Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday 1993

Surprisingly good. I know everyone hates this one, but I guess the previous film was so bad that I managed to enjoy Jason Goes to Hell. I was really afraid after the experience of Jason Takes Manhattan, but this one overcame my expectations — that were super low — but anyway, a fun movie.

Jason is dead in the ending of the last film? Yes, but he is in every other movie of the franchise too, so that didn’t bother me. With that said the opening sequence is cool! It subverts our expectations and presents something new, Jason is really “killed”. Well, at least his body is destroyed.

Bringing the idea of Jason never really dying, but passing on his soul, his evil essence to some other receptacle seem it the next right move to the franchise.

Although the argument of the script is good, I don’t think it was well developed. Some things happen just for some random reason and we get no explanation whatsoever.

Creighton Duke, the bounty hunter, mysteriously knows everything about Jason’s origin, his family and how to kill him. Jason having a sister is something that doesn’t make much sense, but I can live with. She's a bit annoying and in the scenes of combat she is stupid.

I kind of liked the score and how Jason's look is in this one, really gory.

One aspect I really enjoyed about Jason Goes To Hell is its pacing. This is one of the best in the series to do this: I didn’t “feel” the movie hours passing through. I just started watching and then realised the movie was about to end. Well done.

Cool ending with Freddy taking Jason’s mask hinting the plans for a crossover.

During the 1980s, only two years passed without an entry in the Friday the 13th series. That's eight films in ten years, and while the quality usually betrayed those short production times, they always felt like kin. Spiritual relatives. It took four years for a ninth chapter to see the light of day, plus a switch from Paramount to New Line Cinema, and somewhere along the way there was a great disconnect.

A true B-grade picture in every sense, Jason Goes to Hell is the worst Friday yet, and one of the most desperate, flailing, pointless films I've ever seen. Though veteran blade-swinger Kane Hodder has returned to the role, this Jason bears little resemblance to the cool, creepy psycho killer of the earlier films. Inflated and deformed, at this point he's basically a roid-raging leper in a twisted, vaguely-familiar hockey mask, but he's changed in more than just a physical sense.

The story revolves around his black heart, literally migrating from host to host to inspire fresh killings after Jason himself is blown to bits in the opening scene. We've swallowed some absurdly stupid plot devices over the course of this franchise, including a similarly lame-brained "fake Jason" angle in 1985's A New Beginning, but this one sets an awful new standard. It plays like cruddy straight-to-video '90s gimmick horror, not the quaintly under-produced slasher material that had typified the series to this point.

Needless to say, the acting hasn't improved (somehow, impossibly, it's actually grown much worse) and the production values, which enjoyed a well-deserved bump in Jason Takes Manhattan, are once again cut-rate and pitiful. Not a good look for New Line, proving right out of the gates that they don't understand what they're making and don't honestly care, one way or the other.

After much waffling over the matter, my OCD got the best of me: I couldn't NOT finish the Friday the 13th movies after watching so many of them, even though I had vowed I wouldn't watch any more of them. Fortunately this particular installment (although it unfortunately really isn't The Final Friday ) at least had better acting in it. Yes, the story was every bit as hackneyed and idiotic as the rest of them (with the exception of the original, which was...well, ORIGINAL) but at least the cast kinda sorta looked at least semi-professional. Granted, their reactions/responses were every bit as idiotic and unbelievable as all the rest of the Friday movies, but…I don't know…this particular film was at least easier to sit through. And that ought to tell you something about the rest of the franchise as well as what it tells you about THIS particular installment: if the best I can say is, "It didn't suck as bad as the others..." (and yes, that's the best I can say) then you should know to steer clear of all of these with, as previously mentioned, the exception of the original Friday the 13th movie. I have to concur with what someone else had made note of about these later F13 films: where the original movie (and its subsequent follow-up) was just a good old-fashioned horror/slasher movie with a weird twist and an evil villain, they've actually shied away from that and started to make Jason much more of a supernatural presence, unstoppable, un-killable, no matter what. And that, to me, is what has essentially killed the entire franchise: You can't kill the dude, so what's the sense of a conclusion that pretends he's dead? You already know in a year or so, there will be another movie with yet another eye-rolling "resurrection" of Jason, and we'll go through the motions all over again. Yawn infinity. I was actually surprised that this particular film didn't have very much gore at all; there were some violent scenes but nothing to make you cringe. (I sat here and ate my supper while I watched this. No problems.) Watch this but be prepared to be highly unimpressed.