About two years ago, I bought the Blu Ray box set of the original Paramount Friday the 13th releases (1-8) at the local Wal-Mart and gradually made my way through the series with my girlfriend. In retrospect $20 was the perfect amount of money to plunk down on the set--cheaper than the accompanying beer and pizza one needs to enjoy the films. I wouldn't say any of the movies are good, per se, but in the right frame of mind they are trashy fun.
Would that the series had stopped there.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday was not included in that box set, being the first episode in the franchise after New Line Cinema bought the rights (ostensibly for the opportunity to match their own slasher titan, Freddy Krueger, against the hockey-masked antihero). So I had to wait until it showed up on a streaming service to which I had access. Tonight was that night. Was the movie worth my own personal wait? Well, let's just say it made me nostalgic for even the worst of the Paramount entries.
What's wrong with the movie? Where to begin? I'm not sure there's a single positive thing I can say about Jason Goes to Hell, except that it didn't strike me as out-and-out immoral. What a ringing endorsement.
First of all, the concept is ill-conceived. Why make a Friday the 13th movie that barely features Jason? He IS the franchise. Sure, he's at his most effective when kept off-screen for a large portion of the movie, but to eliminate him altogether is to completely miss what fans love about Friday the 13th as a brand name. Instead the plot focuses on a vaguely defined "evil" jumping from body to body to accomplish what we are now told was Jason's mission all along: to eliminate the Voorhees bloodline, because only a Voorhees can kill a Voorhees...but also can reincarnate Jason's evil into a new body. Yes, the motivation of killing off his own family members IS stolen from the Halloween franchise, and yes, it's a dumb plotline there as well. Also, if Jason knew all along he needed to kill his own long-lost (or at least never-before-mentioned) sister, why was he spending so much time at Camp Crystal Lake offing teenagers arbitrarily? Just for kicks, I guess.
In a way, I sympathize with screenwriters on long-running horror franchises. As a given series goes on, they have to continually inject the latest movie with enough innovation to justify its existence while still delivering what the fans have come to love and expect. Both Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street indulged in convoluted, nonsensical mythologies to carry the series along (though Nightmare at least did something interesting with it by part 7). So in that sense, kudos to Friday the 13th for wringing 8 more-or-less satisfying entries out of the exact same premise (tedious though it got by the time Jason took Manhattan) before invoking supernatural retconning. But back to Jason Goes to Hell specifically.
The second problem: the cast. The characters fall into two categories: grotesque caricatures, for which there is certainly precedent within the franchise; and the completely nondescript. As usual the comic relief characters are not ACTUALLY funny but at least have a certain amount of energy. The main characters are so bland I can't tell you a single character trait shared among them. The leads are boring and have absolutely no chemistry and the supporting cast leave equally little impression. At one point a waitress in a diner grabs a shotgun and starts blasting away at the Jason-surrogate like Sarah Connor in the Terminator series and I found myself thinking, "Do I have any idea who this character is?" The only exception is mysterious Jason-hunter Duke, played by Steven Williams, who for unexplained reasons knows all about (and becomes the exposition for) all this new mythology about the Voorhees evil. His character doesn't come to anything either but at least he feels alive.
The final nail in the proverbial coffin is Adam Marcus's direction. The movie doesn't look particularly good. The earliest films in the series have a low-budget grit and grain that, combined with the camp setting in the lush wilderness, winds up being at least accidentally aesthetic. Jason Goes to Hell, by contrast, is just polished enough to be completely lacking in atmosphere. The pacing is arbitrary at best, with tension failing to materialize and jump scares consistently falling flat. In terms of cinematography, Marcus barely outperforms a typical Goosebumps episode, especially in the opening sequence in which a heavily-armed FBI team takes down Jason; it's just so amateurish and flatly lit and goofy you feel like you're watching a movie-within-a-movie, a la a Zucker Brothers comedy or something. Jason himself is so bulky and mutated, with his lumpy bulging head threatening to swell over and envelop his hockey mask, that he looks like a rejected design for a Resident Evil antagonist.
Lastly, I hate the tone of gratuitous fanboy wankery Marcus sets throughout the film. Fanboys think nothing is more clever or satisfying than pointless meta-commentary and empty references to other properties they like. When you give fanboys money to make art, they spend so much time and energy imagining how they can create little coded messages and "winks" for the other fanboys in the audience that apparently they forget to go a step further and create something decent and compelling in its own right. Watching a movie borne of such a mentality is akin to the torment of being cornered by an angry bearded guy with poor social skills who needs to blather at you in excruciating detail about why The Last Jedi MUST be omitted from canon. What a blot on the face of the Evil Dead franchise that the actual Necronomicon prop worms its way into this smug self-satisfied hack job.
