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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
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| Year: |
1984
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Director: |
Joseph Zito
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| Stars: |
Kimberly Beck, Erich Anderson, Corey Feldman, Barbara Howard, Peter Barton, Lawrence Monoson, Joan Freeman, Crispin Glover, Clyde Hayes, Judie Aronson, Camilla More, Carey More, Bruce Mahler, Lisa Freeman, Wayne Grace, Bonnie Hellman, Ted White
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| Genre: |
Horror |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
It appears as if the killer Jason Vorhees has finally been vanquished thanks to a well-placed axe to the head from a girl who would have been one of his victims. The ambulance arrives to take away the body, and one of the medics is feeling jumpy, starting when Jason's lifeless hand falls from under the sheet on the stretcher. They get the body back to the hospital and into the morgue, but one of the orderlies is less interested in attending to the corpse than he is getting to know one of the nurses. But exactly how dead is Jason? Those two are about to find out...
Of course he's not dead, they wouldn't kill him off at the start of the movie, and so it is one of the most durable bad guys in shockers, if maybe not one of the best, began what was promised by the title to be his last outing. And the band played believe it if you like, because The Final Chapter made more money than all the other Friday the 13ths, thereby guaranteeing that it would return in some form or another. To top it all, the producers had found a formula that apparently worked like a cash fountain dream, meaining there was a sense of glee in this instalment that was missing from the previous ones.
In effect, this was the best Friday since the first one, not a bold claim but at least giving some satisfaction to those growing tired of Jason's antics. Although most of them would not be watching this, so it was the horde of fans that this was aimed at, perhaps in the style of the youngest character, little Tommy played by that oddly popular child actor of the eighties, Corey Feldman. Tommy is a devotee of horror movies, much like the people attending screenings of this, though he does not seem to keen on the idea of being in an actual horror movie scenario himself.
Not until the end, anyway, which features the most ignominious demise of a horror movie villain since The Incredible Melting Man was shoveled up and put in a bin. Before we reach that embarrassment, it's business as usual, very much so, with little variation on what had gone before. Therefore the part in the hospital has very little bearing on what happens later on, the fact that Jason is proven to be alive after all excepted, just as all the others had begun with a similar introduction that did not feature the main cast. In its favour, on the other hand, the summing up archive footage is kept to a mere three minute pre-credits sequence.
At first glance there appear to be two final girls, one of whom is Tommy's sister Trish (Kimberly Beck) who lives with their mother in the woods, and one of a party of six kids who arrive for a fun holiday and are bafflingly unaware that there has been a mass murder going on (like the previous entry, this does not take place on Friday the 13th). That other is Sarah (Barbara Howard), who is a nice girl who refuses to go skinny dipping, but succumbs to being seduced by her boyfriend three quarters of the way through, thus sealing her fate. To add novelty, there are twins involved, and one of the young persons is none other than Crispin Glover, a chap with performance anxiety which he gets over just in time to be macheted in the face. Plus he does a funny dance - that's Crispin, always giving. Tom Savini returned to do the makeup here, but doesn't really represent his best work, though true fans will be pleased he was there for all that it mattered. Music by Harry Manfredi.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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