three movies they were ready to call it quits, and this one promised the death of Jason Voorhees. Of course this wouldn’t really be the end (not even close) but it’s interesting to see how they’d initially planned on sending him, and the franchise, off. The movie itself is, for the most part, more of the same – teens get slowly stalked and slashed – but it does have a few tweaks, with a couple of stronger (than usual at least) characters.

It starts with a recap of the series, but this is an actual good one, using the footage of Paul from Part II by the campfire telling the legend of Jason Voorhees with footage of important parts from the last three movies playing over. It even gives a montage of many of the kills from the first three movies which really gets you pumped up for more carnage. Unfortunately a lot of the movie doesn’t quite deliver on the promise. It’s par for the course for the most part. It’s fairly entertaining in its simplicity and familiarity, but its kills are mostly basic and it doesn’t have the punch one would expect from what was meant as the ‘final chapter’.

Beginning only a few hours after the last film, paramedics retrieve Jason’s body and take him to the morgue. But Jason isn’t really dead and escapes, slaughtering a few hospital staff before returning once more to Crystal Lake. The next day a group of teenagers head out to a cabin they’ve rented on Crystal Lake for a holiday. The cabin is next to the Jarvis family’s house, home to teenaged Trish (our heroine), her twelve year old brother Tommy (our unlikely hero) and their mother. Also in the woods is handsome camper Rob, mysteriously there to ‘hunt bears’. It isn’t long before Jason arrives on the scene and the killings begin.

Besides Trish, who is once again a nice, forgettable girl, we finally get something of a male protagonist, and it’s one that bucks tradition: Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), a twelve year old horror movie make-up enthusiast (and the first child character in the series). This is one of those rare times where a horror movie has a kid character that doesn’t completely ruin things. Tommy is perfectly fine; he’s never annoying, he’s proactive and helpful (kid knows how to fix an engine), and he even acts like a kid (his obsession with horror movie make-up, his excitement at the prospect of seeing boobs). Tommy Jarvis ends up being the most significant protagonist in a F13 movie, with the events of this film having consequences for the franchise and its next few instalments, which eventually led to Jason becoming the more iconic killer he is known as.

In the finale Tommy manages to trick Jason momentarily by dressing himself up to look like a child version of Jason (somewhat similar to how Ginny in Part II tried to pretend to be Jason’s mother). I have some issues with this – for one, all Tommy had to go on was a crappy hand-drawn ‘artist’s rendition’ of child Jason from a tiny newspaper clipping, so his attention to detail is weird from such a limited, mostly inaccurate reference point. More importantly, considering Jason has spent the last twenty-plus years living in the wilderness and covering his face it’s likely the guy doesn’t actually know/remember what he looked like as a child.

More to the point: Tommy Jarvis kills Jason. Actually kills him. He hits an unmasked Jason in the side of the face with a machete, the blade lodging itself in there. Jason falls to the ground, his head slides down the blade and he’s seemingly dead. When his fingers twitch, Tommy grabs the machete again and starts hacking away at Jason. Kid’s really hardcore. Kid’s also pretty messed up from it, with the final image being a slow close-up of his disturbed little face. This is something that’ll be dealt with in another movie. You see, Tommy Jarvis is probably the most memorable, significant F13 character in the entire series because he’s one of the only reoccurring ones (not counting Alice from the original turning up to get killed in Part II).

Crispin Glover is here as Jimmy, one of the only characters in a F13 movie to get some sort of character arc, regardless how silly. Jimmy starts off as a bit nervous and completely lacking confidence with the ladies after being dumped by his girlfriend (and not helped by his douchebag ‘friend’ Teddy who belittles him), afraid that he’d be unable to get/please another girl, then he loosens up, gains some confidence, dances like he’s spastic and successfully has sex with one of the girls. And then almost immediately after Jason stabs him in the hand with a corkscrew and hits him in the face with a meat cleaver, killing him. It’s about the most characterisation a victim has had in the series to this point.

The rest of the characters are mostly forgettable, mostly there to get hacked up. Rob is the first character we’ve had who is actively there to find and kill Jason. He knows that Jason is still alive and is determined to kill him, though they don’t really explain why. He turns out to be pretty useless in the end. The rest of the teens are just there to die and don’t have much in terms of personality, except for douchebag Teddy who thinks he’s a stud, belittles Jimmy and then strikes out with every single girl in the film before Jason hacks him up.

Jason himself is more imposing here than he was in the last two films. He’s rocking the hockey mask/green jumpsuit look he has for most of the rest of the series, and when he shows up he’s more threatening than he was in the last two. I guess it’s because of his slower walking speed and larger frame. When he’s unmasked he once again looks a bit ridiculous, but more monstrous than he did in Part II and III. He gets beaten up a great deal, which makes sense considering he’s meant to die here. Besides having a machete embedded in his head, one of his hands is cut into and he takes a claw hammer in the neck. He brushes that off though – even in the last two movies he shrugged off a lot of drastic damage, but he could still get hurt.

Make-up artist Tom Savini is back to do the gore effects this time, but unfortunately most of the kills are ordinary or uninspired. It begins with an absolutely awesome one – Jason uses a saw to cut into a mortician’s neck and then twists his head around – but that’s basically the pinnacle, with the majority of the others being pretty basic (stabbed, crushed head, thrown out window, etc.). I do get the impression that some of the kills were edited down for violence (it’s happened in a great many F13 movies actually). Weirdly Jason getting the machete in the face and his head sliding down the blade is still there, which is pretty gruesome (though obviously fake). There’s a lot more nudity in this one than in the first three, with a lot more girls taking their kit off (there’s a skinny dipping scene, and a pair of twins who seem there just to disrobe).

Part IV, besides its premature claims of being the final Friday, actually ended up having the biggest effect on the franchise by far. While the film itself is pretty basic, not straying too far from what had come before, the events in the film would lead to the biggest changes in the next few sequels, with long reaching effects for the franchise and Jason Voorhees.

Of course we aren’t finished yet. Part IV was meant to be the final chapter, but it made a bunch of money so of course they made another one. But Jason is supposed to be dead, right? So how could they continue the series? They found a way, though it might not be the one you’d expect.