There is certainly a place in the world for bad movies. Mindless garbage, unambitious fun. What I can't abide is boring, self-congratulatory, inane, incompetent drivel. Even a diehard Friday fan ought to skip Jason Goes to Hell. Just go find the Blu Ray set of 1-8 at Wal-Mart instead.
Would that the series had stopped there.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday was not included in that box set, being the first episode in the franchise after New Line Cinema bought the rights (ostensibly for the opportunity to match their own slasher titan, Freddy Krueger, against the hockey-masked antihero). So I had to wait until it showed up on a streaming service to which I had access. Tonight was that night. Was the movie worth my own personal wait? Well, let's just say it made me nostalgic for even the worst of the Paramount entries.
What's wrong with the movie? Where to begin? I'm not sure there's a single positive thing I can say about Jason Goes to Hell, except that it didn't strike me as out-and-out immoral. What a ringing endorsement.
First of all, the concept is ill-conceived. Why make a Friday the 13th movie that barely features Jason? He IS the franchise. Sure, he's at his most effective when kept off-screen for a large portion of the movie, but to eliminate him altogether is to completely miss what fans love about Friday the 13th as a brand name. Instead the plot focuses on a vaguely defined "evil" jumping from body to body to accomplish what we are now told was Jason's mission all along: to eliminate the Voorhees bloodline, because only a Voorhees can kill a Voorhees...but also can reincarnate Jason's evil into a new body. Yes, the motivation of killing off his own family members IS stolen from the Halloween franchise, and yes, it's a dumb plotline there as well. Also, if Jason knew all along he needed to kill his own long-lost (or at least never-before-mentioned) sister, why was he spending so much time at Camp Crystal Lake offing teenagers arbitrarily? Just for kicks, I guess.
In a way, I sympathize with screenwriters on long-running horror franchises. As a given series goes on, they have to continually inject the latest movie with enough innovation to justify its existence while still delivering what the fans have come to love and expect. Both Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street indulged in convoluted, nonsensical mythologies to carry the series along (though Nightmare at least did something interesting with it by part 7). So in that sense, kudos to Friday the 13th for wringing 8 more-or-less satisfying entries out of the exact same premise (tedious though it got by the time Jason took Manhattan) before invoking supernatural retconning. But back to Jason Goes to Hell specifically.
The second problem: the cast. The characters fall into two categories: grotesque caricatures, for which there is certainly precedent within the franchise; and the completely nondescript. As usual the comic relief characters are not ACTUALLY funny but at least have a certain amount of energy. The main characters are so bland I can't tell you a single character trait shared among them. The leads are boring and have absolutely no chemistry and the supporting cast leave equally little impression. At one point a waitress in a diner grabs a shotgun and starts blasting away at the Jason-surrogate like Sarah Connor in the Terminator series and I found myself thinking, "Do I have any idea who this character is?" The only exception is mysterious Jason-hunter Duke, played by Steven Williams, who for unexplained reasons knows all about (and becomes the exposition for) all this new mythology about the Voorhees evil. His character doesn't come to anything either but at least he feels alive.
The final nail in the proverbial coffin is Adam Marcus's direction. The movie doesn't look particularly good. The earliest films in the series have a low-budget grit and grain that, combined with the camp setting in the lush wilderness, winds up being at least accidentally aesthetic. Jason Goes to Hell, by contrast, is just polished enough to be completely lacking in atmosphere. The pacing is arbitrary at best, with tension failing to materialize and jump scares consistently falling flat. In terms of cinematography, Marcus barely outperforms a typical Goosebumps episode, especially in the opening sequence in which a heavily-armed FBI team takes down Jason; it's just so amateurish and flatly lit and goofy you feel like you're watching a movie-within-a-movie, a la a Zucker Brothers comedy or something. Jason himself is so bulky and mutated, with his lumpy bulging head threatening to swell over and envelop his hockey mask, that he looks like a rejected design for a Resident Evil antagonist.
Lastly, I hate the tone of gratuitous fanboy wankery Marcus sets throughout the film. Fanboys think nothing is more clever or satisfying than pointless meta-commentary and empty references to other properties they like. When you give fanboys money to make art, they spend so much time and energy imagining how they can create little coded messages and "winks" for the other fanboys in the audience that apparently they forget to go a step further and create something decent and compelling in its own right. Watching a movie borne of such a mentality is akin to the torment of being cornered by an angry bearded guy with poor social skills who needs to blather at you in excruciating detail about why The Last Jedi MUST be omitted from canon. What a blot on the face of the Evil Dead franchise that the actual Necronomicon prop worms its way into this smug self-satisfied hack job.
There is certainly a place in the world for bad movies. Mindless garbage, unambitious fun. What I can't abide is boring, self-congratulatory, inane, incompetent drivel. Even a diehard Friday fan ought to skip Jason Goes to Hell. Just go find the Blu Ray set of 1-8 at Wal-Mart instead.