A film that is not a lie, unlike the previous one.
No, really. Jason does, in fact, go to Hell.
Admittedly, it happens in the last five minutes of the movie, but at least it isn't a complete lie.
Jason Goes to Hell represents a change in the ownership of the franchise, namely from Paramount Pictures to New Line Cinema, who they had been competing against for years with their Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. However, even with the rights to use everything within the franchise (mostly), New Line was forbidden to use the name "Friday the 13th". Hence our title, which is... well, to be fair, the "The Final Friday" part is a lie.
Not that this is something new to us.
Said rights issues also prevented Tommy Jarvis from being the hero of this film, which I'm personally rather okay with. Jason Lives, along with being probably my favorite entry in the series after the original, was a perfect conclusion to Tommy's character. He had defeated the monster who had troubled him since childhood and he could walk off into the sunset at last.
I know things like the Tommy tapes in the Friday the 13th game as well as certain fanfilms out there have continued the story of Tommy, but it's really just not necessary and nothing of it that I've seen covers any real new ground or says anything new about the character and his journey. And before someone accuses me of being hypocritical, I'm including my own What If? series that I've written about the man in alternate universes.
So, the producers (including original Friday the 13th producer Sean S. Cunningham) and the writers Dean Lorey and Jay Hugely decided to go in a different route than their original plans.
Okay, to be fair, the original plan that Cunningham had was to do a Freddy vs. Jason movie, but that wouldn't happen for quite some time.
The route that ended up being taken was quite controversial among fans of the series, and it's understandable in a lot of ways. If there's one things that fandoms by and large don't like, it's big and sweeping changes done suddenly and jarringly. But did the film do it so badly? Was it just growing pains? Let's take a look.
The film kicks off with an FBI sting operation, led by a woman who literally uses her nudity to summon Jason (I'm not kidding), cornering Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) at Camp Crystal Lake and then proceeding to cause the entire NRA to have the most thunderous orgasm of all time as they blow him to Kingdom Come.
...with explosives. Get your head out of the gutter.
Now, you might be wondering - "Hey, Madcap! Didn't Jason get reverted into a child at the end of Jason Takes Manhattan? How did he get back to full size and how did he get back to Crystal Lake?" Good questions! While various spin-off media has given suggestions as to how that might have happened, Cunningham and director Adam Marcus decided to just skip over that question entirely and pretend like the previous movie never happened.
As I said while talking about a completely different franchise, I love me a continuity eraser button!
So, Jason is back in Crystal Lake. Except, this time, he's in lots and lots and lots and lots of pieces. One of those pieces, his heart, is examined during the autopsy and the coroner feels and fulfills a compulsion to eat it, which allows Jason to possess him.
...yeah, I know. Just go with it.
On the side of our human characters, rather than Tommy Jarvis, we instead have Steve Freeman (John D. LeMay - the only actor to be in both Friday the 13th The Series and a Friday the 13th movie!). Steve has had a daughter with Jessica Kimble (Kari Keegan), the daughter of Diana Kimble (Erin Grey). However, Diana has a bit of a secret - she's the sister of Jason Voorhees.
...okay, half-sister, but still. Just go with it.
Rounding out the main cast for this one, we have bounty hunter and PBR-drinking fiend Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), who is determined to hunt down and kill Jason Voorhees for real. Why would he care, you may ask? Simple: It's in the script. Or rather, it isn't in the script as his motivation was in an earlier draft of the script and it got cut.
So, as you can tell, this entry adds in a bunch of new additions to the lore that just plain were not there before. Sure, we can accept Jason getting resurrected with magic lightning or a similar but legally distinct version of Carrie fighting Jason, but a body snatcher plot? A Voorhees family history that includes the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead franchise? A magic dagger in the hands of someone with Voorhees blood being the only thing that can really for really real kill Jason once and for all, really?
Yeah, honestly, I can accept this.
Look, we've had weird psuedo-mystical shit in this franchise since at least Part 3. Not to mention that Jason tanked enough damage in his first three outings that he should have been dead several times over, so I hardly think that adding in supernatural or otherworldly elements into the franchise is all that out there.
Do I think that it's well-implemented? Uh...
No. Not exactly. Diana suddenly being hammered into the series raises a bunch of continuity errors, although it might help to explain who paid for the headstones of Pamela and Jason that we saw in previous movies. There are certainly workarounds and ideas that could be proposed to make her work in the continuity (and, believe me, the fans have).
What is a little more jarring is that the Voorhees House that Pamela supposedly lived in (and which the Necronomicon was found later in the film) is still standing despite the terrible legend of Jason Voorhees that was so intensely terrible that the entire town at one point renamed itself Forest Green and then changed the name back in the very next movie because tourism dollars were apparently more important to wanting to treat their collective PTSD.
...oh, I already made that joke, didn't I?
One other big criticism I have for this one is the lack of Jason being... well, Jason. We only get to see Kane Hodder in the full get up during the very beginning and the very end of the film and he had a pretty good design for what we got to see of it. I do like how Jason seemed to be bulkier over time in The New Blood, Jason Takes Manhattan, and this movie. I would have liked to have seen that transfer into Jason X, but... well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
All quips and observations aside, Jason Goes To Hell is not a bad movie. It's not a great movie, but the Friday franchise kind of tapped out on original/good ideas when The New Blood was a thing. Granted, there's a bit of a weird resurgence a few years after this, but... again, we'll get to that when we get to that.
Jason Goes to Hell was not critically-acclaimed or indeed beloved by the fanbase upon its release, but it did manage to make back it's budget about five times over, and New Line had just spent so much money for the rights from Paramount, so a sequel was inevitable.
When we return to the shared universe of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, I'll be covering the two films Jason X and Freddy vs. Jason - one of which I really like. Want to know which one?
Be there!
Jason Goes To Hell comes to us from Sean S. Cunningham Films and New Line Cinema.
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