Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

(1993) **

Sigh. This one is stupid down to its very roots. It starts with a deceptively promising opening, as the scantily-clad girl dashes out of the house at the first sign of trouble (smart) and flees into the woods, Jason stalking behind her, sporting his new "rutabaga head" look. Suddenly the big man's surrounded by spotlights and a SWAT team is peppering him with bullets. Turns out she was a scantily-clad agent, ha ha, and we're finally seeing the authorities muster the right response -- the one we've been waiting to see for years. They blow him to bits and then it's off to the morgue and cinematic suckery.

Just after the coroner discovers that Jason's heart is filled with some unknown black liquid, the heart starts beating. Naturally, the coroner grabs it and starts greedily devouring it like a tar-filled calzone. Then all these orange lights swarm out of the Jason parts and go into the coroner. Get it? He's being possessed. Wow, gosh, jeez, thud.

In principle, I'm not against the "disembodied killer that possesses people" idea. I haven't seen Fallen, but the same premise is done really well in both The Hidden and Shocker (oh wait a second, Shocker sucked). But this is a Jason movie, dammit; didn't they learn their lesson with #5? Even if I got an iota of fun out of seeing Jason's murderous glare coming from regular, unmasked people, I want the mask, dude!

Unfortunately, ripping off The Hidden is only part of the game, as they open up new story ideas that amount to a huuuge pile of horse hocky. This is all thanks to a foolish, instantly-unlikeable bounty hunter played by the captain from 21 Jump Street. He's supposed to be the movie's tough guy, but I hated every moment of his screen time. For some reason he's the only one who knows that Jason can only be killed by a blood relative, and only with a special dagger that this dude happens to have on him. Apparently someone decided, at this very late stage, that they weren't ripping off Halloween enough. So here's Jason's sister and niece, and here's the Voorhees house!

In the end, Jason's host body totally craps out and he emerges as a little demon puppet (if they were smart, it'd have a face like a hockey mask). Instead of putting a bucket over it, our hero (the guy from Friday the 13th TV series) drops it like a spooked housewife and Jason manages to use his sister's corpse to rebirth himself. You heard me. When the kill stroke finally happens, big muppety arms come out of the ground and pull Jason down. They try to inject some drama by having the arms nearly pull TV series guy down, too (I guess Hell has the same safety standards as the Tall Man), but I was just laughing at the arms.

In the end Freddy's hand reaches out of the dirt and grabs the hockey mask. Whatever. I say skip this clunker.